Читать книгу Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing: The Definitive Biography of a Comedy Legend - John Fisher - Страница 9

He was born Thomas Frederick Cooper on 19 March 1921, although like Cole Porter and many another in the entertainment profession he cheated his death by a year when show business claimed him: ‘As I popped into the world, blinking at the light and wondering what to do for an encore, someone grabbed me by the legs, held me upside down and whacked me. Already I could see life wasn’t easy.’ Indeed the reality was even more painful. Even Cooper’s birth bore the stamp of adversity that came to characterize his stage act. In more serious moments he would ruminate on the actual conditions in which prematurely he came into this world: ‘They tell me that when I was born the midwife gave me up for a weakling. Slung me to the bottom of the bed. Gave up on me. If my mother hadn’t kept me alive on drops of brandy and condensed milk, I wouldn’t be here now.’ That midwife was Maud Shattock, although according to her son, Ivor, she was not officially recognized as such, rather the informal pillar of the community whose combined efficiency and kindliness brought upon her the responsibility of delivering babies, laying out the dead, and acting as a Mother Courage figure in the lives of those around her. The arrival of young Thomas would have been one chore among many on a typical day. Ivor says, ‘My mother never went to bed before twelve and was up at four.’ A few days before she had taken pity on Tommy’s parents as they came searching for accommodation. His mother was seven months pregnant. She had just returned from the cinema when her waters broke. In later years he had his own version: ‘I was a surprise to my parents. They found me on the doorstep. They expected a bottle of milk.’

His birthplace still stands at 19 Llwyn Onn Street, Caerphilly, a tiny terraced house, with two bedrooms upstairs and two living rooms downstairs, the white stucco of the upper storey in stark contrast to the tessellated red and slate brick of the lower level. His parents rented the front room on the lower floor. ‘Llwyn Onn’ translates as ‘Ash Grove’, thus hinting at the semi-rural environment that distinguishes it from the centre of the Welsh cheese capital dominated by the gloomy remains of its thirteenth-century castle. The wide street slopes down to fields that give way to railway sidings, the area retaining the prospect of childhood exploration and adventure that was taken from Tommy when only a few years after his birth his parents moved to Exeter. The tip a few yards away from the house where all around would dump the ashes and embers from their coal fires remains in use to this day, serving almost as a spiritual hearth for this most famous of sons.

Thomas Samuel Cooper, Tommy’s father, was born on 13 October 1892. A Caerphilly man, he lost his first wife and child at childbirth before the First World War, making the near tragedy of Tommy’s own birth even more poignant. The son of a coalminer, he too found himself drawn down the mines upon leaving school. Invalided out of the First World War with honourable discharge on 1 April 1917, he never went back to the Coegnant Colliery at Caerau that had sustained his early adulthood. One version says that he was gassed at the Somme, another that he was gassed working in the hold of a ship unloading petrol cans. Whatever, he suffered the after-effects to the end of his days. He had been acquainted with Gertrude Catherine Wright before the hostilities, but any attraction between them had been forestalled by her earlier engagement to a clergyman. Born on 1 March 1893, she was the daughter of a farm bailiff from Stoke Canon, a few miles from Exeter. What brought Gertrude to Wales, or Thomas to Devon in the first place, before or after the war, is lost to history. Their wedding at the Register Office, Pontypridd on 16 October 1919 provided him with happy consolation at the end of a traumatic decade.

An early photograph of the couple suggests that Tommy inherited his looks from his mother. Here are the soulful eyes, the heavy nose, the straight line of mouth that he came to twist up and down from grin to frown with quicksilver flexibility. However, the consensus is that he derived his sense of fun from his father. Cooper always described his dad as ‘a happy-go-lucky fellow. He loved talking to people. He’d talk to a complete stranger. Before you knew where you were he’d be sitting down talking to them. A very nice man.’ In the Welsh tradition, he used to sing informally at concerts, but at heart he was a frustrated clown. Zena Cooper, Tommy’s sister-in-law recalls: ‘He never stopped laughing. A deep throaty laugh. Obviously a family trait! He was a natural and he was hilarious. On the beach you had these deckchairs and he’d put one up the wrong way and suddenly the people sunbathing would start to laugh and he’d make it worse. He loved the audience and would milk the crowd.’ His father had been one of a family of seventeen. Having weathered the depression and the war, he was way ahead of his son in discovering the value of laughter as shield and safety valve in the front line of sanity.

His talent for comedy was also shared by his brother, Tommy’s uncle, Jimmy Cooper. A photograph survives depicting a pudgy-faced individual in a stylized clown make-up crouching alongside a top-hatted straight man. He sports two outsize black circumflex accents in lieu of eyebrows, marks repeated in mirror image beneath his eyes. Unlike his brother, he obviously adopted a more than incidental approach to the business of laughter. He wears a cap one size too small and fondles an accordion, one of a string of talents that extended to magic as well as comedy. Tommy’s cousin Betty Jones, daughter of Aunt Lizzie, his dad’s sister, remembers his flair for tricks with eggs, a skill not to be dismissed at a time when they were scarce and precious. He achieved laughter and mystery together by supposedly swallowing a borrowed watch on a chain. There was nowhere else it could have gone. Bend down and you could hear it ticking in his tummy. Another cousin, Bernard Diggins recalls that he was originally employed down the mines, but became branded as a Communist and was subsequently banned for causing trouble in the pits. He would go the rounds of the legion halls and miners’ clubs and have everywhere in an uproar as he enacted a sketch depicting a sentry on duty wanting to spend a penny. Both Betty and Bernard recall that this was considered too risqué for the children to watch and they would be shooed from the room. ‘Ooh gosh! He’d go behind the box. He must go. The things he used to do!’ exclaims Betty. ‘But like Tommy, he was natural, see.’

