Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

Roger was well aware of the closeness between Tony and his mother, and assesses his own standing in the triangle between them with honesty: ‘There was a sort of fixation there between the two of them and I was not part of that. It doesn’t worry me. I don’t feel any lack of affection. I think I’ve come out of this very well, actually. I could have been a screwed-up mess, but I’m not because I think I accepted the special relationship between them. It really was.’ Not that everything was always well between them. Lyn Took, Tony’s secretary at the height of his fame, found it hard to discern a maternal presence at all. His friend, the actress Damaris Hayman, thought she exerted a rather unhealthy hold on him: ‘He used to say that she was very fond of “my son, the celebrity” and she sort of dined out on it, to use the phrase.’ Roger is prepared to admit that she aggravated her son at times: ‘I can understand that, because she’d go off on cruises and she’d always sit at the captain’s table and she’d come home and say, “I don’t know why I’m sitting at the captain’s table.” And I’d say, “It’s because you’re always telling everyone who you are and dishing out signed photographs of Tony into the bargain. Why else do you think you are?” She was the cruise queen. He paid for them. He was wonderful to her and rightly so because she had been so wonderful to him. From my point of view it was totally understandable.’ Hancock became resigned to the humour in the situation: ‘One day I caught her in a pub distributing signed portraits of me all around the bar all in one quick, deft movement as if she were dealing cards at Las Vegas. There they were drinking their beer and playing shove-halfpenny and suddenly before I could do anything about it, they found a Hancock picture in their hands.’ More importantly, on his Face to Face interview with John Freeman Tony described as his most vivid memory of his mother ‘the encouragement she gave me to do what I wanted to do, though I showed no sign at all of being able to do it initially’. Roger is not prepared to admit that his mother may have seen more of the father – and the vicarious realisation of his father’s theatrical dreams – in her middle son. Tony, in the same interview, acknowledged the lead his father gave: ‘I think in many ways it was a deep thing with me to try and justify it. Because I believe he was pretty good.’

Roger scarcely knew his father. His only memory is a poignant one: ‘He was going upstairs and he paused half way up on his way to the top floor. I sort of indicated that I wanted to come up with him and he said, “No, don’t – don’t come up.” By that time he was dying, but I didn’t know. Why would I know?’ Jack Hancock died of peritonitis aggravated by both lung and liver cancer at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Boscombe, on 11 August 1935. He was forty-seven and had been ill for nearly a year, the last month in the hospital. By that time the family, spurred on by the resentment shown by the brewery to Jack’s extracurricular activities as an entertainer and promoter of his own shows around the district, had moved from the Railway Hotel to their own independent venture. By August 1933 they were installed at the Swanmore Hotel and Lodge at 3 Gervis Road East, a select but neglected property within easier reach of the sands huddled beneath the East Cliff. According to his youngest son, a piece of advice handed down in the family by his father over the years had been, ‘Whatever you do, it’s your face that matters, not your arse!’ The posher new address with its wide pavements and leafy feeling away from a bustling main road met the criterion. To make it sound even more exclusive it was rechristened the Durlston Court Hotel after the preparatory school in Swanage where the eldest son, Colin, was a boarder.

Designated by its proprietors as an ‘Ultra Modern Private Hotel’, the new venue boasted forty bedrooms. Private suites could be had for 12 guineas a week and ‘Residents’ were deemed a ‘Speciality’. The ambience now had less to do with the music hall and the saloon bar and was more, as Hancock pointed out, in keeping with a Terence Rattigan Separate Tables type of existence endorsed by ‘a solid core of elderly gentlefolk who have come to the coast to see out their days on their modest means’. But the theatricals, who continued to keep their allegiance to his father, were still welcomed. This was a world where Country Life and Tatler, in which his mother advertised assiduously, jostled side by side with TitBits and the Stage. The clash between the refined respectability of one outlook and the rorty raffishness of the other would inform Hancock’s comic outlook for the rest of his life. On 7 August 1935, sadly only four days before Jack’s death, a feature article on the recently reopened and refurbished premises appeared in the Bournemouth Daily Echo and singled out its ‘unrivalled advantage of a natural environment of extreme beauty without artificiality’, adding that ‘the tender green of the lawns contrasts pleasantly with the strong white surface of the building’. The article was accompanied by an advertising feature in which all who had been involved in the renovation work displayed their calling cards. Tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner of the page was a box that read, ‘The whole of the Electrical Installations for the above by R.G. Walker.’ It gave his address as 37 Palmerston Road, Boscombe. He would soon move back to the hotel in another capacity.

