Читать книгу Double Bill (Text Only) - Bill Cotton - Страница 7
ОглавлениеMy father had two sons and each of us inherited different parts of his nature – which just shows what a larger-than-life personality he was. My brother, Ted, who was five years older than me, shared my father’s love of flying – just as Dad had piloted Bristol fighters in the First World War, Ted flew Mosquito fighter bombers in the Second. As Dad’s younger son and named after him, I was fairly good at sports such as football and cricket, but chiefly I inherited my father’s love of show business and some of his flair for popular musical entertainment – though neither of us could read a note of music.
I think my earliest memory of my father was of him being very upset. When I was about four years old we lived on a new housing development in Kingsbury, north London. There was still plenty of building work going on and a constant stream of lorries passed our front gate. Apparently, one day someone left our gate open; I ran out into the road and got pinned to the ground by the front wheels of a truck. Miraculously I wasn’t seriously hurt but a doctor was called and, so the story goes, I remained utterly silent while he used a fork to dig out the stones that had been imprinted on my back by the lorry’s wheels. When he’d done he gave me a couple of sharp slaps on the backside and I screamed the place down. My silence had not been bravery but shock.
Meanwhile, in the road outside, my father was lambasting the poor lorry driver who’d really done nothing wrong. When my father was aroused he could be frightening; he had a Cockney’s ripe turn of phrase and was a trained boxer – I once saw him knock a motorist who picked a fight with him right across Denmark Street. He wasn’t particularly proud of the bellicose side of his nature but he had learned as a boy in the backstreets of Westminster that you either stood up for yourself or went under.
In a way, it’s poignant that my earliest memory should be of him being fiercely defensive of me. I recall him as an unfailingly loving father; I remained secure in that knowledge even when he did things I found puzzling or even upsetting. When I was small I didn’t realise that he was a famous band leader. I didn’t know what he did for a living, he just seemed to live life the wrong way round. He would set off for work as Ted started his homework and I was being put to bed, and it’s a miracle we didn’t become chronic insomniacs for he had a habit of bawling up the stairs, ‘Anyone awake?’ at whatever time he got home. If he got any answer, he would carry us both down to share his supper. We were a tightly knit family, and always if it was humanly possible Dad came home. Even when the band had played miles away he would drive through the night to get back to his own bed.
Though Dad was my hero, throughout my childhood my favourite band-leader was in fact Henry Hall, whose BBC Dance Band broadcast every weekday evening from Savoy Hill. After I’d had my bath, brushed my teeth and hair and put on my pyjamas, I was allowed into the front room to listen to the programme. I loved his music, especially ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, which he made a hit. Years later, when I was running BBC TV Entertainment we did a programme celebrating fifty years of broadcast music. We got Henry Hall to conduct a band made up of all the top session-musicians, and they played a medley of the famous signature tunes of big bands of the thirties, which included amongst others Jack Hylton’s ‘Oh, Listen to the Band’, Jack Payne’s ‘Say It With Music’, Henry’s own signature tune, ‘Here’s to the Next Time’, and of course Billy Cotton’s ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’. It was a magical, nostalgic occasion. At the end the band gave Henry, by then in his eighties, a standing ovation, and he said afterwards that he’d never officially retired as a band-leader until that moment. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, including mine.
It was at the Holborn Empire that I heard Dad’s band for the first time. My mother, my brother and I caught a bus from Kingsbury which dropped us off in Oxford Street, from where we took a cab for the rest of the journey so we could arrive in style. For me the star of that evening wasn’t my father but my Uncle Bill, who happened to be the senior commissionaire at the theatre. There he was, dressed in a magnificent green uniform with gold piping, war medals clanking on his chest. He opened the taxi door, saluted and called me ‘Young sir’. I was speechless with pride. A page-boy took us up to a luxuriously upholstered box in the circle. I was about to see my first variety show; it included dancers, jugglers, comedians, a ventriloquist and a magician. Then the melody of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ rang out, the curtain went up and there was my father in white tie and tails conducting his band. When the signature tune ended he turned to the audience to do his opening patter and I couldn’t contain myself. I jumped up and shouted out in a loud voice, ‘Hello, Dad!’ Quick as a flash he called back, ‘Now, don’t give me away, son,’ and there was a sympathetic chuckle from the audience. I sat back proudly and clutched my mother’s hand.
A few years later when my brother went away to boarding school, Dad would take me on my own to any nearby theatre he was playing at. I would stand in the wings and when he took his curtain call run onto the stage and solemnly bow to the audience with him – the old girls in the front stalls loved it, but not half as much as I did. It was on trips like this that I met face to face some of the great stars of the day, especially at the Palladium. There would be American superstars like Joe E. Brown and Laurel and Hardy whom I had seen only on the screen of the local cinema at Saturday matinées. There was also home-grown talent such as Will Hay, Max Miller, the Crazy Gang and Bud Flanagan.
