Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic

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If we were to begin where Frankie Howerd would have wanted us to begin, we would be five years out of date. According to all of his own public accounts,

(#litres_trial_promo) Frankie Howerd (whose proper surname, incidentally, was spelt ‘Howard’) was born on 6 March 1922. In truth, he was not: being painfully aware of the age-based prejudices of his own precarious profession, he arranged, in the first of many self-inflicted imprecisions, to have his real infancy erased.

The authentic beginning had actually arrived back on 6 March 1917, when Francis Alick Howard – the first child of the 30-year-old Francis Alfred William Howard and his 29-year-old wife, Edith Florence Morrison – was born in the City Hospital in York. An early photograph recorded the sight of a broad-browed, blown-cheeked and somewhat reproachful-looking baby, with a downy dome of fair hair, a pair of large protruding ears, and a mouth already puckered up into the now-familiar outraged pout (‘I was,’ the famous adult would always insist, ‘quite beautiful’

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The Howards’ first family home was situated at 53 Hartford Street, a small but rather smart red-bricked terraced house not far from the city centre in the Fulford district of York. Both parents, right from the start, went out to earn a wage. Francis Snr was a private in the 1st Royal Dragoons; following in the footsteps of his father (a former sergeant at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst), he served as a staff clerk.

(#litres_trial_promo) Edith, meanwhile, laboured long and hard as a ‘cream chocolate maker’ at the local Rowntree confectionery factory.

Before their child had the chance to acquire any real awareness of his loose northern roots – the solitary memory to survive to later life, apparently, would be of him tumbling down some stairs and bumping his head

(#litres_trial_promo) – the family was obliged to move down south. In the summer of 1919, when the baby Francis had reached the age of two-and-a-half, his father was transferred to the Royal Artillery, promoted to sergeant and posted to the Woolwich Barracks at Greenwich in south-east London.

The need for the switch had been accepted with some enthusiasm by the newly-elevated Sergeant Howard, who recognised that he was not only taking a modest but none the less welcome step up the professional ladder, but was also, as someone Plumstead born and bred, on his way back to a place that struck him as so much more like ‘home’. The acceptance of such a rude upheaval almost certainly came rather harder, however, to his wife, Edith, whose entire life, up until this point, had been lived in close proximity to her mother, father and seven siblings within the confines of the comforting walls of York.

The Howards’ new family home was located at 19a Arbroath Road in Eltham (which in those days was a relatively quiet and rural area situated on the borders of London and Kent). Once the Howards had actually settled in, however, it soon began to feel like a home without a family. The problem was that Frank Snr had to spend his weekdays based six miles away at the Royal Artillery barracks, while Edith was left on her own in an unfamiliar environment to bring up their infant son. Although the ostensible head of the household would duly return, with his wage packet, each weekend to be with his wife, the stark contrast in their newly separate styles of life – his brightened by the clarity of its routine and the quality of its camaraderie, hers dulled by a creeping sense of loneliness and a palpable loss of purpose – would in time breed tensions deep enough to shake the base of the bond between them.

For a while, however, the couple worked hard to find ways to remain committed. Frank Snr not only behaved responsibly in his role as the family’s sole breadwinner, but also invested a fair amount of effort into trying to make what little time he shared with his wife and son seem reasonably worthwhile. Edith, for her part, bit her tongue on all of the bad days, savoured each one of the few that were good, and buried herself in the business of being both a homemaker and a mother.

It was not just young Francis on whom she would dote. A second son, called Sidney, was born in April 1920, closely followed, in October 1921, by the birth of a baby daughter named Edith Bettina but known to everyone as Betty. Edith adored them all, and, making a virtue out of a necessity, she soon came to relish her role as the family’s singular parental figure.

As a mother, she gave her children a generous measure of encouragement and affection. A short, slender woman with dark, vaguely ‘gypsyish’ good looks, discreet but deeply sincere religious beliefs and a quietly cheerful disposition, she made sure that her family had fun, sharing with them her great love of music, humour and the art of make-believe. When she could afford to she would take the children out, and when the money was tight she would stay with them inside, but, wherever they were, she always ensured that they would laugh, play and consider themselves to have been richly and warmly entertained.

