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For Gwen,
For Vicky,
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When war was declared, Southampton became one of the major targets of the Blitz. His parents made frequent visits back to Devon and Caerphilly to stay out of harm’s way with family and friends. When peace arrived they appear to have lost their appetite for the semi-rural community. They moved from ‘Devonia’ around the beginning of 1948, ploughing all their resources into a shop at 124 Shirley Road, a major thoroughfare out of the centre of Southampton to the North West in the Romsey direction. Today the premises accommodate ‘Johnny’s Fish and Chips’ emporium. The nearby Rotrax café and cycle store are no more, while the tattoo parlour a few doors down has survived all trends. It has been said that Tommy set his parents up in the shop, but this is not the case, since they were up and running with at first a fresh fish business long before he achieved lasting success. The fish business did not prosper. Zena Cooper recalls how on a Saturday her father-in-law would sell the fish left over at the end of the week for next to nothing. In the end the neighbourhood got wise and bought nothing earlier in the week. Gertrude had to put her foot down and any fish not sold at full price by the end of Saturday she buried in their little postage stamp of a garden. Obviously a lady of amazing industry, she once again kept the family buoyant financially by harking back to her dressmaking skills. Within a short time she converted the shop into a haberdashery to act as a front for them, with alterations and repairs a profitable sideline.
In these final years of their lives the surviving memories of those who knew them give us further insight into the characters and eccentricities of his parents. Members of Gertrude’s family recall that to deter shoplifters she used to tie all the stock together with some of her son’s invisible thread, so that if someone sneaked something away when she wasn’t looking, all the rest would come with it. Mrs Spacagna, who had a hairdressing business in the vicinity, remembers her as a very private person, but a brisk business woman, always distinctive on her own shopping round from the long black cloak she wore. I have a memory too. As a child brought up in Southampton’s Shirley district in the Fifties, no sooner had I heard that the mother of my television hero had a shop less than a mile from where I lived than nothing could hold me back from making the pilgrimage to seek her out for myself. I could not summon the courage to enter, but remember peering through the window past the displays of knitting needles, zip fasteners, ribbon, braid, and buttons galore to spy sitting behind the counter what could have been a smaller version of Tommy Cooper in drag. It all looked dusty and higgledy-piggledy. I could have been peering into a pantomime set. I was later told she was only too happy for people to go in to talk to her about her son, of whom she was rightly proud. Photographs of his career festooned the walls, and albums would be brought from the back room at the merest beckoning. I regret missing the opportunity.
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