Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic

His mother gave him a reason to focus on the future, and, more important still, a reason to believe that he still had a future. She represented precisely the kind of adult that he hoped he could become: someone kind, compassionate and honourable but also warm, amusing and refreshingly self-deprecating – ‘a “good-doer” rather than a “do-gooder”’.20

Clinging tightly to this ideal, he heeded his mother’s advice and, once enrolled for Sunday School at the Church of St Barnabas (known locally as the ‘tin church’ because of its run-down appearance and rusting corrugated roof21), threw himself into the culture of organised religion: ‘It gave me a feeling of belonging; some comforting communal security.’22 It was like, in his eyes, a Variety show with morals: lessons, songs, lantern slides and sermons. He loved it, and was spurred on to join ‘the Band of Hope, the Cubs, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel – I joined everything religious in sight’.23

His mother was impressed. Delighted – and more than a little relieved – to see the calming (and edifying) effect these spiritual activities were having on her shy and introspective young son, she began to harbour the hope that he might one day find his vocation as a clergyman. Frank himself, in fact, was already thinking along similar lines, although his sights were being aimed somewhat higher: his ultimate goal was to become a saint.

As improbable as it now sounds, the general drift of the ambition was sincere: ‘I really thought in those pre-teen years that if I lived a good, pure life in the service of God I could end up as Saint Francis of Eltham, and go to Heaven.’24 He knelt down each night to say his prayers, kept the Bible by his bed and never failed to read at least a page before setting off to sleep. The strong appeal that the idea of Heaven held for him centred on the belief that it promised to be ‘this world without this world’s miseries: its poverty and sickness and stammering shyness’.25 The trainee St Francis might not have known much about where he wanted to go, but his understanding of what he wanted to leave behind could hardly have been any clearer.

Heeding his mother’s advice that a good formal education, while no guarantee in itself of canonisation, was at least vital to becoming a vicar, Frank began studying hard to win one of the two London County Council scholarships that were then being offered by the local fee-paying Woolwich County School for Boys – soon to be renamed Shooters Hill Grammar26 – to potential pupils from poorer backgrounds. Always an academically able young boy, with a particular aptitude for mathematics, he duly passed the entrance examination and, on 1 May 1928, Frank Howard, aged eleven, proudly took his place at the ‘posh’ school.

The first year proved difficult. He felt that he looked out of place – an unusually tall, very thin, slightly stooping scholarship boy – and feared that most of his middle-class, fee-paying classmates were mocking him behind his back for being nothing more than a mere ‘charity’ case.27 His sense of discomfort was made even more intense by the fact that, having exchanged a ‘safe’ school environment that he had known so well for ‘the terrifying question-mark of a strange unknown’,28 his stammer had started to worsen.

From the second year on, however, he began to feel more at home and increasingly happy, forming a fairly large circle of friends, producing consistently solid if unspectacular work in class and performing considerably better than he had expected at cricket. He even developed ‘a great crush’ on one of his fellow-pupils, a young girl named Sheila, although it led only to humiliation when the draft of a love letter was discovered by a mischievous classmate and subsequently displayed for all to see on the school notice board.29

His extra-curricular interest in religion, meanwhile, appeared stronger and deeper than ever. Indeed, he came to be regarded as so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the subject that in 1930, when he had reached the age of thirteen, his vicar at St Barnabas, the Reverend Jonathan Chisholm, invited him to become a Sunday School teacher. It all seemed to be going smoothly and swiftly to plan: ‘I was happy teaching, despite my diffidence, for being religious I was anxious to serve.’30

Religion, however, was far from being Frank’s only serious interest. The world of popular entertainment had by now come to rival it as a source both of fascination and inspiration.

As with so much else that felt positive in Frank’s young life, this appetite had been inherited from, and cultivated by, his mother. Although devoted to the solemn code of the black book, Edith was far from averse to sampling the odd bit of sauciness culled from the ‘blue’ book, and she was always happy to hear her eldest son repeat the latest jokes in circulation (though she did draw the line – and administer a crisp clip round the ear – when, without knowing quite what it meant, he included a certain four-letter word he had overheard being uttered by the local greengrocer).