Assuming those duties that had been neglected by their absent father, she also instilled a fairly strong sense of discipline in each of her children, and tried to teach them a simple but solid code of conduct. Echoing many of the lessons she had learned from her own father, David (a stern and very strict Scottish Presbyterian), she would always stress the importance of industry, frugality and self-reliance, and insisted on treating others with a proper sense of fairness and respect.

Of all her three children, it was Frank (as he preferred to be addressed) who appeared the one most eager to please her, as well as the one who was most closely attuned to her own personality and point of view. He loved to sit and listen to her singing snatches from all of her favourite musical comedies (‘my first impression of show-business’), felt thrilled when she showed so much enthusiasm for any performance that emerged from out of his ‘idiot world of fantasy’, and was delighted to find that he shared her ‘way-out sense of humour’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In short, he adored her.

Even after he had started attending school – the local Gordon Elementary

(#litres_trial_promo) – and begun to acquire a broader range of friends, potential role models and adult authority figures, this special allegiance stayed as firm and true as ever. He would remain, totally and openly, Edith’s son.

He had never been, in any meaningfully emotional sense of the term, ‘Frank’s son’. Whereas young Sidney and (to a lesser extent) Betty would greet each fleeting visit from their strangely unfamiliar father with a fair degree of enthusiasm and excitement, their older brother never showed any pleasure at being in his presence, regarding him coldly instead as little more than a ‘gatecrasher’.

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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.’

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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’

(#litres_trial_promo) – 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.

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It also appears telling, from this perspective, that towards the end of this period

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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”’.

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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 roof

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(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 Grammar

(#litres_trial_promo) – 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 his place at the ‘posh’ school.

The first year proved difficult. He felt that he looked out of place – an unusually tall, very thin, slightly stooping scholarship boy – and feared that most of his middle-class, fee-paying classmates were mocking him behind his back for being nothing more than a mere ‘charity’ case.

(#litres_trial_promo) His sense of discomfort was made even more intense by the fact that, having exchanged a ‘safe’ school environment that he had known so well for ‘the terrifying question-mark of a strange unknown’,

(#litres_trial_promo) his stammer had started to worsen.

From the second year on, however, he began to feel more at home and increasingly happy, forming a fairly large circle of friends, producing consistently solid if unspectacular work in class and performing considerably better than he had expected at cricket. He even developed ‘a great crush’ on one of his fellow-pupils, a young girl named Sheila, although it led only to humiliation when the draft of a love letter was discovered by a mischievous classmate and subsequently displayed for all to see on the school notice board.

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His extra-curricular interest in religion, meanwhile, appeared stronger and deeper than ever. Indeed, he came to be regarded as so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the subject that in 1930, when he had reached the age of thirteen, his vicar at St Barnabas, the Reverend Jonathan Chisholm, invited him to become a Sunday School teacher. It all seemed to be going smoothly and swiftly to plan: ‘I was happy teaching, despite my diffidence, for being religious I was anxious to serve.’

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Religion, however, was far from being Frank’s only serious interest. The world of popular entertainment had by now come to rival it as a source both of fascination and inspiration.

As with so much else that felt positive in Frank’s young life, this appetite had been inherited from, and cultivated by, his mother. Although devoted to the solemn code of the black book, Edith was far from averse to sampling the odd bit of sauciness culled from the ‘blue’ book, and she was always happy to hear her eldest son repeat the latest jokes in circulation (though she did draw the line – and administer a crisp clip round the ear – when, without knowing quite what it meant, he included a certain four-letter word he had overheard being uttered by the local greengrocer).

She also introduced him to the potentially thrilling spectacle of live entertainment when, on 26 December 1925, she took him to the Woolwich Artillery Theatre to see his first pantomime, Cinderella, featuring the fragrant Nora Delaney as the principal boy: ‘It was an exciting, glittering, over-the-rainbow world, and I instantly wanted to become a part of it: not specifically as an actor or comedian or singer or anything else, but just in order to escape to wonderland.’

