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Desmond Milligan

Desmond Patrick Milligan, born 3 December 1925 in Rangoon, younger brother of Terence Alan Milligan, born 16 April 1918 in Ahmednagar, Poona. Simple, straightforward names, but this is the Milligan family where nothing is simple or straightforward.

Their father, Captain Leo Alphonso Milligan, was a charming, eccentric Irishman. Their mother, Florence Mary Winifred Kettleband, was a resolute Englishwoman, strong and determined. She ruled her family with military precision. Both were from military backgrounds. For years I had assumed they had married in England, Leo had been posted to India, and they had gone there as bride and groom. The reality was rather different. Florence was taken to India where her father had been posted. It was 1901 and she was eight years old. Leo was posted to India in 1912, arriving in Kirkee, where the Kettlebands lived and where their romance was about to begin.

When he was in England Leo had developed a love for the theatre. So much so, he changed his name to Leo Gann and had reasonable success appearing in the Imperial Palace in Canning Town, doing a soft-shoe shuffle dance, and a song and dance act. It was inevitable when he arrived in India he would form a repertory company and he performed at regimental balls and concert parties. It was in St Ignatius church he heard Florence playing the organ and singing in the church choir. She had a trained contralto voice and Leo was hooked – ‘I fell in love with her voice.’ Together they formed a double act ‘entertaining the troops’ performing at the Poona Gymkhana Club. They were both accomplished horse riders, and Leo became riding master and gave instruction on equestrian drill. One can only imagine what a wonderful life they had together.

Leo was a wonderful storyteller, always insisting the stories were truthful, until one day, as a boy of about seven years old, Spike caught his father telling lies about a tiger he had shot. He said to Spike, ‘Now listen, son, would you rather have the boring truth or an exciting lie?’ For me, this sums up Leo more than any of his stories. No wonder Spike spent the rest of his life embellishing the truth.

In her later years I grew very fond of ‘Grandma’, as I always called Florence. On her yearly visit to England (from Australia, where the family, apart from Spike, relocated) she would stay with me for a week. It was always a joy. We would go out to dinner in the evenings and she would relate stories of her time in India with ‘her boys’. The wine would be consumed, sometimes a little too much, and I do recall one evening in the Trattoo restaurant the resident pianist was Alan Clare, a very accomplished pianist and composer. In the middle of one of her stories she suddenly stopped talking and shouted over to Alan, ‘Alan, you played a bum note there.’ Then went back to telling her story. That memory will stay with me forever.

A devout Roman Catholic, when she was staying with me I had to drive her to confession on a Saturday evening. I once asked, ‘Grandma, why do you still go to confession, what do you have to confess at your age?’ (She was about 83 or 84 years old at the time.) She replied in that strong voice, ‘Norma, please don’t you get like Terry.’ She was very artistic, she made beautiful clowns, hand sewn in bright coloured velvets, large pointed hats and stars for their eyes. The one I have sitting on a chair in my office is 3 feet high. She named him ‘Nong’, from Spike’s poem On the Ning Nang Nong. On one of her visits she knitted a beautiful white rabbit and gave it to me on the last night of her visit, attaching this little gift card (above right).

And Grandma, I miss you very much.

In one of our early conversations Spike told me he had a brother, Desmond, who lived in Australia. He extolled Desmond’s virtues, explaining that he was a great artist and his portraits were worthy of being hung in the National Portrait Gallery. How was I to know that the rest of the family called Desmond Patrick, or that, while Desmond called his brother Spike, the rest of the family called Spike Terry?

I only discovered this idiosyncrasy when Spike was going to Australia and I received a phone call from Grandma Milligan. ‘Will you please tell Terry that Patrick will pick him up at the airport. He needs to know the flight number and time of arrival.’ Who was she talking about? Confused? Well, it gets better.

