Double Bill (Text Only)

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © Bill Cotton 2000

The right of Bill Cotton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781841153285

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008219420

Version: 2016-09-20

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my wife, Kate, for things too

numerous to mention, but above all for her love.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

On a crisp spring afternoon in 1969 I sat in St Margaret’s, Westminster, which is next door to the Abbey. It was my father’s funeral and, because he had been what one newspaper obituary called ‘one of the greatest entertainers of modern times’, the church was packed. My father was as usual playing to a full house, but this was the very last time he would do so. Celebrities like the great band-leader Henry Hall rubbed shoulders with hundreds of ordinary folk for whom Billy Cotton and his band had become over the years a valued part of their lives, on radio, television and in the theatre.

St Margaret’s is one of the most fashionable and beautiful churches in the land; MPs in particular cherish the privilege of being married or having their children baptised there. But it was the location for my father’s funeral not because he was famous or important but because he was born in the parish. When I went along to ask the rector if the service could take place there, he seemed dubious: Lent was a busy time; there were lots of services planned; the choir would be at full stretch; and so on. Beneath his expressions of regret, though, I detected just a tinge of scepticism at my claim that Dad had grown up in the parish and sung in St Margaret’s choir. Then a verger appeared and the rector explained to him what I was doing there and the difficulty of fitting in the funeral. ‘That’s a pity,’ said the verger. ‘He really loved this place. I often chatted with him when he slipped in to listen to the choir.’ That settled it. It was agreed that Dad should be laid to rest in his own parish church.

In fact, Dad had been born at what is now an exclusive address, No. 1 Smith Square, adjacent to the Conservative Party central offices. In 1899 it was a two up, two down terrace house (rent: seven and sixpence a week) and Dad shared a bedroom with three brothers while six sisters squashed into an attic room. Westminster was then a self-contained village within London. Like the other kids in the area, my father played in the streets around the Parliament buildings, hitched lifts on the cow-catchers of trams and swam in the Thames off Lambeth Bridge when the police weren’t looking. (If they were looking, Dad would often end up running home, naked and dripping wet, his boots tied by their laces round his neck.)

Dad’s father was a ganger in charge of a section of the Metropolitan Water Board, and looked splendid in a top hat with a badge on it. He was a huge man who could with one hand pick up his wife, Sukey, who was only four feet tall, and tuck her under his arm. He was once invited onto the stage of the Aquarium in Tothill Street to try his luck against George Hackenschmidt, the Russian world-champion wrestler. In a flash he was on his back, but went away with the ten shillings promised to anyone brave enough to go into the ring against the world’s strongest man.

I still use my grandfather’s malacca walking-stick which has a gold band around the top inscribed, ‘To Joseph Cotton: from X Division, Metropolitan Police in appreciation of help with violent prisoners. May 1925.’ He must have been sixty-five years of age when he came to the rescue of a couple of police constables trying to arrest a gang of thugs. So he knew how to take care of himself.

Grandad was mad on clocks. However complicated they were, he could take them to pieces and put them together again. He had three or four clocks in every room of the house – cuckoo clocks, chiming clocks, water clocks. It was bedlam to walk through the house on the hour or half-hour.

In the deep silence before the funeral service began, I gazed around the church to keep my mind occupied and my eyes off Dad’s coffin. As a choir boy, under the eagle eye of St Margaret’s legendary organist and choirmaster, Dr Goss-Custard, Dad had sat in one of those stalls practising every weekday at noon between morning and afternoon school-lessons. Apparently he had a beautiful voice, and besides enjoying the singing earned a few precious shillings for special services such as weddings and funerals. And so began a life dedicated to music. To the end of his life he could sing arias such as ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’ from Messiah, though since that was composed for a soprano voice it sounded strange in his husky bass-tones. According to my grandmother he was a typical choirboy: cherubic in surplice and ruff collar but a tough, vigorous lad elsewhere, especially on the football field. His school played all their matches on Clapham Common, and they’d have to march the three miles there and back carrying the goalposts.

Tattered regimental banners, worn with age and damaged in battle, hung down from the nave of St Margaret’s, and I wondered whether the standard of the Second Battalion, the London Regiment, was among them. Popularly known as the Two-and-tuppences, this was the regiment my father joined in 1915. He’d volunteered as soon as the Great War broke out the previous year, but as a spotty fifteen-year-old couldn’t convince the red-sashed recruiting sergeant that he was ‘sixteen, coming on seventeen’. Twelve months later he enlisted as a boy bugler and was posted to Malta, where he was introduced to the seamier side of life in the quarter of Valletta the troops called the ‘Gut’. There were peep shows where for a penny you could see a naked lady, but Dad was perpetually hungry and preferred to go instead to the Salvation Army. They gave him a cup of tea and a fairy-cake in return for him standing on the roof of the building, bashing a tambourine and pointing at the red-light district. ‘That’s the way to the Devil,’ he’d shout, ‘and this is the way to the Lord. Come on in!’ And whenever one of the lads followed his advice Dad would get another fairy-cake.

