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PROLOGUE

On a crisp spring afternoon in 1969 I sat in St Margaret’s, Westminster, which is next door to the Abbey. It was my father’s funeral and, because he had been what one newspaper obituary called ‘one of the greatest entertainers of modern times’, the church was packed. My father was as usual playing to a full house, but this was the very last time he would do so. Celebrities like the great band-leader Henry Hall rubbed shoulders with hundreds of ordinary folk for whom Billy Cotton and his band had become over the years a valued part of their lives, on radio, television and in the theatre.

St Margaret’s is one of the most fashionable and beautiful churches in the land; MPs in particular cherish the privilege of being married or having their children baptised there. But it was the location for my father’s funeral not because he was famous or important but because he was born in the parish. When I went along to ask the rector if the service could take place there, he seemed dubious: Lent was a busy time; there were lots of services planned; the choir would be at full stretch; and so on. Beneath his expressions of regret, though, I detected just a tinge of scepticism at my claim that Dad had grown up in the parish and sung in St Margaret’s choir. Then a verger appeared and the rector explained to him what I was doing there and the difficulty of fitting in the funeral. ‘That’s a pity,’ said the verger. ‘He really loved this place. I often chatted with him when he slipped in to listen to the choir.’ That settled it. It was agreed that Dad should be laid to rest in his own parish church.

In fact, Dad had been born at what is now an exclusive address, No. 1 Smith Square, adjacent to the Conservative Party central offices. In 1899 it was a two up, two down terrace house (rent: seven and sixpence a week) and Dad shared a bedroom with three brothers while six sisters squashed into an attic room. Westminster was then a self-contained village within London. Like the other kids in the area, my father played in the streets around the Parliament buildings, hitched lifts on the cow-catchers of trams and swam in the Thames off Lambeth Bridge when the police weren’t looking. (If they were looking, Dad would often end up running home, naked and dripping wet, his boots tied by their laces round his neck.)

Dad’s father was a ganger in charge of a section of the Metropolitan Water Board, and looked splendid in a top hat with a badge on it. He was a huge man who could with one hand pick up his wife, Sukey, who was only four feet tall, and tuck her under his arm. He was once invited onto the stage of the Aquarium in Tothill Street to try his luck against George Hackenschmidt, the Russian world-champion wrestler. In a flash he was on his back, but went away with the ten shillings promised to anyone brave enough to go into the ring against the world’s strongest man.

I still use my grandfather’s malacca walking-stick which has a gold band around the top inscribed, ‘To Joseph Cotton: from X Division, Metropolitan Police in appreciation of help with violent prisoners. May 1925.’ He must have been sixty-five years of age when he came to the rescue of a couple of police constables trying to arrest a gang of thugs. So he knew how to take care of himself.

Grandad was mad on clocks. However complicated they were, he could take them to pieces and put them together again. He had three or four clocks in every room of the house – cuckoo clocks, chiming clocks, water clocks. It was bedlam to walk through the house on the hour or half-hour.

In the deep silence before the funeral service began, I gazed around the church to keep my mind occupied and my eyes off Dad’s coffin. As a choir boy, under the eagle eye of St Margaret’s legendary organist and choirmaster, Dr Goss-Custard, Dad had sat in one of those stalls practising every weekday at noon between morning and afternoon school-lessons. Apparently he had a beautiful voice, and besides enjoying the singing earned a few precious shillings for special services such as weddings and funerals. And so began a life dedicated to music. To the end of his life he could sing arias such as ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’ from Messiah, though since that was composed for a soprano voice it sounded strange in his husky bass-tones. According to my grandmother he was a typical choirboy: cherubic in surplice and ruff collar but a tough, vigorous lad elsewhere, especially on the football field. His school played all their matches on Clapham Common, and they’d have to march the three miles there and back carrying the goalposts.

