Читать книгу Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing: The Definitive Biography of a Comedy Legend - John Fisher - Страница 11

The idea of Trooper Cooper resplendent in the plume and pomp of The Royal Horse Guards astride a charger with sword held to attention is a sublime comic image. But in later years he was always keen to downplay the impression: ‘I’ve done sentry duty in Whitehall many times. Khaki uniform though – nothing fancy.’ His basic training at Pirbright was interrupted by the outbreak of war and Tommy found himself learning to ride a horse sooner than he expected. Riding army fashion – that is riding one horse, while leading two others – in Rotten Row at 6.30 in the morning became another established part of his early routine. With his fast gained reputation as ‘The life and soul of the NAAFI’, it is hard not to imagine him trotting down the Mall, boots burnished and spurs glinting, without his mind wandering to the latest gags and gimmicks to be shopped from the magic supply depots, the practical joke with which he could bring uproar to the barracks that evening.

Tommy’s height made him a natural for the Blues. He joined as a private and took seven years to achieve the rank of sergeant, by which time the fighting was over. He always said that what he liked best about the early years was the boxing. There were 100 guards in his unit and he stood out among them. He claimed never to have won any championship, contrary to reports that he did win a heavyweight title, sufficient to be offered a contract to turn professional at a later date. However, the sport did teach him how to look after himself, giving the lie to his later claim that he spent so much time on canvas that he was going to change his name to Rembrandt. His nose was broken, but not in the ring, rather when he slipped alongside an army swimming pool. In later years his son, Thomas, reminisced about his dad’s prowess in this area: ‘Everyone thought of him as a big softie who would not hurt a fly. In fact he was capable of laying you out with one punch and would not hesitate to do so if he thought someone had asked for it. He hated trouble, but I remember one time in a pub in Golders Green when three yobbos were giving the landlord a bad time. One broke a bottle over the counter and went to stick it in the landlord’s face. And dad, who had been standing at the bar minding his own business, just turned round and flattened the yobbo with a right-hander on the chin. The other two looked on in amazement and scarpered.’

A less valuable legacy in civilian life was his proficiency on horseback, although he always retained a love for horses. Zena Cooper recalls that when Tommy returned from the war he would go riding with his brother, David, in the New Forest and show off by emulating feats better associated with the Cossack riders, passing under the belly of the mount and up again the other side while at a gallop, even riding backwards. Not that he would have won any regimental trophies in this area. He made a veritable party piece out of the detail of one catastrophe: ‘I remember one Christmas, at a full-dress ceremonial parade, there were one hundred of us neatly lined up by the sides of our horses. Now, as a recruit I didn’t know this, but when you get on a horse, when you put the girth around the horse, the horse blows himself out because he doesn’t want to be tight. So you’ve got to wait. Well, I didn’t know this, and he looks at you. He’s a little bit suspicious, you know what I mean? Then all of a sudden you have to go quick and he goes “Ooh!” But I didn’t know this, so as a recruit I just went like that with the girth and he went out with his stomach and I thought I was tight. So the order came, “Prepare to mount” and I put my foot in the stirrup and they said “Mount” and the saddle went underneath. Ninety-nine of us rose as one man and I’m in a heap on the ground.’ The look of dismay on his big, baffled face as he gathered himself up from the floor would have been worth the price of admission.

His regimental misadventures could fill a book or certainly an episode of one of those forces comedies that, in the Fifties, Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko brought to a comic zenith worthy of Cooper himself. In the British theatre of service comedy it is easy to picture William Hartnell as the sadistic sergeant going the rounds to prod Cooper and his cohorts out of their slumbers for roll-call at four o’clock in the morning. As Tommy remembered it, “‘Good morning.” “Good morning.” “Good morning.” And he had a bayonet in his hand!’ Outside it was pitch black and the corporal used to emerge with a huge hurricane lamp. ‘Good morning, men,’ he’d shout. ‘Good morning, lamp,’ Cooper would answer back. It was a fair response. They were too blinded by it to see him. Michael Medwin or Harry Fowler would have been spot-on casting for the barrack room lawyer who led the protest when the sergeant insisted on a rifle inspection no less than ten minutes after they had come back from a route march and flopped exhausted onto their beds. His departure was the cue for said barrack room lawyer to lay down their rights: ‘I’m not going to clean mine at all. The King’s rules and regulations say we’re entitled to half an hour’s rest. It says so – under section twenty-nine, subsection six.’ ‘I listened to him, I did,’ said Tommy, ‘I believed him. Then the sergeant came in. He said, “Right, get your rifles ready.”’ Cooper stepped forward and stood up to him through clenched teeth, ‘We’re not cleaning them.’ The sergeant was taken aback. ‘We’re not cleaning them, are we fellows? Are we fellows?’ As his voice became more questioning, the realization dawned that the rest of the troop behind him were working away like the clappers. It is unlikely that any member of the British comedy acting establishment could have done justice to the crestfallen vulnerability of our hero at a moment like this.