Desmond was married to Nadia Joanna Klune who was born on 21 May 1932 in Alexandria, Egypt. Their son Michael Sean was born on 10 December 1965 in Sydney, Australia. According to Spike, apart from his own mother’s ‘curries’, Nadia’s mother’s cooking – Mama Klune’s – had to be tasted to be believed. He went on about it for years, and finally on my first trip to Australia with him we were invited to Mama Klune’s for dinner – a ‘welcome home, Spike’ dinner. I asked why ‘welcome home’ when he had never lived there and I was told, ‘Well, everyone thinks he lives here.’ And that was that; total acceptance. But I wouldn’t let it go. ‘Spike, you have never lived here. How can it be a “welcome home” dinner?’ His reply has stayed with me for nearly forty years. ‘Norm, your home is always where your mother is.’ Some twenty years later I was going to Yorkshire for the weekend, and although I hadn’t lived there for over thirty years, I said to Spike, ‘I’m going home for the weekend.’ He had remembered. ‘There, I told you so. Your home is always where your mother is.’

So, welcome home dinner or what, Spike couldn’t wait to taste Mama Klune’s food again. No one had prepared me for the torrent of languages, a baffling clamour of conversation in three or four tongues, and the realisation that everyone seemed to understand except me. As we sat around the table, Mama Klune spoke to Nadia in Greek and Nadia answered in Greek. Michael answered in English, while Papa Klune spoke to Nadia in Italian and she answered in Italian. Nadia spoke to Michael in Greek, but again he answered in English. In all, Nadia spoke five languages fluently: Greek, Italian, French, Arabic and English. I asked Michael if he spoke these languages as he seemed to understand what was being said. ‘Oh yes, but I was born in Australia so I speak Australian.’ It was a wonderful evening, Nadia acting as interpreter for me. There was a lot of laughter. Spike was right, the food was excellent, and so I was catapulted into the Milligan family.

DESMOND: Terry is almost eight years older than me, but the story I heard as a boy, over and over again, was the calamity of his birth. Of course, it had to be in the middle of a storm and the nearest transport to get my mother to the military hospital in Ahmednagar was a bullock wagon taxi called a dhumni. The hospital was several miles away and the roads were rough dirt tracks. She had started in labour, she was in great pain. When they arrived at the hospital the duty nurse had to unlock the door, that’s how small the hospital was. By this time my mother was in the advanced stage of labour and when the battery doctor arrived – Dr Anderson – she screamed at him, ‘Get out of here! I never want to see another man in my life again.’ Dr Anderson replied, ‘Don’t blame me, Florrie. I didn’t do it.’ So, at 3.30 p.m. on 16 April 1918, screaming his lungs out, Terence Alan Milligan was born, all 8½ lbs of him. From now on I’ll give him his nickname, Spike. He had been given this name when he was in the army because he was so thin.

Apart from hearing the story of his birth a thousand times, we had a wonderful happy childhood. My father had been transferred to the Third Field Brigade Port Defence in Rangoon, Burma. I was born there in December 1925. We had a big house within the military grounds, and we had servants, including a gardener. My earliest memory of Spike was in 1930 when Rangoon was struck by a huge earthquake, the epicentre being in the north. It was evening and after the earthquake my mother and father had been expecting a major riot and looting. I remember, as we sat down to dinner, Dad had on his pistols. Mum had her .44 Winchester rifle alongside her, and Spike, being Spike, was upstairs having a cold bath. He too had a pair of pistols on the chair alongside the bath. As the first shocks arrived Father Milligan reached over and grabbed me. ‘Everybody outside,’ he shouted and rushed into the garden.

Everything was shaking. The noise was terrifying, added to by all the birds being shaken out of the trees. Up in the bathroom the double doors shook violently. Spike thought that rioters were breaking in and shouted, ‘Koowan Hai? Koowan Hai?’ (Who’s there?) Of course, no reply, so he picked up his pistols and fired through the doors. He soon realised it was an earthquake, threw a towel around himself and ran to join us in the garden.