Tattered regimental banners, worn with age and damaged in battle, hung down from the nave of St Margaret’s, and I wondered whether the standard of the Second Battalion, the London Regiment, was among them. Popularly known as the Two-and-tuppences, this was the regiment my father joined in 1915. He’d volunteered as soon as the Great War broke out the previous year, but as a spotty fifteen-year-old couldn’t convince the red-sashed recruiting sergeant that he was ‘sixteen, coming on seventeen’. Twelve months later he enlisted as a boy bugler and was posted to Malta, where he was introduced to the seamier side of life in the quarter of Valletta the troops called the ‘Gut’. There were peep shows where for a penny you could see a naked lady, but Dad was perpetually hungry and preferred to go instead to the Salvation Army. They gave him a cup of tea and a fairy-cake in return for him standing on the roof of the building, bashing a tambourine and pointing at the red-light district. ‘That’s the way to the Devil,’ he’d shout, ‘and this is the way to the Lord. Come on in!’ And whenever one of the lads followed his advice Dad would get another fairy-cake.

From Malta he sailed to the Dardanelles, where a desperate engagement against the Turks was being fought. He later recalled that as he clambered down the troopship’s side to wade ashore off Cape Hellas, a huge Marine asked where his rifle was. Touching the musician’s badge on his arm, Dad replied, ‘I don’t carry a rifle. I’m a bugler.’ The Marine snorted, ‘There’s only one bugler around here – that’s Gabriel. He’s in heaven and you’ll soon bleeding well be joining him without one of these. Catch!’ With that, the Marine threw him a rifle and Dad became a serious soldier. Unable to move inland from the beaches, under constant Turkish shelling and German aerial bombardment from Taube biplanes that dropped steel darts to skewer you to the ground, Dad spent weeks sleeping in the freezing rain amid the bodies of his comrades and scurrying rats. He grew up during that doomed and brutal campaign. There was precious little chivalry around; the Turks mutilated prisoners and the Allied soldiers sometimes retaliated by hurling hand grenades into the POW cages where the Turkish prisoners were held.

Dad’s mother didn’t know he’d been posted abroad until she got a home-made Christmas card from him. He’d drawn a soldier holding a Christmas pudding with a bubble coming out of his head that read, ‘With thoughts of home from your loving son, Will.’ It was postmarked the Dardanelles. She nearly had a fit and started proceedings to buy him out of the army, an option open for boy soldiers. It cost thirty pounds, a king’s ransom, but somehow she scraped the money together. However, by the time the army’s bureaucracy creaked into action the Dardanelles expedition had ended in disaster and Dad was evacuated with everybody else. On the way home he helped stoke the boilers on the old three-funnelled battleship Mars, which was on its last voyage to the breaker’s yard via Southampton. When the Mars docked Dad queued up with the rest of the complement, clutching his pay-book. His turn came and the paymaster smiled sardonically, ‘Run along, son, I’ve got no chocolate.’

He had to find his own way home from Southampton. By this time the family had moved from Westminster to Kilburn, so he caught a train to Victoria then a bus up the Harrow Road, where he met a postman doing his rounds at ten o’clock at night. He asked the man if he knew where the Cotton family lived. The postman looked at this boy with a pack and rifle, obviously exhausted, and immediately said, ‘Yes, I know Joe Cotton’s house; it’s a bit of a walk but I’m going that way.’ While this wasn’t entirely true, he nonetheless picked up Dad’s kit and helped him home.

Dad was given a hero’s welcome but found a huge gap in the family he’d left. His elder brother Frederick had been in a reserved occupation as a draughtsman at Vickers. When he saw Dad leave for the army he couldn’t bear not being in uniform, and told his mother he too was going to enlist. He was killed in France within a fortnight.

Being a returned juvenile hero held no attraction for my father, so at the age of seventeen he again volunteered, this time for the Royal Flying Corps (later to become the Royal Air Force). When it was suggested during the interview by one of the board that Dad was too young to be commissioned in the RFC, the presiding officer said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, if he’s old enough to fight in the Dardanelles, he’s old enough to fight in the RFC.’ So Dad began a lifelong love-affair with flying and became a pilot, though because of a crash in training he never fought in the air – which probably saved his life: on the Western front, the life-expectancy of RFC aircrew was measured in weeks.