She also introduced him to the potentially thrilling spectacle of live entertainment when, on 26 December 1925, she took him to the Woolwich Artillery Theatre to see his first pantomime, Cinderella, featuring the fragrant Nora Delaney as the principal boy: ‘It was an exciting, glittering, over-the-rainbow world, and I instantly wanted to become a part of it: not specifically as an actor or comedian or singer or anything else, but just in order to escape to wonderland.’31

From that moment on, Frank seized every opportunity to see, hear, read about or re-enact the very best that the stage, screen and radio had to offer. There were countless outings to the various local cinemas, which in those days ranged from the upmarket Palace (which boasted a ‘well-appointed’ café lounge) to the downmarket Little Cinema (or the ‘Bug Hutch’, as Eltham’s youngsters preferred to call it,32 which during the silent years featured a piano accompanist called Lena Crisp – a future Frankie Howerd stooge). There were also many sessions spent in front of the wireless set, listening to all of the big dance bands (first Jack Payne’s, later Henry Hall’s), plenty of revue and Variety shows (such as Radio Radiance and Music Hall) and the first few broadcast attempts at sketch and situation-comedy (starting off with Myrtle and Bertie).33 There were even, when Edith’s meagre funds allowed, occasional excursions to local clubs, theatres and fairs, as well as a visit to the novelty ‘Air Circus’ that was held one summer on (and above) Eltham’s green and pleasant Nine Fields. In addition to all of this, of course, there remained the keenly anticipated annual pilgrimage to the pantomime.

The urge to imitate and emulate these glamorous forms and figures grew stronger with each passing year. Inside the Howard home, Frank started out by entertaining his mother and baby sister with peep-shows created from old cardboard boxes, and original plays that came complete with a miniature theatre (made out of rags, sticks and Edith’s best tea tray, and populated by a cast of cut-outs from well-thumbed copies of Film Fun), as well as a selection of self-authored gags, funny stories and painful puns grouped together under the banner of Howard’s Howlers.

It was not long before he began hankering for a bigger and broader audience, and he soon managed to persuade the girl next door, Ivy Smith, to help him form a ‘two-child concert party’. The duo managed to perform several surprisingly lucrative Saturday matinées at the bottom of his back garden, charging other children a farthing a time for the privilege of admission, before a startled Edith stumbled upon the event (or ‘robbery’ as she called it) and demanded that everyone present be reimbursed without delay.34 His response was to transform the operation into a scrupulously charitable affair, performing a further series of concerts (first with Ivy and then later with his similarly-minded sister, Betty) designed to benefit a variety of worthwhile local causes.

By the time, therefore, that Frank began his spell as a Sunday School teacher, his strong sense of duty to the Church was already prone to distraction from his even deeper desire to perform. Things soon grew worse, as far as spiritual matters were concerned, when he found himself obliged, as part of the preparation for his new duties, to join his fellow-tutors each Monday evening at Reverend Chisholm’s home in Appleton Road for tea, cake and very, very, lengthy hermeneutical advice: ‘I remember how I’d look at him, trying to be attentive, but with my mind wandering to films and music and the theatre.’35

The problem was not just that so little now seemed to be seeping in; it was also that so much that was already in seemed to be leaking out. With nothing more to rely on than a wafer-thin recollection of the basic theme of the kindly but rather dull Reverend Chisholm’s latest briefing, Frank would find that he had no choice but to improvise his way through each one of his own Sunday School sessions, spending more time regaling his audience with tales of Robin Hood, Morgan the Pirate and Sexton Blake than he did engaging them with any pertinent biblical issues, axioms or events. His popularity soared as an unusually entertaining teacher, but so too did his sense of guilt as an increasingly heavy-lidded trainee saint: ‘I thought I’d let God down in some way.’36

He soldiered on for a while in a state of stubborn denial, unable to face up to the fact that he was on the verge of disappointing a mother who seemed so proud that he had found what she had taken to terming his ‘calling’.37 Then, to his great surprise and immense relief, he stumbled upon a compromise: the deceptively perceptive Reverend Chisholm, sensing that his protégé was an extrovert trapped in an introvert’s cassock, encouraged him to join the Church Dramatic Society. It struck Frank immediately as an inspired piece of advice: now, instead of having to abandon the Church for the theatre, he could accommodate the theatre within the Church.

