Titter Ye Not!

It was worse when it came to weaponry. After his initial introduction to the heavy .303 Lee-Enfield rifle, Frankie knew they were not destined to be friends. As someone who never got beyond the primary school level in Do-It-Yourself — his later boast was that he couldn’t even change a light bulb, let alone a fuse – Frankie was as out of place stripping down a rifle as a car mechanic performing a heart transplant.

Sergeant Major Tonks dubbed him the ‘Unknown Quantity’, and made his life a misery. But the one thing Frankie did know about himself was his desire to get back on the boards.

‘I couldn’t help myself. Even while I was square-bashing on the parade ground I was day-dreaming about it. Performing was something that was absolutely compulsive, and I must have had some sort of innate belief in myself to flounder on,’ he would claim later.

At that point in his life he needed all the faith in himself that he could muster. The Lewisham débâcle had been the start of the first low point in a career that would see him soar to the heights of stardom and sink to the depths of despair. But that was for later. Right now, if there was a graph on the wall of Frankie’s personal profit-and-loss account, it would show a minor dip.

His ego had been further dented on the actual outbreak of war, when he immediately applied to ENSA (Entertainments National Services Association) to offer his own services. ‘I wasn’t trying to dodge the column,’ he stated later. Just trying to do what he thought he was best at — entertaining.

Frankie’s best wasn’t good enough. He found himself alone on the vast stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which was frightening enough in itself, auditioning in front of an Army major and a group of colleagues, all of them in uniform. Years later he would hold that stage, and a 2,000-strong packed house, in the palm of his hand. Right then, gawky and uncertain at twenty-two, the sight of the khaki-clad line-up in the fourth row was too much.

Maybe it was a combination of the brooding atmosphere of the huge auditorium and the gaze of the critical authority. But once again his ‘nervous tendency to go to pieces at the wrong moment’ – Frankie’s own words – got the better of him.

The message was: Thanks a lot, but no thanks. Frankie gave them a weak salute, and found himself out on the street.

But now, at last, came his chance to shine. If not at the Front – well, at the back. The rigours of square-bashing day after day over the hard Tarmac at Shoeburyness were behind him, a memory of wasted hours and sore feet. He was transferred away from the basilisk stare and frightening lung power of Sergeant Major Tonks to B Battery in another section of the barracks, accorded the rank of Gunner, and taught the rudiments of the British Army’s fire-power in the face of a forthcoming Nazi invasion.

Because the threat was very real. The ill-fated British Expeditionary Force on the beaches of France had its back to the Channel, and the little boats prepared to sail for Dunkirk. All leave was cancelled. France was about to fall. From the safety of the garrison walls on the north bank of the Thames Estuary, Gunner Howard watched the small craft edge past the Maplin sandbanks on their way from Canvey Island, Westcliff and Southend to brave the Luftwaffe dive-bombers and write their own page into history.

And he waited for the call.

Which never came.

Instead he whiled away the hours until a different, unexpected demand came through: the urgent need in these darkest of hours to boost morale and give the chaps some diversion. In other words, camp entertainment. Frankie would prove adept at that, in every sense.

He stepped forward smartish, offered his services as a comic, and was snapped up on the spot by a grateful Entertainments Officer, possibly because there wasn’t too much other noticeable talent around at that time. At the first Sunday night concert in the Mess, he was introduced as ‘Gunner Frankie Howard’ – another first, because up to then he had always been called Frank. Away from the footlights he would remain Frank to his friends and relatives, Frankie to the profession.

‘I didn’t like Frankie too much,’ he admitted later. ‘It seemed positively babyish.’ But to the regiment he became Frankie, and to his comrades that’s how he stayed.

He went down a treat. Officers and lower ranks alike guffawed and cheered at his jokes. The Lewisham Hippodrome faded into obscurity.

The memory of those early days watching the North Sea stayed with him forever, to be recalled whenever the talk returned to ‘What did you do in the war … ?’

He remembered the sandbags along the beachfront at Southend, with Gunner Howard stretched out face downwards in their protective shadow, toes and elbows digging into the sand, peering along his rifle barrel through the barbed wire at a grey horizon with palpitating heart, waiting for an invisible enemy to appear. Frankie always likened it to that scene in the war epic The Longest Day when the helmeted German manning a pillbox on the coast of France saw the D-Day armada emerging out of the mist. ‘I knew how he felt. I think I’d have had a fit if that had happened to us.’