One incident in Cooper’s military career has practically assumed the status of an urban myth, although on separate occasions Tommy assured both Barry Cryer and myself that it did take place and that it happened to him. He was lucky not to be court-martialled. One morning in the early hours he was on sentry duty and dozed off standing up by the side of the sentry box. Within seconds the sergeant came round the corner with the orderly officer: ‘And all of a sudden I open my eyes just a little bit and I can see them standing there. So I’ve got to think of something now or otherwise I’m going to end up inside. So I wait for a second and I’m standing there and I open my eyes fully and I say, “Amen!”’ Assuming they noticed at all, it did the trick and nothing was said. Many years later the episode became the basis of a regular routine in his stage act, Tommy playing his dozy self and the fierce sergeant major in mimed counterpoint amid a flurry of ‘not like that’s’ and ‘like that’s’. But there was no denying the potential seriousness of the situation: ‘I fell asleep. I did. That’s a crime, isn’t it? You could go to the Tower for that.’

The comic capital he made out of the incident perhaps compensated for the downside of a life spent constantly standing to attention and stamping on parade. He put many of his later health problems – varicose veins, phlebitis, thrombosis in the leg, ulcers too – down to his guardsman’s duties. In fact, he could have had treatment for the veins while he was in the services. He told his friend, Bobby Bernard of the occasion he went into the surgery to see the medical officer about the problem. Another soldier was standing there in his shorts. He turned to Tommy and said, ‘Look at mine. They’re getting better.’ According to Tommy, ‘His veins were worse than mine.’ ‘If that’s better, I’m going,’ shouted the cowardly conjuror.

In an article in the Lancashire Evening Post in May 1974, his fellow trooper Ben Fisher provided a vivid recollection of Cooper the serviceman. No sooner had Ben joined the Blues in 1943 than he found himself sharing a tent with Tommy. Come morning, it quickly became apparent that his colleague enjoyed special privileges: ‘While all around echoed to the whacking of the duty Corporal of Horse’s cane on tent walls, we were left in peace, for this, as I was soon to learn, was “Cooper’s Tent” and as such apparently beyond the pale of military discipline.’ As their friendship grew, Fisher discovered that Tommy had developed a disarming flair for avoiding the more onerous military duties. Indeed, he can never actually recall Tommy being ‘on duty’, but there was no question that the most familiar name in the camp was ‘Cooper’: ‘It was usually shouted at the top of his voice by our Corporal Major. On hearing the call Tommy would emerge from some nook or cranny with the air of a man interrupted during some urgent assignment, and wanting nothing more than to get back to it.’ Fisher stressed that he never emerged empty-handed. There was always a bucket, a brush or some utensil or other dangling from his hand as proof of his unstinted industry.

In off-duty hours he would give impromptu concerts in front of the tent, not only performing his crazy conjuring, but also comedy sketches: ‘Our favourites were “The Death of Robin Hood” and one about the Home Guard.’ In the latter, with possible echoes of his Uncle Jimmy, he improvised a one-man Dad’s Army. Arifle and tin hat with the lining removed so that it fell around his ears were the only props he required to pantomime his way through a series of disastrous drill movements. For the Robin Hood scene he would make a dramatic entrance from the woods around the camp, pretending to be mortally wounded with an arrow clutched to his chest. Staggering to the front of his tent, he would summon Little John to help him find a suitable burial place. Tommy would then switch to the other character. It is hard now to imagine him playing Little John as camp as he then did, a prissy individual, ‘fussy about keeping the camp tidy, making all sorts of excuses about why this or that spot wouldn’tdo’. After much pleading from the folk hero, the routine ended with Robin stumbling back to the trees in disgust, shouting the payoff line, ‘All right … all right … but it’s the last time I’ll ask you to do anything for me!’

