a few days’ leave, and the barrier between him and his young son became insurmountable. ‘I positively resented his intrusion,’ Frankie would reveal later.
On one memorable occasion his parents did take him on a rare family night out – into the smoky interior of the local working men’s club, where little Francis, aged four, was given his first stab at fame: to go on stage, sing a song, and come away with a bag of sweets as a prize.
Frankie’s reaction? ‘I howled the place down. I was absolutely petrified, and struggled and screamed blue bloody murder to get off. But I still got the bag of sweets!’ He could have had no idea then, but it was the shape of things to come.
Stage fright would stalk Frankie for the whole of his career, often leaving him quivering in the wings or in his dressing-room, numb with terror, steeling himself to walk out and face the public gaze.
Growing up amid the rural Nine Fields of Eltham – a village, incidentally, that spawned another comic son in the shape of Bob Hope – young Francis found himself increasingly retreating into a solitary world of dreams and fantasy. He would go for long walks alone, creating his own scenarios like any imaginative young boy – but with a difference. His dreams took him out in front of applauding masses, bestriding the stage like a colossus, master of the theatrical manor and all he surveyed. At the age of ten he was even practising how to sign his autograph.
The Howard children went to the local Gordon Elementary School, named after the hero of Khartoum, where Frankie proved a model pupil, anxious to please. So much so that on his first summer holiday when the school was set a mathematics task of three hundred sums to solve over the long nine weeks off, studious Francis was the only pupil to struggle through the lot. Mathematics was his best subject, geography his worst.
His mother’s Presbyterian background ensured that her eldest son was enrolled for Sunday School almost as soon as he was tall enough to reach the door handle of the church hall at nearby St Barnabas.
Frankie found himself instinctively drawn into this friendly, dedicated new family with all the security it represented. It was his first taste of religion and he became addicted to it.
In next to no time he had eagerly signed on for the Band of Hope and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Plus the local Cub Scouts, even though the weekly vow of ‘Akela, we promise to do our best’ made little impression on him – Frankie was, and remained, hopeless in anything of a practical nature.
Eagerly, Frankie would look forward to the Sunday School annual treat, a church outing to Herne Bay. The family were too poor to afford proper holidays, apart from a single week in Brighton for Mum and the three children when school packed up for the summer.
Edith Howard did her best with precious little in the kitty and Frankie could recall a magical evening when he was first taken to the pantomime: Boxing Day 1925, aged seven, to ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ at the romantic tribulations of another dreamer, Cinderella no less, at the Royal Artillery Theatre, Woolwich. His mum took her brood along on the bus to join the Boxing Night throng for the cheap seats in the gallery. They queued for two hours for the 8.00 p.m. performance – but Frankie, cheering Nora Delaney as Prince Charming and booing the Ugly Sisters for all his little lungs were worth, treasured the memory all his life.
Thirty years later he would step on to that same stage for his own show, and be surprised at how small it was. At the age of seven, it looked huge.
‘I was hypnotized by the fairyland magic, a world in which everything was beautiful and glamorous,’ he would recall. ‘It was an exciting, glittering, over-the-rainbow world, and I wanted to become a part of it.’
The Boxing Night panto became a treasured annual date in the Howard diary. At home, Edith Howard encouraged her young son to create his own tiny wonderland in the front room: a tea tray for a stage, rags on sticks as makeshift curtains, actors cut out from cartoon drawings and pasted on cardboard so that they could stand up. Then Frankie would invent his own stories, shifting them around the stage as he talked his way through their adventures for hours on end.
He never tired of it, and at weekends after Sunday lunch he would put on special performances for his mother, brother and small sister.
Now Frankie’s mother was forced to go out and do charring for wealthy families on the ‘other’ side of town to make up the money to support her own family. She scrubbed floors, washed dishes, cleaned rooms for a few precious pounds. But the kids never went hungry or found themselves without clean clothes. The pride of a working-class mum saw to that.
By coincidence, it was at this time that the eager-beaver young Francis decided to embark on his first commercial venture to make himself a spot of pocket money. He persuaded the little girl next door, a winsome moppet named Ivy Smith, to help him mount a concert party – and charge admission.
Their stage was the end of the garden, with the fence as backcloth. The time was Saturday afternoon. The audience – asked to fork out a farthing for the privilege – were the local neighbourhood kids. And the wardrobe belonged to Frankie’s mother and Ivy’s parents, who knew nothing about it. Draped in clothes several sizes too big, the pair paraded around giving full rein to the imagination of their youthful entrepreneur-producer.
Until Mum finally appeared on the scene, took one look at her clothes being dragged across the grass, and demanded: ‘What’s going on here?’
Frankie proudly informed her that he was giving a concert – and, what’s more, making money out of it. The reply was a sound cuff around his head, and a stern lecture from his mother along the lines of daylight robbery, ending with the order: ‘Give it all back – now!’
A chastened Francis surrendered his profits and, rubbing his head, reflected that show business had its pitfalls after all.
Scholastically, Frankie Howard was nobody’s fool. At the age of eleven he sat for the entrance examination to Woolwich County School for Boys, later to become Shooters Hill Grammar School – and won a scholarship there. He was awarded one of only two London County Council Scholarships that were on offer.
On 1 May 1928 he duly donned a smart uniform of blue blazer, grey trousers and black tie with gold stripes, and set off across the fields for the daily 45-minute slog to a brand new school. Young Francis Howard walked into the new building in Red Lion Lane with four hundred other children of varying ages and abilities, sharing the tummy-butterflies and usual mixture of anticipation and trepidation on the first day of any term. Frankie, trudging along the footpaths that morning, was in a blue funk at the prospect of being in an alien class – socially as well as academically.
Shooters Hill Grammar was a mixed fee-paying school that drew its pupils from a wide circle of well-to-do middle-class families embracing Greenwich, Blackheath and south as far as Bromley. Today it has changed its name to Eaglesfield, and with 1,500 pupils is the largest secondary modern boys’ school in southern England. But in those days, as a scholarship boy Francis stood out in a smaller crowd, or felt he did, and the knowledge did nothing to help his innate shyness and over-sensitivity.
But he was tall for his age, though thin as a rake, athletic, and proved good at sport. In a school where cold baths and cricket counted for everything, sporting prowess was the green light to popularity, and soon he was accepted by the others and indeed became a leader on the field of human conflict where willow meets leather.
Even at that age, he had a long reach and large hands, and became a demon bowler for his team.
A slight hiccup came in his first summer term when he was smitten with a young girl in his class, and made the mistake of writing her a love letter, which he tentatively passed to her under the desk. ‘Her name was Sheila, and I had a huge crush on her.’ Such is calf love – but some cad got hold of the precious missive, and next day it appeared pinned up on the school notice board for all the world to see. ‘Oh, the shame of it!’ Frankie would wail later, still squirming at the memory of the hoots of derision before he elbowed his way through the crowd and tore it down. But he got his own back the following Saturday by taking six wickets in six balls, and was hoisted shoulder high by his team-mates to be carried off the field in triumph.
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