Titter Ye Not!
On Sunday he went to the church of St Barnabas on the corner. And at the age of thirteen he was deemed knowledgeable enough by the church elders and the Revd Jonathan Chisholm, vicar of St Barnabas, to be invited to become a Sunday School teacher. On Monday evenings he joined half a dozen other tutors from the diocese at the vicar’s home in Appleton Road for tea and cakes, and instruction for the following Sunday’s work.
Problem: Francis was not a good listener, and his attention was inclined to wander into the dream clouds as the vicar droned on. Result: when it came to the class on Sunday and he was facing a dozen eager young faces in his room off the church hall, he had no idea at all what he should be telling them.
But never one to be lost for words, Francis – he never quite made it to St Francis, though he admitted to it as a fleeting thought – launched into great yarns from his imagination featuring pirates, detectives and historical adventures.
In those days the face that would later launch a thousand quips – and virtually never veer from the script on TV, stage, screen or radio – proved a dab hand at off-the-cuff invention. Like the story-tellers of old, Frankie entranced his youthful audience – and the word spread. This was the room to be in. He received the plaudits from the Revd Chisholm with due humility, even if the Bible had taken a back pew that day. Luckily the vicar never sat in. He even encouraged his young protégé to join the Church Dramatic Society.
But now, at thirteen, a crisis loomed. The signs had probably been there, along with the growing pains of a shy introvert lad who longed to proclaim his talent to the outside world. Suddenly young Francis developed a stammer, a genuine speech impediment he put down to a mixture of wanting to please and over-eagerness to get the words out. ‘I was all stutter and gabble,’ is how he summed it up.
Also looming on the horizon was a church performance of Tilly of Bloomsbury, a vintage comedy by Ian Hay, and Francis practically went down on his knees to beg them to let him take part.
Enter Mrs Winifred Young – one of the several women who Frankie would later claim unequivocally to have had a major influence on his life, and the direction it took. Mrs Young was the producer, and she saw something in the shy, stumbling youth beyond a stutter and a capacity for walking into the scenery.
She found a role for him – Tilly’s father, aged all of sixty-five, complete with false beard, who would stalk around the stage declaring his faith in his daughter’s virtue through his whiskers. Mrs Young took the embryo actor under her wing, inviting him round to her house in Westmount Road on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and laboriously rehearsing him for two hours in the subtleties of enunciation and, above all, talking s-l-o-w-l-y.
And she won through. Slowly Francis relaxed, learned to enjoy his lines, forgot his nerves in the concentration on the part. ‘She was my Professor Higgins,’ he said. ‘I did exactly what she told me – and when it finally happened I was the hit of the night!’
He was, too. The unwieldy youth whose features were ill-disguised behind a long grey beard won the loudest applause. More important, he even won a few lines in the local paper’s review. The South London Press singled him out for praise, and Francis proudly cut out the six-inch critique and pasted it in a school exercise book.
‘It was my first Press cutting,’ he recalled. ‘But I had to wait a precious long time for the second!’
2
Early Signs
Someone had said something to Frankie that took root inside his head and wouldn’t let go.
It happened as the curtain rang down in St Barnabas Church Hall on the last ripple of applause for Tilly, and a sweating potential star-is-born unclipped the spectacle frames that held his beard in place and breathed a deep sigh of relief.
‘You know,’ said the someone, ‘you should be an actor …’
Frankie never remembered who owned the voice. All he did know was that a gangling thirteen-year-old who had taken three curtain calls owed that someone a debt of gratitude. Because those lucky seven words welded a sudden determination inside him, turned the crossroads sign round from religion to acting – though some say pounding a pulpit isn’t that much different – and sent him on his way with a swing in his stride.
Suddenly Frankie Howerd knew, with incontrovertible certainty, where he was heading.
‘I could so easily have gone into the Church,’ he said. ‘I had religion instilled into me from the day I was born.’
His mother had been at the play. When he went home that night and told her of his Big Decision, Edith Howard, bless her, gave him a hug and said: ‘That sounds like a nice idea, Francis.’ It may have been the euphoria of the moment, or she may have been following a mother’s instinct of knowing when to agree with your offspring’s wildest dreams, but for Frankie it was the seal of approval he needed.