Bud was a great joker. I remember Dad treating me and some school pals to lunch at the Moulin d’Or. You’d see all the big stars there – it was the place to eat, and to be seen. Bud was at another table, and when we got up to leave and our coats were handed to us he jumped up and started shrieking, ‘Stop! Call the police!’ I was embarrassed beyond belief as he proceeded to tip out of our coat pockets knives, forks and spoons he’d bribed the waiters to plant in them.
I loved going with the band when they did cine-variety, playing between film-showings at two cinemas such as the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road and the Trocadero, Elephant and Castle. They started at two in the afternoon and by the time they finished at ten p.m., they’d done seven shows. Though I was allowed to travel with the band, I don’t think they were all that keen on having me aboard because my father didn’t tolerate bad language in front of his family. When I appeared the band members would pass the word along: ‘Ham sandwich’ was their warning they’d better watch their tongues. Why ‘ham sandwich’ I don’t really know; perhaps it was rhyming slang for ‘bad language’. Another code word was ‘Tom’, their private name for Dad so they could discuss him without outsiders realising who they were talking about.
It was around this time that Dad adopted ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ as his signature tune. When asked why he said the idea had been put into his head by his nephew Laurie Johnson who was in the orchestra. On one occasion Laurie had observed Dad standing on the edge of the dance-hall floor, turning every dance into an excuse-me whenever a pretty girl whirled past him, and said to him, ‘You’re always stealing somebody’s girl!’ Dad responded by singing him a verse of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’, and one thing led to another.
Dad was constantly on the move and the family didn’t see as much of him as we would have liked. He had become involved in what were known as Blue Star Flying Visits to the various Mecca dance-halls all over the country. The proposal had come from a Dutchman called C.L.H. Heimann who had heard Dad’s band in one or two theatres and been very impressed. He had just bought a chain of Mecca cafés and proposed to turn them into dance-halls. He engaged Dad and supplied a state-of-the-art motor coach to take the band on one-night visits to every Mecca venue. Thus was born what later became an institution of British popular culture before, during and immediately after the war – Mecca Dancing.
Dad soon began to take the idea of flying visits literally and bought himself a second-hand Puss Moth, a wooden aircraft, very reliable and simple to fly. In it he flew to the nearest aerodromes to the towns where the band was performing – I was thrilled by the drama and excitement of it. I recall my cousin Laurie telling me of an occasion when he flew with Dad to a booking at Great Yarmouth Pier. They flew to the Boulton and Paul aerodrome at Norwich where a car collected them and took them on to the coast. The next day they drove back to the aerodrome, and while they were sitting in the club house an official came in and told them they ought not to fly because the weather was deteriorating. The misty rain and murk for which the Fenlands are notorious was closing in.
Dad chose to ignore the weather warning and fly on to Leicester, where the band was performing that evening at the Palais de Dance. Visibility was nil and in those days the only available navigational aid was a bubble and compass. In such conditions the single course open to aircraft was to ‘Bradshaw’ – follow the railway lines. But railway lines to where? Dad was hopelessly lost and realised that he was also low on fuel. He decided to hedge-hop in the hope of spotting a familiar landmark. He pushed down the stick, and the aircraft was swooping towards the ground when Laurie screamed through the voice tube, ‘Look out!’, whereupon Dad hauled back the stick and just missed a place in the history books as the man who demolished Peterborough Cathedral.
He had just enough fuel left for a quarter of an hour’s flying, so decided to land at the first flat field he saw. It turned out to be the jumping arena of a stables, complete with fences he had to sail over one by one until he came to a halt. Plenty of horses had taken the jumps but this was the first time an aeroplane completed the course. The owner came out to greet them and Dad introduced himself; they had a drink together then pushed the Puss Moth, wings folded, into a shed. The owner’s driver took Dad and Laurie to Melton Mowbray station, from where they caught a train to Leicester. The next day Dad returned, collected the aircraft and flew it back to Croydon. The joys of flying in those carefree early days! Little wonder that Dad was my childhood hero when his life was punctuated by escapades like these.
It was much to our delight that for one period in the 1930s Dad spent much more time at home. This was while he and the band were the resident orchestra at Ciro’s Club in London’s Park Lane. It was a very upmarket, even exclusive, establishment, quite different from the general run of variety theatres in which Dad spent much of his professional life. Entertainment correspondents of various newspapers were astounded at the appointment and predicted that it would be a very brief engagement – just long enough for Dad to open his mouth, as one unkindly put it. Because Ciro’s was a very select place the band had to play very quietly, muffling the brass by stuffing scarves and handkerchiefs down the bells of their instruments. The clientele didn’t want to hear the band so much as feel it; it was an accessory, like the vastly expensive flock wallpaper or the periwigged flunkeys in knee-breeches who manned the cloakroom and served the drinks.