Many people are surprised when they learn of Tommy’s Welsh heritage, although town and country have in recent years become increasingly alert to the potential commercial value of the fact. Wales does not profess a great comic tradition. Contemporary with Cooper have been the redoubtably chirpy Stan Stennett (his billing ‘Certified Insanely Funny’ might have been coined for Tommy himself); the pantomime kingpin of the valleys, Wyn Calvin; and funniest of them all, Fifties radio star, Gladys Morgan with her ear-splitting laugh that could cause a leek to wilt at a distance of ten miles. Most recognizably Welsh, Harry Secombe came nearest to Tommy in fame and recognition but was puzzlingly overlooked in a recent poll of the top 100 Welsh heroes that rated Cooper at thirty-four and Aneurin Bevan in poll position. It must say something about laughter and the Welsh that Cooper is the only intentionally funny man to figure in a list that honours actors, writers, sportsmen, politicians and kings, but in which even more recent comedy recruits like Max Boyce, Rob Brydon and Paul Whitehouse fail to make the running. Even one of Tommy’s personal heroes, Bob Hope was absent. Cooper would have been impressed that Hope was Welsh on his mother’s side. Iris Townes hailed from Barry and used to sing in the local music halls before her marriage to Hope’s father.

Tommy had no show business link on his mother’s side. Gertrude was perceived as the strong-minded individual who held the family together, the business sense she had acquired from her own family paying dividends throughout the marriage. It is hard to make out what employment her husband took up after the war, although his profession is still given as ‘collier’ on their marriage certificate and as ‘coalminer hewer’ on Tommy’s formal registration of birth. Essentially the family income would appear to embrace his service pension – a substantial one according to his daughter-in-law – and what she might accrue from her own training as a dressmaker and needlewoman, skills she kept into her eighties, progressing from door-to-door transactions in Caerphilly to, much later, her own shop in Southampton. From her he undoubtedly acquired his determination and sense of ambition. In contrast, Jack Wright, Tommy’s cousin on his mother’s side, also recalls a lady ‘who would dither a lot. When she went into the kitchen, she always seemed to panic. “Oh dear! Oh dear!” A real ditherer.’ In other words her presence was not completely absent from Tommy’s act.

Tommy was three when the family moved to Exeter. His doctors had condemned the damp, dank polluted air of the coal mining community and Gertrude took her husband and son to find refuge among her own people. They settled in an even tinier house in a similar terrace in a much narrower street, at 3 Fords Road, at the back of Haven Banks in the district of St Thomas, a modest distance across canal and river from the city centre. Cottage industry became the order of the day as ice-cream was added to sewing to supplement the family finances. The summer months would see the minuscule kitchen turned into an unlikely hive of confection and refrigeration. Tommy would either help or hinder his parents as they sold the delicious Devon dairy product through the front sash window of the small abode. There were times subsequently when it must have all come back to him: ‘I said “I’d like a cornet, please.” She said, “Hundreds and thousands?” I said “No. One will do me very nicely”.’ In time they acquired a van and peddled the delicacy around the fairgrounds, at race meetings, and on forays into the small resort towns, like Dawlish Warren. The Coopers became quickly accepted by the fairground folk, who took a shine to this curly headed cherub. They thought nothing of leaving him in the caravan of friends who kept a tame chimpanzee and people in the family still smile over who or which might have been perceived as the brighter of the two. The consensus is that the chimp might well have ended up looking after Tommy, not the other way around. And so another joke of later years assumes a nostalgic dimension: ‘The other week I had to share my dressing room with a monkey and the producer came in and said, “I’m sorry about this,” and I said, “That’s okay,” and he said, “I wasn’t talking to you.”’

An early photograph of him astride his tricycle outside the house in Fords Road suggests that the clear Devon air had its desired recuperative effect. He had obviously taken the vigour of the valleys with him in his veins and we see a child destined soon to be a dead ringer for Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’. He would reminisce of the occasion around this time when his mother took him into an ironmonger’s. Suddenly she noticed a crowd peering into the shop window. There seated on a toilet seat, part of the window display, was young Thomas. ‘Come off that,’ yelled his mum. ‘I can’t,’ replied her son, ‘I haven’t finished yet!’ After receiving his early education at the Comrie House Prep School a hop, skip, and a jump away in Willeys Avenue, he was sent to Mount Radford School at 56 St Leonard’s Road, on the other side of the city. Established in 1827, it was advertised during Tommy’s sojourn as a ‘boarding and day school for boys, recognized and inspected by the Board of Education, Headmaster Theodore Ernest Vine, M.A., assisted by an efficient staff of resident and visiting masters.’ Every day Tommy would cycle the couple of miles there and back. It is significant that the pupils were fee-paying.