Within a short time Tommy was sent overseas and the war became a reality. His section of the Blues was deployed to the western desert to a camp near Suez as a reconnaissance unit working with armoured cars and small tanks: ‘We used to go out first, see the enemy and then come back – cos we were cowards!’ He did not take kindly to having to sleep in a hammock – back home the army beds had been adjustable – but did develop a passion for hot climates that would inform his holiday habits for the rest of his life. He eventually received a gunshot wound in his right arm and ended up in Army Welfare. Tommy lost his A-1 rating, but his talents as an entertainer had not escaped the authorities. He was given the opportunity of auditioning – successfully – in Cairo for a travelling army concert party. In spite of the painful hard slog of his guardsman’s routine and a minor injury into the bargain, it is tempting to suggest that only now did his service career become serious. He had at last found a proper, albeit frequently makeshift stage for his talents. He was not the only member of his generation of funny men to develop his skills entertaining his comrades in this manner. The system also provided greater scope for individuals who would not otherwise have visited a theatre to see an act like his, although with the variety theatres in decline it was too much to be hoped that they would cultivate the habit on a regular basis once Civvy Street reclaimed them.

Tommy was now in his element, although there were those in this newly acquired audience who might have had second thoughts. In his exhaustive study of service entertainment, Fighting for a Laugh, Richard Fawkes reported the recollections of the actor John Arnatt, under whose jurisdiction Cooper the trouper at one point found himself in Cairo: ‘In one of John’s shows was an unknown conjuror making a virtue of the fact that his tricks didn’t always work … he had not done anything before … certainly not as a professional.’ According to Arnatt, ‘He was a bastard to be with as an officer because he delighted in getting you up on the stage to help him out and then he would take the mickey out of you something terrible. He had the entire audience on his side and if you weren’t careful you came out of it looking none too dignified.’ Interestingly in later years Tommy almost entirely dispensed with audience participation on stage and left the mickey taking – always a dubious form of pastime when members of the public are involved – to others. For the time being the rough and ready forces environment was the perfect setting for such spectator sport.

He had the intuitive sense to deliver what the troops required, making great play of the trick in which some of the cards in the packet held by the officer on one side of the stage magically found their way into the packet held by the officer on the other, becoming distracted along the way as he kept breathing on their pips and shining them all the while. The crowd roared. In later years he never lost his disrespect for military authority. The magician and writer, Val Andrews recalls seeing him lose his temper with people who insisted on using their service rank outside the military environment: ‘Colonel this! Major that! Tell everyone you’ve just met Sergeant Cooper!’ Back at base, echoing his childhood, he remained paradoxically a man isolated in his own world, immune to the popularity his extrovert performing talent should have won him with the rank and file. His colleague, Jack Chambers is on record that Cooper remained a man it was hard to get to know: ‘We’d be sitting together after the show – drinking cups of tea out of sawn down beer bottles – and he didn’t join in. He never had a mate or anything like that.’ All his personality was now diverted into his act. Had there been other magicians in the unit, I am sure he would have found a bosom pal for life.

When the fighting drew to a close he joined the Combined Services Entertainment Unit attached to the War Office giving shows for the troops left scattered throughout the Middle East. With a restless conscript army, morale boosting was as essential at a time of keeping the peace as it had ever been while the greater distraction of fighting was taking place. It was now that Tommy decided he wanted to dedicate his life to being an entertainer. It was also in Cairo that the performance took place that must come close to the one in the Hythe canteen for qualifying as the most defining of his career. As Jack Chambers has explained, it was a cardinal offence for a soldier to be improperly dressed, even down to not wearing your cap: ‘So if you can imagine one thousand troops sitting there and onto this stage comes a chap wearing very scruffy shorts and socks down to his boots – well, it was a masterly stroke and he just stood there with this gormless grin on his face and then he’d do the laugh.’ To add to the anarchy he wore a pith helmet, a cloak, and had the word ‘hair’ written across his chest. One night at the YMCA at RAF Heliopolis he forgot the pith helmet and at the expense of cliché the rest is history.

