Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

Away from the political arena Denis Norden’s notion of the ‘Hancock’ canon as a novel sends one scurrying for literary parallels. The naïve, pompous, lower-middle-class Pooter from the George and Weedon Grossmith comedy classic, The Diary of a Nobody, is an obvious link. Significantly it began life as a Punch column, a device not a million miles away from the half-hour situation comedy device of sixty years later. Here the house in suburbia again backs onto a railway line, the curate calls, albeit not played by Kenneth Williams, and social aspiration dictates the life of the chief resident. A more complex character is Kenneth Widmerpool from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Military man and politician in a way that Hancock could only pretend to be, he is revealed by turns through a twelve-volume cycle as villain and victim, manipulator and fool in a way that chiefly serves to remind us of Hancock through the sympathy Powell manages to engage on his behalf, from his very first appearance at school wearing ‘the wrong kind of overcoat’. At times pompous to the point of ridicule, he gets by like Hancock, blustering against fate, cushioned by speeches of windy verbosity. A more light-hearted literary character has an equal claim to be considered Tony’s alter ego. In formulating the Hancock character Galton and Simpson found themselves reversing the anthropomorphism of Kenneth Grahame’s enduring creation from Toad Hall. In a television interview, Bill Kerr catalogued the similarities: ‘The bluster, the pomp, the dignity, the frailty.’ But more than that he looked like Toad. Once in a while television companies raid the current stock of familiar comic faces to cast the classic afresh. It is a tragedy that nobody gave Hancock the chance. Bubbling over with his own self-importance, all airs and graces, he would have made it impossible for another actor to follow in his amphibious tracks. To hear Toad rhapsodising on the prospects of motor travel, one might well be travelling with Hancock, tooting along on the open road to the Monte Carlo rally in one of his early radio shows: ‘The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today – in next week tomorrow! … O poop-poop!’ They could have changed places. The thought of ‘Toad’s Half Hour’ and a dressing room with his name on the door would have puffed up the creature’s ego even more.

Of course, Hancock had the advantage over any fictional character in that on television he could look you in the eyes. As Duncan Wood, his principal television producer, said, ‘He looked like a beaten-up spaniel – even if the dog bites you, you still pat it on the head again.’ Alan Simpson risked stating the obvious on the matter: ‘He was a very sympathetic performer. Certain people on television – irrespective of how good they are – if they don’t like the look of you, you’re dead. The character of Hancock was such a terrible failure at everything he did, everybody felt sorry for him, even though he was very arrogant, very pompous.’ But there was another quality. For all he may have played a ‘mug’, and an often unpleasant one at that, there always bubbled beneath the surface of his BBC portrayal a level of charm, intelligence, not to mention enjoyment in the task at hand. Intuitively an audience picks up on such qualities and subconsciously enters a sharing game with the performer. It was partly in the words, but it was entirely in the playing. Dennis Main Wilson, who knew the man as well as anybody professionally, once said that ‘to be a great clown you have to have vulnerability and indeed humility and if you ain’t got them as a clown, you ain’t gonna be a star – no way!’ In its inner self the great British public sensed this in spades.

In time this book will address how much of the Hancock image was rooted in reality, how much the fictitious accretion for laughter’s sake alone. For the moment it is enough to know that Hancock himself had the full measure of what was going on. As was so often the case, it seemed to come back to the feet. He told a reporter on the Coventry Evening Telegraph, ‘You can’t get away from it – underneath the handmade crocodile shoes, there are still the toes.’ He saw the pretensions with which people clothed themselves as the key to his humour, his role being to puncture them. Six years later that was still his credo. In an interview in Planet magazine he explained, ‘What I portray is what I find pretentious in myself and others. I play up pretensions, pomposity and stupidity in order – I hope – to destroy them. Who first decides about the position of the little finger when you’re drinking a cup of tea? Or who first decided the correct way to hold your soup bowl? Let’s say we did a comic skit where two people had a great barney about the right way to hold a soup bowl, showing up the stupidity of the whole thing. After the show the audience might go somewhere for a meal and remember the skit when they started on the soup. The impression might not last very long, but it would be there.’ It is reassuring to know that he and presumably Alan and Ray were ahead of Denis Norden on that one. But he was always at pains to point out the one thing he was not. As he emphasised to Russell Clark on Australian television a few months before he died: ‘I wasn’t a little man fighting against bureaucracy. This is nonsense. I was always trying to make life a little less deadly than it really is, and a lot of it was extremely belligerent comedy.’ As Philip Oakes noted, ‘Hancock, far from being the classic figure of the clown (that is, he who gets slapped) was the first to slap back.’ But there was always the suggestion of uncertainty in the aggressiveness. It was inevitable in the case of a character that wanted the whole world and yet had no means of achieving it except on the cheap.