Frankie sensed her true feelings, but said nothing. ‘I think Mum was disappointed that I decided against entering the Church,’ he told friends later. ‘But thank God she supported me all the way. If she had come down heavily on me, I don’t know what I’d have done.’ Luckily, Mum was too sensible.
The next day Frankie enrolled for acting lessons.
His father was home, but doing very little to help. Finally invalided out of the Army, he took a local job as a clerk, but the pay was so poor that his wife still had to keep scrubbing the floors and polishing the furniture to make ends meet. In that year, 1933, the sixteen-year-old Frankie had little idea what was going on outside the unremarkable but comfortable confines of Eltham. The only clue was in the line of grey-faced men he would pass in the dole queue stretching round the block outside the local labour exchange.
The world was a bitter place, and that spring saw the height of the Great Depression with three million unemployed and the average manual wage standing at £2.10s. (£2.50) a week.
The sprawling tentacles of suburbia were reaching out from London, slowly but remorselessly grasping the precious green acres of fields and hedgerows and slipping them into its hungry concrete jaws. Ironically, given the economic climate, this was the year of the first housing estates, with building hitting a record for the century and new houses going up at the rate of a thousand a day, selling for £350 each, with a down payment of just £5 to clinch the deal.
All Francis saw of the emergence of a brave new world was the tearful face of his beloved mum when his brother Sidney and sister Betty had to be taken away from school at the age of fourteen. His parents could no longer afford their education. The youngsters were shunted out into the big wide world – Sidney joined the Post Office as a clerk, while Betty found a job as an office junior. Francis, resting on the laurels of his scholarship, stayed at school. ‘Quite honestly,’ he admitted later, ‘I never had any idea of the sacrifices my parents made to keep me.’
A year later it would just be his mum. After his father died in 1934 it was she who refused to give in. Instead she worked herself to the bone to keep the family intact. It would be a mixture of guilt and affection that kept Frankie close to her for the whole of her life. When fame and fortune came, he never forgot the early days and what she did for him.
But right now his mind was on rather more than academia. The London County Council, or LCC, ran evening classes for aspiring actors, and that included all aspects of theatrical work. Frankie enrolled, and after a few months with the LCC Dramatic Society was told of a chance to be promoted to the acting heights – to RADA, otherwise known as the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Or, if you prefer, mecca to every young hopeful in the land. The Academy was floating its own scholarship around like a tempting carrot.
Frankie’s teacher at that time was an actress named Mary Hope, who would seem to have had more faith in her pupil than he did in himself, and put him to work in prolonged coaching sessions. The examination required the embryonic thespians to spout an extract from a contemporary play, followed by two Shakespearian soliloquies. Frankie stifled his nerves, and agreed to take the plunge.
On a dismal grey day he set off from home in his best suit, clutching a packet of cheese sandwiches his mum had made him for lunch. Frankie got off the train at Holborn, and walked the half-mile to No. 62, Gower Street, where the imposing RADA building is located. He had been jittery to start with, the butterflies in his stomach fluttering with growing urgency as he got nearer to his goal. Walking through the doors, he would say, turned him into a ‘near wreck’.
He records what happened next in graphic detail.
‘I shuffled into a vast room where the other candidates were waiting, and was summoned in for the audition, absently clutching my sandwiches. That’s when my nerve went. My left leg started to shake – the original knee-trembler! Then I started the speech.
‘“To be … um … er … to be or … um … n-n-not to b-b-be … Th-th-that is … is … is … um … er … the quest-quest-question …”
‘That’s when my bag of sandwiches burst, showering crumbs and cheese all over the floor …’
Poor demoralized Frankie squeaked his way through the audition, knowing from the expressions of the three judges that he was on a hiding to nothing. He stumbled out of the audition room, shouldered through the crowd waiting their turn, and fled into the cold grey afternoon.