When Dad returned home from nights at Ciro’s he would tell us about some of the more exotic or distinguished people he’d met. For a while the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was an habitué. He was fond of night-life and partial to the club’s dark, romantic atmosphere. Though flattered by HRH’s presence, the owners of the club found him a bit of a pain because he would arrive with an entourage and insist on being treated like royalty, killing an evening stone dead. All the other guests sat in respectful silence as the Duke chuntered his way through the wine list, ate his meal and eventually left (which he’d do after requesting the Billy Cotton Band to play his favourite tune, the Waltz Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana – not a theme calculated to set feet tapping or bring the crowds onto the dance-floor).
The third time the Prince requested the same piece Dad, exasperated, said to the club manager who’d brought the message, ‘Go and ask the silly so-and-so if he knows any other tune.’ The following day Dad was summoned to the presence of the chairman of the board, Lord Tennyson, who told him that although he and the band were popular with members, they did expect a little more courtesy. ‘You mean “servility”,’ replied Dad. ‘That’s not my style. I certainly believe in greeting people in a proper manner, but they’ll get no bowing and scraping from me.’ Lord Tennyson then broached the subject of HRH, pointing out that even among club staff the heir to the throne was not to be referred to as a silly so-and-so. ‘The problem is, Cotton,’ said the noble lord, ‘that you are too outspoken. You’ll be calling him that to his face next.’
The upshot was that Dad and his band were banished to Ciro’s in Paris for three months, in a role-exchange with the club’s resident band, the Noble Cecil Orchestra, and he found the clientele there much more responsive and uninhibited than their London counterparts. Cecil’s band was initially greeted with shock at the London Ciro’s, because every one of its players was black – though nothing unusual these days, the fact was considered scandalous at that time among the club’s many ex-colonial members.
However, whereas at home Dad was ‘one of us’ and expected to behave as such, Noble Cecil and his orchestra got away with murder. As Dad himself acknowledged, all the noisy, catchy tunes he had been barred from playing, the Cecil band blasted out – and the clients, including the Prince of Wales, came to love them. When the two bands swapped venues again, Dad found he was able to play his own kind of music, the Billy Cotton sound, trombones blaring, saxes wailing and drums thumping out the rhythm. He also enticed one of Noble Cecil’s band to stay and work for him: trombonist Ellis Jackson was still playing in the Billy Cotton Band and doing a credible tap dance well into his eighties.
I was absorbing the ethos of show business through my skin when I was still a boy. I learned a lot; things like the significance of the running order on a variety bill. In those days the Billy Cotton Band would be one of perhaps three or four star attractions whose names were emblazoned in huge letters across the posters, but I also watched from the wings as the names in little letters – the supporting acts, especially comedians – performed. With desperation lurking behind the laughter in their eyes, they worked frantically to get some response from audiences who were waiting impatiently for the big stars and daring these lower-order comedians to make them laugh. Their act done, they’d leave the stage to the hollow sound of their own footsteps, head for the bar and demolish half a bottle of whisky while they waited to die the death again in the second house. Comics suffered this ritual humiliation year in and year out in the hope that one day there might be a talent spotter in the audience who would pluck them from obscurity. It amazed me how few stand-up comedians gave up in despair; they all seemed to be incorrigible optimists.
A boyhood spent standing in theatre wings watching the contrasting scenes before me – stars excited by roaring crowds and also-rans withering at the sparse applause of bored audiences – bred in me an empathy I have never lost towards showbiz performers. When eventually I became a BBC Television executive and had the power to employ musicians and entertainers, though I couldn’t let my professional judgement be distorted by sentimentality, every time I auditioned a TV hopeful I willed him or her to succeed. In my mind’s eye I could see some miserable comedian gloomily staring into an empty whisky glass waiting for the call of destiny that would never come.
In the late nineteen-thirties we were living in a family house in Willesden which had a large garden, stables and a proper snooker room. There Dad entertained an eclectic mix of the kinds of personality who occupied the gossip- and feature-columns of the day’s newspapers. There was the motor-racing set, many of them the younger sons of the aristocracy; flying aces like Amy Johnson; show business stars; music publishers; and the sporting mob – footballers, cricketers and boxers. One regular visitor was the world snooker champion Joe Davis, who would play a dozen of us at once and we’d get just one shot each before he cleared the table. The only person who could beat him was the comedian Tommy Trinder, who reduced him to such helpless laughter that he fluffed his shots. In fact, Tommy had everyone present in stitches except for his wife, Vi, who never laughed at anything he said – ever. Tommy had a lifelong ambition to get a smile out of Vi but he never realised it; my father, on the other hand, had only to make a mildly amusing remark and she’d explode with mirth.