Tommy told the story a zillion times of how this night he mislaid the helmet and happened to pinch the fez from the head of a passing waiter. It is unlikely that the move was premeditated and it paid instant dividends, adding even further inches to his height. In the company of the Guards he would have become less self-conscious about his size anyhow. As he stood there, this gangling giant of good humour, he had no idea that before long his new headwear would, as a badge of recognition, rival the bowler and trilby to which comics as diverse as Chaplin, George Robey, Max Miller and Tommy Trinder held allegiance. In addition, Arthur Askey had his forage cap and Bud Flanagan his battered straw hat. Cooper would now forever be associated with the fez. The kind he wore was originally burgundy coloured and much taller. Some time around the Sixties Tommy came to favour a brighter, more compact version. In her years with Tommy, one of Mary Kay’s unofficial duties was to serve as Mistress of the Fez. In a letter to me she wrote: ‘The shorter ones were his favourites and the colour of the early ones was too dark. I must have made a dozen nice bright fezzes over the years, but they weren’t easy to make and if you notice some are taller on one side than the other! I always secured the tassel into the top of the fez so that it didn’t fling about when he bent down. Also the felt had to be a nice, pinky red.’

Different versions of how it all came about have been recorded. In some early interviews he let slip that he got the idea when he was in Port Said: ‘I bought one for ten piastres – about two bob then – and when I came home and needed a new one I had to pay thirty-five shillings.’ Down the years more than a few reminiscing servicemen have claimed that they gave him theirs. None of this is necessarily untrue. He would eventually have bought his own and acquired others, while Port Said may have been the scene of his decision to run with the idea as a permanent fixture. What surprises so many is that he was far from the first magician to wear one, a detail of which he would have been well aware.

A conversation on this very theme at The Magic Circle one evening resulted in an impromptu competition to see who could come up with the most names to have beaten Cooper to the fez. In fact there was a time when it became an unofficial part of the uniform for every other small time magician and children’s party entertainer. There were also more than a few acts with fezzes prominent on the variety circuits of the Thirties and Forties, although Tommy would not necessarily have known of them all. Among those who could have given his fez a run for its money from those early days was Eddie Songest – ‘With a Couple of Tricks and Colossal Nerve’– who used to boast that his was ‘a trophy won in a competition in which he consumed twenty-five boxes of Turkish delight in the world record time of thirty-seven and five eighths of a second’. Tommy would certainly have been familiar with Sirdani, with his ‘Don’t be fright!’ catchphrase and a stage identity that was a strange hybrid of Arab and Jewish. He made a name for himself on radio during the war explaining simple magic tricks and puzzles as a regular feature on the programme, Navy Mixture; every publicity photo I have seen of him reveals the squat purple flowerpot hat. Len Gazeka from the Midlands had an unusual gimmick to go with his fez. He would enter with his magic carpet under his arm, which he then proceeded to unroll on stage. Whenever he stood on the rug the tricks worked; whenever he failed to do so he found himself in Cooper territory. Possibly predating them all was Ben Said who had played at Maskelyne’s as a comedy magician in the early Twenties. He had known better days as an illusionist in the grand manner, under the name of Amasis. In the files of Tommy’s manager, Miff Ferrie was a poignant letter from Said from the Fifties with a brochure attached asking for work. ‘There is only one Funjuror’, the publicity proclaims. Miff must have noted the fez in the photograph. Ali (of Ali and Yolanda), Alex Bowsher, Johnny Geddes, Chris Van Bern, Percy Press; all have their place in the roll call of fez honour.

As British magical stalwart, Pat Page has explained, ‘Everyone had a fez.’ By coincidence, at about the same time as Tommy came home from the war in 1947, the magician Roy Baker was starting to market his original version of the egg and bag trick in which a fez was substituted for the bag. It was named ‘Abdul’s Fez’ and hundreds must have been sold over magic shop counters down the years, but there is no record of Tommy ever performing it or adapting his own fez for the clever variation of one of his favourite tricks, although in due course he did rise to the comic possibilities the hat offered him. There was the time he took it off and white chocolate drops cascaded over his shoulders: ‘I’ve got terrible dandruff’; the occasion at a Royal Performance when he came on with a weather vane attached: ‘I’ve been struck by lightning!’

Conceivably it would be harder for a young performer to come out on stage wearing a fez now had Cooper and the others not done so. In our politically sensitive world, football fans travelling to Turkey in recent years have been asked to leave their Tommy Cooper impressions at home. Apparently Turks have regarded the fez as insulting since the wearing of such hats was banned by Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, in 1925. Bizarrely there was even one occasion in June 1967 when the organizer of a private function where Tommy was booked to appear requested that he leave his trademark headgear at home for fear of upsetting the largely Jewish clientele. Others have adopted a more practical attitude to it. Val Andrews told him early in his career that he should take the fez off at the end of his act: ‘People will think you’re bald and you have a great head of hair and this is an asset and when you reveal it, it’s a surprise.’ To Val’s delight, he always did.