Well aware of the sacrifices his mother had made, Frankie felt he had failed her. ‘I had let everybody down. My mother, the school headmaster, my mates, my tutor, everyone. And myself. On the train home I just stared blankly out of the window. But when I got to Eltham I couldn’t bear to face her.’ He found himself in a field at the back of the house – ‘where I sat in the long grass, sobbing my heart out.’
The tears dried. Frankie Howerd sat there for two long hours. And slowly his mind cleared.
‘I had a strange premonition,’ he would describe it later. ‘Call it a flash of intuition – call it anything. But I sat bolt upright in the grass, and said aloud: “You’re stupid! What are you? Plain stupid! God gave you a talent, and if it’s not to be an actor – what then?’
‘And the answer came: a comedian!
‘Why not? I didn’t have anything to lose, except my pride – and that was wounded enough already after such a traumatic day.’
Frankie crawled home at sunset to face his mother, and break the bad news to her. When she heard about the RADA débâcle she smiled sympathetically, patted his shoulder, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. When she heard about his new ambition to be a funnyman, there was the briefest of pauses before she nodded and said: ‘If it makes you happy. As long as you’re kind and decent, I don’t care what you do.’ What more could a devoted son ask of a devoted mother?
Frankie left school. He had no great diplomas to his name when he shook hands with the headmaster and turned his back on the gates of Shooters Hill Grammar for the last time. Just a GCE (the General Certificate of Education). His name is listed under the farewell Valete in the 1935 school magazine.
But he had some good memories to take away with him – and he’d managed to filch the cricket ball with which he took the six-out-of-six to become a hero for a day.
Now it was time to get a job, and help with the family finances. In those hard times it was anything but easy, but after prodigious scouting of the area Frankie landed a job as a filing clerk with the firm of Henry A. Lane, Provisions and Produce, at No. 37–45, Tooley Street in the East End – at the princely wage of £1 per week. The job was dreary and dead-end, the only relief being after work when Francis found solace in Southwark Cathedral, where he would sit alone in a pew for hours listening to organ music or concerts – and on one unforgettable occasion the St Matthew Passion which seemed to scorch its way into his very soul.
His religious zeal burned as vividly as ever, coupled with a growing appreciation of music. ‘I know nothing about classical music,’ he confessed once. ‘But it all adds up, doesn’t it?’
As he shifted restlessly at his desk overlooking the docks, Frankie’s pen toyed with shipping orders and invoices while his mind was elsewhere – in the realm of the theatre, and the local concert parties around Shooters Hill where once more he was a leading light. His boss didn’t help. According to Frankie, the manager – one Henry Lane himself – had a limp, a black patch over one eye, and a malevolent gleam in the other, a legacy from the Great War. Mr Lane vented his spleen daily on the hapless youth in his charge – and Frankie, being Frankie, was panicked into making ludicrous mistakes like spilling tea in the boss’s lap or ink over the desk.
In the ten weeks he worked there, Frankie also came out in an unsightly rash of boils, caused by a mixture of stress and being run down. They were the first of innumerable ailments which would dog his footsteps over the ensuing years, earning him his unfortunate reputation for hypochondria, much of it well-founded. But to start with it was just boils.
The final straw in Frankie’s unhappy association with the company came when a bundle of documents he dispatched to Vladivostock was opened and revealed to be a programme for a revue he had just put on called Frank Howard’s Gertchers Concert Party. It was a case of ‘Kindly leave the office’ – and Frankie, at nineteen, found himself enduring the humiliation of the dole queue for the first time in his young life.
His mother helped find him his next job. The head of the household where Edith Howard did her daily cleaning chores ran an insurance company, heard about her son’s sorry tale, and gave him a post as a clerk in the firm’s Southwark office at thirty shillings a week.
But by now all Frankie’s creative juices were flowing into his amateur dramatics, with concert parties taking up most of his energy. That meant comedy – and he worked day and night to think up sketches and routines he could perform in the local church hall, old folks’ homes and even for the Shooters Hill Dramatic Society he had joined. He formed ‘Frank Howard’s Knockouts’, insisting once again that his name was in the title – the first significant traces of a performer’s ego becoming apparent?
