Читать книгу Sir David Jason - A Life of Laughter - Stafford Hildred - Страница 7

The tidy, terraced houses in Lodge Lane, Finchley, were built more than 200 years ago. They were first built as farm cottages for workers on the agricultural estates that swept right down into the edges of north London which have long since been swallowed up by suburbia. On 2 February 1940, as the Second World War raged bitterly across Europe, one of the coldest winters in years had encouraged most residents to stoke up the fires and stay indoors. But Billingsgate fish porter Arthur White and his sprightly little Welsh wife Olwen, who lived at 26 Lodge Lane, were otherwise occupied at the nearby North Middlesex Hospital bringing twin baby boys into the world.

They already had a seven-year-old son, also called Arthur, and they were delighted to increase the size of their young family two-fold. Four days later, a neighbour generously used some of Arthur’s precious petrol ration to ferry Olwen and the baby boys home and, for a few days, their joy at their domestic bliss was undimmed, even by the horrors of war. But one of the boys was weak and ailing. His breathing was failing as a massive infection took hold of his fragile frame. Olwen did everything she could to try to breathe life into her sickening son but, tragically, he died after just two short weeks of life.

‘I was in such despair,’ said Olwen bleakly, years later. ‘We had decided to call the twins David and Jason. David was healthy but Jason was so sickly he never had a chance and I felt so helpless. I just had to watch him go. I don’t even know what was really wrong with him. I buried the tiny body myself, out the back. I didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t tell anybody. We had no money for a proper burial. It was war and I had to do it.’

The healthy twin thrived and his birth was registered a month afterwards when Arthur and Olwen later trudged to Edmonton Register Office on 19 March 1940 to record, sadly, a single addition to the family. David John White was a lively baby with a powerful set of lungs which he was always eager to demonstrate to his grieving parents. Olwen and Arthur were devastated by their loss, but they were also determined that their tiny son should not be forgotten, and would often quietly wonder together what might have become of Jason had he been strong enough to survive. Olwen was naturally especially delighted when her surviving twin eventually went on to make the two names so well loved and famous throughout the land.

Yet, in fact, it was not until David was 14 that he discovered the stunning truth that he was a twin and that his baby brother had died soon after birth. It was an enormous shock to the teenager. To outsiders, David has always tried hard to look deeply unimpressed by the revelation but, in reality, it had a shattering effect on the young man. When asked by the authors about his lost brother, he quickly became very businesslike and matter-of-fact, insisting coolly, ‘It just came out during the course of some conversation with my mother that apparently I had had a twin.’

David is typically anxious to play down any hint of the family trauma and would say only, ‘The bottom line of the story is that one survived and one did not. It happens all the time. Many years ago, my brother Arthur’s wife was pregnant with twins and she lost both of them. They now have a son called Russell which is wonderful.’ David insists publicly that he does not feel his determination to do well is any sort of compensation for the death of his brother. ‘It has never, ever occurred to me,’ he said. ‘Two little dots came out. One dot lived and one did not. I just found out casually in the course of a conversation. “You did have a twin, you know”, said my mother. I just said, “Oh did I? Oh really”. At that time, my mother was great and there was no problem. It was never given any weight and it was not a problem for me. I was not made to feel any responsibility. The irony is that we are all made from a moment in time.’

But one school friend remembers it very differently. ‘When he came to school the day after his mum told him about his twin dying, he looked terrible. He was shaking with emotion and he looked absolutely shattered. He swore us to secrecy about it and I think he hardly ever mentioned it again. But that day he looked awful, as though all his humour and energy had drained out of him. That day he said he felt guilty but, to be honest, I think afterwards he somehow drew strength from it, as if he had an added responsibility to achieve things on behalf of his brother as well as himself.’

David’s parents were determined to do the very best for all their children. Olwen insisted that the long family tradition of looking after your own was very strongly in her mind. In any case, there was a war on and tragedy was an everyday occurrence.

England in 1940 experienced a bitterly cold winter and it was a shivering London that welcomed baby David. The Thames froze over as temperatures tumbled to the lowest of the century. But inside the humble terraced house, with its outside toilet and its tin bath hanging on a nail in the back door, David White spent his first months and years of life in a home which was always warm and happy, air raids permitting.