The Middle East also provided a milestone in his personal life. It was there that he met Gwen. They first came together on a troopship travelling from Port Said to Alexandria, or maybe from Naples. Her accounts vary, but the romantic detail remained precise: ‘The very first time I saw him I didn’t speak to him. I had a shocking attack of flu and I was sitting in a deckchair all wrapped up in blankets and I saw this big man in battledress – he was a sergeant by now – standing against the ship’s rail with his back to the sea. The first thing I noticed was that the blue of the sea caught the blue of his eyes. He had the most magnificent physique I had ever seen. He was terrifically attractive in an ugly-attractive sort of way.’ When she asked someone who he was, she was told, ‘His name’s Tommy Cooper and he’s doing a show on board.’ Because of the flu, Gwen watched the performance from outside through a glass door. She couldn’t hear a word, but she saw enough to formulate an opinion: ‘I thought he was the funniest man I’d ever seen. This man’s got star talent, I told myself. One day he’ll be a big name.’ Upon arrival in Egypt Dove went her separate way to Cairo, not realizing that within days their paths would cross again. Gwen was a civilian entertainer attached to CSE and on Christmas Eve 1946 she found herself having to accompany Tommy on the piano at a concert in Alexandria: ‘I said to him, “Let me see your dots.” He didn’t know what I meant. I said “Your music.” He said, “Just play the first few bars of ‘The Sheik of Araby’.”’

On their way back in the army bus he sat next to her. ‘Can I put my head on your shoulder?’ he asked. ‘Certainly not,’ she declared. The relationship began at that point and two weeks later he proposed: ‘I don’t suppose you’d marry me, would you?’ ‘I suppose I will,’ was the response. There is no reason to suppose that Tommy had been party to such a deep attachment before, but the affair was not without its emotional complications. Gwen had recently been engaged to a pilot killed during the air raids on Cologne. When asked what she would have done had he survived, she replied, ‘I’d have broken off the engagement. I really fell for Tommy.’ They married in Nicosia, Cyprus on 24 February 1947. Tommy was so poor she had to buy her own wedding ring, although he made up for it later with a diamond eternity ring. Their honeymoon was a single night snatched at the Savoy Hotel, Famagusta. When they walked through the door the man at reception called out, ‘Ah, Brigadier Cooper!’ Their friends in the concert party had booked them in as Brigadier and Mrs Cooper as a joke. Without an inkling of embarrassment she would admit they had not slept together before that night, which with characteristic frankness she always described as ‘bloody wonderful’.

Throughout their life together he called her ‘Dove’. With her full-bodied figure she used to joke, ‘Anything less like a dove!’ Their daughter thinks the term of affection came about after a few drinks when ‘love’ turned to ‘dove’ and stuck. Maybe it came out of ‘lovey-dovey’. Whatever the derivation, there is unlikely to be any deep magical significance to the word, since Channing Pollock, the suave American deceptionist who popularized the manipulation of the birds in his brilliant stage act, did not arrive on the theatrical scene until the early Fifties.

Gwen was five months older than her husband. She had been born in Eastbourne on 14 October 1920, the daughter of Thomas William Henty, a blacksmith’s assistant. The gift of a piano from her parents at the age of eleven was the defining ‘box of tricks’ moment in her own life. All who came to know her would identify with the irrepressible joie-de-vivre and sense of purpose that could have led her to personal stardom in her own right – a performer in the Tessie O’Shea mould with piano in lieu of banjulele – had she chosen that path. On her travels in the Middle East she had fast been gaining a reputation as an entertainer. Ragged press cuttings pasted in her scrapbook before she met Tommy reveal that she had a far wider range of talents than her known skills as an accompanist would suggest. Working under the ENSA banner in the touring show, Sunrise in 1945, she is reported: ‘The girl of many faces is something of a phenomenon. As the moth-eaten old charlady, she rocks the audience with laughter. As herself a few minutes later, she provokes that peculiar whistle which troops reserve for what they usually describe as “a bit of all right”. She more or less runs riot through the show.’ Another review, from Beirut, tells us, ‘She gets right to the hearts of the audience. She has a Gracie Fields personality, her character sketches have 100 per cent entertainment value, and her vivacious singing at the piano of a charming satire entitled, “Men – men – men!” produced roars of laughter.’ In Baghdad she is described as putting over ‘her own sophisticated Mae West-ish solo act, but she isn’t afraid to discard the glamour and paint her nose red in real slapstick stuff.’