Travelling to concert dates could prove a problem, but Frankie was nothing if not an opportunist, and thumbed a lift with anyone who would take him. Once he found himself on the back of a motor bike en route home after the annual Herne Bay Sunday School outing. It poured with rain. The upshot: to boils, add pneumonia.
Frankie expanded his concerts to other boroughs, and was soon performing in church halls throughout South London – and all for free. He even changed his name to Ronnie Ordex for a time, decided he didn’t like it, and changed it back again. Finally he felt it was time his efforts yielded a material dividend.
He started looking around for a suitable place to air his talent – for money. His first tentative attempts to turn professional resulted in dismal failure. But the boy tried, how he tried! Now twenty-one, he wrote himself a comic monologue, and rehearsed it until he was word perfect with scarcely a hint of a stutter. Then he thumbed through the entertainment columns to find the nearest music hall that was featuring what he was looking for. Talent Night!
In the thirties most of the country’s music halls put on a ‘Friday Night is Talent Night’ spot in their bill at one time or another. All Frankie had to do was pick the theatre, make his way there, and join the queue to put his name down on the list. He made sure he came on early so that he didn’t have to wait around too long kicking his heels and trying to control his nerves. That first monologue failed to get the laughs, so Frankie ditched it. The following week he put on schoolboy shorts and tried out a comic song. Again, a smattering of applause that sounded suspiciously like sympathy. Next, he switched to impressions. James Cagney, Charles Laughton, Noel Coward, they all came in for their share of mimicry. The trouble was that they all sounded the same. Frankie wrote that off to experience, and went back to playing safe – telling jokes.
It was at the Lewisham Hippodrome that he decided to try the one about Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins …
Long John is standing by the rail staring out to sea when Jim tentatively approaches him and plucks at his sleeve. ‘Yes, lad,’ growls the old sea dog. ‘What be ye wantin’?’
‘I was wonderin’, Long John,’ ventures young Jim, ‘how you come to lose your leg?’
‘Aaargh, that come from a cannon fired from a Spanish ship. I’m walkin’ the deck when — whoosh! This cannon ball takes me leg clean off. But quick as a flash me mates find a piece o’ wood and screw it in – and I’m as good as new.’
‘And … how come you got a steel hook for a hand?’ queries young Jim.
‘That, lad, be when I’m fightin’ Bluebeard the Pirate. He gets in a lucky swipe with his cutlass – and me hand drops overboard into the sea. Quick as a flash me mates grab a steel hook from the deck and screw it in – and there it is! Good as new.’
‘Finally,’ pursues the lad, ‘that eye patch. How come you’re blind in one eye?’
‘Ah that! That’s seagull droppin’s!’
‘But seagull droppin’s don’t make you blind –’
‘It do’, says Long John [and here Frankie would crook one finger at his eye] ‘if you’ve got a hook for a hand …’
He should have stayed in bed that day. On the bill were comedians Jimmy James and Derek Roy, both of whom had their own highly individual line in comedy patter, so the audacious tenderfoot found himself in tough company, while Jack Payne and his Band kept the music swinging. Jimmy – real name James Casey – was perfecting the drunk act that would be hailed as the best of its kind in comic history. As he staggered on in top hat and tails, trying to reach the cigarette in his mouth with two wavering fingers, you could almost see the stage tilting beneath him as he attempted to stay upright. He would become known as ‘the comedian’s comedian’, and Frankie, watching open-mouthed from the wings, could never have guessed that within twenty years he would be following his idol out on to the stage of the London Palladium in successive Royal Variety shows. Or that Jack Payne would one day become his agent.
‘Jimmy performed his drunk act like a rhythmic ballet. There was a kind of beauty about it,’ Frankie said, marvelling. ‘Humour is all about conflicting elements – and here was a drunk performing a ballet! There’s conflict for you.’
Derek Roy was making lesser waves, but would go on to become the resident comedian on the BBC’s Variety Bandbox, the most successful radio show of its kind, and Frankie would join him in presenting the show on alternate weeks. A-mazing – but that night in Lewisham his career could have been nipped in the bud for all time when he suffered the ultimate humiliation for any comic … being hooted off the stage.