Baby David did his bit for the family war effort by noisily resisting attempts to put on his tiny gas mask. Whenever the air raid sirens sounded and the family started to move to the relative safety of the shelter erected in the house, David’s screams of protest began. ‘It used to worry me a lot, that gas mask,’ recalls Olwen. ‘He just screamed like mad when I put it on him.’

David’s cries often had to compete against the noise of German air raids which used to inspire his mother to retaliate by hurling curses in the direction of Berlin as she angrily crashed dishes around in her tiny kitchen. Once, the Luftwaffe almost silenced these outbursts with a near miss, which left the house structurally undamaged but somehow managed to blow out Olwen’s cooker. Happily, the only casualty was the cake she was baking at the time.

The War made its grim effects felt as food rationing was brought in and, just four days after the birth of the twins, that most famous of Government campaigns was launched to combat the threat of German spies – ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. Olwen was determined to protect her brood from the worst of the war. Her native Wales had endowed her with brisk efficiency and a warm sense of humour. A baby girl, June, completed the family four years after David was born. And while there was never much money to go around, the fiercely independent Olwen supplemented her husband’s meagre wages by going out and working as a cleaner.

The wartime blackouts frequently disrupted Arthur’s trips to work. He had to get up at about 4.00am to cycle to Billingsgate and, soon after war broke out, he overslept. Arthur looked like being very late and was urgently pedalling through a dark and gloomy north London when the road simply disappeared and he went careering into a bomb crater about 50ft wide and 40ft deep.

Arthur was knocked out cold. When he came round about 20 minutes later, he found he was trapped at the bottom of a huge hole and, try as he might, he was unable to scramble up the sides and out. He started shouting for help and, after a further 15 minutes, two men arrived and shone their torches down on an anguished Arthur.

‘Go on,’ said Arthur, ‘get me out of here will you, lads?’ The faces looking down were wide-eyed in amazement. Then one of the rescuers said, ‘Bloody hell. He’s had a 50-ton bomb dropped on him and the bugger’s still alive!’

There always was a black side to wartime humour. David’s older brother, Arthur junior, was growing up fast and was quick to capitalise when a German air raid on north London blasted a part of a human arm up on to the guttering at the back of 26 Lodge Lane. Enterprising Arthur was charging the other children 2d (two old pennies) a look until his sideshow was interrupted by angry adults. The local doctor was called to remove the arm in a bag, much to the irritation and disappointment of Arthur and his ghoulish young customers.

Arthur was always a boisterous lad and came close to ending one of Britain’s most promising acting careers some 20 years before it had begun, with a badly aimed house brick. Arthur recalled the incident with a wince.

‘When we were schoolboys, David wanted to come to a camp I had made with my mates. I wouldn’t let him, and he was hanging about trying to get in. Unfortunately, he got in the way of a brick I was throwing at our ‘enemies’. It hit him on the head and nearly killed him. I was shattered, and to this day he still carries the scar.’

Olwen was the driving force of the family and, on most matters, whatever she said went. Neighbours were always treated with just enough friendliness and respect but kept firmly at a safe distance. The family was well-liked but Olwen saw to it that they always kept themselves very much to themselves.

David’s early explorations of his locality were conducted in a somewhat unusual form of transport, a rickety wooden wheelbarrow. Next-door neighbour Ernie Pressland recalls David as … ‘a little ragged-arsed sod in a barrow. His brother Arthur used to get lumbered with pushing him around. All the kids from Lodge Lane used to stick together in one great big sprawling gang. Arthur was our leader – we used to call him ‘King Arthur’ – and we used to go scrumping apples over near the posh houses in Totteridge.’

The Whites were one important social step up on the Presslands in that their air raid shelter was an indoor Morrison device, while their neighbours relied upon the outdoor Anderson variety to save them from the Germans. But after young Eileen Pressland caught what tragically became a fatal dose of pneumonia after a night of shivering in the cold, the family shunned either form of shelter.