Vi was an extraordinary character. She put the kibosh on a tour Tommy made of Australia when they were both interviewed by the press on the airport tarmac before they flew home. Tommy rhapsodised about Australia, its wonderful climate, its beautiful scenery, its marvellous audiences … Eventually, a reporter asked Vi what was the best thing she’d seen in Australia. She said, ‘This aeroplane that’s going to take me back to my bulldog in Brighton.’ She hated the razzmatazz of show business, and I think she warmed to my dad because he was totally without any overweening self-regard. Fame left him totally unaffected. To the end, he remained a big-hearted, down-to-earth Cockney, noisy and affectionate.
My mother ran our family effortlessly. She’d inherited her father’s head for business and had the only bank account in the family, from which she doled out cheques to my father as he needed them. And she wasn’t dealing in loose change either – Dad made big money in his time, but since one of his famous sayings was ‘Money is for spending’, it was up to Mabel to keep the ship afloat. She was the still centre of a hurricane. There was noise and frantic activity all around her, and she went on calmly holding the family together while my father dashed about playing the theatres, driving racing cars, flying aeroplanes and sailing boats. She graciously entertained the big show-business names who blew in and out of our house, but she wasn’t overly impressed. All that was another world; what mattered to her was giving her sons as normal and loving an upbringing as possible, and looking after the old man.
That in itself was a full-time job. One day when I was quite small, Dad complained of pains in his arms and legs and developed a high temperature. Rheumatic fever was diagnosed, he became seriously ill and was looked after round the clock at home by two nurses. The house was darkened and Ted and myself were sternly enjoined to keep quiet. I was given the job of keeping guard at the entrance to our drive and waving down passing vehicles if they were going too fast or making a lot of noise – even the Walls ice-cream man was asked not to ring the bell of his tricycle or call out his wares until he was beyond earshot. For a couple of weeks it was touch and go as to whether or not Dad would make it, but he was as strong as an ox and once he turned the corner he quickly recovered. Whilst Dad was ill, though, the entire brass section of his orchestra, which included some of the finest trumpet and trombone players of the time, the best-known being Nat Gonella, was enticed away by a rival band-leader called Roy Fox. Dad screamed ‘Theft!’ and never forgave those who deserted him; the rest he rewarded with inscribed silver cigarette boxes which became known as ‘loyalty boxes’.
When I was nine years old I joined Ted at Ardingly College. As a new boy I wasn’t allowed to have any contact with him – we travelled there together, but as we approached the school Ted warned me that tradition decreed juniors mustn’t socialise with seniors during term-time. As is often the case with younger siblings, my elder brother had excited in me both admiration and envy, so I had been desperately keen to follow him to public school. But on that day, as Ted left me behind and strolled away chatting and joking with his contemporaries, I stood there alone, clutching my suitcase, gazing at this gloomy Victorian building which made Bleak House look like a holiday camp looming ahead in the dark winter afternoon, and I just wanted to be back with Mum and Dad. I lived for their visits and pursued a curiously schizoid existence. For one third of the year I mixed at home with the stars who made a great fuss of me, the other two thirds were spent in this miserable barracks of a place where the masters beat any cockiness out of me.
It was only when I had settled down at school and got to know my school-mates that I realised how famous my dad was, and I did quite a brisk trade in enrolling them as members of his fan club for two-pence each. I remember one weekend he visited Ted and myself in his state-of-the-art car, a Lagonda which boasted a car radio – a real novelty in those days. Every Sunday, Radio Luxembourg transmitted a programme – recorded in advance – called the Kraft Hour, which featured Dad and his band. On this occasion showing off the car, Dad turned the radio on, and hey presto! there he was on the air. Since these were the early days of radio, when pre-recorded programmes were rare, some of my astonished school-mates didn’t understand how Dad could be in two places at once.
I confess I swelled with smug pride whenever my father visited Ardingly College on open days. He would sign up for the Boys versus Parents cricket match, knock out a quick half-century, bowl some unplayable balls and then dash off to Croydon where he kept his aeroplane, fly back and, to the delight of the boys, buzz the school. No doubt some sniffy parents thought it was all outrageous exhibitionism, but Dad was so artless in his desire to give people pleasure it would never occur to him that anyone could think he was doing it to stroke his own ego. In spite of his great fame, there was an engaging innocence about him; he had no pretensions about his importance. He was, for example, terrified of Ardingly’s headmaster, Canon Ernest Crosse – of course, we all were in our early days in the school. Even when I became a sixth-form prefect and counted Canon Crosse more as a friend than a teacher (he later conducted my marriage service and baptised my children) Dad never lost his apprehensiveness about having to make conversation with him. ‘He’s your headmaster,’ he used to say. ‘You talk to him.’