The Society’s upcoming project was a revival of Ian Hay’s 1919 Cinderella-style drawing-room comedy Tilly of Bloomsbury, and the newest member of the company made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was ‘pathetically eager’ to take part.38 Although the play had acquired a certain reputation for containing several roles that were suitable for the most ‘wooden’ of actors (even the BBC’s notoriously teak-taut Director-General, John Reith, had managed to march his way through a recent amateur production without appearing too out-of-place39), it was immediately clear to the current producer, Winifred Young, that Frank represented a serious casting challenge. Auditioning for the relatively undemanding part of Tilly’s working-class father, he was excruciatingly bad, reading his lines ‘in an incoherent gabble, flushing in a manner that would make a beetroot look positively anaemic, knocking over the props in my clumsiness – and embarrassing everyone in my anxiety to please’.40

When the ordeal was finally over, Mrs Young took him to one side, smiled a soft, sympathetic smile and then asked him: ‘Will you let me help you?’ Astonished that he was not being admonished, he stuttered an eager ‘Yes’ in grateful reply.41

From that moment on, this gifted and compassionate amateur director worked as Frank’s private – and unpaid – tutor. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, he would spend two taxing but hugely rewarding hours at her house, gradually learning how to overcome his stammer, start the process of mastering his role and, perhaps most importantly of all, begin believing in himself: ‘She taught me how to “ee-nun-cee-ate,” to be calm, to concentrate on the performance – and to forget myself as a self-pitying nonentity.’42

He would later claim that he owed ‘as much to Winifred Young as to anyone else in my career’, speculating that without her intervention ‘there might not have been any career, merely bitter frustration’.43 There was certainly no doubting her immediate effect: she transformed him, within a matter of a few short weeks, from a painfully awkward-looking nervous wreck into the show’s most notable success.

Frank came through it all without offering the audience more than barely a hint of his former hesitation, anxiety and self-doubt, and, in spite of the modest size and nature of his role, his performance had drawn the warmest of all the applause. For the first time in his life, he felt triumphant.

Someone who happened to encounter him backstage after the show told him matter-of-factly: ‘You should be an actor.’44 Those five words, regardless of whether they were uttered out of honesty, politeness or perhaps even a playful sense of sarcasm, triggered a profoundly positive effect on the still-exhilarated novice performer, serving as ‘a sudden and instant catalyst on all my vague hopes and half-dreams, fusing them into an absolute certitude of determination’.45 That moment, the adult Frankie Howerd would always say, was the special one, the turning point, the moment when – all of a sudden – he really knew: ‘[F]rom that night on I never deviated from a sense of destiny almost manic in its obsessive intensity.’46

There would be no more talk of St Francis. The future was for Frank the Actor.

CHAPTER 2

A Stuttering Start

Well. No. Yes. Ah.

They coined a new nickname for Frank Howard at Shooters Hill school: ‘The Actor’.1 He loved it.

He loved the idea that an actor was what he was set to become. It might only have been 1932, three long and arduous maths-and Latin-filled years before he was due to leave school, but already, as far as he was concerned, acting was the only thing that really mattered.

Having acquired his initial theatrical experience under the auspices of his church, Frank now proceeded to advance his acting ambitions inside his school, joining its own informal dramatic society and establishing himself very quickly as one of its most lively and distinctive figures. Gone, in this particular context at least, was the insecure loner of old, and in his place was to be found a far more sociable, self-assured and increasingly popular young man: his whole manner and personality appeared to come alive, growing so much bigger and bolder and brighter, whenever the action switched from the classroom to the stage. Here, at least, he knew what he was doing, and he knew that what he was doing was good.