Ernie recalls, ‘After Eileen died, we all slept together in the same bedroom, all six kids and my mum and dad. My mother said, “We’ll all go together if we go.” But we all became close in the Blitz. The Whites were good friends and neighbours.’

Young David was known as ‘Whitey’ and, it seems, had a real dramatic talent right from his early days.

Ernie Pressland remembers, ‘I had been firing potato pellets from a toy gun and David reckoned I’d copped him one in the ear. I didn’t really know if I hit him but he went through such a dying spasm act that my mother went bananas and broke the gun to pieces over my back.’

It was certainly obvious to all the family that David’s flair for acting was apparent from a very early age. Olwen found her children’s favourite game was dressing up. Her frilly blouses and floppy hats, dresses and coats and her husband’s trousers and shirts were all in constant demand from the three youngsters who loved to act out their own little plays. Arthur, the oldest, generally took the early lead in the junior White dramatic society, but David and June always seemed to be playing the biggest parts by the end.

When they got older, they pestered their mother to take them to scavenge in junk shops for even more outlandish outfits. Olwen encouraged the artistic side in her offspring. She was steeped in the Welsh family tradition of creating your own entertainment through large gatherings with every relation called upon to deliver a song or a monologue.

In fact, when the children moved on to nearby Northside School, it was June who impressed dramatically with a spirited portrayal of Queen Victoria in an early school play. At Northside School, David’s cheeky sense of humour certainly began to develop. His best friend was a lad called Mike Weedon who lived just two streets away in Grange Avenue. The two youngsters made sure that life was never dull for their English teacher, an endlessly harassed lady called Miss Holmes. Mike recalls that one of David’s early pranks was to spray on a little extra decoration to her dress.

‘I remember once, as Miss Holmes walked up the aisle between desks with a smart blue dress on, David got a pen full of ink and flicked it on to the back of her dress. She never knew it was him as the ink blended in with the colour of the dress.’

David was always the form clown and his high-spirited partnership with Mike Weedon made sure both boys were regularly in trouble with some teachers.

‘We were always getting separated because of our antics,’ recalls Mike Weedon. ‘Every lesson seemed to begin with “White, get down to the front of the class. Weedon, get to the back of the class.” We always tried to sit next to each other, but we played up too much.’

Certainly, Miss Holmes did not always fully appreciate David’s irrepressible sense of fun. She once caned him very hard on his wrist and hand in front of the class.

Mike Weedon says, ‘She was so mad at something he had done, she struck him haphazardly across the wrist and we couldn’t believe it when David turned round and said, “I’m going to report you to the headmaster.” And he went right along to the headmaster, Mr Maurice Hackett. Huge weals had come up on his wrist and he just stormed out of the classroom and into the head’s office. She got into trouble and was told to ease off by the Head. She missed his hand and hit his wrist and it could have been quite damaging.’ David was never shy about sticking up for himself. He was well below average height but, somehow, his energy and his ready wit meant that he was rarely picked on by bigger boys.

But Mr Hackett was not always so sympathetic. David and Mike packed countless scrapes into their school careers. A favourite way to start the day was to devise a new way of avoiding assembly in the morning. One day, the pair dodged down into a darkened tunnel area that ran underneath school to get out of the tedious ceremony. Unfortunately, the tunnel contained a drain which swiftly soaked them up to the ankles in water, and much worse was to come when they squelched out after assembly.

Mike remembers, ‘We kept quiet until everybody had gone and crept up the stairs and round to the front door. Who should be standing there, but Mr Hackett. He caught us fair and square and we had to wait outside his room before we finally got the cane. One stroke on the hand.’

David certainly did not shine in his first years at school. He was painfully shy and in his early teens lacked any sort of confidence. But a perceptive and thoughtful teacher helped him to develop.

David said, ‘When I first started at school I was not very bright and I did not do very well. I always seemed to be very backward. Then I found that there was something I could do well and that helped me a lot. I was always very physical and we had a very good young teacher, called Mr Joy, who taught us gymnastics. Because I was agile and could do things, he said, “That is very good,” and he told the rest of the class to watch how I did one exercise and try to copy it.’