It didn’t. There was no German armada, just rumours.

Frankie told a nice story about how he and a young Welsh rookie were seconded to guard Wakering, a village not much more than a speck on the map located on the Essex marshes below Foulness Island. Actually there is a Great Wakering and its sister hamlet of Little Wakering, and it was their duty to ensure the two hundred-odd residents slept peacefully at night, knowing the British Army was on hand to protect them.

In fact the British Army consisted of Frankie, Dai and a tent in which they took turns to sleep while the other stood guard on round-the-clock twelve-hour shifts. In that summer of 1940 Frankie would clump around the country lanes, with his rifle in his hand and ideas for comedy sketches churning in his mind.

Back in the tent they had set up with a local farmer’s permission in a secluded corner of a turnip field, he would jot down the gags and save them for – who knew when?

One day the farmer emerged from his gate to accost Frankie in the lane. ‘You know, son, we’re really grateful to you,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ said Frankie. ‘Why’s that, then?’

‘Well, we can hear your boots marching up and down, and it gives us a great sense of security. If there is an invasion – we know you’re there!’

Yes, thought Frankie. Me and my rifle and ten rounds of ammunition to hold back the hordes. He thanked the farmer, and stomped on down the road, extra loud.

In fact, it was an idyllic time – and idle. If there was a war on, he wouldn’t have known it, apart from the blackout curtains over the windows of the farmhouses and the occasional plane flying overhead. Otherwise, in that hot dry summer, the only sounds to disturb his train of thought were the tractors in the fields and the cheery hum of insects in the hedgerows.

It was with mixed feelings that Gunner Howard was ordered back to the garrison as the first chill breath of autumn filtered through the trees. Sorry to leave the friends he had made in the village. Glad to have another crack at the concert parties and try out his new material.

Back at base, Frankie was swift to approach the Entertainments Officer. His enthusiasm proved infectious and soon he was practically running the weekly shows single-handed.

‘Tact’, he admitted, ‘was never my strong point. I tend to speak my mind.’ And speak it he did, with increasing volume and acerbity as the Sunday nights drew nearer and nerves started fraying. ‘There weren’t too many comedians around, so I largely had the field to myself. Just as well, because I wanted – nay, Francis, insisted – on being top of the bill!’

His rivals for the place of honour were usually singers, both from the Royal Artillery and the women ATS, who would help vary the bill, plus an assortment of conjurors, musical maestros, jugglers, even dancers. But Frankie was already virtually a semi-pro, head and shoulders above the rest, and he could pull rank on them all – in expertise if not in authority.

Insisting on anything in the Army when you are a lowly gunner may seem out of step with reality. But with a cunning combination of ‘Francis at his most charming’ and friendly persuasion, plus his sheer talent for making people laugh, Frankie invariably found himself where he felt he belonged. Top of the programme, closing the show. And always to the clamour of cheers, clapping and boot-stamping that are music to a performer’s ears. Particularly to one with a swollen head.

Because Frankie was cocksure, and he didn’t mind who knew it. ‘Yes, I was arrogant,’ he would admit. ‘I thought I knew it all. I mean, I felt some of them weren’t out of short trousers when it came to performing.’

The weekly Music Hall was a kind of military ‘Sunday Night is Talent Night’. Now, for the first time, Frankie was not afraid to exploit his nervous stammer. He found it got laughs, and began to capitalize on it.

First step: get the audience on your side. Frankie did this by the simple method of creating a conspiracy with his listeners. ‘Rather than acting to them, I did it with them. I told them my misfortunes as if I was gossiping over the garden fence. It’s the sort of thing you hear any night in any pub in the country. Everything happened to me, except that I let it get completely out of hand, and carried it to extremes.

‘It worked because people identified with my troubles. There but for the grace of God …

‘I was a bit raw in those days. But the essence of my act was born there, the seeds were sown in that Army camp on Sunday nights in the Mess.’

In the crowded, smoky haze with the troops crammed at tables over their beer, Frankie hit the right nerve – and touched funny-bones. The other secret of his act was that everything he did tilted at Authority – with a capital A.