When I asked the surviving members of his family how on earth his parents could have afforded this, cousin Betty did not demur: ‘His mother was from moneyed folk, see. Very lady-like, Aunt Gertie. Posh-like and she worked very hard. She was good with money, born into a family used to handling it. My cousin and I used to do sewing too, but we never charged for it. Aunt Gertie said, “You must charge and then people will appreciate the work.”’ Zena Cooper saw no difficulty either: ‘His father’s pension was very good. Even after his death (from chronic bronchitis and emphysema in a Southampton nursing home in 1963), the army looked after his mother very well.’ Further research reveals that it might not have been so expensive. Upon its foundation one of the objects of the school was stated as ‘to reduce the tuition fees to as low a scale as would defray the expenses of the establishment and afford a fair remuneration to competent masters.’ The school closed in 1967. The solid two-storey building with its imposing portico and white Georgian façade still stands in compact splendour in its leafy suburb today. It is now office accommodation.

Mother wasted no time in instilling a sense of thrift in her son, a trait that would have lasting, even paranoiac effects on his character in due course. Bernard Diggins recalls how when he was being despatched on an errand or sent to visit his Welsh grandparents by train, his mother insisted that any money on his person be distributed through his various pockets, so that if some went missing from one, he would still have some left in the others. Betty has even witnessed the money being sewn into his clothes. At the end of the decade, on 10 June 1930, David John would be born, a brother for Tommy. This time the birth certificate lists the father’s profession as army pensioner. The ice-cream was still profitable, but there were other pressures on the family finances in addition to the new mouth to feed. His mother’s financial skills were needed more than ever as his father’s chronic gambling habits left them without a roof over their heads. According to his niece, Betty, the trait was always perceived by the family as the forgivable backlash to the tragedy of his first wife and child. Now he had literally gambled the house away.

Tommy’s daughter, Vicky recalls her grandmother describing the unhappiest day of her life when with baby David in her arms, Tommy and her husband at her side, and a single suitcase holding their worldly possessions they had to walk away from the house in Fords Road. The Depression notwithstanding, the scene suggests some persecuted eastern European country rather than the balmy south coast of England in 1933. They relocated to the village of Langley, a scraggly rural backwater on the edge of the refinery town of Fawley on the east of the New Forest in Hampshire, with Southampton seven miles away on the indefatigable Hythe Ferry. One of the earliest memories of Tommy in those days comes from Kathleen March, his fellow pupil at Fawley Junior School. She recalls Cooper Senior working at the nearby RAF camp at Calshot, and cites this employment as the reason for their moving to the area, a fact that has not been verified. More vividly she remembers Tommy’s mum as a rather strait-laced lady who would cycle the couple of miles of gravelly roads to meet Tommy from school with his younger brother perched in a child’s seat on the bicycle. A mischievous child, he was constantly reprimanded by their teacher, Miss Nightingale, ‘Stop pulling that girl’s hair.’

Within a couple of years their resources had improved to the extent that they were able to build a modest bungalow of their own. Scarcely half a mile from their temporary home in Home Farm Lane, ‘Devonia’ was tucked away at the distant end of the little developed Lea Road. His father was now allocated a strict allowance of pocket money – ‘a couple of shillings to bet on the horses’– and any scheme he might devise to raise extra cash was not discouraged. A vast acreage to the side of the abode that doesn’t appear to have belonged to anybody in particular fortuitously provided him with the opportunity of raising turkeys and chickens. In time his son would joke about the family diet: ‘We had chicken every day. We always looked forward to Christmas for the vegetables!’ There is no doubt that poultry exerted a nostalgic fascination for Tommy to the end of his days: for one of his last television appearances he made an unforgettable entrance wearing chicken legs. But Zena Cooper recalls it wasn’t an easy trade: ‘Make a lot of noise and the turkeys all die.’ Whatever the hazards, the poultry business did not last long. Besides, her mother-in-law hated the things.

An old school chum of Tommy’s brother, Roy Storer, recalls helping their father with his work sheets when he was employed as a truck driver engaged in demolition work making way for the construction of the new Fawley oil refinery after the war. He remembers a man with thick, wavy, grey hair, a pronounced tan and a facial appearance like Sid James; in contrast, his wife always struck Roy as ‘tall, dark, and mysterious’. One morning he told Storer quite excitedly that he had just received some photos of Tommy from Egypt. He proudly shared them with his young colleague, but said he couldn’t understand why Tommy was wearing a silly hat with a tassel. For Roy, the funny hat with magical connotations was not necessarily out of keeping with the boy his family remembered. The defining moment of Tommy’s childhood had come one Christmas in Exeter when at the age of seven or eight he was given a box of tricks by his Aunt Lucy, on his mother’s side. Lucy Westcott lived not too far away on the Exeter to Sid-mouth road near Aylesbeare, where she used to breed Samoyed dogs. The gift instantly captivated him and remains, alongside his West Country burr, the great legacy of his Devon years. When Commercial Television reached Wales and the West Country in January 1958 he paid his bright and breezy tribute to her when interviewed by radio comedy stalwart, Jack Train for the opening transmission, The Stars Rise in the West: ‘Auntie, if you’re watching, thank you very much for that magic set, but I still can’t do the tricks.’