He left the RAF with a gratuity of two hundred and fifty pounds, spent ninety of it on a belt-driven Norton motor cycle and started looking for work. He tried motor-cycle racing in Ireland; then tried being a mill-wright’s assistant; and finally got a steady job as a bus conductor. Throughout this time he was playing football regularly. He played in the Middlesex Senior League and eventually got a trial for Brentford, whose manager with gritty realism told him, ‘Remember one thing. Brentford can’t play football so we make bloody sure nobody else does!’ Dad was not a professional and whenever Brentford didn’t pick him he got a game for Wimbledon, which at that time was an amateur side in the Athenian League.

Army buglers were also trained drummers, and Dad decided to cash in on his experience by joining a part-time band called the Fifth Avenue Orchestra – not Fifth Avenue, New York but Fifth Avenue, Queen’s Park. He played the drums badly until the best musician in the band, the pianist Clem Bernard, suggested the sound would improve if Dad quit the drums, stood in front and waved his arms about in time to the music – which he did brilliantly for the rest of his life.

In 1921 he married my mother, Mabel Hope Gregory. She too had a brother killed in the war and her mother was an invalid, so she played a vital part in her father’s business (he owned a chain of butcher’s shops in which my father worked for a time). He was less than entranced about his Mabel marrying a penniless musician-cum-amateur footballer, but eventually accepted the inevitable. Dad and Mum took a couple of rooms behind a barber’s shop in Kilburn Lane, where they were poor but happy. Sometimes of an evening, coming home from a gig at a dance hall, they would toss a coin to decide whether they should eat or ride home on the bus – it didn’t matter which way the coin fell, they always chose to buy something to eat and then walked home, lugging a set of drums between them.

Then Dad and the band were offered an engagement at the Regent, Brighton which was part cinema and part dance-hall. He decided that the Fifth Avenue Orchestra needed a more sophisticated name now they had hit the big time, so they became the London Savannah Band. After Brighton came Southport, then the Astoria on Charing Cross Road, London, and finally Ciro’s Club. By now, instead of playing for dancing they had become a stage band, putting on a show including vocalists and much clowning around. Billy Cotton had emerged as a showbiz personality in his own right; he was no longer just the leader of the band, he was its chief attraction.

Dad was now able to indulge his favourite pastimes. He gave up football but played cricket for Wembley when his engagements allowed, and he’d take me and my brother Ted with him. The whole family was there the day he scored a century, and my mother said it meant more to him than when he appeared in his first Royal Command Performance.

But he couldn’t wait for the day when he would be able to afford to race motor cars at Brooklands. When the time came he bought a clapped-out Riley Nine and got it tuned by an Italian mechanic called Charlie Querico. Being a professional, Charlie had a healthy contempt for all amateurs – especially showbiz types – so Dad decided to teach him a lesson. Just as all the cars were on the grid with their engines warming up, Dad raised his hand and beckoned to Charlie, who had a limp and hobbled over in a panic.

‘What’s the trouble?’ he yelled over the roar of gunning engines.

‘Which gear do I start this thing in? I’ve forgotten,’ Dad roared back.

‘First, of course!’ shrieked Charlie. Then, seeing the old man grinning at him, added, ‘You’re bloody mad,’ and got quickly out of the way.

Memories … Dad’s had been a boisterous, generally happy life. He swept us all up – family, friends and fans – in his warm, jolly embrace. Wherever he was there was noise and activity – I’d never known him as quiet as he was that afternoon in St Margaret’s. For an instant I was tempted to shatter the solemn silence by shouting out his famous slogan ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ with which he had begun a thousand performances. But I knew that this time it was no use. He had dominated my life, now I was on my own. No more amusing incidents where people mistook me for my Dad or got our names mixed up. An extraordinary Double Bill had come to an end.

But that afternoon, as one does when reluctant to face a tragic present, I dwelled on happier days …