Later he would christen all bosses, be they managing directors, chief producers, entrepreneurs or impresarios (take a bow, Bernard Delfont!) with the sobriquet of ‘Thing’. For now his barbs were directed at ‘Them’, the faceless Top Brass who were never named but shown up as causing Gunner Howard F.A. maximum discomfort while sheltering behind their pips and their stripes. He would end his act for the troops by leading them into one of the wartime songs that brought a catch to the throat and a tear to the eye: ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ or the rousing ‘Bless ’Em All’.

Frankie’s face was rapidly becoming his fortune in terms of the laughter it provoked. So was a voice which had the first hint of what later persuaded Harry Secombe to suggest he wore ‘the tenor’s friend – a truss with a spike in it.’ It could be likened, as one critic suggested, to ‘A corncrake suffering from an overdose of gravel’.

In fact Frankie had been working assiduously on his voice while on lonely patrol in the country lanes of Essex. He told his friend Lew Lane, the producer of numerous events for the Water Rats charity, how he expanded his vocal cords. ‘I sing the alphabet,’ he revealed. ‘It’s really very simple.’ And in front of Lew one night in his dressing-room at the Prince of Wales Theatre he sang it from A to Z, up and down the scale.

‘They say some actors can read a telephone book and make you laugh,’ Lew said later. ‘Hearing Frankie sing the alphabet sent shivers down my spine. All the letters had a resonance of their own … it was weird.’

Weird or not, it worked. Frankie grew in confidence. And his voice grew fuller by the day, its range reaching out to the corners of the low-ceilinged Mess at Shoeburyness Barracks.

He totally flouted the advice once given to budding comics by the legendary Lupino Lane: ‘Any inclination to fidget and lack stage repose should be immediately controlled. This can often cause great annoyance to the audience and result in a point being missed. Bad, too, is the continual use of phrases such as “You see? … You know! … Of course …”’

But on an unashamed wave of ‘You sees’ and ‘You knows’ emanating from the makeshift stage by the bar, no one could possibly miss the rumpled khaki-clad figure fidgeting and pulling faces up there through the cigarette smoke.

‘Listen … Lis-sen!’ it exhorted. The voice was demanding, petulant, and in the end it got its way. ‘Pull yourselves together! You’ll make me a laughing stock, you know. Now, who can manage a little titter? It isn’t always easy to get your titters out on a wet Sunday …’

They listened. They got their titters out. And they laughed.

Full of new-found zest, buoyed by the applause of his weekly ventures on to the public stage, Frankie grew bolder. His sister Betty helped out on some occasions, forging the close-knit bond that would stay with them for life. Sometimes he persuaded her to take to the stage as his stooge, even sing a song or two. At other times she would take the train out from Fenchurch Street on a cheap-day return to lend him moral support.

Frankie’s downfall came one November day in 1941, and it was spectacular.

Autumnal mists were swirling around the barracks, lending a chill to the air from the North Sea. To cheer up the battalion, Frankie persuaded his Entertainments Officer to put on a lunchtime show in the Mess.

Only this time he was in drag.

‘I was dressed as an old ATS scrubber, with huge balloons pushed under my jacket, a straw wig, a white powder face and a great half-moon blob of lipstick over my mouth,’ Frankie would say, regaling friends with the story after much persuasion. ‘I got up on a table and sang a comic song – but in the middle of it, the air-raid siren suddenly started up.

‘Everyone stampeded for the exit to get out on the parade ground and take up their posts. I managed to get backstage and do a quick change into my own uniform, got the wig off – but I forgot about the make-up!

‘You’ve guessed it. I scrambled out with my rifle and pack and lined up with the others. I was in the back row and standing smartly to attention when this young officer marched briskly along the ranks to make sure we were good and ready for whatever Jerry might throw at us.

‘He stopped abruptly opposite me, looked me up and down, but said nothing. Then he just stared into my chalk-white face, and I remembered the mascara and lipstick. Cor – strewth! I felt some explanation might be in order.

‘“Er – concert party, sir … The alert went …”

‘He just looked at me. “Um,” he said. “So it did.” And he moved off, only more slowly. At the end of the row he turned and peered at me, shaking his head slowly.

‘The rest of the lads never let me live that one down.’

