Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic. Graham McCann

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      When Frankie Howerd came to look back on this formative stage in his life, he would confess that the only thing that he had shared willingly with his father (aside, perhaps, from their fair-coloured hair) was the recognition of ‘a singular lack of rapport’. Frank Snr had seemed, at best, ‘a stranger’, and, at worst, a rival: ‘I positively resented his “intrusion” in the relationship I had with my mother.’⁸

      He also genuinely resented the emotional pain he could see that his father was causing her. It was hard enough on Edith when the sum total of the time she could hope to share with her husband amounted to no more than two days out of every seven. It was harder still when he was transferred to the Army Educational Corps, and began travelling all over the country, and spending far longer periods away, fulfilling his duties as an instructor and supervisor of young soldiers.⁹ These many absences certainly hurt her, but then so too did her husband’s apparent belief that the mere provision of his money would more than make up for the patent lack of his love.

      Even if her eldest son failed to understand fully the intimate nature of the causes, he was mature enough to appreciate the true severity of the effects. His beloved mother was suffering, and his father was the man who was making her suffer.

      This alone might have been sufficient to explain the adult Frankie Howerd’s apparent aversion to any mention of his father, but, according to several of those to whom he was close,¹⁰ there was another, far darker, reason for the denial: his father, he would claim, was a ‘sadist’ who not only used to ‘discipline’ his eldest son by locking him in a cupboard, but also (on more than one occasion during those brief and intermittent visits back to their home in Arbroath Road) subjected him to abuse of a sexual nature. While there is no conclusive proof that this is true, Howerd himself remained adamant, in private, that such abuse really did take place.¹¹

      The story, if one accepts it, certainly makes it hard not to reread the fragmentary autobiographical account of the first decade or so in his life as a coded insight into a profoundly traumatic time. So many tiny details about that ‘incredibly shy and withdrawn child’¹² – including a fear of authority that grew so great as to make young Frank appear ‘conscientious to the point of stupidity’; an early need to go off on long solitary walks ‘just to be alone in my own private, dream world’; the unshakeable conviction that he was ‘ugly and useless to man and beast’; and the longing for a place ‘in which shyness and nerves did not appear to exist ’ – seem to fit the familiar picture of someone struggling through the private hell that accompanied such abuse.¹³

      It also appears telling, from this perspective, that towards the end of this period¹⁴ Frank suddenly acquired a serious stammer. It first started to be noticeable, he would recall, whenever he was ‘frightened or under stress, and in an unfamiliar environment’: ‘I’d gabble and garble. Always a very fast talker, I’d repeat words and run them together when this terror came upon me.’¹⁵

      Failing health would gradually diminish any real physical threat posed by Frank Snr. Invalided out of the Army at the start of the 1930s following the discovery of a hole in one of his lungs,¹⁶ he struggled on, increasingly frail and emphysemic, as a clerk at the Royal Arsenal munitions factories until his death, in 1935, at the age of forty-eight. Memories of past threats, on the other hand, would prove impossible for his son to expunge. The real damage had already been done.

      When, in 1969, a young journalist had the temerity to quiz Howerd on his feelings about his late father, he merely responded with a slightly too edgy, and therapy-friendly, attempt at a casual putdown: Frank Snr, he muttered, ‘was all right. He was away a lot. Look, I didn’t let you in here to ask me Freudian questions.’¹⁷ Seven years later, however, there was a far more obvious display of disdain in his autobiography, which all but edited out the father from the story of the son’s life. In stark contrast to its lovingly lavish treatment of Edith, not one picture of him was included, and no description was provided: aside from the acknowledgement (apropos of nothing in particular) that Frank Snr was ‘essentially a practical man’,¹⁸ the only recognition of his father’s existence was to underline his absence: ‘Most people have a mother and father,’ Howerd observed, before adding, more with a sigh of relief than any hint of regret: ‘I seemed to have only a mother.’¹⁹

      His mother gave him a reason to focus on the future, and, more important still, a reason to believe that he still had a future. She represented precisely the kind of adult that he hoped he could become: someone kind, compassionate and honourable but also warm, amusing and refreshingly self-deprecating – ‘a “good-doer” rather than a “do-gooder”’.²⁰

      Clinging tightly to this ideal, he heeded his mother’s advice and, once enrolled for Sunday School at the Church of St Barnabas (known locally as the ‘tin church’ because of its run-down appearance and rusting corrugated roof²¹), threw himself into the culture of organised religion: ‘It gave me a feeling of belonging; some comforting communal security.’²² It was like, in his eyes, a Variety show with morals: lessons, songs, lantern slides and sermons. He loved it, and was spurred on to join ‘the Band of Hope, the Cubs, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel – I joined everything religious in sight’.²³

      His mother was impressed. Delighted – and more than a little relieved – to see the calming (and edifying) effect these spiritual activities were having on her shy and introspective young son, she began to harbour the hope that he might one day find his vocation as a clergyman. Frank himself, in fact, was already thinking along similar lines, although his sights were being aimed somewhat higher: his ultimate goal was to become a saint.

      As improbable as it now sounds, the general drift of the ambition was sincere: ‘I really thought in those pre-teen years that if I lived a good, pure life in the service of God I could end up as Saint Francis of Eltham, and go to Heaven.’²⁴ He knelt down each night to say his prayers, kept the Bible by his bed and never failed to read at least a page before setting off to sleep. The strong appeal that the idea of Heaven held for him centred on the belief that it promised to be ‘this world without this world’s miseries: its poverty and sickness and stammering shyness’.²⁵ The trainee St Francis might not have known much about where he wanted to go, but his understanding of what he wanted to leave behind could hardly have been any clearer.

      Heeding his mother’s advice that a good formal education, while no guarantee in itself of canonisation, was at least vital to becoming a vicar, Frank began studying hard to win one of the two London County Council scholarships that were then being offered by the local fee-paying Woolwich County School for Boys – soon to be renamed Shooters Hill Grammar²⁶ – to potential pupils from poorer backgrounds. Always an academically able young boy, with a particular aptitude for mathematics, he duly passed the entrance examination and, on 1 May 1928, Frank Howard, aged eleven, proudly took