New talent went on right after the interval. Jimmy James had closed the first half, and curiously enough excelled naturally in the style which Frankie would later adopt. He was a brilliant adlibber, and could milk laughs from the slightest chance remark. He was once asked by a BBC producer what he did on the stage, and replied: ‘I’m glad you brought that up. It’s been worrying me for years!’ While in a historic live radio show from the Garrick Theatre in the early fifties he mislaid his script and went through an entire nine-minute sketch with a bemused Tony Hancock as his feed, making it all up as he went along. And nine minutes can be a long time.
Curtain up. Frankie heard his name called. Taking his usual deep breath to stem his nerves he walked out with as much confidence as he could muster – and froze as a blinding spotlight pinned him to the stage like a fly in aspic. He gulped, tried to stammer out the start of the Long John Silver story. And dried.
Someone in the audience tittered.
Frankie tried again. After a few seconds his voice faded away into silence. The huge theatre was deathly quiet, suddenly hostile.
And poor, unfortunate Frankie just stood there, the shivering hub of his own personal nightmare.
‘I had never known anything like it – and yet it was what I’d wanted all my life,’ he said much later, appreciating the irony of that dreadful night. ‘I could only stand there like an idiot screwing up my eyes against the glare. I tried to get going on the joke, but it was so off-putting that my voice just tailed away and I dried up! I suppose I just wasn’t used to it.’
The audience started to laugh and heckle. Boos and cat-calls mingled with the jeers. From the pit the orchestra leader hissed, ‘Say something – or get off the stage!’
Frankie got off the stage. His eyes were streaming with tears of humiliation.
It was a chastening experience, the kind where a brave soul might say to himself: ‘One day I’ll laugh about this …’ And he did, years later, with Derek Roy. But not then. Frankie turned up his coat collar and crept away into the night.
He tried again, this time with the Carroll Levis Discoveries – nothing to do with jeans – that would eventually become a hit TV talent-spotting show. He keyed himself up no fewer than four times. ‘Comedy, impressions, comic monologues, dramatic speeches, I tried them all.’ Result? ‘Nothing. It was no good.’
Successful amateur, failed pro. Frankie Howard’s curriculum vitae could have been summed up in those few words, and it hardly made impressive reading. He could make people laugh with his sketches and gags on a local level – church hall audiences loved him. But when it came to the ‘real thing’, as far as a career in comedy was concerned, he was up against a brick wall and he knew it. Worse, he could see no way round or over it.
Then the war came, and with it a chance to conquer fresh pastures. That’s if he could conquer his nerves first.
3
Basic Training
Five months after war was declared on 3 September 1939, Frankie received his call-up papers. Why the War Office waited until February 1940 before deciding that Howard F.A. should do his bit for King and Country has never been made clear. As it turned out, for the first two years of his service he lived up to his initials, and did just that.
He applied to join his dad’s old regiment, and was duly accepted for the Royal Artillery. First stop: the barracks at Shoeburyness where they fitted out his tall, ungainly figure in khaki, found him a bunk in one of the dormitory huts, and set about turning the new recruit into a fighting soldier.
Of course, it was hopeless from the start. Frankie was willing, no doubt about that. But his innate nervousness led him into all sorts of scrapes, the kind that would not be out of place in one of the Carry On farces he would later adorn.
First, basic training. It was nerves, he insisted, that led him to answer back to the fearsome Sergeant Major Alfred Tonks at his first appearance on the parade ground. To actually mutter the words ‘Speak up!’ when the sarge was bellowing his guts out in a roar that scattered the pigeons, smacked suspiciously of potential suicide rather than a wish to see the war through.
From that moment Private Howard’s fate was sealed. He was singled out as a troublemaker, and paid the price accordingly.
A fellow recruit, Private Peter Enright, recalled the early days of square-bashing with a nostalgic smile. ‘They had us out there all day and every day trying to drill some kind of discipline into us. But poor old Frank just couldn’t get it together. When the sarge shouted “Right wheel!” once, Frank actually headed off to the left. And when the order came to “Mark time!” – guess who bumped into my back and sent me sprawling into the bloke in front? Right first time.’