Tony was eleven at the time of his father’s death and his memories were more concrete. He confided in Philip Oakes the image he cherished of his father in the back of a taxi putting himself together in readiness for his act. It is easy to see why it appealed to him. To a man who was congenitally dishevelled like Hancock the idea that somebody could reassemble himself in the back of a cab as a paragon of wedding-cake elegance was heroic. When in 1967 David Frost asked him who had most influenced him as a comedian, Tony used the question to reminisce fondly about the one occasion his father managed to top the bill: ‘It was at St Peter’s Hall (in Bournemouth). In those days a semi-professional entertainer used to wear one of those collapsible top hats and a monocle, always! There was one entrance to the hall – through the front. And he was refused admission, in spite of his gear, because he hadn’t got a ticket! He explained that he was top of the bill, and they said, “Sorry, no ticket, no entry.” So he was out. In the end, he climbed through the lavatory window. The show must go on, you know. But it didn’t go on with him again. He never got a return date.’ On another occasion Hancock added, ‘If that had happened to me, I would have gone straight home and to hell with them! But I hope he brought the house down for his pains.’

Jack Hancock was a practical joker too. A story was passed down in the family concerning another car journey. Jack suddenly turned to his friend and fellow publican, Peter Read, and with reference to a prop basket on the floor of the car shouted out, ‘It’s gone again … quick, get the flute and play it, otherwise we’ll never get it back in the basket!’ The driver, increasingly agitated, pulled up on the verge: ‘Either you get that snake back in the basket or we don’t budge another inch.’ Other memories were more sombre. He proved a trooper to the end and even in the last stages of his illness, when he was severely emaciated, Tony remembered him wrapping a sheet around his jaundiced shoulders and regaling the patrons with an impression of Gandhi. As Eric Morecambe would have said, ‘There’s no answer to that!’ His last performance had been given at a midnight matinée at Bournemouth’s Regent Theatre the previous Christmas, when he shared a bill with radio favourite Ronald Frankau and his old friend George Fairweather and tore the place down with his impersonation of Stanley Holloway delivering the monologue, ‘Albert and the Lion’.

When asked by the journalist Ray Nunn in the summer of 1962 whether he thought his father’s death had had a lasting effect on his personality, he replied, ‘I prefer not to answer that.’ With respect for the response, Nunn moved swiftly on to his next question, ‘What do you hate most of all?’ ‘Any form of cruelty,’ said Hancock. Osborne’s Jimmy Porter had been ten years old when his father had died: ‘For twelve months I watched my father dying … he would talk to me for hours, pouring out all that was left of his life to one lonely, bewildered little boy, who could barely understand half of what he said … you see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry – angry and helpless.’ It would be wrong to read such intimacy into Hancock’s situation, but Damaris Hayman, who sensed the love Tony had for him, recalled an emotional moment when he told her his father reminded him of the stag in Bambi, the moment when the young fawn acknowledges him as his sire and his mother explains, ‘Everyone respects him … he’s very brave and very wise. That’s why he’s known as the Great Prince of the forest.’ ‘Obviously,’ says Damaris, ‘his father was an almost god-like figure to him.’

On that same appearance with David Frost, Hancock reminisced about one of the songs his father used as a closing number. He couldn’t remember the words, but a member of the viewing public later obliged and he was invited back on the following evening’s show to interpret them. The song was called ‘First Long Trousers’ and it took the son some emotional effort to get to the end:

Say, young fellow, just a minute,

These are your first long trousers, eh?

Your little grubby knee breeches

Are for ever put away …

… Gee, you look well in them, sonny!

I can’t believe my eyes.

It doesn’t seem a year ago

When you were just – this size!

A little pink cheeked youngster,

Why, you toddled more than ran

Every night to meet your daddy –

Now you’ve got long trousers on.