In the late Twenties the likelihood is that the gift came from one of the Ernest Sewell range of conjuring sets. Sewell was a private ‘society’ entertainer who came to have almost a monopoly in this specialized area of the toy trade. His credentials were proclaimed from the lids of these enticing cabinets: ‘whose entertainments have been presented at Windsor Castle before members of the Royal Family.’ If anyone had told Cooper then that within twenty-five years he would have been performing his own stylized form of hocus pocus at the same venue he may have run scared from conjuring for the rest of his life. Tucked away in the neat cardboard recesses of the interior would have been the playing card that mysteriously changed into a matchbox, the coin that disappeared when dropped into a glass of water under cover of a handkerchief, and the perennial nail through the finger ‘mystery’. Here were intriguing devices for conjuring a borrowed coin into the centre of a ball of wool, for plucking a never-ending stream of cigarettes from the air, and for secretly divining the age of compliant audience members.

If Tommy had been lucky enough to secure the set at the top of the range he might well have encountered for the first time elementary versions of those classics of magic that became shorthand references to his own act in the years to come: the linking rings, the egg and bag, and the ‘Passe Passe’ bottle and glass. In time it became a mark of a successful commercial magician to endorse his own box of tricks. In Cooper’s career there were no fewer than four attempts made by prominent toy companies to package similar compendiums under his name. He always claimed to be unhappy with the poor quality of the proposed contents – ‘I didn’t want children to be disappointed, you see’– but in at least two instances a failure to secure favourable business terms was the answer. The simple props in cardboard, metal and string that had appealed in his childhood had moved into the plastic age. But Tommy overlooked the fact that it was never about the quality of the materials, always about the dream offered by the colour, the glow, the expectation, when the lid was raised.

For the young Cooper that Christmas Day was also Annunciation Day. Tommy said, ‘I took to magic straightaway. All my spending money went on new tricks and all the time I could spare went on practising them.’ According to his school friend, Peter North, he eagerly awaited the next issue of boy’s comics like Rover and Wizard, but not for the sharp-shooting, goal-scoring heroes of its inside pages. His attention was drawn immediately to the back page, which was dominated by an advertisement for Ellisdons, the High Holborn firm that proclaimed itself to be ‘the largest mail order house in the world for jokes, magic and novelties’. In the manner of many a young conjuror before and since he would commandeer his mother’s dressing table with its all-seeing mirror as a practice zone; squeeze every last magical function out of every potential scrap of spare tissue, ribbon, cardboard he could find; and, when elementary manipulation skills failed him, despair constantly of dropped balls, eggs, and playing cards until his bed was called into play as a safety net.

No one has more intimate memories of the young Tommy from his Langley days than Peter North. They reveal a complex child, on the one hand reclusive and lonely with few friends, himself the butt of people’s jokes, who would rather run from than face up to a situation – ‘A lot of people would shun him, not want anything to do with him.’ – on the other obsessed with fun for himself and, so he hoped, for others with a liking for the centre of attention this provided. Eventually when Peter first saw him on television he couldn’t believe that he appeared ‘so forward. He’d always been the outsider. Never one of the gang, you see. Never went out with the lads. We could never fathom what he did with his spare time.’ Such is the consuming power of a hobby as fascinating as magic. Who needed the fleapit up the road in Hythe with its three changes of film a week?

His solitude would have been intensified by having no brothers and sisters of a playable age and, according to Zena Cooper, a mother who found it difficult to express love to her children: ‘In fact she was as hard as nails. She was not an outwardly loving woman and had shown him little affection as a child. There were no cuddles and grandpa was just a laugh. That’s why Tommy had to have the applause. And that need extended throughout his life. He had to be loved and was always afraid that one day his audience wouldn’t love him.’ Vicky, his daughter recalls her grandmother as a very stern person with a brisk business manner who ‘talked in a strange way – she had a kind of speech impediment as if she were talking with pursed lips like through a drinking straw.’ This may have been due to her deafness. The specifics aside, it is a not unfamiliar background to the psychology of the entertainer, the difference being that in Tommy’s case his solitariness provided the crucible in which his future métier would be fashioned so early. The nearest he ever came to voicing parental rejection was when he recalled performing his tricks on his parents: ‘I’d do it and then I’d say, “Did you see how it was done?” And they used to say, “Yes.” Then I used to cry.’

Aspects of his childhood would mirror themselves in the years of his greatest success. ‘Loner’ was the first word to come to Barry Cryer’s mind in a discussion of his nature offstage: ‘In real life he looked so singular and strange, he always seemed alone, even in the middle of the crowd.’ But the need for an audience was always there. ‘He could sit and sulk a bit if he sensed the attention that he felt justified to himself was not forthcoming. This usually meant he had a trick he wanted to show you while everyone else was deep in conversation about sport or politics or whatever. Then once he got his opportunity and had enchanted you with this piece of magic or convulsed you with that gag, all was right with the world.’ Many is the discussion of the economy or of Manchester United’s chances in Europe that has ground to a halt because Tommy had a pack of cards in his pocket, the latest joke shop novelty up his sleeve: ‘Look, this is funny!’