Frankie had what is known as a ‘quiet war’. Instead of posting him to the front line, the Army had the sense to see that the talents of their ham-fisted but willing recruit were more suited to a microphone than to a bayonet. Gunner Howard F.A. stayed on at Shoeburyness and was transferred to the Quartermaster’s Office where he virtually took over the garrison’s ‘fun factory’. He ousted the Entertainments Officer, and flung himself wholeheartedly into getting together the weekly acts that, for a couple of hours at least, would take the minds of the troops off what was happening across the Channel.

Along with the job, he was promoted to Bombardier. Since the only bombarding Gunner Howard had ever done in his life was the verbal kind, delivered from a stage or maybe a table-top, Frankie was a- mazed to be singled out.

But his enthusiasm, coupled with his need for perfection even in those young, headstrong days, tended to get the better of him and outstrip diplomacy. It would happen again and again in later life, putting people’s backs up, getting himself a reputation as a niggler and worrier, both of which were fully justified. Or as a troublemaker, which wasn’t.

But who could tell a general that, when a two-page memorandum landed on the top-brass desk from a stripling in the lowest ranks telling him what was wrong with the Army?

‘I knew I shouldn’t have done it,’ Frankie would accept later. ‘But as far as I was concerned too many of the officers were putting their noses in where they didn’t belong. I was in charge of the shows, and there they were telling me what to do! Most of them didn’t know their funny-bone from their elbow, if you get my meaning.’

So he sat down and shot off a broadside to the garrison Commander-in-Chief, outlining his grievances. Mainly it was about the blue-pencil censorship, scratching out too many of his best lines. But there was more. Frankie demanded this, he demanded that.

The apoplectic general, slamming the pages down on his blotter in disbelief, demanded his head.

The upshot: Bombardier Howard was put on a charge and thrown into the guardhouse. It ready bleakly: gross insubordination.

Frankie wriggled out of that one, but it was a close call. The C-in-C relented after apologies and a long explanation was read out to him, plus an invitation to see the next show for himself. Frankie even won recognition for an Entertainments Committee from all ranks to oversee the acts.

It was now that Frankie started to embroider his delivery with the mannerisms that would make it unique in years to come. The stumbling hesitations became more pronounced. Innocent words sprouted horns of wickedness. His leer took on new dimensions of suggestiveness.

And the boys and girls in khaki loved it.

As his confidence grew, Frankie joined a local concert party in nearby Westcliff. On his way to rehearse, he spotted a poster. Talent Night in Town! Frankie altered course, made his way to the Empire Theatre, and was first in the queue. There were no lights outside because of blackout regulations. Most of the audience were elderly. The atmosphere was curiously sombre. Frankie thought he would liven it up.

He bounced out on stage, brimful of pep. ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen —’ Not gentle-men, not yet. ‘I am now going to sing a little song entitled “She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas”!’ There was a stunned silence. From the wings Frankie heard an enraged hiss. The manager.

‘Gerroff! Now —!’

Frankie, flummoxed, looked at the drapes and his voice rose in an indignant squeak. ‘Eh? What –?’

A ripple of laughter ran through the audience, but the manager would not be thwarted. ‘I’m not having dirty jokes like that in my theatre!’ he fumed. ‘Out you go!’ And behaving like ‘Disgusted of Westcliff’, he ordered the bewildered comic out of his theatre.

Much later Frankie would remember that night and work it into his act, talking to an invisible presence in the wings.

It was with the concert party, playing to local institutes in church halls, that Frankie met Mrs Vera Roper, a vivacious housewife who was a dab hand at the piano. She would accompany him when he burst into song. But one night Frankie started off … to silence. He stopped short, glared at her, and said: ‘Are you ready?’ No reply.

‘That’s all I need,’ Frankie growled. ‘A deaf accompanist!’

And that was how ‘Don’t mock the afflicted’ came into being.

Mrs Vera Roper had, in fact, been mulling over her ration book which lay on top of the piano, counting the number of meat coupons that were left in it. She was far too preoccupied to take in Frankie’s sarcasm.

He looked at her again, then at the audience. ‘Poor dear,’ he said scathingly. ‘She’s past it!’