David had never before been used as a model for his contemporaries to match, and he thoroughly enjoyed the experience. ‘It was the first time a teacher had ever said anything like that to me. That was a big turning point for me, because I thought if I can do that in gymnastics, why can’t I do it in History or Geography or whatever?

‘I was never very good at Maths, but at English and Science I began to creep up the scale because I realised that if I could do something well physically, it gave me a spur. Before then, I believe that deep down I had subconsciously given up. I always used to feel the lessons were so complicated and I would just give up before I started, so I was always bottom of the class. But Mr Joy proved that I could do something well. That gave me enormous confidence and it opened the door for me. I was a natural gymnast and it has been with me ever since.

‘He started me reading a lot and helped me in every way. I worked at science and got an award, and I went on to become a prefect and captain of the football and swimming teams. I owe that man a lot.’

David deliberately avoided pointing out that his improvement at school exactly coincided with his discovery that he was a surviving twin. He prefers not to delve into the psychology of loss but it seems clear that his new-found purpose and sense of awareness had at least some connection with the surprising new knowledge that he was the surviving twin.

Maureen Wanders was another teacher who treated young David more gently. She spotted his flair for entertaining and recalls, ‘He was a natural performer who always made the other children laugh. He seemed to stop growing when he was 13 or 14 and I think he was quite self-conscious about being short. But he was high spirited and very popular. He brought the house down in one play we put on.

‘And in class he could always be relied upon to liven things up. He wasn’t naughty, just great fun, with a great sense of humour. David shone at English, but drama was where his real talent lay. You could not miss his natural flair.’

David frankly recalled, ‘At school, I was a well known joker and the reason why was because I was very small and very slight and, in order to survive, I started clowning. I think this is true of a lot of people who are in comedy.

‘In my case, I knew that if you’re little you tend to get beaten up by the bigger lads, so in order to defend myself as I was not very well built, I decided to make them laugh. It was no help being a coward. They kicked cowards. You had to use your brains. And all bullies need a court jester. I couldn’t fight them with my fists so I fought them with my wits. I didn’t want to get kicked to death so I made them laugh. I really worked at it so, if there was any problem, I could get them so busy laughing that they forgot about beating me up.’

David was always able to laugh off his lack of inches but just sometimes he yearned to be tall. He often looked smaller than he was because he used to be swallowed by clothes which were just a little too big for him to provide long lasting value.

‘We never had much money in our family,’ he said. ‘Everything I owned my mother would say, “He’ll grow into it,” so I had jackets with sleeves that were too long and shoes that were too big. And, one Christmas, when I was 10 or 11, the thing I wanted more than anything was a bike. Come Christmas morning and there it was, but my feet wouldn’t reach the pedals.

‘As usual my mother had bought me a full-size model, “to grow into”. My father had to put wooden blocks on the pedals and even then my toes only just touched them. My street cred really plummeted after that.’

David’s mother always had great hopes for her children. She was pleased that David’s schoolwork was improving, but was still anxious to help. She frequently sent David, and any other youngsters she could dragoon, up to the local library in Finchley to listen to worthy, self-improving lectures as an addition to their schoolwork.

A youngster, called Brian Barnycoat (known as Bodgy for short) became friendly with David and Mike Weedon and the trio became great pals for many years.

Even as a young boy, the most noticeable thing about David was his sharp sense of humour. He led the threesome on a trip into central London to see his radio heroes The Goons. Peter Sellers was David’s childhood idol. He played his Goons records over and over again on the record player in the White front room and marvelled at the hilarious Sellers mimicry and range of voices. David was addicted to the Goons and thoroughly enjoyed watching one episode being recorded. He said, ‘They broke all the rules and, of course, the older generation did not understand what on earth we were all going on about. They were so off the wall.’

David gradually realised that he had a talent to amuse, even if it did embarrass his friends sometimes. A favourite early comic stunt was to alarm the occupants of a crowded Tube train by pretending to sew his fingers together.