Especially engaging about Cooper the performer on stage was the child that stayed locked within him, coupled with the child he brought out in every one of us. It is a cliché among magicians to state that children are the hardest audience to fool. There is a complementary side to that view that is seldom ever voiced, namely that the child magician thinks his own audience is the easiest to deceive. Anyone who owned a magic set or placed an order with Ellisdons can recall the pride and wonder with which we set out to mystify our senior family members, buoyed along as we were by their willingness to applaud our elementary efforts. Common sense tells us now that there was little to perplex an adult mind among those most basic of tricks, but still they applauded and possibly, unlike Tommy’s mum and dad, feigned amazement. And at one level that is what happened when audiences watched Cooper. Surely nobody was really fooled as the spoon on the end of the thread jiggled about in the jar or the unsophisticated little black bag was turned inside out to show the egg had vanished? But everyone entered the fantasy.

One of the most telling moments in his entire repertoire occurred when having failed to produce the promised bouquet from the empty vase on the plinth, he surreptitiously activated the secret switch on the top of the pedestal with an expression that dared the audience not to see a thing. It is as if he literally expected us to edit from our visual experience anything he did not wish us to see, corresponding to every occasion a child magician ever fleetingly turned his back to the audience to make the crucial move that, if spotted, will give the trick away. In the process to the very end of his days he thus summed up the wonder and optimism of every child who ever woke up to discover that box of tricks at the foot of his bed on Christmas morning.

In an interview with Ken Dodd, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare professed: ‘There is about a lot of comedy a regression. It is a negative word, a return to childhood. In fact it’s the endorsement of childhood values, of fun, of anarchy, of colour in a grey and dull world.’ The comment pinpoints the spirit of play that characterizes Dodd’s humour; it applies equally to Cooper. The world he came to create on stage can be seen as a metaphor for what his childhood became with its desperate frustration to get his magic right, and when he could not engage an audience by baffling them, at least to leave them laughing. Roy Storer’s adopted sister, Joan, recalls how the kids would gather in a circle around Tommy in the school playground to witness an impromptu magic show. As his confidence increased he staged more formal displays for a halfpenny admission in the shed in the garden of ‘Devonia’. Even then, according to Joan, he took the practice of his magic seriously. He certainly had picked up on his mother’s philosophy that a service, a commodity became more important if you had to pay for it. More importantly he discovered that magic provided his ticket to a form of social acceptance: he admitted in later life that it was only when he started to do conjuring tricks that he found the other kids took any notice of him.

The days when parcels arrived from Holborn were red letter ones, although Peter North recalls, ‘he’d always rush to perform the tricks before he had mastered them, like the one with the egg cup with a lid and the ball inside. People would laugh at him then. But he never seemed to mind. He just laughed it off.’ Peter intimates that the teenage Tommy might not have been bright enough to appreciate what was really happening here. Like the scarecrow on the road to Oz, he was a nonstarter academically: ‘He used to sit next to me in class and copy my answers in maths. I had no idea he was looking over my shoulder. But in addition to the answers you had to show the stages that brought you to your conclusion. Tommy always had the bottom line correct, but merely inked in the intermediate figures at random. He just gave himself away! And, of course, whenever I was wrong, Tommy was wrong. The teacher only had to see the exercise books side by side.’ The same teacher used to give his hair a disciplinary tweak a hundred times more than anybody else. Maybe unwittingly she set the style for the protruding tufts that later on added definition to the fez.

By way of compensation for his intellectual shortcomings he went out of his way to promote himself as the high panjandrum of practical jokes, all the while endorsing the old Will Rogers adage, ‘Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.’ Some were jokes you could order through the mail, like the giant spring snakes that jumped out of jam jars (a mainstay of his act for years to come); the noisy metal plates that sounded like a window shattering whenever they were dropped (Tommy was never without these in his back trousers pocket); the sneezing powder that made everyone in the class sneeze but you (if you blew it in the right direction); and the mysterious imitation ink blot left on desk or windowsill for someone to report to teacher (‘Who’s upset the inkwell? It must be Cooper!’). Other gags needed more careful stage-managing. He would prevail upon Mrs Knight, the owner of the local sweetshop to give him any spare imitation chocolate bars used for window display purposes. To one of these he would attach a long length of invisible thread – magician’s parlance for a fine, black filament scarcely visible to the naked eye – and place it in a prominent position in the school playground. Keeping hold of the other end he would hide behind the toilet building and patiently wait for the first person to discover the chocolate, at which point he would jerk the thread away to leave his school colleague as perplexed as Tantalus. By now Tommy would be running away, laughing his head off, just as the other kids would guffaw at him whenever he set off down the road on his bicycle, his big pelican feet spread out like flippers. He could never ride in a straight line, since his knees were constantly clashing against the handlebars.