The laughter that rose from the chairs in the hall gave him pause to think. The song got going finally, with Mrs Roper’s ration book tucked safely back in her handbag. But Frankie was unusually silent in the van ride home to base.

For the next week he was engrossed in a weird and wonderful idea. On the surface it sounded too silly to work: a singer accompanied by a totally deaf pianist – how on earth could it be feasible? But slowly it took shape, and the preliminary sketch became a running gag that was probably the most famous in Frankie Howerd’s entire repertoire.

During the next fifty years, Frankie would have no fewer than eight ‘deaf’ lady pianists tinkling the ivories. Each one benign and bewitching in her own way, each a stoic pin-cushion for her master’s cruel barbs. ‘No, don’t laugh … poor soul, it might be one of your own–’ The long-suffering Vera became ‘Madame Vere-Roper, known to me as Ada’. Why was it so funny? It was the way he told it, of course.

Next in line for musical immortality was Blanche Moore – ‘Madame Blanchie Moore’ – a large, motherly woman who stuck valiantly by him in theatres, concert halls and clubs up and down the country. She hailed from that same concert party, though at that time she only played for her two daughters while they performed a lively dance routine.

She, too, was a housewife, happy to be called on by Frankie for various dates, with the understanding that the family came first. If she was free, with no domestic commitments, she would be on the next train to whichever venue awaited her talents. If not, no problem. Frankie had other ladies-in-waiting.

Until four years later – when Sunny Rogers, the whip-cracking, rope-twirling Gal from the Golden West, rode into town.

4

On the Road

In 1942 Bombardier Howard was transferred to Wales, and found himself ensconsed in an Army Experimental Station in a remote coastal area near Swansea. It was while he was there, pushing a pen for Requisitions by day and writing comedy sketches with it by night, that word of an Army concert party called Stars in Battledress reached his ears. It had been formed on the lines of ENSA to boost the morale of the boys at various bases along the Allied Front. It could mean being sent into Europe or North Africa or to the Far East, wherever a war zone was located.

Frankie volunteered the same day he heard about it. In all, he volunteered four times – but on each occasion his audition was given the thumbs-down. If a bad workman blames his tools, and a bad comic is tempted to blame his material, Frankie, who was by now a remarkably good comic, must be unique in this case in being able to blame his audience. Of one.

The lone stranger was the ‘interviewing officer’, who behind the pips and a bored expression sat alone in large empty Nissen huts while the would-be stars in battledress did their best to impress him. Frankie needed a full house, a large audience to tease along. His ‘Oooh, no – now lis-sen!’ had the hollow echo of failure, and he knew it almost before he left the hut to await the verdict a week later.

It was their loss – but in those days, who could know? Frankie tried not to feel disillusioned, but it wasn’t easy. Especially for a performer whose opinion of himself seesawed wildly between adrenalin-fuelled buoyancy and the stricken depths of self-doubt. The station was too small to warrant a regular concert, so he joined a local amateur dramatic society to keep his feet near the footlights.

The war dragged on. The only significant event in Frankie’s life was when he was promoted to Sergeant, and put in charge of a large Army lorry packed with soldiers. With only half a dozen driving lessons behind him – ‘Well, there’s the Army for you, always ready to test new talent’ – Frankie lost control inside a minute, and drove the giant vehicle through a hedge and into a tree. No one was hurt, and Frankie never got behind a driving-wheel again in his life.

His brother Sidney was in the RAF and sister Betty was doing her bit for King and Country in the ATS. Frankie was actually part of the D-Day force that set out for the dawn invasion on 6 June, but neither the Germans nor more than a boat-load of men in his own Royal Artillery battalion were aware of it. The merchant ship that took him across to the beaches was unable to disembark its troops because of heavy seas, and wallowed in the swell until the first wave of the invasion had long passed on its way. Frankie was only dimly aware of what was going on – to boils and pneumonia, add sea-sickness.

He was posted to Lille, then transferred to Brussels as part of the Military Establishment. Frankie would tell a hilarious story of how he personally liberated Holland, simply by being in the first staff car to arrive at The Hague after his convoy became lost in fog. His bewildered uniformed figure was hoisted aloft by cheering crowds, and carried shoulder high through the cobbled streets. ‘I was even asked for my autograph,’ he said. There’s a first time for everything.