‘He would pull a hair from his head and then go to thread it through a needle,’ recalls Mike Weedon. ‘He would start with his little finger and work round them all and then pass through the palm of his hand. Then he would pull it and automatically the fingers of his hands would close. He would take about ten minutes for it all to happen and people would be fascinated. We would be cringing, it was so embarrassing. We all thought he was crazy. But I suppose he was only acting.’

Not all young David’s attempts at humour were quite so subtle. A hapless window cleaner, widely considered by David and his young pals in Lodge Lane to be something of a dirty old man, experienced a rather smellier and more slapstick comedy routine. In those days, when horse-drawn carts were still a familiar feature of the north London traffic, the window cleaner always carried buckets to scoop up the horse droppings to sell as manure to some of the enthusiastic rose-growers of the community. This meant his barrow was usually laden with, not just ladders, but buckets of steaming natural fertiliser.

David thoughtfully inserted two bangers deep into one bucket, lit the fuse and made a run for it. The resulting explosion left the poor window cleaner and a couple of innocent passers-by covered in horse muck.

Ernie’s younger sister Julie Pressland was a good friend from childhood. She remembers the incident clearly. ‘We all thought the window cleaner was a pervert so no one was very sorry for him,’ she says. ‘It was a real mess. There was horse shit everywhere. The window cleaner was really mad and, kids being kids, someone told him David was responsible. But, by then, David was long gone.

‘That was pretty typical of David. He was full of devilment but he never did anyone any real harm. It was just for a joke. He loved to make people laugh even in those days. I remember he had an air gun and he filled another neighbour’s tin bath full of holes.

‘Another time we had some washing strung out on a line in the back yard and my mum kept looking out and saying, “There’s a funny wind – it’s only blowing the knickers.” David was hanging out of his back window taking pot shots at our underwear with his toy gun! There were five women in our family so there were always plenty of drawers on the line for him to aim at.’

David did later become an accomplished cook, but one of his early efforts looked distinctly unpalatable. His mother was baking and young David came out into the yard with some pastry that he said he wanted to make into pies. He mixed it up with leaves, mud and sugar and baked it. Then, when he had cooked the alarming mixture, he sat down and ate it and, with characteristically convincing dramatic style, he pretended he was munching on a chocolate eclair!

Julie says, ‘He was always very funny. And even when we were young he could walk into a room and make people laugh. It was never unkind, cruel humour but always gentle, taking the mickey out of himself instead of other people. He would make a joke about his lack of height and get everyone laughing at him. We lived on the poor side of the street. The houses on the other side were more expensive and we always used to call that the posh side.’

Julie and David spent hours just chatting in the rickety lean-to which separated their tiny back gardens. ‘He was always good to be with because he was such a laugh. His imagination would always conjure up stories and jokes. But he did have a serious side.

‘I remember once he planted this tree at the bottom of his garden. It was really more a yard than a garden. There were no flowers or greenery at all and he wanted to make it look nicer. He really nurtured this tree. He watered it and really tried to look after it. I think he was a sort of premature ‘green’. It got to be about 6ft tall and he was really proud of it. Then the man whose garden backed on to David’s chopped it down one day when we were at school. He said it cut out his light. David was absolutely gutted. Really upset.’

Julie’s older sister Maureen was impressed by David’s ability to mimic a wide range of different voices. ‘I’ll never forget David coming outside into the yard at the back on a warm summer’s night and putting on a really posh voice. “Would you care to take the air on the veranda,” he said and then he laughed. He had the kind of laugh which meant you just had to laugh with him.’

David was by now above average at his lessons but rarely excelled. He saved his efforts for more worthwhile causes, like arguing passionately with his pals that Elvis Presley should most certainly make that much talked about but never realised tour of Britain. David didn’t know then that he had a genuine link with Presley, who had also suffered the death of his twin.

Acting entered young David’s life through school plays. Mike Weedon remembers acting with him in an early play called The Ostler.

‘He had a singing part and really shone. Even as a boy he had a real charisma about him on stage.’

David had his own room at home where he spent hours listening to the radio. His favourite show was the science fiction adventure series Journey Into Space and he sent off for a picture of the crew of the Discovery. He was delighted when it arrived, complete with autographs on the back.