His surreal sense of humour extended out of the school arena into the surrounding environs. Roy Storer can clearly recall Tommy riding his bike down nearby Hampton Lane holding a newspaper in both hands and appearing to read it at the same time. This appeared to be quite a feat given the rough surface of the road and the fact that not surprisingly the saddle was adjusted to its highest point. Roy recalls his disappointment when he learned that he managed the feat by virtue of two holes cut in the newspaper to give him an approximate view of where he was travelling. Roy’s mother kept the grocery shop in the Lane, half a mile from where Tommy lived. She has known him to enter with a huge suitcase wearing a turban and long silk dressing gown, blacked up like a renegade from a minstrel show: ‘He kept repeating “Veree cheep, veree cheep” until my mother had to insist, “I don’t want anything today Tommy,” and he would go on his way.’

So much of it came down to his size. When Spike Milligan made the comment that when God made Cooper he got it wrong, he was not far from the truth. Size and shape have long been accepted as key components in a comedian’s armoury and Tommy was no exception, his individual body parts contributing to the living cartoon his outward appearance presented from an early age. In later life he would joke that he could palm an ostrich. The outsize hands made his misplaced dexterity all the funnier, the feet his walking – not to mention his cycling – all the more peculiar. He once admitted to his daughter, Vicky, an amazingly easy tendency to blush when he was a boy, recalling how when still at school his mother would take him into a shoe shop and ask for a size thirteen. All the shop girls would snigger at the thought of someone so young endowed with feet so enormous. That he was still in short trousers at the time didn’t help matters. In later life he could still feel the heat suffusing his cheeks. When Vicky asked how he dealt with the situation, he replied that he developed a tendency to turn away from it either facially or, if possible, with his whole body, a form of psychological ducking and diving. To this day Vicky wonders whether this motor response survived in some degree in her father’s constant motion on stage, first this way, then that, as he went from table to table surveying which prop to display next in his comedy of indecision.

In January 1935 Tommy moved from Fawley Junior to the new Hardley Secondary School two miles away. He completed his education only a couple of months later, leaving school at fourteen to take up an apprenticeship at the British Power Boat Company in nearby Hythe, the principal employer in the area, where for a short while his father undertook menial work in the saw mill. According to Peter North, who was close behind in entering the company, Tommy was among the ten per cent of the new intake whose parents subsidized the arrangement by paying a premium for their son to be taken on, a practice common among moneyed families who wanted their boys to have a trade: ‘An awful lot of premium apprentices had double-barrelled names.’ Presumably his mother’s financial acumen and family resources secured for him the privilege. His mum and dad would certainly have perceived it as the best they could do for Tommy amid the limited work opportunities in the area. Not that the small town was anything but prosperous. In 1936, of the approximate working population of 1,800 in Hythe and Fawley combined, only sixty-four were unemployed. When compared with the average northern industrial town that had up to seventy per cent of its workforce idle at this time, the figure was impressive.

The agreement would have been for seven years and according to Derek Humby, who joined as an apprentice at the same time as Tommy, the starting pay was a staggering two and a half pence an hour in old money, or ten shillings for a forty-eight hour week, rising by two shillings per week for the term of the apprenticeship. Fully qualified men were earning half-a-crown or two shillings and sixpence as the hourly rate. The firm specialized in producing torpedo boats and similar vessels and its motto – ‘Tradition, Enterprise, Craftsmanship’ – was known for miles around. At about the time Tommy joined, a new scheme was brought in based on the so-called ‘Three Principles’ of good time-keeping, good discipline, and progress in craftsmanship. According to Bill ‘Hoppy’ Wilson, who set up the scheme, apprentices were awarded ten points on attaining each principle: ‘For ten points they were given a voucher to purchase a tool for their trade free of charge. Higher points were given a voucher of greater value. These were granted every three months and by the end of the apprenticeship they had a complete tool box.’ Initially three months at a time were spent in each department, the chromium plating division, the carpentry shed, the coppersmith’s shop, the electrics area, and so on. There is no record that Tommy acquired even a single screwdriver!

Tommy and Derek saved up their pennies to enable them to take the ferry into Southampton every Saturday. They would invariably target Canal Walk – notoriously known as ‘The Ditches’ – in the rough part of the old town where ‘Tommy White’s’ served the best faggots and peas around. They then made their way to Chiari’s café and ice-cream parlour across the street. In addition Chiari was a landscape painter who incorporated a gallery into his establishment, as well as an amateur magician. He fascinated Tommy with the tricks he knew and taught him several, including the one where you wrap a marked matchstick inside a handkerchief, ask someone to break it through the cloth, and then produce it whole again. When they couldn’t afford the price of a cup of tea, Tommy would be allowed to perform for the patrons in lieu of payment. On one occasion Chiari promised Cooper he would teach him the secret of the Indian Rope Trick. The tuition never materialized, but its promise ensured Tommy’s constant return. On those Saturdays when Derek was unable to accompany him, he would head straight for Chiari’s. The following Monday he would always confront his friend with a cheery, ‘I’ve got a good one to show you today.’