Right from the start, he made it abundantly clear that he was eager to try everything: acting, writing, direction, production, promotion – whatever it was, he was willing to do it, work at it and, given time, perhaps even master it. Everywhere that one looked – backstage, in the wings, centre stage, even at the table with the tickets right at the back of the school hall – Frank Howard seemed to be there, still slightly stooped, still slightly stammering, but now entirely immersed in the experience.

As a performer, he progressed at quite a rapid rate. Although he was hardly the type, even then, to lose himself in a role – his playful disposition, in addition to his distinctive voice and looks, conspired against the pursuit of such a style – his obvious enthusiasm, allied to his lively wit, ensured that each one of his stage contributions stood out and stayed in the mind. At his most inspired, such as the occasion when he played the spoiled and rascally Tony Lumpkin in Oliver Goldsmith’s satire She Stoops to Conquer, he showed real comic promise, relishing the chance to release all of the dim-witted verve that he had found lurking in the original text.2

As a fledgling playwright, on the other hand, the great amount of faith he invested in his own ability struck most of those whose opinions mattered as gravely misplaced. An audacious attempt to squeeze a rambling one-hour play, entitled Lord Halliday’s Birthday Party, into a tight ten-minute slot in a forthcoming concert was thwarted by the school’s headmaster, the rather dour Rupert Affleck, who deemed the script (which featured a messy divorce, a brutal murder and several other striking themes lifted straight from some of the movies Frank had recently seen) ‘far too outrageous and bold to be performed by young boys’, adding (according to Howerd’s own rueful recollection) that he was ‘appalled that a fifteen-year-old could be so depraved as to write such filth’.3

Embarrassed but undeterred, Frank proceeded to write several more scripts that Mr Affleck, had he seen them, would no doubt have considered to have been of far too sensational a nature. When, however, a play that he did manage to get performed – his blatantly derivative murder-mystery, Sweet Fanny Adams – elicited nothing more audible (let alone encouraging) from the auditorium than the lonely sound of tumbleweed being blown through the desert, he resolved in future to keep the rest of his ‘masterpieces’ to himself.4 Always a populist, Frank reasoned that if the current market demand was restricted to his acting, then his acting, for the time being, would have to be the sole commodity that he would seek to deliver.

In 1933, at the age of sixteen, he began attending an evening class in acting offered by what in those days was called the London County Council (or LCC). It was there that he first encountered his next great mentor: Mary Hope.

Hope – an experienced stage actor herself – became one of Howard’s tutors, and, just like Winifred Young before her, she soon found herself intrigued by the young performer’s quirky appeal. First, she encouraged him to join the LCC Dramatic Society – a vastly more serious and rigorous kind of company than either of Howard’s previous two theatrical troupes – and then, after seeing how richly original was his potential (and also how open he was to instruction), she advised him to aim his sights on securing a scholarship at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). If he was interested, she added, she would be willing to work alongside him as his coach.

Howard, his eyebrows hovering high and his bottom lip hanging low, was, as he would later put it, ‘a-mazed’. Listening back to the phrase as it echoed around inside his head – ‘Was I interested?’ – the only word that sounded out of place was the ‘was’. He was almost too thrilled to speak: ‘Choked with emotion, I managed to stammer that it was the most exciting prospect imaginable.’5

Before he could commit himself with a clear conscience, however, he knew that he would have to find a way to win his mother’s blessing. This did not seem likely to be easy. Edith, after all, had set her heart on seeing her son acquire a good education and then pursue a suitably upright and worthy religious career; now he was set to dash both of these treasured hopes at a stroke. Frank’s great sense of guilt grew even worse when he reflected upon the many sacrifices that had been (and still were being) made, not just by his mother but also by everyone else in his family, so that he could see through his education at Shooters Hill.

The loss of the ailing Frank Snr’s Army salary, occurring as it did right at the time when the country was deep in the depths of the Great Depression, had forced Edith to find work as a cleaner in order to help pay the mounting pile of bills. A further, and far more painful, consequence of the family’s shrunken income was the fact that it had made it impractical for either Sidney or Betty to match the length (or the quality) of their elder brother’s education: both, it had become clear, would have to leave school as soon as they reached the then minimum age of fourteen (Sidney, as things turned out, for a career in the Post Office,6 and Betty for a job in an office7). Everyone, it seemed, had suffered for the benefit of young Frank, and now young Frank was ready to risk it all on RADA.

