Читать книгу Kenneth Williams Unseen: The private notes, scripts and photographs - Russell Davies - Страница 8

Michael Whittaker: ‘I got such a shock. They were all different colours. I’d seen them there before but I didn’t know what they were. Then for him to say he’d been collecting them specifically to end his life, I was at a loss for words.

I didn’t know what the proper response was. It was a weak response but he didn’t like it. Knowing his strong character, nothing I would have said would have stopped him. He did just what he liked to do.’

Gyles Brandreth had collaborated with Kenneth on the editing of his tactful autobiography, Just Williams. During that process, too, the subject of suicide had arisen – necessarily, since Kenneth’s own father, Charlie, had died a somewhat mysterious death in 1962. The Hammersmith Coroner’s Court had returned a verdict of ‘Death by Misadventure, due to corrosive poisoning by carbon tetrachloride’. The causes were restated on the death certificate as ‘Bronchial Pneumonia, and Carbon Tetrachloride poisoning, self-administered, by accident’, according to Kenneth’s diary note. He himself did not attend the inquest, on the grounds that his presence would attract a degree of publicity upsetting to his mother. He continued to perform nightly in the theatre throughout this period, with no signs of distress. Nor are there any expressions of regret in the diaries. Indeed, rumours of uncertain origin circulated at the time to the effect that the police were examining the possibility that Kenneth was somehow connected with his father’s death, at least to the extent of putting Charlie ‘in harm’s way’ by exchanging bottles, substituting carbon tetrachloride for some more palatable drink the old man expected. But if any theories of that kind were tested, nothing came of them.