The shocks subsided but the town to our north, by the epicentre, was totally destroyed. I was looking over my father’s shoulder directly at the Golden Shwe Dagon Pagoda. It was all illuminated and as I looked the umbrella crown at the top broke off and crashed to the ground. It contained a casket of jewels placed there by the last king of Burma in 1930. It’s extraordinary, but it was not put back until 1960, and I wondered if the jewels got put back up. Lucky for us this did not happen during the monsoon season. In the East, when the rainy season moves in, boy, does it rain. It’s like a solid wall of water hitting the ground, and it goes on and on. All social activity comes to a halt. The Burmese priests, called pungees, walk through it with giant umbrellas, in their saffron-coloured costumes. Then when the rain stopped, everything grew like crazy. All the little creatures came out of hiding: snakes, lizards, little furry things and insects by the million. Gorgeous butterflies and more . . . but back to the earthquake. There were many aftershocks over the following days, but it is surprising how quickly life returns to normality. Mum and Spike were soon playing on our tennis court or going on outings with his school, as if nothing had happened.

NORMA: In spite of the age difference, did you still play together as children?

DESMOND: Oh yes, life for us kids was heaven. Spike went to St Paul’s High School, run by the Brothers de La Salle, and I went to a tiny school run by Catholic nuns in the convent grounds. Father, as a military man, taught us to play soldiers and drill with our toy guns. We would have battles in the bits of jungle and three lakes that surrounded us. We made a flag and we called ourselves ‘The Lamanian Army’. Spike wrote an anthem, ‘Fun in the Sun’. We recruited three soldiers, Sergeant Taylor’s son, Haveldar’s son and our servant’s son – wait for it – Hari Krishna. It was here that the fun started, the lampooning of people and places where Spike’s stretching of reality began. He decided we needed a proper trench. We dug a big one right in the middle of Mum and Dad’s garden. My God, were we reprimanded.

Even the word Goon goes back to when we were reading Popeye cartoon strips in the English papers that we received. There were some blob-like characters in the strip that were called Goons, and that is where the word came from. When we were fooling around, we would impersonate these characters as we saw them. We would literally become them. I suppose one could say it was the beginning of The Goon Show. The world of the Raj gave us so much material for fun. For example, there was an Indian businessman who had dealings with Dad’s battery. His name was Percy Lalkakaa. He bought himself a bright red motorcar. There were very few privately owned motor cars in this little town at the time. But a bright red one! Wow! So Spike (we stilled called him Terry) wrote a song about him and his car. It went something like this:

Oh Percy Lalkakaa in his red motorcar,

Oh Percy Lalkakaa we see him from afar.

Oh Percy Lalkakaa he comes to see Papa,

He comes to see Papa in his red motorcar . . .

We loved the lakes that surrounded us. In the heat of summer they dried up and grass grew across them. The villagers grazed their cattle on them, but when the thundering monsoons arrived the lakes filled to the top. Then Spike came into his own. He would persuade his school friends to play truant and swim in the Chorcien lakes which weren’t exactly healthy, and Spike would develop severe tropical fevers. But he still kept on doing it.

Nothing daunted Spike. He decided to build a machan – a tree platform for shooting big game – but this one was to be in our garden. A homemade ladder gave access to the platform. I would dress up as a tiger and Hari Krishna as a deer. Spike would always have the toy gun and he would fire at us. We spent many happy hours playing this game and with all the kites we made. Spike always drew funny faces on his, and then we would vie with each other who could draw the funniest face.

Spike was about twelve when he joined the 14th Machine Gun Company as a cadet and drove Mum mad. He would dismantle a Vickers .303 machine gun and reassemble it about a hundred times. Possibly to stop this continuous practice Dad bought him a banjo and undoubtedly this started him off on his musical career, and from then on music was the order of the day.

Entertainment came right to our front door – snake charmers, dancers, the shoe repair man (the Mooche Wallah), the barber (the Nappie Wallah). There was no television or radio so as a family we entertained ourselves. Dad formed a concert party that toured the army camps performing everything from comedy sketches to Shakespeare. The Milligan boys were drawn into productions so this was a very good grounding for Spike.

But time was running out. The Great Depression had struck, the size of the army was cut down and the Milligan family came to London, in winter 1933, when Spike was 15 years old. I remember we were returning to England from Bombay on the SS Kaiser-I-Hind. A makeshift canvas swimming pool had been erected on the deck. I was about six or seven years old and was just learning to swim, or drown as Spike put it. I jumped into the pool and panicked, I was saved only by the squeaky high-pitched voice of a stick-thin four-year-old girl, saying to my father, ‘He’s fallen in the water!’ That memory never left Spike and it would later become one of the most famous catch phrases in The Goon Show.