‘Children are inclined to take a tremendous amount for granted,’ the adult Frankie Howerd would come to reflect, ‘and for my part I never fully appreciated […] the degree of the hardship involved in keeping me at Shooters Hill.’8 The teenaged Frank Howard, however, in spite of his youthful self-absorption, knew enough to know how great a blow the news of his apparent recklessness would be, and how easily his sudden change of plan could be taken as a betrayal. He hated telling them, but he had to.

When he did, he could not have been more pleasantly surprised by his mother’s outwardly calm and remarkably compassionate reaction. Instead of initiating a bitter debate or administering a furious rebuke, she just sighed, smiled resignedly, and said: ‘That sounds like a nice idea.’9 Frank’s relief and gratitude were immense: if his redoubtable mother was still on his side, then she would ensure that the entire family remained on his side. ‘I think she was disappointed that I wasn’t going to enter the Church, after all,’ he would recall, ‘but since her primary concern was for my happiness, she gave me all the support she could.’10

He returned, suitably emboldened, to his coach Mary Hope, and started working hard – ‘harder than I’d worked for anything in my life’11 – in preparation for his forthcoming RADA exam. There were three set pieces to master: one a short speech from a contemporary play, and two soliloquies from Shakespeare. With the momentous event only a matter of months away, the schedule was unrelenting: day after day, week after week, the context of each discrete piece was studied, the character of each speaker explored and the rhythms of each line assessed. Hope also worked with Howard on keeping his nerve, controlling his stammer and coping in general with the unfamiliar experience of being up there on show all alone. Rehearsal followed rehearsal, critique followed critique, until both of them were happy that they had secured a strong start, a solid centre and a suitably big finish. When the time finally came, Frank Howard felt sure that he was ready.

The big day started cold and grey. Rising from his bed early, having barely slept throughout what had felt like an impossibly long night, Frank washed, fussed over his fine curly hair, and then put on his best, barely worn, brown suit – which hung limply off his tall, skinny frame like a large sack would have done from a stick. Studying the effect in the mirror, he thought that he looked rather good. There was just time to go downstairs for a quick cup of tea in the kitchen and some welcome words of encouragement from his mother, and then he was up, out and off to meet his fate.

Clutching the packet of cheese sandwiches that his mother had made for his lunch, he caught the train from Eltham to Holborn Viaduct, and then, with a growing sense of trepidation, walked slowly through Bloomsbury, with all of the lines from the three speeches rattling around inside his head, until he arrived outside the entrance to the grand-looking RADA building at 62 Gower Street. What happened next was an experience that Frank Howard would never, ever, forget.

Shuffling inside, he found himself at the back of a vast room that appeared to be almost full of his fellow-applicants. It only took one quick glance over at them – smart, smug, matinée idol types – and one furtive glance back at himself – suddenly revealed as a scruffy, shambling, ‘sweating oaf’12 – for all of the old demons to come crashing back. The others looked as if they belonged; he felt that he did not. As he stood there, rooted helplessly to the spot, he held on tightly to his packet of sandwiches (‘I had to cling to something’), and felt sure that he could hear more than a few mocking laughs.13 He knew what he had to do, but at that singularly vital moment, in spite of all of those months of lessons and learning and desperately hard work, he knew that he had lost all faith in his ability to do it.

Called in for his audition, he walked over to his spot, still clutching his packet of cheese sandwiches absent-mindedly to his chest, and then, sensing that he was having some trouble in keeping still, looked down and noticed that his left leg had started to tremble. The more he tried to stop it, the worse the quivering became. When he looked up in embarrassment at the examiners (one of whom – the imperious actor Helen Haye – he recognised immediately as the haughty wife of the master villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s recent movie, The 39 Steps), he found that they were all staring back not at his face but straight down at his leg. Panicking, he took his right hand (which remained wrapped around his squashed packet of sandwiches) and slammed it down hard and fast against his left knee, praying that the violent gesture would at least bring the shaking to a stop.