On the work front Tommy’s concentration did not hold up for long. Every new trick in his pocket was an excuse to disrupt work in the boatyard as his mates gathered around to be amused and amazed. The constant downing of tools intimated that he must even then have had a quality that held the attention of observers, even if his bosses were less than tolerant. Humby recalls the occasion he caused an official stoppage of work. He and Tommy were officially designated tea boys with responsibility for readying the tea for the workmen during their dinner breaks, a task for which they received an additional three old pence a week. One day the formidable canteen lady, Mrs Youren, was pouring the tea for them when Tommy took three of her cups and proceeded to show Derek his version of the centuries-old trick with the cups and the balls. She was not amused and threatened to stop pouring if he didn’t stop messing around. It all sounds like a storm in one of her teacups, but Tommy persisted, the men veered from cheering to jeering, and it was hard to know who was on whose side. In the end the foreman had to be called to reprimand him before the normal day’s work could proceed.

It was in that very canteen – little more than a wooden shack – where one of the most widely reported incidents of his career took place, marking as it did a shift of allegiance from performing serious magic to burlesque conjuring. It was Christmas and the management had insisted Cooper should rise to the occasion by performing in a more organized way. Tommy described the occurrence many times over the years. Stage fright had turned his body to jelly, his throat to sandpaper. His props and his table went flying in all directions. The egg that should have disappeared was left dangling on elastic from his sleeve. The big trick where the milk was supposed to stay suspended in its upturned bottle failed to work. As he remembered it, ‘The stage was swimming with milk. I dropped my wand. I did everything wrong. But the audience loved it. The more I panicked and made a mess of everything, the more they laughed. I came off and cried, but five minutes later I could still hear the sound of the laughter in my ears and was thinking maybe there’s a living to be made here. When I joined the forces I began to do some shows in the NAAFI and started to do tricks that all went wrong.’

Tommy never lost his passion for straight magic and once established as a star relished those moments when he could turn the tables on his audience by sneaking in an example of genuine skill and, to his apparent surprise, a miracle would result. We can never be sure how black and white things appeared to him that day back in the British Power Boat canteen, but the escapade can certainly be pinpointed as the occasion when he first entertained the idea of an act based on incompetence, even if at that stage he could have had little inkling of where he would get to perform it. From that point on his ineptitude was deliberate. His friend and fellow magician, Val Andrews, has commented, ‘From the very start of his performing career Tommy worked extremely hard to ensure that everything he touched would break, fall over, refuse to work, or by arranged accident reveal its secret. Years of hard work and experience went into honing the perfect comic article.’ At other times, as the mood of the interview took him, Tommy would shift the scene of the Hythe catastrophe to a service concert in Egypt or a postwar audition in a London nightclub. However, there can be little doubt that his comic agenda was set that Christmas lunchtime. Derek Humby had been there to witness the fiasco. Nor was he the first comedian to be switched on to his trade in this way. As Eric Sykes has observed: ‘What people fail to realize is that you don’t decide to be a comic; the audience decides that you are a comic.’ Juggler W. C. Fields, fiddler Jack Benny, aspirant thespian Frankie Howerd, frustrated pianist Les Dawson all accidentally discovered a talent for laughter when their original talents failed to make the grade.

The variety theatres of Southampton provided Tommy with his first appreciation of magic as performed before a proper audience on a large stage. The great illusionists of the day passed through the stage doors of the Hippodrome, the Palace, and the Grand. Horace Goldin, Chris Charlton, The Great Carmo, and Murray the Escapologist were all major names who in the late Thirties visited the town that proudly billed itself as ‘The Gateway to the Empire’. One particular performer attracted Tommy’s attention, as he later confided to ‘Wizard’ Edward Beal, a kindly small-time local entertainer who found time to run a bookshop next door to the business Tommy’s family ran in Southampton in the late Forties. In his book Particular Pleasures, which contains an appreciation of Cooper, J. B. Priestley queried, ‘I wonder if he is old enough to have seen, even as a young boy, the wildly original act of the American, Frank Van Hoven.’ Van Hoven, billed as ‘The American Dippy Mad Magician’ and one of the first of the true burlesque conjuring acts, died in 1929. While Tommy did not see the original, he did see the man who copied his act, namely Artemus. The week of 20 March 1939 saw the Southampton Palace Theatre featuring a bill headed by ‘Artemus and his Gang – Juggling with Water, Eggs, and Ice.’

Van Hoven’s other billing had been ‘The Man Who Made Ice Famous’, placing due emphasis on his main prop, namely a huge block of ice, the slippery peregrinations of which kept audiences in uproar as it slithered across the boards, causing freezing havoc among the three stooges enlisted to hold it and to keep it in a state of perpetual motion with the table and the goldfish bowl slopping full of water that they were supposed to hang on to at the same time. A borrowed handkerchief also came into it somewhere: only when the block of ice was in fragments, the bowl emptied of its contents, the table smashed to smithereens and the audience reduced to hysteria did Van Hoven get a chance to explain that he had been trying to pass it into the ice. Those who saw both considered Artemus mediocre in comparison with the original, but those who came to him fresh would rave enthusiastically. He did vary the routine, substituting the production of real eggs from a hat in lieu of the handkerchief business. The accidental omelette that materialized as eggs smashed on the wet and icy stage made the surface even more hilariously hazardous. In later years, as we shall discover, Tommy made great play of a burlesque magician sketch in which someone else played the wizard and he played a stooge from the audience. Eggs were the operative prop on this occasion. Tommy was too practical to have to bother about ice and goldfish bowls. But, as he reminisced to Ted Beal about the act, there was no doubt that Artemus had impressed him. Assuming he saw him in March 1939 and not before, the experience postdates the Hythe canteen episode, but must have further heightened his perception of the burlesque conjuror in entertainment terms. Ted also confided in Tommy his special philosophy: ‘The trouble with so many magicians is that they are purveyors of puzzles without the humour’; but by the late Forties, Tommy had already come to that conclusion for himself.