From Malta he sailed to the Dardanelles, where a desperate engagement against the Turks was being fought. He later recalled that as he clambered down the troopship’s side to wade ashore off Cape Hellas, a huge Marine asked where his rifle was. Touching the musician’s badge on his arm, Dad replied, ‘I don’t carry a rifle. I’m a bugler.’ The Marine snorted, ‘There’s only one bugler around here – that’s Gabriel. He’s in heaven and you’ll soon bleeding well be joining him without one of these. Catch!’ With that, the Marine threw him a rifle and Dad became a serious soldier. Unable to move inland from the beaches, under constant Turkish shelling and German aerial bombardment from Taube biplanes that dropped steel darts to skewer you to the ground, Dad spent weeks sleeping in the freezing rain amid the bodies of his comrades and scurrying rats. He grew up during that doomed and brutal campaign. There was precious little chivalry around; the Turks mutilated prisoners and the Allied soldiers sometimes retaliated by hurling hand grenades into the POW cages where the Turkish prisoners were held.

Dad’s mother didn’t know he’d been posted abroad until she got a home-made Christmas card from him. He’d drawn a soldier holding a Christmas pudding with a bubble coming out of his head that read, ‘With thoughts of home from your loving son, Will.’ It was postmarked the Dardanelles. She nearly had a fit and started proceedings to buy him out of the army, an option open for boy soldiers. It cost thirty pounds, a king’s ransom, but somehow she scraped the money together. However, by the time the army’s bureaucracy creaked into action the Dardanelles expedition had ended in disaster and Dad was evacuated with everybody else. On the way home he helped stoke the boilers on the old three-funnelled battleship Mars, which was on its last voyage to the breaker’s yard via Southampton. When the Mars docked Dad queued up with the rest of the complement, clutching his pay-book. His turn came and the paymaster smiled sardonically, ‘Run along, son, I’ve got no chocolate.’

He had to find his own way home from Southampton. By this time the family had moved from Westminster to Kilburn, so he caught a train to Victoria then a bus up the Harrow Road, where he met a postman doing his rounds at ten o’clock at night. He asked the man if he knew where the Cotton family lived. The postman looked at this boy with a pack and rifle, obviously exhausted, and immediately said, ‘Yes, I know Joe Cotton’s house; it’s a bit of a walk but I’m going that way.’ While this wasn’t entirely true, he nonetheless picked up Dad’s kit and helped him home.

Dad was given a hero’s welcome but found a huge gap in the family he’d left. His elder brother Frederick had been in a reserved occupation as a draughtsman at Vickers. When he saw Dad leave for the army he couldn’t bear not being in uniform, and told his mother he too was going to enlist. He was killed in France within a fortnight.

Being a returned juvenile hero held no attraction for my father, so at the age of seventeen he again volunteered, this time for the Royal Flying Corps (later to become the Royal Air Force). When it was suggested during the interview by one of the board that Dad was too young to be commissioned in the RFC, the presiding officer said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, if he’s old enough to fight in the Dardanelles, he’s old enough to fight in the RFC.’ So Dad began a lifelong love-affair with flying and became a pilot, though because of a crash in training he never fought in the air – which probably saved his life: on the Western front, the life-expectancy of RFC aircrew was measured in weeks.

He left the RAF with a gratuity of two hundred and fifty pounds, spent ninety of it on a belt-driven Norton motor cycle and started looking for work. He tried motor-cycle racing in Ireland; then tried being a mill-wright’s assistant; and finally got a steady job as a bus conductor. Throughout this time he was playing football regularly. He played in the Middlesex Senior League and eventually got a trial for Brentford, whose manager with gritty realism told him, ‘Remember one thing. Brentford can’t play football so we make bloody sure nobody else does!’ Dad was not a professional and whenever Brentford didn’t pick him he got a game for Wimbledon, which at that time was an amateur side in the Athenian League.

Army buglers were also trained drummers, and Dad decided to cash in on his experience by joining a part-time band called the Fifth Avenue Orchestra – not Fifth Avenue, New York but Fifth Avenue, Queen’s Park. He played the drums badly until the best musician in the band, the pianist Clem Bernard, suggested the sound would improve if Dad quit the drums, stood in front and waved his arms about in time to the music – which he did brilliantly for the rest of his life.