Oh, I don’t know how to tell you,

But I want to, yes I do,

That your mummy and your daddy both

Are mighty proud of you.

And we’re going to miss the baby

That from us this day has gone.

But that baby we’ll remember

Though he has long trousers on.

By that time there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

It was only after his father’s death that Tony was sent away from home to school. He had spent the autumn term of 1929 at Summerbee Infants School, now the Queen’s Park Infants School, at Charminster, about half a mile from the family laundry. A conversation between Hancock archivist Malcolm Chapman and a fellow pupil revealed that he turned up in a smart brown suit, which was most unusual at a time when most parents in the area could not afford that kind of apparel. When the family moved into the hotel trade, his education climbed a notch up the social scale. Saugeen Preparatory School, founded in 1873, announced itself to prospective parents as ‘a preparatory school for boys for the Public Schools and the Navy’. It could boast of John Galsworthy as an old boy and had links with Robert Louis Stevenson (Lloyd Osbourne, the stepson for whom he wrote Treasure Island, had gone there as well). Coincidentally, the building in Derby Road is now occupied by another hotel, the Majestic. Coincidentally again, Treasure Island provided a leitmotif that would resonate in Hancock’s stage act down the years. The young Tony was now obliged to adopt a school uniform that comprised Eton collar, short jacket and black pinstripe trousers. The establishment provided the choristers, the young Hancock among them, for St Swithun’s Church only a few hundred yards away both from his parents’ second hotel venture and the school itself. In the spring of 1935 Saugeen School relocated to nearby Wimborne.

Events moved quickly in Hancock’s life after his father died. On 1 January the following year his mother remarried. A few days later he followed in the footsteps of his elder brother, Colin, and was enrolled as a pupil at Durlston Court School in Swanage. That he made the move halfway through the academic year suggests his mother may have needed to regroup and give herself the additional space to manage the business and her new life. It may merely signify that Saugeen School – had he continued to attend its new Wimborne location – closed down or was about to close down around this time. In his will Jack Hancock left the gross value of his whole estate of £13,961 to ‘Billy’ for ‘her unstintable [sic] and loving kindnesses during my life’. The remarriage so relatively soon after her first husband’s demise caused some consternation among many of the family’s friends. George Fairweather had little time for Robert Gordon Walker, twelve years his wife’s junior, the electrical contractor involved in the renovation of Durlston Court Hotel. A man of athletic appearance, he had played for Boscombe football club as a semi-professional for ten years. Within six months of the marriage he had sold his electrical company and was registered as a joint director of the hotel.

According to Roger, however, there was little question of his becoming a major presence in the lives of the three brothers: ‘My mother always said, “You mustn’t have anything to do with him. You’re my son and I’m the one who makes all the decisions. You’re not to take any decisions from him.” She rather put him down.’ When years later Roger himself married, he took his bride down to Bournemouth to meet his stepfather: ‘I’d always been put off him by my mother. When Annie met him for the first time, she said, “I think he’s lovely.” And for the first time in my life I realised he actually was a very nice person, but I’d always been talked out of it by my mother.’ It is understandable to imagine that any guilt or embarrassment Lily felt in the circumstances may have been channelled into brainwashing her children in this way. In her lifetime she married three times, but as Roger stresses, ‘Never for money! Never for money! Except the last one, who dropped down dead at her feet. He was a multi-millionaire. They were about to be married. There was going to be a fourth.’ One thing he will never take away from her is the intensity with which she threw herself into running the business: ‘She worked so bloody hard. Twenty-four hours a day.’ If she was not in the office, she was in the kitchen. Not that she was without back-up staff. Her youngest son recalls the Swiss chef who used to chase everyone around the kitchen with a knife when his anger was roused. Colin was by now managing the accounts, when, that is, he was not indulging his passion for tap-dancing. When questioned about the social contradiction in how a relatively modest family could afford to process three offspring through private education, Roger can only point to her industry: ‘I wish I had known my mother better. She was so supportive. She paid all the school fees. But children don’t think of that at the time. It wasn’t as if they were well off. She grafted so hard.’