In the concert party she had been partnered in the ‘slapstick stuff’ by one Jimmy Murray, ‘an extremely good young comedian with a smooth and pleasant style.’ Upon marrying Tommy it was inevitable that they would contemplate a double act together. A large buff regulation notebook – emblazoned with a crown and ‘GR Supplied for the Public Service’– that Tommy kept up around this time provides some intriguing glimpses of their brief partnership on stage:

Tommy: Hello, darling. Is dinner ready?

Gwen: (Starts to cry)

Tommy: What’s the matter, my sweet?

Gwen: Y-you d-don’t l-love me any more.

Tommy: Don’t be silly. What gave you that idea?

Gwen: Well, we’ve been married now for five weeks and this is the first time you’ve been worried about food!

One routine they worked on was a pastiche on American Broadcasting with its leaning towards product placement:

Gwen: Hey, bighead. Get out of that bed. We’ve got a programme to do.

Tommy: Will you quit yapping! Six o’clock in the morning. Who’s to listen to us? Some burglars, maybe. Oh boy,

I’m tired.

Gwen: Why don’t you stay home some night and try sleeping?

Tommy: Sleeping? On that Pasternak Pussy-Willow Mattress? Pussy-Willow? It’s stuffed with cat hair. Every time

I lie down on that cat hair my back arches!

Gwen: Oh, stop grumbling! Here’s your tea!

Tommy: It’s about time. (Sips) Phoo! (Spits) What are you trying to do? Poison me?

Gwen: It’s that McKeesters’s Vita-Fresh Tea! It won’t kill you.

Tommy: It won’t? Why do you think the government makes them put that skull and crossbones on the packet? (Tommy screams)

Gwen: What is it?

Tommy: Your hair! It looks as though you just took your head out of a mixer.

It was obviously an act in progress. Gwen recalled in later years that they were once rehearsing in a room in Cairo. The slanging match was so convincing, the caretaker wanted to call the police. Later they tried a softer, kindlier, less negative approach:

Gwen: Good morning, Tommy dear.

Tommy: Good morning, Gwen angel.

Gwen: Sweetheart, I must say you look refreshingly well-rested this morning.

Tommy: Yes, thanks to our wonderful Pasternak Factory-Tested Pussy-Willow Mattress. The mattress that takes all the guess work out of sleeping. So soft and restful.

Gwen: Yes, sweetums. Here’s your tea.

Tommy: Thank you, doll. (Sips) Ahhh! What tea!! It must be –

Gwen: You’re right, lovey. It’s McKeester’s Vita-Fresh Tea, the tea with that locked-up goodness for everybody.

Tommy: Quick, darling. Another cup. Ahhhhhh!!

Gwen: Oh, peach-nut! You’ve spilled some on your vest.

Tommy: Good. Now I can try some of that Little Panther Spot Remover. No rubbing. Just slap some Little Panther on your vest and watch it eat the spot out.

Gwen: And imagine – a big two-ounce bottle for only three pence farthing.

Tommy: Or, if you are a messy eater, you can get the handy economical forty-gallon bottle.

Gwen: Angel eyes, I have so much to say this morning.

Tommy: Stop. Don’t move, Gwen.

Gwen: But, darling!

Tommy: Your hair is breathtaking. That sheen. That brilli ance. What did you do to it?

And so on … ! After the war there is evidence that they tried out the act before a civilian audience at the Theatre Royal, Margate, but it was a non-starter. According to Gwen, Tommy wanted to stay together as a team, but she had never lost faith in that first impression of her husband as a single act through the glass partition on the Alexandria ferry. Her devotion and dedication to the man and his career would endure until the end of her days.

Cooper was quintessentially a solo performer. In recent years the claims of one Frankie Lyons to have been part of a double act with him back in 1946 during the CSE years have to some people’s minds been exaggerated out of belief, not least when they were given additional importance when formulated in the mid-Nineties into a stage play by his son, Garry. An army concert party is by nature an informal organism, a makeshift showbusiness world in which all the members are expected to work alongside one another in sketches, musical numbers and passing exchanges of corny humour known in the trade as crossovers. Tommy’s exercise book provides us with examples. The initials could refer to ‘Cooper’ and ‘Frankie’, but more likely stand for ‘comic’ and ‘feed’:

C.: Hello there. Maybe you can help me. I’ve got a problem and I don’t know whether to go to a palmist or a mind reader for the answer.