After I’d been at boarding school for a couple of years, World War II broke out and Dad, who was on the Reserve of Air Force Officers, was called to a board at Uxbridge which tried to decide the best use to make of him. Obviously he wanted to fly in combat; they on the other hand decided that although he was a very fit forty-year-old, he should become adjutant to an RAF squadron at Northolt. Dad was outraged – Billy Cotton a pen pusher? The Air Marshal who presided asked him why he was wearing glasses. ‘Is it true that you have a defect in your left eye?’ Dad had to agree that he had sight problems, and that was that. They spared him an office job and recommended that he and his band should be loaned to ENSA to entertain the troops in France during that first cold winter of the war. Then, after Dunkirk, he was seconded to the Air Training Corps and spent the rest of the war trying to keep up morale on the home front as well as doing his bit to ginger up the teenagers who enlisted in the ATC as the first step to service in the RAF. It was my brother, Ted, who did the family’s stint in the RAF.
When I came home for school holidays, my Dad often took me touring with him. People needed something to take their minds off the war, so the theatres were packed. The band played patriotic songs like ‘We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’ and ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ over and over again. Petrol was rationed and we had to travel everywhere by slow train. The hotels were unheated and the food was pretty basic but I still enjoyed myself. Many of the younger stage performers were in the forces, so the old stars came out of retirement to do their bit. I got the chance to see the likes of G.H. Elliott, who was truly a show-business legend. He was known as the ‘Chocolate Coloured Coon’ because he wore black face make-up. I heard him sing ‘Lily of Laguna’ and watched his soft shoe shuffle; it was an education in stage technique. Even in old age he was a song and dance virtuoso.
A great friend of my father’s was Jack Hylton, probably the most famous of the pre-war band-leaders. By the time the war began, he’d become an impresario and got the rights to do stage versions of two hit radio shows, Tommy Handley’s ITMA and Garrison Theatre which was set in an army base and fronted by the actor Jack Warner, later famous for his lead in Dixon of Dock Green. Jack introduced variety acts and kept lighthearted banter running through the show. On radio these two shows were great successes but good theatre demands action and spectacle – the eye as well as the ear has to be entertained – and Jack Hylton realised he needed to add an extra dimension, so he engaged the Billy Cotton Band to bolster the stage show.
Thanks to Tommy Handley’s genius, ITMA did well in the wartime theatre. Garrison Theatre, though, was a real turkey, so when it transferred to Blackpool, Hylton persuaded Tommy Trinder, one of the biggest comedians of the time, to join the show for a limited season. Then began the great dressing-room saga. Contractually, my father was entitled to the No. 1 dressing room and Jack Warner to No.2. These pecking-order squabbles might seem trivial to outsiders, but they mattered a great deal to stars whose self-worth as well as bankability could depend on a detail such as the number on a dressing-room door. Where was Tommy Trinder to be accommodated? As he was a great pal of my father’s, it was suggested that Tommy should move in with him. (Jack Warner had no intention of moving out, and who could blame him?) Instead, Tommy insisted on having a special dressing-room built out of scenery on the side of the stage.
During one performance, Jack Warner was on stage doing an impression of Maurice Chevalier, which had a certain poignancy because France had just fallen. The band played the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, quietly in the background while in ringing Shakespearean tones Jack Warner declaimed that France would rise from the ashes again. At this point Tommy’s voice rang out from the makeshift dressing-room, ‘A drop of hot water in No.9 please’ – a well-known catch phrase in public bathhouses at the time. Jack was beside himself with fury, Tommy assumed an air of innocence and couldn’t understand what the fuss was about, and my father as usual tried to be the peace-maker. Then a stray German bomb dropped near the theatre, which besides playing havoc with bookings put these silly artistic tantrums in perspective.
Dad may not have achieved his dearest wish and flown in combat, but he and the band were subject to the dangers of travelling around Britain during the war, playing as they did in towns and cities that got a pasting from the German air force. In Plymouth, both the theatre where they were appearing and the hotel where they were staying went up in flames. The band got out just in time and spent the night on the moors overlooking the city. Dad was having supper at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool when it was hit by a bomb. He escaped injury and for the rest of the night travelled backwards and forwards on the Mersey ferry, on the principle that it was harder to hit a moving target.
During the blitz, a bomb dropped in the garden of our Willesden house and blew the front off, so we had to move out. We stayed at Farnham Common for a while with a good friend of my father’s, Jimmy Philips, who was a music publisher. We eventually found a house nearby and we’d frequent the local pub, the Dog and Pot. It was there that my father and Jimmy first heard a German song which was a favourite of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the desert. The Eighth Army lads had adopted and adapted it, adding some pretty ribald words. Both Jimmy and my father were struck by the tune and got a song writer called Tommy Connor to put some lyrics to it. It was called ‘Lili Marlene’ and became immortal.
At about this time Leslie Grade, who had become my father’s agent, went into the RAF. His brother Lew took over the agency and with his other brother, Bernard Delfont, created one of the greatest show-business dynasties of the century. The Grade organisation represented Dad until he died. There were plenty of heated discussions between client and agent over the years. Leslie used to tell the story of my dad pitching up in his office and demanding more work in London. When he was told that there weren’t any more theatres left, that they were either booked up or bombed out, Dad hit the roof and shouted that he’d had enough, their partnership was forthwith dissolved. As Dad stormed out of the door Leslie shouted, ‘You’ll be back!’ – and sure enough, he was. He’d left his hat behind.