Tony Hancock remained at Durlston Court School in Swanage until the summer of 1938. When he joined, there were around sixty-five boys on the register. Converted in 1903 from a large mid-Victorian private house, it occupied a commanding position overlooking the bay and the resort’s monumental Great Globe, 40 ornamental tons of the Portland limestone that characterised the area. Between 1928 and 1965 it could boast the redoubtable Pat Cox as headmaster, immortalised later by another Durlstonian, the scriptwriter and producer David Croft, as the part-inspiration for Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army. ‘It’s not that he was a pompous man,’ David recalls, ‘more that he represented all the best characteristics of being British, loyalty, and the old school.’ Cox had been a junior officer in the Durham Light Infantry during the Great War at the age of seventeen. ‘It’s not if we win the war, it’s when we win the war,’ he would pontificate during the later conflict. Croft arrived just after Hancock left. He recalls that the mistress in charge of the junior school had with some foresight told Hancock that if he didn’t sit up straight and hold his head erect he would grow into a round-shouldered old man. Sadly he did not need to reach old age to fulfil the prophecy. According to Roger, himself an old boy, the school’s motto, engraved on its crest beneath the imperial Roman eagle, was ‘Erectus Non Elatus’. This quickly translated into ‘Upright, not boastful’. Hancock might have preferred the line from the old George Formby song: ‘I’m not stuck up or proud – I’m just one of the crowd – a good turn I’ll do when I can!’

It was inevitable that he would apply himself to the drama life of the school. He made his first public appearance cast as the ‘celebrated, underrated nobleman, the Duke of Plaza-Toro’ in an end-of-term production of The Gondoliers. This required him to lead a train of noblemen on stage and announce with great dignity, ‘My Lords … the Duke!’ On opening night, the nobility was assembled, the audience was expectant, and his moment came. Hancock raised his hand in an impressive gesture, his lips parted, but the only sound that emerged was a strangled gargle. The voice of a master from the prompt side urged him to go off and come on again. The crocodile traipsed back into the wings. At the second attempt things were even worse. Tony recalled, ‘My jaws worked hard – like a gramophone without a record on it. Not one other sound could I raise but for a mouse-like squeak. “All right, Hancock,” said the teacher, “you’ve had your moment of clowning.”’ The school magazine reported, ‘The part of the Duke had to be played silently in mime!’ He progressed sufficiently to be offered a part in the next production, The Pirates of Penzance. Tragically, between auditions and casting his voice broke, ‘which was just as well considering what little I had done with it in its intact state,’ wrote Hancock. ‘I sounded like a cross between Lily Pons and Paul Robeson.’ The master, knowing full well that parents were paying large sums for small boys to flaunt their exhibitionist tendencies in this manner, clutched at a particular straw: ‘What I really want is a good stage manager.’ But Hancock’s determination knew no bounds. By making a nuisance of himself he was allowed to join the chorus on strict instructions: ‘Remember, Hancock, you can whack your thigh. But you must not sing.’ Eventually he was reduced to demanding roles like falling out of cupboards and wardrobes: ‘I can claim to have died the death in more ways than one at Durlston Court. The odd thing was that the more I failed as a child actor the more I determined to succeed as an adult … setbacks and adversity in general have always stiffened my resolution and it was so maddening to lie there on the stage being stepped over and prodded for heart beats when I felt I had it in me to make people laugh.’ There was little doubt about that. Many years later his mother told an Australian newspaper that he had been a ‘funny little lad’ since the age of three: ‘He used to do such funny little things that had everyone laughing and always had a funny saying at the tip of his tongue.’

For the moment he was markedly more successful on the playing field. The school records reveal that as a victim of measles in his first term he got off to a slow start both academically – coming twelfth out of twelve in his class – and athletically. He rallied sufficiently to win the school’s welterweight boxing final ‘by a narrow margin – he is quick and hits very hard and showed that he can take as well as give punishment’. He went on that year to excel on the cricket field, taking thirty-five wickets with an average of 6.3 including seven for six against Old Malthouse School. At soccer he scored twenty-two goals in fourteen matches. The following year saw cricket figures of seventy wickets in thirteen games, including one return of eight for twelve. A member of the school shooting team, he was awarded his First Class marksmanship badge in his final year, and on sports day 1938 the Victor Ludorum Cup. His final cricket season revealed figures of fifty-seven wickets at an average of 4.3. The headmaster wrote, ‘In Hancock, A. J. we have one of the best bowlers Durlston has ever had.’ He had been more specific at an earlier date: ‘He always bowls a good length with plenty of nip off the pitch and swings in from the leg rather late.’ As for lessons, he managed to win the prizes for English and French in his final year and to achieve 76 per cent in the Common Entrance Algebra exam to secure his place at public school.