In 1921 he married my mother, Mabel Hope Gregory. She too had a brother killed in the war and her mother was an invalid, so she played a vital part in her father’s business (he owned a chain of butcher’s shops in which my father worked for a time). He was less than entranced about his Mabel marrying a penniless musician-cum-amateur footballer, but eventually accepted the inevitable. Dad and Mum took a couple of rooms behind a barber’s shop in Kilburn Lane, where they were poor but happy. Sometimes of an evening, coming home from a gig at a dance hall, they would toss a coin to decide whether they should eat or ride home on the bus – it didn’t matter which way the coin fell, they always chose to buy something to eat and then walked home, lugging a set of drums between them.

Then Dad and the band were offered an engagement at the Regent, Brighton which was part cinema and part dance-hall. He decided that the Fifth Avenue Orchestra needed a more sophisticated name now they had hit the big time, so they became the London Savannah Band. After Brighton came Southport, then the Astoria on Charing Cross Road, London, and finally Ciro’s Club. By now, instead of playing for dancing they had become a stage band, putting on a show including vocalists and much clowning around. Billy Cotton had emerged as a showbiz personality in his own right; he was no longer just the leader of the band, he was its chief attraction.

Dad was now able to indulge his favourite pastimes. He gave up football but played cricket for Wembley when his engagements allowed, and he’d take me and my brother Ted with him. The whole family was there the day he scored a century, and my mother said it meant more to him than when he appeared in his first Royal Command Performance.

But he couldn’t wait for the day when he would be able to afford to race motor cars at Brooklands. When the time came he bought a clapped-out Riley Nine and got it tuned by an Italian mechanic called Charlie Querico. Being a professional, Charlie had a healthy contempt for all amateurs – especially showbiz types – so Dad decided to teach him a lesson. Just as all the cars were on the grid with their engines warming up, Dad raised his hand and beckoned to Charlie, who had a limp and hobbled over in a panic.

‘What’s the trouble?’ he yelled over the roar of gunning engines.

‘Which gear do I start this thing in? I’ve forgotten,’ Dad roared back.

‘First, of course!’ shrieked Charlie. Then, seeing the old man grinning at him, added, ‘You’re bloody mad,’ and got quickly out of the way.

Memories … Dad’s had been a boisterous, generally happy life. He swept us all up – family, friends and fans – in his warm, jolly embrace. Wherever he was there was noise and activity – I’d never known him as quiet as he was that afternoon in St Margaret’s. For an instant I was tempted to shatter the solemn silence by shouting out his famous slogan ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ with which he had begun a thousand performances. But I knew that this time it was no use. He had dominated my life, now I was on my own. No more amusing incidents where people mistook me for my Dad or got our names mixed up. An extraordinary Double Bill had come to an end.

But that afternoon, as one does when reluctant to face a tragic present, I dwelled on happier days …

ONE

My father had two sons and each of us inherited different parts of his nature – which just shows what a larger-than-life personality he was. My brother, Ted, who was five years older than me, shared my father’s love of flying – just as Dad had piloted Bristol fighters in the First World War, Ted flew Mosquito fighter bombers in the Second. As Dad’s younger son and named after him, I was fairly good at sports such as football and cricket, but chiefly I inherited my father’s love of show business and some of his flair for popular musical entertainment – though neither of us could read a note of music.

I think my earliest memory of my father was of him being very upset. When I was about four years old we lived on a new housing development in Kingsbury, north London. There was still plenty of building work going on and a constant stream of lorries passed our front gate. Apparently, one day someone left our gate open; I ran out into the road and got pinned to the ground by the front wheels of a truck. Miraculously I wasn’t seriously hurt but a doctor was called and, so the story goes, I remained utterly silent while he used a fork to dig out the stones that had been imprinted on my back by the lorry’s wheels. When he’d done he gave me a couple of sharp slaps on the backside and I screamed the place down. My silence had not been bravery but shock.

Meanwhile, in the road outside, my father was lambasting the poor lorry driver who’d really done nothing wrong. When my father was aroused he could be frightening; he had a Cockney’s ripe turn of phrase and was a trained boxer – I once saw him knock a motorist who picked a fight with him right across Denmark Street. He wasn’t particularly proud of the bellicose side of his nature but he had learned as a boy in the backstreets of Westminster that you either stood up for yourself or went under.

In a way, it’s poignant that my earliest memory should be of him being fiercely defensive of me. I recall him as an unfailingly loving father; I remained secure in that knowledge even when he did things I found puzzling or even upsetting. When I was small I didn’t realise that he was a famous band leader. I didn’t know what he did for a living, he just seemed to live life the wrong way round. He would set off for work as Ted started his homework and I was being put to bed, and it’s a miracle we didn’t become chronic insomniacs for he had a habit of bawling up the stairs, ‘Anyone awake?’ at whatever time he got home. If he got any answer, he would carry us both down to share his supper. We were a tightly knit family, and always if it was humanly possible Dad came home. Even when the band had played miles away he would drive through the night to get back to his own bed.