In spite of having in Leslie Grade one of the best agents in the business, my father’s career took a dip in the immediate postwar period and he seriously considered giving up the entertainment business and buying a garage. The problem was that the Billy Cotton Band seemed to have been around for ever; there was a dated feel to their music compared with that of orchestras such as the Ted Heath Band and the Squadronaires who had first formed ad hoc as groups of musicians serving together in the forces, then decided to stick together when they were demobbed. To the millions who had served in the forces these were the exciting and evocative sounds of the hectic war years, whereas Dad’s band, having been playing since the twenties, seemed to belong to a sedate era that had vanished for ever.
I remember going with him to the Streatham Empire where he was playing to a half-empty theatre and worrying whether his share of the box-office takings would pay the musicians’ wages. The truth was that live variety was dying – though ironically television was responsible for its resurrection and my father, having suffered through its declining years, was one of the chief beneficiaries when a bright new age dawned.
To add to the family’s problems, my brother while in the RAF had been posted to Burma where he contracted first malaria and then TB. After a long convalescence at the famous Baragwanath Hospital in South Africa, Ted came home, was demobbed and got a job in the film industry. Then TB broke out in his other lung, at which point my father flew him out to Switzerland, which as a result of its crystal-clear and unpolluted mountain air had become a leading centre for the treatment of the disease. Following intensive care, Ted went back to work again, but the family always had some anxiety about his health – as it turned out, with good reason.
In desperate need of work, Dad went to the BBC to see an Australian called Jim Davidson who was at that time Assistant Head of Light Entertainment. Jim proposed some radio work on different days of each week. This was no good to Dad because he played all round the country, often in towns a long distance from the nearest radio studio. On the other hand, he couldn’t afford to abandon live variety and keep the band in existence just for one broadcast a week. Jim Davidson thought for a moment and then said, ‘How about a show on Sunday mornings?’ This was a startling proposal. The BBC was still shrouded in Reithian gloom on Sundays, the founder of the BBC having decreed that no programmes should be broadcast which might distract churchgoing listeners from holy things. And the Billy Cotton Band with its raucous leader hardly qualified as a suitable religious offering. But Jim Davidson decided to take the risk and booked the band to do half a dozen shows at ten-thirty on Sunday mornings.
The show was an immediate success, though the strain on Dad and the band was immense. After a hard week on the road, they often had to travel through the night to get to the BBC studio by seven o’clock on Sunday morning for rehearsals. My father was to claim later that his famous catch phrase ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ was born when he arrived at the studio one Sunday morning to find the members of the band nodding with weariness in their chairs. ‘Oi, come on,’ he roared. ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ Noting its tonic effect on everyone in the studio, the producer suggested that that’s how the show should begin. Far from being outraged by The Billy Cotton Band Show, the representatives of the churches on the BBC’s religious advisory committee felt that the programme sent people off to church in an upbeat, cheerful mood. There was, though, the odd Puritan who believed that broadcast dance music on the Sabbath was the work of the devil. One Lancashire vicar was reported in the press as telling his congregation, ‘The choice is yours, Billy Cotton or the Almighty!’ Dad was flattered by the comparison. The Church’s only concern was the programme’s timing, which clashed with most church services which began somewhere between ten and eleven. The BBC then proposed that the programme should be moved to one-thirty, Sunday lunchtime, when families traditionally all gathered round their tables in convivial mood. It was this decision which transformed my father from being a fading band-leader into a national institution. Whole generations grew up and grew old associating the sound of The Billy Cotton Band Show with the smell of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
One unexpected side-effect of the radio show’s success was that Dad’s theatre bookings perked up again. Leslie Grade booked the band for a four-week tour with Two-Ton Tessie O’Shea. The show was called Tess and Bill, and ran for more than two years. Both Dad and Tessie were larger than life personalities – hugely so in Tessie’s case – and they got on well together. They toured all round the country to packed theatres and were at one about everything but money. Tessie had a much shrewder appreciation of Dad’s radio popularity than he had himself, and decided she’d take a percentage of the box office, whereas he preferred a fixed fee. Tessie’s instinct paid off and the tour made her very rich, until she made a fatal miscalculation. They had worked all the London suburban theatres, from Edgware to Hackney and New Cross to Lewisham, then Tessie proposed a final visit to the Victoria Palace – a West End theatre with an enormous coach trade. Dad felt that Londoners who’d paid four and sixpence to see them in the suburbs wouldn’t shell out twelve and sixpence for a repeat performance at the Victoria Palace, and he was right. Tessie lost a lot of money and Tess and Bill eventually split up.
