he was so poor he could never – you hear – never afford one. His only way was to pilfer stockroom goods and sell them. This has afforded him a secondhand violin which, even now, he is learning to play. Have pity on this boy. As a result of his action he could become a virtuoso.’
It was a triumphant performance. As Leo correctly reckoned, burgeoning classical violinists got far more sympathy from magistrates than trumpeters. Spike was discharged and played his gold-plated trumpet in the Harlem Club Band, all because of an exciting lie.
Although Spike’s family was Army on both sides he was not keen to join up when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. He was conscripted the following year, on his twenty-first birthday, and took this trumpet with him to the 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery. Every morning he would sound the reveille, and aspects of the life must have recalled the pleasures of his childhood. It was at this time that he acquired a new name. In the services there were three common nicknames: Clarkes were called Nobby, Joneses Taffy, and tall and skinny ones often became Spike. He decided this was preferable to Terence and so, to everyone apart from his mother, Spike he was from now on.
Spike saw a lot of action in North Africa then moved to Italy, escaping injury until he was caught in heavy fighting outside Naples in 1944 and blown up by mortar fire. Although his wounds were slight the stress of battle and the sight of his friends perishing had caused him intense suffering. He was diagnosed with combat fatigue, the Second World War term for shell-shock. This episode was, though he did not know it at the time, the first manifestation of the illness which would dog him for the rest of his life.
After he recovered Gunner Milligan joined an Army dance band and reached the rank of sergeant. As soon as peace was declared in May 1945 he was posted to the Central Pool of Artists, whose rôle was to entertain the troops waiting for demobilization. One day he was practising guitar in a rehearsal room, when tall ex-Gunner Bill Hall, a brilliant violinist, invited him to form a trio with a double-bass player, Johnny Mugrew. Spike accepted, reckoning they sounded like Le Hot Club de France, a famous Parisian jazz combo. It was when they were playing at the Officers’ Club in Naples that he was struck by one of the cabaret acts, ‘someone from Mars, Gunner Secombe H., singer and lunatic, who had been pronounced loony after a direct hit from an 88mm gun in North Africa. He rushed on chattering, screaming, farting, sweat pouring from him like a monsoon.’ Spike could not understand a word Harry said and thought he was ‘a Polish comedian’, although they had met in North Africa.
The Bill Hall Trio was a great success and on demob they were offered officer status if they would continue to play for the troops for six months. They accepted and Florence was able to tell the neighbours that her son was a ‘banjo-playing officer’. It was then that Spike developed his first manic act, which would eventually lead to The Goon Show. A natural front man, Spike would do the links between songs, and these quickly mutated into riffs with funny voices, then sketches, with Bill and Jimmy playing a part. He did not tell jokes as such. But then Spike is famous for being the first comic who didn’t need punch lines to make people laugh. They toured through Italy and when they reached Naples the Italian Corps de Ballet joined the show. They were thrilled to have women on board, and Spike was particularly keen on the prima ballerina, Maria Antoinetta Pontani. For months Spike and Toni were inseparable and I believe she was the love of his life. They spent an idyllic weekend in Capri and planned to marry. Spike wrote home with the good news. But his mother would have none of it. ‘We don’t want a foreigner in this family,’ she told him. Apparently Spike accepted, which I have never understood. There is no doubt he was in love with Toni and she with him and it would have been in character for him to ignore his mother’s opposition. By the time I knew Spike he was someone who always did what he thought was right, regardless of anybody else’s opinion. Toni married an Italian diplomat who was sympathetic to their friendship, and Spike flew to Rome to take her out. When her daughter moved to Paris it became much easier for them to see each other. This continued until a couple of years before his death.
In 1946 the Bill Hall Trio arrived back in Britain and toured the halls, earning seventy-five pounds between them a week – affluence indeed when the average wage was about five pounds – but Spike was not satisfied. After a few months he decided to go solo with his wild act. The parting was acrimonious. Bill said, ‘I hope you never get another fucking job.’
Sure enough, the act flopped and Spike joined another trio which travelled around Italy, but he still wanted to succeed in his own right and returned to England in 1948. He was doing his best – ‘it wasn’t good enough’, he said later – to break into radio. It was then he heard that the ‘Polish comedian’ was appearing at the Windmill in Soho. This theatre was the place for post-war talent. Alumni of the Central Pool of Artists would try out their acts there between the more risque performances, including the famous female ‘statues’, nudes who were not deemed obscene so long as they did not move. Spike went along to see Harry and when they caught up after the show he was introduced to another comic performer, Michael Bentine, who was also on the bill. The three became friends and, while Spike struggled to eke out a living, of an evening they started to hang out at the Grafton Arms in Sutton Ground, Westminster.
The landlord Jimmy Grafton, formerly a major, was very handsome and a tireless entrepreneur. He had taken over the pub, was struggling to write scripts, and always had an eye for talent, becoming Harry Secombe’s agent. One night in the bar, after Spike had played piano while Harry sang, they had a few drinks and told stories. Jimmy heard some of Spike’s and immediately asked if he would like to write with him for Derek Roy. Roy had sung with the band leader Geraldo and now had his own comedy guest spot on BBC radio. Spike was always very dismissive of Derek Roy, the ‘unfunniest man in the business’, and reckoned he ‘killed ninety-nine per cent of all known jokes.’ But this was the break he had been waiting for.
In 1949 Spike was invited to appear in one of Roy’s shows to do ‘an idiot voice’, which he told me developed into Eccles for The Goon Show. Ever hopeful of making it alone, Spike developed an act based on the voice for the music halls but quickly died a death and it was back to the Grafton Arms. He had no money and nowhere to stay but Jimmy had three attics free above the pub and offered one to Spike. He took his typewriter up there and continued to hammer out jokes for Derek Roy. Occasionally he was disturbed by a noise in the next room so he looked through the keyhole and a monkey looked back at him. Jimmy had bought it as a present for his wife. A friendship developed between Spike and the monkey but this came to an abrupt end when it bit him and the monkey was consigned to the garage.
Meanwhile Harry was prospering and had got a spot at the Hackney Empire. In the bar after the show Harry introduced him to a man Spike said ‘wanted to look like a male model – posh suit, posh collar and tie, Crombie overcoat, gloves carried in his left hand and a trilby hat.’ This suave fellow was Peter Sellers, who came from a stage family and made quite an impression on Spike, although he never forgot that Pete ‘didn’t buy a bloody drink all night’: he was ‘dignified but skint’.
Pete started to join them of an evening at the Grafton Arms and he and Spike became close, the attraction for Spike being that he had ‘such a mad, abstract mind’. Spike and Pete had many traits in common. Both could be loyal, yet occasionally betray people without a smidgen of guilt, both liars when it suited them, both adulterers, both sometimes generous and other times incredibly mean, and both adored their mothers but could occasionally spit bile about them. They blurred the margins of fantasy and reality, loved pranks, and shared an amazing amount of talent. I experienced the good and the bad aspects of both men. Peter Medak, who directed them in the disastrous film Ghost in the Noonday Sun, assessed them like this: ‘They were identical but with one important exception. Milligan had a heart.’ That summed them up for me.
When they first met Pete was already working for the BBC. It had happened because his mother Peg, a woman as redoubtable as Florence, had a brilliant idea. In 1946 Pete rang the BBC and impersonated Kenneth Horne, the star of Round the Horne. He recommended an outstanding new talent, one Peter Sellers. ‘Just listen to him’, he said, ‘and you’ll recognize that he’s a star in the making.’
With the proceeds of his radio performances Pete had bought a tape recorder and he and Spike started to record funny voices on it. They discovered that if they did