Though Dad was my hero, throughout my childhood my favourite band-leader was in fact Henry Hall, whose BBC Dance Band broadcast every weekday evening from Savoy Hill. After I’d had my bath, brushed my teeth and hair and put on my pyjamas, I was allowed into the front room to listen to the programme. I loved his music, especially ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, which he made a hit. Years later, when I was running BBC TV Entertainment we did a programme celebrating fifty years of broadcast music. We got Henry Hall to conduct a band made up of all the top session-musicians, and they played a medley of the famous signature tunes of big bands of the thirties, which included amongst others Jack Hylton’s ‘Oh, Listen to the Band’, Jack Payne’s ‘Say It With Music’, Henry’s own signature tune, ‘Here’s to the Next Time’, and of course Billy Cotton’s ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’. It was a magical, nostalgic occasion. At the end the band gave Henry, by then in his eighties, a standing ovation, and he said afterwards that he’d never officially retired as a band-leader until that moment. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, including mine.

It was at the Holborn Empire that I heard Dad’s band for the first time. My mother, my brother and I caught a bus from Kingsbury which dropped us off in Oxford Street, from where we took a cab for the rest of the journey so we could arrive in style. For me the star of that evening wasn’t my father but my Uncle Bill, who happened to be the senior commissionaire at the theatre. There he was, dressed in a magnificent green uniform with gold piping, war medals clanking on his chest. He opened the taxi door, saluted and called me ‘Young sir’. I was speechless with pride. A page-boy took us up to a luxuriously upholstered box in the circle. I was about to see my first variety show; it included dancers, jugglers, comedians, a ventriloquist and a magician. Then the melody of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ rang out, the curtain went up and there was my father in white tie and tails conducting his band. When the signature tune ended he turned to the audience to do his opening patter and I couldn’t contain myself. I jumped up and shouted out in a loud voice, ‘Hello, Dad!’ Quick as a flash he called back, ‘Now, don’t give me away, son,’ and there was a sympathetic chuckle from the audience. I sat back proudly and clutched my mother’s hand.

A few years later when my brother went away to boarding school, Dad would take me on my own to any nearby theatre he was playing at. I would stand in the wings and when he took his curtain call run onto the stage and solemnly bow to the audience with him – the old girls in the front stalls loved it, but not half as much as I did. It was on trips like this that I met face to face some of the great stars of the day, especially at the Palladium. There would be American superstars like Joe E. Brown and Laurel and Hardy whom I had seen only on the screen of the local cinema at Saturday matinées. There was also home-grown talent such as Will Hay, Max Miller, the Crazy Gang and Bud Flanagan.

Bud was a great joker. I remember Dad treating me and some school pals to lunch at the Moulin d’Or. You’d see all the big stars there – it was the place to eat, and to be seen. Bud was at another table, and when we got up to leave and our coats were handed to us he jumped up and started shrieking, ‘Stop! Call the police!’ I was embarrassed beyond belief as he proceeded to tip out of our coat pockets knives, forks and spoons he’d bribed the waiters to plant in them.

I loved going with the band when they did cine-variety, playing between film-showings at two cinemas such as the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road and the Trocadero, Elephant and Castle. They started at two in the afternoon and by the time they finished at ten p.m., they’d done seven shows. Though I was allowed to travel with the band, I don’t think they were all that keen on having me aboard because my father didn’t tolerate bad language in front of his family. When I appeared the band members would pass the word along: ‘Ham sandwich’ was their warning they’d better watch their tongues. Why ‘ham sandwich’ I don’t really know; perhaps it was rhyming slang for ‘bad language’. Another code word was ‘Tom’, their private name for Dad so they could discuss him without outsiders realising who they were talking about.

It was around this time that Dad adopted ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ as his signature tune. When asked why he said the idea had been put into his head by his nephew Laurie Johnson who was in the orchestra. On one occasion Laurie had observed Dad standing on the edge of the dance-hall floor, turning every dance into an excuse-me whenever a pretty girl whirled past him, and said to him, ‘You’re always stealing somebody’s girl!’ Dad responded by singing him a verse of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’, and one thing led to another.

Dad was constantly on the move and the family didn’t see as much of him as we would have liked. He had become involved in what were known as Blue Star Flying Visits to the various Mecca dance-halls all over the country. The proposal had come from a Dutchman called C.L.H. Heimann who had heard Dad’s band in one or two theatres and been very impressed. He had just bought a chain of Mecca cafés and proposed to turn them into dance-halls. He engaged Dad and supplied a state-of-the-art motor coach to take the band on one-night visits to every Mecca venue. Thus was born what later became an institution of British popular culture before, during and immediately after the war – Mecca Dancing.