David’s house was usually the base for the youngsters and Mike Weedon recalls it was generally Olwen who took an interest in their youthful games and ambitions. ‘His dad was an old sour-puss, old Arthur. David’s mum was fun. But Arthur had a very bad gait and would limp and that might have been part of his bad moods. He kept out of the way and we kept out of his way. Although his dad always had an eye out that we didn’t really get into trouble.’

What Mike Weedon never knew was that Arthur senior was wracked with pain from crippling arthritis. David was often deeply upset when he saw his father in agony. It left a lasting impression on him and in later life he frequently takes time out quietly to help arthritis charities.

The intrepid threesome all shared a lack of inches. They were all very short for their age all the way through school but never worried about it too much. ‘We used to call ourselves “The Shorthouses”,’ laughed Mike Weedon. ‘I got picked on a couple of times because of my size, but David was so funny and well-liked I don’t think he ever got picked on.’

But perhaps the event which really shaped the future came when David was 14, just after his mother had broken the news to him about his dead twin. The school play had a problem when a young actor dropped out with measles and Headmaster Hackett was looking around for a replacement.

David remembers, ‘For some reason, he decided I could do this part. I can still hear him saying, “White, I want a word with you.” I thought, “Oh Gawd, what have I done now? This is it. I must be in trouble again.”’

But, in fact, the Head carried the news that the boy’s illness would keep him out of the production and cheeky young David White was his choice for replacement. ‘I want you to take over,’ he told David.

Perhaps, surprisingly, the suggestion was not then a welcome one. David might have enjoyed dressing up and larking about at home but doing it in public before the critical eyes of his pals was quite another thing.

‘I wasn’t very keen at all,’ he says. ‘I thought acting and plays were girls’ things. When you’re in a working-class school, being in a play seems like playing girls’ games. You don’t fancy doing it because it’s all a bit girlish and I most definitely wanted to be seen as one of the lads.’

But the Headmaster insisted. ‘I think you would be absolutely right and you are the only one I can think of to do this part,’ he said firmly. The expression on David’s face told its own reluctant tale so the Head added cryptically, ‘Let me put it this way. Don’t ask me to tell you to do it.’

With that, he left young David White to cogitate on his first casting problem. ‘I was standing there for about five minutes trying to work out what he had said,’ remembered David. ‘Of course, I worked out that I was going to do it anyway. The difference was that he was asking me to do it. I slowly realised that if I said ‘No’, he was going to tell me to do it. That was it. It was a fait accompli, really. I had no choice – I did it under duress.’

The play was a one-act production called Wayside War, set during the time of the Cromwellian wars. David entered the action with a heavy heart. ‘I was playing a cavalier and dressing up in all those funny clothes made it even worse. But something happened to me when I started to do it. It was somehow amazing. It was fun. It worked. After all that pressure to take part I found to my complete surprise that I was actually enjoying myself.

‘It was a spy story, based on real events which had actually happened which really intrigued me. There was a spy in Bridgwater who was giving all this information to the other side. This cavalier stayed at this inn and he knew someone in the area was giving all the secrets away but he did not know who. There was a wonderful woman in this hostelry and they met and spent the evening, and later the night, together. Of course, during this he discovers that she was the spy.

‘But he sort of falls in love with her and the next morning she is going off and he knows that he has got to arrest her because she is putting his side in danger. But he lets her go. Obviously he should never have done that, but he did. Because it was all based on actual happenings, for the first time it made history come alive for me. And being on stage was an amazing experience for me.

‘We did it for three nights. Our parents and friends all came and it went down really well. Then they said we were going to do it in a drama festival. That was something completely new to me, I didn’t know what a drama festival was. But I found out that all these amateur groups and schools put in their shows and then over about two weeks they all get performed. And you go and watch a lot of the other plays and then, on the last night, the four plays selected by the adjudicator are performed. Our play was chosen in the last four, and then after we did it we found out that we had won the trophy. It bowled me over. Suddenly there was a competitive thing in my life, and I met all these people who were enthusiastic about acting. Just being in the play was amazing. I can remember the audience laughing and it occurred to me that I was really, really enjoying it. It was a way of being clever and a success, and I’d never been much of either in school.’