NORMA: I never believed Spike when he told me that story. You have to remember, he would make up a story, swear it was the truth, then say, ‘Well, it made you laugh, didn’t it, so what the hell?’ The child is father to the man. [And although Desmond has confirmed that it was true, don’t forget that he is from the same stock.]

DESMOND: Returning to England in winter – cold, drizzling and windswept, a shock for us colonial-borns. Spike could never get used to the grey skies and drizzle. He missed all the magnificent colours of India. No more big houses with servants. Suddenly, Mum had to do everything. Cooking, cleaning, shopping etc. and we were stuck in one of those long lines of two-storey houses. And in London there were line after line of them going on for miles.

Spike wrote a poem, ‘Catford 1933’:

The light creaks

and escalates to rusty dawn

The iron stove ignites the freezing room.

Last night’s dinner cast off

popples in the embers.

My mother lives in a steaming sink.

Boiled haddock condenses on my plate

Its body cries for the sea.

My father is shouldering his braces like a rifle,

and brushes the crumbling surface of his suit.

The Daily Herald lies jaundiced on the table.

‘Jimmy Maxton speaks in Hyde Park’,

My father places his unemployment cards

in his wallet – there’s plenty of room for them.

In greaseproof paper, my mother wraps my

banana sandwiches.

It’s 5.40. Ten minutes to catch that

last workman train.

Who’s the last workman? Is it me? I might be famous.

My father and I walk out and are eaten by

yellow freezing fog.

Somewhere, the Prince of Wales

and Mrs Simpson are having morning tea in bed.

God Save the King.

But God help the rest of us.

We were no longer the Burragh Sahibs. We were just one of the crowd. It was a let-down for us kids, but we quickly adjusted to the working-class district we were living in. Dad was out of work for six months. Finally, an old army buddy got him a job with the American Associated Press in the news division. He became photo news editor in a very short time. Spike had odd jobs of no consequence, but was soon making his way with the local band groups, joining ‘Tommy Brettell’s New Ritz Revels’ playing at St Cyprian’s Hall, Brockley. By this time Spike had mastered four instruments: the banjo, guitar, double bass and finally the trumpet. So he was well in with the young band scene. But we spent lots of time together during the long cold winter nights, drawing everything you could imagine. I suppose this got me on the road to being an artist.

NORMA: [I told Desmond the remark Spike had made regarding the standard of his paintings, that they should be hung in the National Portrait Gallery. Desmond told me he had painted an extremely good portrait of Spike, parcelled it up and posted it to him from Australia. Spike opened it and returned it just as it had arrived; no acknowledgement, no comment, nothing. Desmond was quite clearly hurt by this appalling behaviour, but all he said was, ‘My brother at his worst.’]

DESMOND: As we became adults we tended to go our own ways. Spike was finishing High School and mixing with his mates, and then things changed dramatically. Mum, Dad and I emigrated to Australia and Spike stayed in England. He was just getting established, had written the first Goon Show, but was planning to follow – the rest is history. Of course, he visited us once, sometimes twice a year, and when he was with Mum, up at Woy Woy, he was always so happy. He did the odd television and radio show. That’s why so many people think he was an Australian. We wrote to each other very frequently. We worked together and I illustrated a couple of his books. We had our ups and downs as brothers.

NORMA: I’m sure you know that your brother, like your father, made up wonderful stories and he would swear they were the truth just to make you laugh. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to find out if the story about your father is true. Spike told me his name was to be Percy Alexander but he was baptised Leo Alphonso. The story goes that, on reaching the cathedral, the priest officiating at the baptism suggested he should be named after popes or saints, hence Leo Alphonso.

DESMOND: It does feel like something my brother could have written, but it’s absolutely true.

NORMA: When did you become aware that Spike was famous?

DESMOND: I remember going to local music gigs to listen to Spike playing his trumpet and realising he was mixing with a different set of people: artists and musicians. But I think my first visit to a recording of a Goon Show – to hear the laughter and applause – and thinking ‘my brother wrote that’. I knew then.