He moved on to the long-established Bradfield College, near Reading, in the autumn of 1938. It might appear he was set securely on the educational ladder to British middle-class success. He stuck it for little more than three terms. His housemaster, J.R.B. Moulsdale, confirmed his aptitude for sport, but as for academia: ‘he was not academically very bright – no qualifications at all – and it is rumoured that his housemaster once wrote a report that said, “this boy thinks that he can make a living by being funny”’. As if to substantiate the pupil’s opinion, Moulsdale added as an aside on another occasion, ‘He was much, much better at imitating his masters. His mother told Joan Le Mesurier of how one visiting day she had gone to the Dean’s office to discuss his academic progress. The news was not encouraging. As she left he told her that she would find her son leaving the hall with the rest of the school. She expressed her concern how she was going to pick him out of the crowd. “It’s simple,” replied the Dean with a twinkle. “He’ll be the only one with his mortarboard stuffed under his arm and his gown trailing on the ground.”’ The impression of a Just William caricature has been endorsed by Richard Emanuel, for whom Hancock acted as fag: ‘He was permanently untidy. His clothes never appeared to fit, his tie veered towards the back of his neck and his collar had a life of its own. He invariably had inky hands and not infrequently ink on his face. His hair was generally in keeping with his collar and tie.’ Whatever his natural propensity for untidiness, Hancock was registering a protest: he hated the place. Soon after the beginning of his fourth term he literally, in his brother’s words, ‘threw the mortarboard and gown away under a bush and jacked it in in disgust’. Fortunately his decision to quit the system, without any apparent opposition from his family, forestalled the prospect of being haunted by a public-school accent for the rest of his life. It is always feasible that family economics were the reason for his departure and that Hancock was at last putting on a good acting performance. The prospect of war could not have had a settling influence either. According to Ronald Elgood, when in the early 1950s Tony found himself playing the Palace Theatre, Reading, ten miles away, Moulsdale invited him back to the alma mater for old times’ sake. He refused point blank, saying how much he loathed Bradfield. Moulsdale appeared somewhat surprised, as though he had not realised his old pupil had this particular chip on his shoulder.

Elgood was a contemporary of Hancock at both Durlston Court and Bradfield. His abiding memory, aside from the fact that there was nothing lugubrious about him – ‘that came later’ – is of a sense of mischief: ‘He was fairly streetwise. I don’t know if he came from a state school. I well recall a game of football with Tony at centre forward. We were naïve little gents and he tapped the ball with his hand when the referee wasn’t looking. We were amazed.’ His tone suggests that they also secretly admired his cheek. He is certainly remembered ‘as a good-natured boy, a nice guy’. To Pat Cox’s wife he was ‘just an ordinary likeable schoolboy’. To Peter Wilson at Bradfield he was ‘a cheerful soul – full of jokes and the joys of spring’. There is no evidence to suggest that he suffered adversely from the notion that it helps to build the character of children by the enforced separation from their loved ones in a repressive, potentially alienating environment, although his brother does point out that he was a shy child. Another Bradfield contemporary, Nigel Knight, observed a ‘complete and utter silence, uncommunicativeness (markedly towards groups)’. Tony admitted to John Freeman being an extrovert till the age of about fourteen, ‘and then it sort of packed up’. He had no idea why. Roger puts it down to public school: ‘You were kept away from the punters. Later I cracked it. I went to a party, at the House of Commons of all places, and I thought nobody knows anybody at this party. I’m no worse off than anybody else. So I started going up to people. But Tony was not particularly gregarious. He was shy. If he did crack it later, it was with the drink, but not without. But it was a wonderful education, particularly in the business my parents were in when you really had no home life. So you were going back to school and seeing your friends, which is really the reverse of what you would expect.’