David’s mother was impressed. She said, ‘We knew he had something special. He had this quick way with him that could lift people in the audience. I think it comes from our family. Back in Wales our family would always provide their own entertainment. Everyone stood up and did a turn, going back generations. Something of that went straight through to David. But not just to him, to all my children. Arthur and June had it, too, and it made me think of the baby that died. I told David and he gave me one of his looks.’

The stage success gave young David confidence but he still had no thought of acting becoming a career. ‘I don’t think I gave a second thought to taking it that seriously,’ said David. ‘I was much too busy having a good time.’

The teenage trio of David, Mike Weedon and Brian Barneycoat enjoyed their own company and after school would rush off on their bicycles on trips into the green countryside on the very edge of London. At weekends, they would cycle to Broxbourne to secret dens they made on the banks of the River Lea.

Next-door neighbour Ernie Pressland was called up for National Service at 18 and sold his bicycle to David who was four years younger. It was a flash model with ‘Tour de France’ handlebars and the price was £2.

‘I was ripped off, and not for the first time,’ reflected David bleakly. Even so, the trio would think nothing of round trips of 50 miles or more and all have memories of long, sun-filled idyllic days. Mike Weedon remembers, ‘We were three loners really, I suppose. We didn’t get into girls’ company much. We really liked our bikes.’

David was unquestionably the leader of the little gang and usually the inspiration of their escapades. Mike Weedon recalls fondly, ‘David organised so many pranks that it became commonplace for him to do it. If he didn’t lark about, then you knew he must be in a really bad mood. He would play around all the time. He was really a fairly good student but he never stood out.’

But baiting teachers with practical jokes and at all costs avoiding taking schoolwork too seriously did not endear the trio to the school authorities. Headmaster Hackett was concerned, as the boys approached 15, that their childish pranks could turn into more serious teenage trouble-making and wisely decided that perhaps they needed a more creative outlet for their energy and mischief. Recognising David’s considerable dramatic skill and potential ability to act more than the goat, he sent off the two young lads with another problem boy to Douglas Weatherhead, then the drama instructor for Middlesex who was running an evening drama group attached to the local amateur Incognito Theatre Group.

‘I’ve got three boys here and if they don’t find themselves something to do they’re going to get themselves into trouble,’ said the Headmaster to the amiable Mr Weatherhead, who was still a stalwart of the Incognitos some 35 years on, but sadly passed away in 1996. He welcomed the three nervous youngsters and introduced them to the Incognito Theatre, an old soda siphon factory converted by the enthusiastic amateurs with seats from a blitzed cinema, which remains their headquarters to this day.

Douglas Weatherhead recalls fondly, ‘Right from the start, I could see that David was quite obviously a winner. Mike Weedon was quite reasonable but David, you could see from the start, was simply exceptional. He picked up accents and intonations beautifully. He would have been a very good serious actor, but of course his lack of height went against him. In those days, you had to be the classic, tall and good-looking Laurence Olivier type to get anywhere. I can’t remember the third boy’s name but we lost him quite quickly. David and Mike, who were real pals, stayed.’

David recalls that his initial euphoria for acting with the Incognitos was not totally based upon dramatic ambition. ‘We went down there for the first time one Monday night because we were now inflamed with the success of Wayside War. And we found that there were 22 girls there and one bloke. We thought, ‘Yeah, we’ll have some of that.’ That was our first picture of the Incognitos. I think that is what coloured our enthusiasm really.

‘They had a proper senior amateur group and they also had this fabulous training group for young people as well. It was marvellous. They had their own little theatre. They trained lots of people to act. It was very good, it was a way of getting young people involved with the theatre. It was like a social group of course but there was also the chance to take parts in the senior group. They taught me so many of the skills of the theatre.

‘We used to go on Mondays and Wednesdays and it quickly became much more than a hobby for me. It gradually became more and more fascinating and more and more interesting. The more I found out about acting, the more interesting it became.