Chapter Two

‘YOU’LL GO FAR, MY SON’

‘A double feature, half a bar of Palm toffee, and three and a half hours in the dark – that was my idea of fun.’

He always claimed that his earliest recollection was of an egg timer. Later in life he went on record as being able to boil ‘a very good three-and-a-half-minute egg without having to glance at my watch once’. Eggs, with the attendant ‘soldiers’ to dip into their soft-boiled interiors, would provide a comfort factor – and at one point a professional windfall – in a life that began as Anthony John Hancock at 41 Southam Road, Hall Green, Small Heath, Birmingham, on 12 May 1924. The more grandiose middle names met in the previous chapter were the stuff of comic fiction. The house with its bay windows and turreted chimneys was the sturdy type of semi-detached that helped to define the identity of the British lower middle class between the wars and beyond. The ‘lower’ may be misleading in that the Hancocks were able to afford a nanny and a cook, whom Tony remembered as ‘a painfully thin woman who, no matter how much food she consumed, never put on a single pound’. The Hancocks were the original residents of the dwelling purchased new for the sum of £400 shortly after the arrival of their first son, Colin, in March 1918. By the time of Tony’s birth his father, John Hancock, had progressed in status to branch manager for the Houlder Brothers steamship line, which he had joined as a messenger boy in 1900, although his heart beat faster when he applied himself to his avocation as a small-time entertainer with a welcome entrée into the round of clubs, smoking concerts and masonics that thrived throughout the city. It is appropriate that in heraldic circles the name of Hancock did originally mean ‘son of John’, ‘Han’ being a Flemish form of John, ‘cock’ an affectionate term sometimes used to mean ‘son of’.

Hancock was what might be called a deadline baby, in that his father left it forty-two days before registering the birth of his second son at Kings Norton register office, the maximum period allowed by law. When the child was three years old, the family, prompted by medical advice in the matter of his father’s bronchial troubles, relocated to the purer air and more temperate, more genteel climes of Bournemouth. In later times Hancock would recall the event with typical deadpan insouciance: ‘What a brave band we were, striking south that summer morning. Every hamlet, every village, every town we passed through accorded us a truly remarkable lack of attention, exceeded only by the complete anonymity of our arrival in Bournemouth itself.’ By all accounts his father was a thrifty soul, refusing to buy enough petrol to take them beyond Bath, where they had to refuel for the final leg of the momentous journey. He had an automatic refrain when questioned why he didn’t fill the tank up completely, the same words of morbid circumspection he used when his wife constantly queried his purchase of one Alcazar razor blade at a time, rather than a packet of six: ‘You never know.’ The move was made viable by the monetary support of Tony’s maternal grandfather, Harry Samuel Thomas, an enterprising printer and lithographer whose success provided him with the financial cushion to serve for twenty-one years as a director of Birmingham City Football Club. His photograph is contained in the handbook published to mark the opening of the St Andrew’s ground in 1906. It was said of him by Harry Morris, a chairman of the club in the 1960s, that ‘he was always a very good judge of a footballer’. His daughter, Lucie Lilian, had married her husband eighteen days after the outbreak of the World War on 22 August 1914 at the parish church of St Oswald’s, Bordesley. On the marriage certificate she is recorded as two years younger than her partner, the son of William Hancock, a foreman builder. The Hancocks originally hailed from a family of stonemasons in the West Country. John, or Jack as he became known, was born in the Bedminster district of Bristol on 14 December 1887 to William, a carpenter and joiner, and his wife, Elizabeth. The family subsequently relocated to Sutton Coldfield. Tony’s mother entered the world on 4 September 1890 at 323 Cooksey Road, Small Heath, the child of Harry and his bride, Clara Hannah née Williams.

