Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic. Graham McCann

British armed forces during the Second World War, and, ironically, most of them were accorded a far greater measure of tolerance, compassion and respect, informally, than many of their successors would receive in peacetime. ‘All the gays and straights worked together as a team,’ recalled one who was there, explaining: ‘We had to because our lives might have depended on it.’³⁴

      Howard and ‘his right-hand man’ (as some teases took to calling him) knew and understood the unwritten rule: so long as they were discreet, the relationship would probably remain safe. According to one of their old Army colleagues, Tom Dwyer, the couple never dared to attempt anything more demonstrative, in the presence of others, than the odd furtive touch of hands in the darkness between their beds. One night, Dwyer recalled, he noticed, as he drifted off to sleep, that each man was lying on his own bunk, but was still linked to the other by a shadowy outstretched arm: ‘They were, like, holding each other’s little finger.’³⁵ Such was often the sum of stolen intimacies to be treasured by those soldiers who sheltered ‘secret’ loves.

      For Howard and his partner, however, there was always the unique freedom afforded them by the stage, with its licence for ‘larger than life’ personalities and playful poses, and, for a while, the relationship had room to thrive. ‘They got on like a house on fire,’ remembered Dwyer.³⁶

      Then came an enforced separation. Howard was posted to a new Ministry of Defence ‘Experimental Station’ over on Foulness – the largest of the six islands forming an archipelago in south-east Essex. He still returned each night to sleep in the barracks at Shoeburyness, but, with less time to spend with his partner and more time to spend on planning his concert parties, some of the original passion began to dissipate.

      The camp attitude, however, did not. It was now part of him, as well as part of his act. It was the means by which he protected himself, preserved his sanity and made palatable his own occasionally prickly personality. A mixture of candour, sarcasm and self-parody, it could almost always be relied on to elicit a laugh, or at least an indulgent or confused ‘Er, yes … Mmmm’, when a blast of invective might otherwise have been expected.

      It came in particularly handy when Howard, during one of his fleeting visits back to Southend to appear with the Co-Odments concert party, found himself on stage with a piano accompanist called Mrs Vera Roper (he had worked first, and often still did during this period, with another member of the party by the name of Mrs Blanche Moore, but on this particular night it was Mrs Roper who was seated at the piano). Although Roper had performed with Howard before without experiencing the slightest form of a mishap, on this particular occasion her mind seemed to be elsewhere – much to her young colleague’s evident irritation. Cue after cue was missed, as she stared off into space and he stammered and struggled to cover up the mistakes. Howard’s patience finally snapped after she twice failed to hear – or at least respond sufficiently promptly to – a carefully rehearsed question he had asked her. ‘That’s all I need,’ he growled, ‘a deaf accompanist!’ and the audience, assuming it to be part of the act, laughed uproariously.³⁷

      That was all that was needed to spark another bright idea into life. What the conventional, sober sensibility responds to merely as an embarrassing error or unnecessary imperfection – something to be corrected or edited out and smartly erased from memory – the camp sensibility seizes on with relish, tweaks up a notch or two and then celebrates with a nudge and a wink. This was precisely what Howard did: he took the immensely frustrating experience of being ignored by a pianist who ‘was pondering how many meat coupons she had left in her ration-book’, and used it as the basis of a brand-new comedy routine: the ‘daft situation’ of him being saddled with an accompanist – ‘Madame Vere-Roper, known to me as Ada’, or ‘Madame Blanchie Moore’ – who appears incapable of providing any accompaniment.³⁸

      It would always progress (or, more accurately, fail to progress) along the following uneven lines: switching back and forth between a piercing shriek to make himself heard by his accompanist and the sotto voce tones required to confide two-facedly in his audience, Howard struggled in vain to get started:

      I thought tonight, ladies and gentlemen, er, I’d give you a bit of music, yes, which, er, if my pianist has sobered up, we’ll do now. It’s called ‘A Night in Old Vienna’. Yes. It’s an operatic aaaria. Yes. It’s lovely, this. Lovely. Here we go. [Madame Vere-Roper, sealed at the piano some distance back, prepares herself to play] N-n-no, no, don’t clap – she’ll want money. I’ve told her this is an audition. Yes. No, the thing is, she can’t hear very well. No, she can’t hear much. And she’s very bitter with it. Yes, she’s a real misery guts. She really is. [Turns, with a forced smile on his face, to acknowledge her] Evening. We’ll do the song now. Yes, chilly. ’Tis, yes. The song. We’ll do the song. I SAID WE’LL DO THE SONG NOW! [Turns back to audience] No. Don’t laugh. No. Don’t, please. You’ll make trouble. I beg of you. Don’t laugh. No, she can’t hear, and, oh, she’s a funny woman, you know! Mind you, she’s had a terrible life. Oooh, shocking life! Oh, yes, terrible! [Shouts in her direction] I’M TELLING THEM YOU’VE HAD A TERRIBLE LIFE. Yes, it is very chilly tonight! Yes! I know! Chilly! Yes! There’s a wind blowing up the passage tonight! Yes! Very chilly tonight! ’Tis, yes! Think winter’s back! I SAID WINTER’S BACK! Yehss! [Talking to the audience again] Poor old soul! Well, she’s past it, y’know – that is, if she ever had it! No, really, no, she should be in bed …³⁹

      It was what Howard did best: appearing to fail dismally at doing his best.

      Over the course of the next half-century, he would use no fewer than eight of these ‘deaf’ pianists,⁴⁰ but the nature of the routine never changed. The attempt to produce ‘a bit of culture’ produced nothing better than a bit of chaos, and more or less everyone in every British audience, from the nervous young soldiers of the early 1940s to the not-so-nervous young university graduates of the early 1990s, could find something to identify with, and laugh at, in that.

      Before Howard could expand and develop his promising act any further, however, he was uprooted once again. Early in 1942, he was posted to a new Army Experimental Station at Penclawdd – a small fishing village on the Gower peninsula near Swansea in South Wales – and assigned an uninspiring but time-consuming office job in Requisitions.

      Penclawdd was hardly the most congenial of locations for an aspiring entertainer. The village itself consisted of a tiny, quiet and close-knit community of cockle-gatherers, while, on its outskirts, the Experimental Station amounted to nothing more than a cluster of Nissen huts. There was a small local amateur dramatic society of sorts (which a grateful Howard joined ‘to keep my hand in, as it were’⁴¹), but precious little else to stir a performer’s spirits.

      Fearing that his ambitions would soon start to atrophy in such sleepily prosaic surroundings, he persuaded his Commanding Officer to allow him to apply to join the cast of Stars in Battledress – the big new Army Welfare concert party (a sort of entertainment ‘flying squad’) that had been formed to tour all of the major fighting zones along the Allied Front.⁴² He expected, bearing in mind all of the recent success he had enjoyed in front of audiences at Southend and Shoeburyness, that his act was now sound enough to assure him of a swift and easy admission. He was in, however, for a shock.

      Auditions for Stars in Battledress were usually held in the nearest available cookhouse