F.: Go to a palmist. You’re sure you have a palm!

And again:

C.: You’d love the dimple in her chin though. You’d love the dimple in her chin.

F.: Why twice?

C.: Double chin!

Out of such brief exchanges a permanent double act is not born. Besides, they evolve out of genuine warmth and respect between the two partners, never at the suggestion of some would-be producer with officer status playing fanciful games with his cast of conscripts. One is reminded of Steve Martin’s classic comedy sketch of the failed Hollywood agent pairing off his make-believe charges: ‘Laurel, you go with Costello; Abbott, you go with Hardy.’ It just doesn’t work that way. Cooper and Lyons never got past first post. Even had they been in line to become the next Flanagan and Allen, the new Jewel and Warriss, Lyons quite obviously lacked the drive and self-sacrifice at the core of true star talent that not only Tommy, but Gwen on his behalf, showed once they returned to home shores. In later life Cooper pondered the quality in a reflective moment: ‘I often wonder what separates the amateurs from the pros. Being persistent, I suppose. There are bound to be tough times and a lot of people give up. But I was determined. Besides, there’s a great streak of optimism in me.’ In other words show business has its own Darwinian structure.

Tommy set his sights on the London Palladium and got there. Frankie settled for an honourable other existence with a modest, but skilled job in engineering. With all the good will in the world, Tommy would never have reached the top variety theatre in the land with him in tow. Had one been casting Lyons alongside the likes of William Hartnell, Michael Medwin, Harry Fowler and company, one would have to settle for Sam Kydd, the chipper insignificant sidekick of a hundred service movies, but never a star. In his later years Tommy found himself lined up against a handful of dependable British character actors as occasional straight men. They all floundered in the shadow of the fez. Terry Seabrooke, one of Britain’s foremost professional magicians, acted as a technical consultant to a production of Frankie and Tommy and formulated his opinion: ‘It showed Tommy as a nasty type with a terrible, ruthless temper. It certainly was not the Tommy I knew for so many years.’

Inevitably the play attracted tabloid scrutiny. In addition, as if to rub salt into wounds a story was brought into the open by Lyons concerning the discovery of illicit drugs on a truck transporting CSE theatrical props that had been overturned on a road in Palestine in early March 1947. A British driver and a British sergeant were arrested and half a ton of hashish and opium was supposedly seized. It is an acknowledged fact that throughout the Middle East at that time demoralized soldiers were profiteering on the black market. Lyons alleges that rumours started to circulate around CSE headquarters in Cairo that Tommy was the sergeant implicated. On 27 August 1947 The Times reported that a lieutenant, described as the manager of a road show called Juke Box, had been acquitted of conspiring to smuggle the drugs that had been seized. At the beginning of March, just days after his marriage, Tommy had been on tour starring in the Juke Box show, but any evidence that he may have been implicated is circumstantial, his possible involvement beyond belief. His mind was now on other matters. Within a month or so he would be on his way back to England. He already had a strategy for entertainment success back home and could look forward to his new wife joining him soon after. It is also hard to think he was bright enough to figure as a criminal mastermind and had real suspicion fallen upon him, his return would have been curtailed. As for drugs per se? Magic was his drug. He had no need – as yet – for other substances. In later years, as we shall see, he would become prey to alcohol abuse and the mood swings that came with it, as susceptible to pain and anger as any other human being. It is jumping the gun to intimate he may have been accountable to such demons so early, as Lyons’ whole treatment of him suggests. Eventually the stage manager and an Arab accomplice were charged and convicted, and in their embarrassment the British authorities were happy to draw a veil over the incident.

Meanwhile, with or without Gwen or Lyons at his side, the embryonic version of Tommy’s comedy magic act stayed sacrosanct. As he wrote in his notebook at the time: ‘Spoon Gag – Rope Gag – Fifteen Card Trick with Assistants – Egg Bag – Finis.’ Professional show business beckoned. It may be appropriate to give Frankie Lyons the last word: ‘He was determined. No matter whom, no matter what, he was going to get there.’ And – happily for us all – he did!