Dad was soon drawing big crowds on the strength of the huge popularity his radio show had given him. Initially he had no interest in television, which began developing into a mass medium once the war was over. With the exception of a couple of Royal galas – celebrating the Coronation, and then the Queen’s return from Australia – he refused invitations to appear. His reasons for doing so were strictly commercial: so long as the BBC had monopoly of television, their fees would remain unrealistically low – too low, Dad decided, to make it worth his while to put together elaborate programmes which could be used on only one occasion. Once the public had seen a show, that was that, he thought. Radio was different: the listeners were curious to see in the flesh the performers they had come to love. It was the arrival of ITV which changed his mind.
Meanwhile I had left school and toured the country with Dad while I waited to be called up for National Service. For Ted’s twenty-first birthday, Dad bought him a brand-new MG Midget, in those days virtually the only mass-produced sports car on the market. A few months later, Dad and I were driving through Coventry and stopped off at a garage for petrol. There in the garage’s showroom was a brand-new fire-engine-red MG. I was gazing at it longingly when Dad came up and said, ‘By the way, that’s your car. Look after it.’
Later he told me that Ted had felt uncomfortable about having a state-of-the-art sports car while I was driving a clapped-out pre-war Fiat Topolino. He lobbied Father to get me one for my eighteenth birthday. What a way to get your first car, and how typical of both Ted and my father’s generosity of spirit! I was a very lucky lad, and knew it.
My father loved cars, every type of car, from Rolls Bentley through Aston Martin to Jaguars and Mercedes and the latest line in runabouts. He had a Morris Minor which we called ‘Leapin Leaner’: it leaned when he got in and it leaped when he got cat! One day I was in his office when he received a phone call from Jack Barclay, the distributor for Rolls Royce and Bentley in Hanover Square. Jack invited him for a sherry. When we arrived at the showroom there was a magnificent Rolls Bentley gleaming in its newness and with the number-plate BC 1. Dad took one look and said, ‘I’ll have it.’ The sherry was swapped for champagne and joy was unconfined – until they produced the invoice. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘It’s the number-plate I want – I’ve got a Bentley and you sold it to me!’ Jack Barclay took it very well and gave the old man the number-plate. BC 1 was on many a car until Dad died.
I was eventually called up, and joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in late 1946 when the world was comparatively peaceful. On the basis that I preferred to ride than walk – especially with full equipment on my back – I was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps as a transport officer.
The only truly terrifying thing that happened to me during my military service was my encounter with the legendary Regimental Sergeant-Major Brittain on the parade ground at Mons Barracks, Aldershot. He was a fearsome sight and had a voice that could shatter glass at half a mile. One exchange with him when I was dozy on parade still lingers in my memory.
RSM: ‘Are you a spiritualist, sir?’
Me: ‘No, sir.’
RSM: ‘Well, you’ve got your head on an ethereal plane, your body in the West End, and your feet are just about in Aldershot. Put him in the guard room.’
Long after I left the army, I met the RSM again. I was producing a record show for television and a girl singer known as Billie Anthony had a new record out called ‘Fall in for Love’, on which Brittain, long since retired from the army, appeared at the beginning of the song bellowing the command, ‘Fall in for love!’ So we booked Billie Anthony and also Mr Brittain to perform the song live in the studio. When Britten arrived I went up to him and said, ‘I have waited a long time to say this, sir. Stand there and don’t move till I tell you.’
The only time I fired a shot and hit a live target was not during my army career but shortly afterwards. We were staying at Sandbanks for Christmas, and there was quite a big house party that included the composer and impresario Noel Gay. We used to go sailing every day, and on this occasion I took with me a four-ten shotgun to shoot shag, the voracious green cormorant. Fifty yards off our port bow, a beautiful swan gave us a disdainful glance and then lazily spread its wings to take off. Jokingly, I said, ‘I’ll ginger him up,’ and fired quite casually into the air in the general direction of the bird. To my horror, this freak shot killed the swan outright. My father said, ‘That’s illegal. All swans belong to the Queen. You could go to gaol for that.’ Someone else suggested that ‘we’d better suppress the evidence’, so we pulled the body into the boat and cruised around until dusk fell. Then we went ashore and marched in single file up to the house, the swan over Dad’s back while the rest of us chanted the Seven Dwarfs’ ‘Heigh-ho’ song from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
We found Noel Gay dozing on a settee in the sitting-room. ‘Look, Noel,’ someone shouted, ‘a Christmas goose.’ Noel opened one eye. ‘I never eat goose,’ he confided and went back to sleep. Just so he wouldn’t feel left out of the fun, we decided to stow the swan in the boot of his car, until Christmas night, when we all dressed in dinner jackets and boarded a dinghy to bury the swan at sea. The corpse was tied to a trawler drag and heaved overboard. We underestimated its weight: all that happened was the swan’s neck went under and its bottom bobbed up. I doubt whoever found it with an iron bar round its neck would think it had died a natural death.