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From that moment on, Frank seized every opportunity to see, hear, read about or re-enact the very best that the stage, screen and radio had to offer. There were countless outings to the various local cinemas, which in those days ranged from the upmarket Palace (which boasted a ‘well-appointed’ café lounge) to the downmarket Little Cinema (or the ‘Bug Hutch’, as Eltham’s youngsters preferred to call it,

(#litres_trial_promo) which during the silent years featured a piano accompanist called Lena Crisp – a future Frankie Howerd stooge). There were also many sessions spent in front of the wireless set, listening to all of the big dance bands (first Jack Payne’s, later Henry Hall’s), plenty of revue and Variety shows (such as Radio Radiance and Music Hall) and the first few broadcast attempts at sketch and situation-comedy (starting off with Myrtle and Bertie).

(#litres_trial_promo) There were even, when Edith’s meagre funds allowed, occasional excursions to local clubs, theatres and fairs, as well as a visit to the novelty ‘Air Circus’ that was held one summer on (and above) Eltham’s green and pleasant Nine Fields. In addition to all of this, of course, there remained the keenly anticipated annual pilgrimage to the pantomime.

The urge to imitate and emulate these glamorous forms and figures grew stronger with each passing year. Inside the Howard home, Frank started out by entertaining his mother and baby sister with peep-shows created from old cardboard boxes, and original plays that came complete with a miniature theatre (made out of rags, sticks and Edith’s best tea tray, and populated by a cast of cut-outs from well-thumbed copies of Film Fun), as well as a selection of self-authored gags, funny stories and painful puns grouped together under the banner of Howard’s Howlers.

It was not long before he began hankering for a bigger and broader audience, and he soon managed to persuade the girl next door, Ivy Smith, to help him form a ‘two-child concert party’. The duo managed to perform several surprisingly lucrative Saturday matinées at the bottom of his back garden, charging other children a farthing a time for the privilege of admission, before a startled Edith stumbled upon the event (or ‘robbery’ as she called it) and demanded that everyone present be reimbursed without delay.

(#litres_trial_promo) His response was to transform the operation into a scrupulously charitable affair, performing a further series of concerts (first with Ivy and then later with his similarly-minded sister, Betty) designed to benefit a variety of worthwhile local causes.

By the time, therefore, that Frank began his spell as a Sunday School teacher, his strong sense of duty to the Church was already prone to distraction from his even deeper desire to perform. Things soon grew worse, as far as spiritual matters were concerned, when he found himself obliged, as part of the preparation for his new duties, to join his fellow-tutors each Monday evening at Reverend Chisholm’s home in Appleton Road for tea, cake and very, very, lengthy hermeneutical advice: ‘I remember how I’d look at him, trying to be attentive, but with my mind wandering to films and music and the theatre.’

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The problem was not just that so little now seemed to be seeping in; it was also that so much that was already in seemed to be leaking out. With nothing more to rely on than a wafer-thin recollection of the basic theme of the kindly but rather dull Reverend Chisholm’s latest briefing, Frank would find that he had no choice but to improvise his way through each one of his own Sunday School sessions, spending more time regaling his audience with tales of Robin Hood, Morgan the Pirate and Sexton Blake than he did engaging them with any pertinent biblical issues, axioms or events. His popularity soared as an unusually entertaining teacher, but so too did his sense of guilt as an increasingly heavy-lidded trainee saint: ‘I thought I’d let God down in some way.’

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He soldiered on for a while in a state of stubborn denial, unable to face up to the fact that he was on the verge of disappointing a mother who seemed so proud that he had found what she had taken to terming his ‘calling’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Then, to his great surprise and immense relief, he stumbled upon a compromise: the deceptively perceptive Reverend Chisholm, sensing that his protégé was an extrovert trapped in an introvert’s cassock, encouraged him to join the Church Dramatic Society. It struck Frank immediately as an inspired piece of advice: now, instead of having to abandon the Church for the theatre, he could accommodate the theatre within the Church.

The Society’s upcoming project was a revival of Ian Hay’s 1919 Cinderella-style drawing-room comedy Tilly of Bloomsbury, and the newest member of the company made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was ‘pathetically eager’ to take part.

(#litres_trial_promo) Although the play had acquired a certain reputation for containing several roles that were suitable for the most ‘wooden’ of actors (even the BBC’s notoriously teak-taut Director-General, John Reith, had managed to march his way through a recent amateur production without appearing too out-of-place

(#litres_trial_promo)), it was immediately clear to the current producer, Winifred Young, that Frank represented a serious casting challenge. Auditioning for the relatively undemanding part of Tilly’s working-class father, he was excruciatingly bad, reading his lines ‘in an incoherent gabble, flushing in a manner that would make a beetroot look positively anaemic, knocking over the props in my clumsiness – and embarrassing everyone in my anxiety to please’.