The search by Tony’s parents for a combined work and investment opportunity – subsidised in part by a £950 profit on the previous sale and in part by Thomas, who also fancied the idea of Bournemouth as a retirement prospect for himself – resulted in the purchase of an unlikely business in the northern hinterland of the resort. The Mayo Hygienic Laundry was situated on the south side of Strouden Road at Nos 144 and 146, washroom and shop respectively, with living accommodation over the latter, in the district of Winton. Hancock found himself genuflecting to this aspect of his heritage only once in his comedy career. As he settles down on his flight to an alpine vacation where the yodelling Kenneth Williams will prove particularly irksome, he stresses, ‘I needed this holiday – it’s been hard work in the laundry lately.’ In spite of the enthusiasm Lily expressly put into what had been an ailing business – a secondary outlet to receive and redistribute washing in the centre of Bournemouth being a decided asset in this regard – there was scant likelihood that the genial Jack would flourish in an environment which presented so little opportunity for the bonhomie of the social world. When, at the turn of the new decade, Strong & Co., the Romsey-based brewery, presented him with a chance to become the licensee of a central hostelry, little time was wasted. It may seem a big leap from running a laundry to managing a public house, but both were service industries and both left a pungent reminder on the olfactory sense of the future comedian: bleach and hops would provide him with a mental trigger à la recherche du temps perdu to the end of his days.

A valuable eye-witness to these times was the aforesaid nanny, Elsie Sparks, who joined the family at the age of seventeen on a salary of £1 10s. a week. More than sixty years later in an interview for the Bournemouth Evening Echo she recalled Tony as ‘a lovely chubby little chap’ who wouldn’t let her out of his sight, although ‘you could always tell when he’d been naughty or done something he shouldn’t have done because he’d hide under the table. And if you ever took him to the park and there were other boys around, he’d run off and bring their caps back to you!’ Tony, like herself, was not too happy with his first impressions of the holiday town: ‘He couldn’t understand the accent, and the sea frightened him.’ It was through Sparks that Hancock had been christened Anthony: long before he was born she could not stop talking about the previous charge she had left in order to attend initially to his brother, Colin. Lily was convinced her second child would be a boy and made a promise that if correct she would call him by the same name to keep her happy. As his brother surged ahead of him, Anthony redivivus became her sole charge. On nature walks in the lanes and fields that encroached upon the new home, she soon observed an introspection and lack of confidence that she sensed was set off by the move south: ‘He disliked meeting anyone new, trying anything new … he couldn’t wait to get home. In fact, the only place he was really happy and relaxed was in the small, fenced-in back garden.’

By Christmas the unhappiness and heavy heart had been joined by a physical setback. The doctor soon diagnosed the swelling around his wrists and leg joints as rickets. Not funny at the time, the disorder left him with that hollow-chested, hunched-shoulder look that became part of his comic vocabulary throughout his adult life. An attempt in childhood to straighten himself out led to exercises that involved hanging from a bar until his arms gave way. The procedure came to an abrupt end the day he caught sight of his shadow: ‘I looked like a bloody great bat,’ he grumbled. It is also the consensus of opinion that he grew into an untidy child, a fact with which Hancock concurred: ‘Mother would take us out on a shopping spree and set us up in smart new suits, but so far as I was concerned she was wasting her time. Colin and Roger would arrive home looking as spruce as you could wish, but I always let the side down. My suits had a way of looking old and ill fitting the moment I got into them.’ The uneasy feeling with clothes persisted through the years of his greatest success.