Meanwhile he was getting nowhere fast at the Power Boat Company. He was totally unsuitable for the task – ‘I can’t even knock a nail in straight!’ – but they couldn’t give him the sack because the premium had been paid: ‘The course I was on was one you had to pay for, so I got off with a warning and being sent home.’ Afraid to tell his parents, he spent his time cycling to nearby towns and villages looking for odd jobs. It is hard to think that the situation could have continued for seven years, but world events intervened. As war clouds darkened and Chamberlain’s umbrella looked insufficient protection against the storm, a combination of patriotism and self-esteem found Cooper volunteering for the services. There is no way the Company could stand in his way and besides his height made him a natural for the Guards. His mother had the shock of her life when one day he arrived on the doorstep of ‘Devonia’ in uniform. That the Company could in fact tolerate his antics no longer was bypassed in the elation of the moment. And as Peter North says, ‘He wouldn’t have lasted there during the war. You had to tow the line. The work was classified as a restricted occupation and there was no mucking about then.’ In the circumstances, it is amazing that he did manage to accept the discipline of the army as he did.

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.

Michael Legg, who worked nearby, was called into the shop one day and told by Mrs Cooper that ‘Dad’ wanted to speak to him. He was shown into the living quarters at the back and Mr Cooper asked if he would call in each day on his lunch break to take a betting slip down to the betting shop in nearby Park Road: ‘I always remember he had wads of notes in his waistcoat, trousers and shirt, as he did not believe in banks.’ Their nephew, Bernard Diggins remembers a narrow passage shut off from the road running down the side of the shop: ‘He grew his own tobacco and had strung up a line on the wall on which he was hanging the large tobacco leaves to dry.’ Thomas died on 2 December 1963, his death certificate listing his occupation as ‘night watchman (retired)’. This reminded his daughter-in-law that he did spend a spell at the nearby Atherley cinema, and may even have been a projectionist there. It would help to explain the notes sprouting out of his pockets, while the tobacco leaves provided their own poignant footnote to his death, which, as we have seen, was due to bronchial troubles.

Tommy’s mother survived her husband by over twenty years. By the early Seventies the dressmaking had become too much for her and she shifted the emphasis of her stock to costume jewellery, although to anyone looking inside it was still the same ramshackle repository it had always been. According to neighbour Marian Rashleigh, necklaces and brooches were now hung in the windows ‘like net curtains, but I don’t remember them ever being cleaned or changed for more modern pieces. I can’t remember when the shop was vacated, but by then cobwebs adorned the necklaces.’ In fact it was vacated twice. When Gertrude became seriously ill in her mid-eighties Zena began to clear the stock. Both Tommy and David had offered their mother a home, but she valued her independence and they found themselves putting it all back to give her something to do! As her niece, Betty says, ‘She was still in the shop at 88 years. It was time she closed up. But she was an obstinate old woman.’ She died of a heart attack in the Royal South Hants Hospital on 13 February 1984 two weeks before reaching her ninety-first birthday and just two months before her elder son.

According to his daughter, Tommy’s relationship with his parents was fragile. His father complained that he never visited his Mum as much as he should, and when he did go there always seemed to be a blazing row because they’d argue about why he didn’t go more often. Their worlds had not unnaturally drifted apart. They had no proper grasp of the erratic working hours and travelling that show business entailed. However, while the Shirley haberdashery was an unlikely environment in which to picture Tommy, another local resident, Sonia Blandford has an affectionate memory of him there:

One day I was sent after school to collect a present that had been ordered as a gift for my Auntie. I was surprised to see

‘Closed’ on the door. I knew I was expected and found the nerve to bang on the door. It was opened by Tommy himself. You can imagine how overwhelmed I felt. While his mum found the item Tommy entertained me by producing lengths of material from my sleeve and eggs from my ear! Although he was a TV favourite of mine, I was terrified of him. He was a giant of a man and his overwhelming personality was too much for a small child such as myself to feel able to cope with comfortably. I think he sensed this and chatted to me about the animals I kept as pets and what I was doing at school until his mum rescued us both from the discomfort of the other. My memories of them both are very fond. He was very kind and although not comfortable with a small girl to entertain who was clearly scared of him found something to talk about that would reassure.

Tommy may well have been embarrassed himself, but whatever decisions he had made about his professional approach to magic in the works canteen, it is encouraging to know that twenty years later he could still empathize with the sense of wonder that magic pure and simple could arouse in a child. Indeed, throughout his life he stayed a kid at heart.