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When the ordeal was finally over, Mrs Young took him to one side, smiled a soft, sympathetic smile and then asked him: ‘Will you let me help you?’ Astonished that he was not being admonished, he stuttered an eager ‘Yes’ in grateful reply.

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From that moment on, this gifted and compassionate amateur director worked as Frank’s private – and unpaid – tutor. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, he would spend two taxing but hugely rewarding hours at her house, gradually learning how to overcome his stammer, start the process of mastering his role and, perhaps most importantly of all, begin believing in himself: ‘She taught me how to “ee-nun-cee-ate,” to be calm, to concentrate on the performance – and to forget myself as a self-pitying nonentity.’

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He would later claim that he owed ‘as much to Winifred Young as to anyone else in my career’, speculating that without her intervention ‘there might not have been any career, merely bitter frustration’.

(#litres_trial_promo) There was certainly no doubting her immediate effect: she transformed him, within a matter of a few short weeks, from a painfully awkward-looking nervous wreck into the show’s most notable success.

Frank came through it all without offering the audience more than barely a hint of his former hesitation, anxiety and self-doubt, and, in spite of the modest size and nature of his role, his performance had drawn the warmest of all the applause. For the first time in his life, he felt triumphant.

Someone who happened to encounter him backstage after the show told him matter-of-factly: ‘You should be an actor.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Those five words, regardless of whether they were uttered out of honesty, politeness or perhaps even a playful sense of sarcasm, triggered a profoundly positive effect on the still-exhilarated novice performer, serving as ‘a sudden and instant catalyst on all my vague hopes and half-dreams, fusing them into an absolute certitude of determination’.

(#litres_trial_promo) That moment, the adult Frankie Howerd would always say, was the special one, the turning point, the moment when – all of a sudden – he really knew: ‘[F]rom that night on I never deviated from a sense of destiny almost manic in its obsessive intensity.’

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There would be no more talk of St Francis. The future was for Frank the Actor.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_d942c0d4-ce8e-5253-86c1-a58050513231)

A Stuttering Start (#ulink_d942c0d4-ce8e-5253-86c1-a58050513231)

Well. No. Yes. Ah.

They coined a new nickname for Frank Howard at Shooters Hill school: ‘The Actor’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He loved it.

He loved the idea that an actor was what he was set to become. It might only have been 1932, three long and arduous maths-and Latin-filled years before he was due to leave school, but already, as far as he was concerned, acting was the only thing that really mattered.

Having acquired his initial theatrical experience under the auspices of his church, Frank now proceeded to advance his acting ambitions inside his school, joining its own informal dramatic society and establishing himself very quickly as one of its most lively and distinctive figures. Gone, in this particular context at least, was the insecure loner of old, and in his place was to be found a far more sociable, self-assured and increasingly popular young man: his whole manner and personality appeared to come alive, growing so much bigger and bolder and brighter, whenever the action switched from the classroom to the stage. Here, at least, he knew what he was doing, and he knew that what he was doing was good.

Right from the start, he made it abundantly clear that he was eager to try everything: acting, writing, direction, production, promotion – whatever it was, he was willing to do it, work at it and, given time, perhaps even master it. Everywhere that one looked – backstage, in the wings, centre stage, even at the table with the tickets right at the back of the school hall – Frank Howard seemed to be there, still slightly stooped, still slightly stammering, but now entirely immersed in the experience.

As a performer, he progressed at quite a rapid rate. Although he was hardly the type, even then, to lose himself in a role – his playful disposition, in addition to his distinctive voice and looks, conspired against the pursuit of such a style – his obvious enthusiasm, allied to his lively wit, ensured that each one of his stage contributions stood out and stayed in the mind. At his most inspired, such as the occasion when he played the spoiled and rascally Tony Lumpkin in Oliver Goldsmith’s satire She Stoops to Conquer, he showed real comic promise, relishing the chance to release all of the dim-witted verve that he had found lurking in the original text.