In retrospect the move to Bournemouth with its bustling entertainment industry both in and out of season provided Hancock senior with the ideal milieu in which to vent his frustrated skills as an entertainer. He would soon be caught up again in the whirl of concerts, ladies’ nights and private bookings that had made life in Birmingham more bearable, culminating in November and December 1923 in two broadcasts, billed first as a ‘humorist’ and then as an ‘entertainer’, on the radio station 5IT that broadcast from the city between 1922 and 1927. Now as the landlord of the Railway Hotel at 119 Holdenhurst Road, near to Bournemouth’s town centre, he had discovered the perfect environment in which to combine business, the entertainment of others and the ability to socialise with the colourful parade of theatricals that frequented the venue, both as occasional drinkers and overnight guests. The hostelry epitomised the racy side that between the wars bristled alongside the more respectable image the resort has always seemed anxious to cultivate. In many respects it may be no different from other South Coast seaside towns with their palm court and putting green aspirations to genteelness, but where else but Bournemouth do you discover illuminations that still shun neon-lit vulgarity in favour of a flickering wonderland of candles each lit by hand in its coloured glass jar?

Remembered from his Birmingham days as great company – ‘he always had three words to your one,’ recalled Harry Morris – Jack Hancock, in the few photographs that survive, is revealed as a worldly cross between the music-hall lion comique tradition of ‘Champagne Charlie’ and his fellow coves, and the debonair, dapper precision of a Jack Buchanan. One picture shows him in the convivial company of that definitive boulevardier from the halls, Charles Coborn no less, immortalised in song as ‘The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Another image, posed as a publicity shot, reveals a slim, sharp-eyed alertness as he looks into the camera. His black bow tie and white wing collar stand to attention, and one can almost hear the overture playing. Everything is right about him. One line in his act is still lodged with affection in the comic lexicon of his youngest son, Roger, who was only four when he died. He would swagger on stage with a folded copy of The Times, then acknowledge an invisible presence in the wings: ‘Put the Rolls in the garage, George. I’ll butter them later.’ The act then segued into a succession of stories and topical comments that he would read from the newspaper – a device not dissimilar to that used in the breakfast-oriented openings to his son’s radio series – in addition to monologues and impressions.

George Fairweather, his friend and fellow semi-professional, recounted his first impression of the tall, handsome figure in top hat and tails, with white scarf and silver-topped cane to complete the image: ‘he was over-dressed even for a formal night out, but within seconds the audience identified with him … he may have been dressed as a toff, but there were no class barriers … he joked about the same things and poked fun at the same people as they did.’ This in part confirms his middle son’s recollection of him as ‘a dude entertainer’ with an upper-crust stage voice. According to George, there was more than a touch of the Terry-Thomas about him, right down to the elegant holder from which he would chain-smoke the Du Maurier cigarettes he kept in their gold case. Tony himself identified show business as ‘undoubtedly the real love’ of his father’s life: ‘He enjoyed nothing better than making people laugh … Mother used to accompany him at the piano. I am told that she laughed so much at his gags, however often she heard them, that she could hardly play a note. That must have been a great comfort to him on the odd occasions when things weren’t going so well with the audience.’ The act often included a monologue about a lonely old man and a little dog. It would reduce his wife to hysteria with tears irrigating her cheeks. When in later years she recalled it for her famous son, it produced an equally convulsive effect. Their marriage was strengthened by his gift for comedy. ‘She could never stay cross with Dad for long,’ remembered Tony. ‘He would pull a funny face, or use a silly voice, and that was that.’

When she was not wiping her eyes from laughter, the hotel gave his mother a new sense of purpose. She soon revealed herself as her father’s daughter as she set about capitalising on its unique situation. Only a hop, skip and a jump from the main railway terminus, it quickly became a magnet for the business customer out of season as much as for the holidaymaker and day-tripper within. In the spring of 1931 press advertisements announced the opening of the New Palm Lounge within the hotel: ‘The ideal rendezvous for ladies and gentlemen, and the most up-to-date retreat in central Bournemouth.’ The tag that followed was a product of Jack’s own sense of humour: ‘It is said that trams stop by request – others by desire!’ He was himself an integral part of the attraction. Peter Harding, a Bournemouth journalist who included the hotel in his regular round, was himself reported as saying that you never saw Hancock’s dad working behind the bar. He always had his regular place at one end where he held court, occasionally leaving it to greet someone he knew, but only to bring them back to his corner: ‘By the end of the night he would be surrounded by a group of laughing men and women and always with a household name among them.’ The presence of the theatrical profession only emphasised the overall ambience of the place, the spiritual ancestry of which would have suggested the cheery backchat and cheeky banter of the music halls.