Dad was at his most exuberant on holiday at Sandbanks, when laughter, joking and frenzied activity surrounded him. Next door to our house was the Royal Motor Yacht Club whose Commodore was an ex-naval officer called Bersey, a splendid man but a stickler for protocol. Every morning at eight o’clock a saluting gun would be fired and a Blue Ensign run to the masthead. It so happened that in the garage of his Sandbanks house Dad kept a whole load of old stage-props, including the Soviet flag, the Hammer and Sickle, which had been used for a stage song called ‘Comrades’. This was in the early days of the Cold War when the former camaraderie between Russia and the West had evaporated.
One morning the steward came out of the club house, checked his watch, fired the saluting gun, tied the furled Ensign to the halyard and looked up to see the Hammer and Sickle already flying proudly from the masthead. He dashed inside and brought out the apoplectic Commodore in his dressing-gown. The local constabulary was called in just in case the Russians were planning an invasion of the Bournemouth area and had landed an advance raiding party. About a year later, the Commodore came up to my father who was drinking in the Club verandah. ‘Don’t think I don’t know who put that Russian flag up,’ he spluttered.
I was demobbed in the latter part of 1948. I had a place at Clare College, Cambridge but I didn’t fancy taking it up; the world of academia wasn’t for me. So I became slightly unfocused and, having nothing better to do, went on tour with Dad, protesting all the time that I really must set about getting a career. He couldn’t see the problem. He’d say, ‘You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?’ and point out that we enjoyed each other’s company; he was doing very well financially and I was very useful to him. That was debatable. I had two main tasks: one was to act as his chauffeur; the other to reconnoitre every town the band was visiting to find out which cinemas might be showing cowboy Western films in the afternoons.
I went to enormous trouble to locate these local flea pits where Dad would sit down assuring me we were in for a treat. Before the opening titles had finished running, his head would drop onto his chest and he’d snore his way through the entire film. Having woken up, he’d take off in search of a cup of tea, murmuring appreciation of a film he’d never seen. That happened again and again.
During this period, my father took a week off which happened to coincide with the British Grand Prix for Formula One racing cars. He suggested we drive up to Silverstone to watch the practice laps for the great event. Since pre-war days, he had been a member of the prestigious British Racing Drivers’ Club, so he knew most of the personalities in the motor racing game. He also displayed proudly on his radiator the Brooklands 120 mph badge commemorating the occasion he clocked a lap at 123.89 mph in an MG and became one of a very select group.
We waved goodbye to my mother who fondly imagined that Dad was going to the Grand Prix as an interested spectator. When we arrived at Silverstone, Dad sought out Wilkie Wilkinson who used to prepare his racing cars before the war and had joined forces with a couple of wealthy up and coming drivers to form an ERA (English Racing Automobile) team. It soon became clear that Dad had arranged beforehand to drive one of Wilkie’s cars.
I was dumbfounded. Dad was forty-nine years of age and suffered from high blood pressure. I watched in amazement as he got his crash hat and visor out of the boot of our car, put them on, and drove off round the circuit. He clocked up a respectable if not spectacular lap time and on returning to the pits said that since there were still four days of practice before the big race he’d plenty of time to sharpen up. On the drive back home he said nonchalantly, ‘Best not to tell your mother about this, she’ll only worry.’
And so this charade went on throughout the rest of the week. Each morning at breakfast he’d spin some yarn about his plans for the day and Mother would nod, apparently understandingly – until Saturday, the day of the race, when she cut short Dad’s fanciful musings. She said, ‘I don’t mind you not telling me you’re driving in a motor race today, it’s the insinuation that I can’t read that upsets me. The story’s in every newspaper, including the fact that I’m not supposed to know about it. So off you go and if you kill yourself I’ll never talk to you again. And don’t come home stinking of petrol as you’ve done every day this week.’
In the actual race he did remarkably well. He was due to take the car over at the halfway point when it stopped to refuel. Just before the car arrived at the pit, the petrol bowser drew up and through some fault starting spewing fuel under pressure all over the place. Dad was crouched on the pit counter ready to jump into the car as soon as it arrived and so got a face-wash of high-octane petrol. His goggles were soaked and he obviously couldn’t see clearly. I begged him not to get into the car, but he said, ‘If you think I’m missing this, you’re out of your mind,’ and off he went. He started slowly but the wind soon blew away the petrol film on his goggles and he finished the race a creditable fourth. Some of the legendary pre-war drivers, George Easton, John Cobb and Earl Howe, came up to congratulate him and they all agreed that he’d taught the youngsters a thing or two and shown there was still life in old dogs. However, the strain had obviously taken its toll on him and on the way home he confided in me regretfully that he was hanging up his helmet and goggles. His part-time career as a racing driver was over.