The family were domiciled in the claustrophobic attic flat at the top of the building. Tony and his brother Roger, who was actually born there on 9 June 1931, have both admitted that a business with an often chaotic twenty-four-hour claim on the attention of its owners did not provide the environment most conducive to a traditional family life style. His mother once explained in an interview: ‘Tony once asked why he couldn’t have a home life like the other boys. But it was impossible – I was busy with the customers all the time.’ For Hancock the answer to the impersonal, though unintentional, disregard by his parents was to raid the petty cash and find escape in the silver screen: ‘Will Hay was my favourite. A double feature, half a bar of Palm toffee, and three and a half hours in the dark – that was my idea of fun.’ At a later time and in different circumstances Roger would cope with a similar situation in the same way, claiming that the constant exposure to the cinema taught him everything he knew about judgement and material, the grounding for his successful career as a literary and theatrical agent.

If Hancock took his theatrical flair from his father, his energy and strong-mindedness must have come from his mum. Known to all as Lily – and, to the annoyance of her family, to her husband as ‘Billy’ – she had denounced Lucie almost as soon as she could talk. Lily survived her son and therefore came within the acquaintance of many of those who figured in his career. To the writer Philip Oakes she was funny and racy, with a warm practicality that cut to the quick of her son’s excesses: when on one visit to the Oakes’ home Tony’s boozy obsession for conversation and music showed little respect for the midnight hour, she finally drew herself up and turned to Philip’s wife: ‘I’ll put my gloves on … it always worked with his father.’ It usually worked with Hancock too. His agent Beryl Vertue first met her on a Mediterranean holiday and was immediately impressed: ‘You could almost see where he got some of his mannerisms from in terms of delivery and everything … she would strut across the beach, full of funny anecdotes and with a kind of feigned vagueness about how to tackle any particular problem.’ As her son ribbed her about her food foibles they became like a double act together. Lily’s friend, the theatrical hairdresser Mary Hobley, recalled for Jeff Hammonds the suddenness with which she would go from being jolly and bright to being serious: ‘She’d talk about life and all that – she seemed a bit mixed up in some way, but she was fun … Tony was like her in a way – he was very bright, but underneath there was this sadness.’

Their close relationship even spilled over into a mutual love of sport. He talked about her to the journalist Gareth Powell, in one of the last interviews he gave in Australia: ‘My mother is seventy-seven and a bit of a card. I telephoned her when I was sailing on the Andes. I said, “I think I’m going to play a bit of cricket with the Australians.” And she said immediately – and I’m talking to her on a boat, on the Andes – “Now I would suggest three slips, one gully, two short legs …!” and she went through the card on this bloody thing. And she’s got no right to do this. A very funny woman indeed. Seventy-seven years and fighting as she goes.’ Even sex was not off limits in their conversation. When, in an echo of Les Dawson’s hypochondriac travesty of a Northern housewife, she delicately referred in company to having something wrong ‘down below’ Tony couldn’t help himself. ‘Get your legs round a good man,’ he would guffaw. ‘That’ll put you right.’ Modesty dictated she would not be drawn further, although it is tempting to imagine the spirit of Tony’s friend Dick Emery, another fine comic transvestite, intruding on her behalf: ‘Ooh, you are awful!’ Indeed, looking at pictures of her in later life one surely gets some idea of how Tony would have looked in drag. The popping eyes and chubby cheeks are there, although school friend Ronald Elgood remembers the very domineering, almost Wagnerian presence of the lady who would collect her son at term’s end. Their love was unquestionable and she remained supportive of him until the end of his life, although others have referred to a negative side in their relationship. ‘She never let me grow up,’ he once said to Joan Le Mesurier. ‘Once we were out on a drive and she said to me, “Look at the choo-choo puff-puff.”’ When Joan queried what was wrong with that, he replied, ‘I was thirty-two at the time.’ Arrested childhood development would provide Galton and Simpson with another common trait in the years to come: finger games, matchstick men drawn on windows and the announcement of the sight of ‘Cows!’ as if they were Martians all dominate that wearisome television train journey to the North.