‘The more new doors I opened up, the more I realised there was to acting. It got steadily more difficult and because it got more difficult I always wanted more and more to get over the next hurdle, to learn the new technique or understand the next new idea. I wanted to succeed as an actor so much and I was desperate to improve my skills. But every level I reached seemed to open up new levels to aim at. The more deep and the more complex the whole business of acting became, the more involved I became. I was there for 10 years and in that time I went and acted with other amateur groups as well. As I was given more and more important roles to play, the challenge became greater.

‘I never found acting an easy thing to do. It was difficult, very difficult. But because it was so difficult, it became a question of developing dedication and application to try to keep improving and developing my skills. And I learned early on that the only person who can really do all that is yourself. I tried to learn and absorb from people who knew more than me, from teachers, directors, actors or anyone, and I tried to apply that knowledge in every way I could.’

Part of David’s initial audition for the Incognitos was to pretend to be much older, first 45 and then 85. Most youngsters of his age would scarcely have appreciated the difference and been inclined to bend every joint stiff to simulate either great age. But David, observers recall, was able effortlessly to suggest the difference between middle age and great age.

‘David was a natural,’ says Douglas Weatherhead. ‘He took to acting like a duck to water. Mike was a great friend of David’s and he was quite good but, of course, David was so much better that he always got the big parts while Mike was left with the small parts.

‘David was also a great joker. He had a marvellous sense of humour and used to tease Mike that he was forever trying to pad out his parts. On one occasion, when Mike was supposed to have suffered a small cut on his cheek in a Drayton and Hare farce, David joked that he would no doubt finish up as a number-one accident case.

‘David always kept us in fits of laughter. Whenever we took a break for coffee, he kept the whole thing going. I never did find out what sort of trouble the Headmaster thought he was heading for, but once he found an outlet in acting there was no sign of any trouble for him. That was it. He was wide-eyed with enthusiasm when he arrived.

‘I remember that, like most of the young lads at the time, he never had much money. And once we were rehearsing a play with David taking a leading role when one of our rather stuffier senior members remarked rather pointedly that David had still not stumped up his annual membership subscription. I think it was half a crown at the time. I was so indignant at this and so impressed by David’s talent that I said if the lad didn’t pay it, I would pay it myself. And I would have done. It would have been a very worthwhile investment, don’t you think?’

Despite their lack of academic dedication, both David and Mike Weedon became prefects in their final year at Northside. Their authority in handing out lines and detention to their juniors was hardly helped by their lack of inches. Both were just 5ft 4in tall when they left school.

‘We did shoot up a bit afterwards,’ says Mike, ‘and we both finished at 5ft 6in.’ The final act of leaving school was quite a traumatic experience for them. Mike remembers, ‘We had always been saying that we couldn’t wait to leave school, but on the last day I know we all really didn’t want to go. It was a very emotional experience for all of us. We all had to go up on stage in turn and there was this great big guy called John Smith who went up and just burst out crying he was so upset. There were tears streaming down his face and I know it affected us all. David was highly strung and a very sensitive young man. After all our big talk about the future, we were really surprised at how choked we all felt.’

The diminutive trio remained good friends long after they left school and, as soon as they were 16, they all exchanged their faithful pushbikes for much more exciting motorbikes, which instantly enlarged the scope of their adventures. David’s first motorbike was an aged 350cc BSA on which he lavished hours of tender loving care.

His mother was never too keen on her precious son’s new obsession, fearing the dangers of David revving around the country on the powerful machine. She was even less enthusiastic when he took the bike to pieces in her tiny hallway. Bitterly cold weather meant that this was the only place to service the bike, but Olwen gave David a fierce telling off every time a drop of oil found its way on to her carpet.

The motorbikes changed the lives of the youngsters. Their horizons were suddenly nationwide. All of a sudden, from being limited to within a few hours’ pedalling distance of their homes, they could now explore the whole country. First on the list was the Lake District.

With David leading the way on his powerful 350cc machine, Bodgy riding pillion and Mike following on his smaller 250cc bike, they set out to explore the beauties of the Lakes. Unfortunately, the bargain basement accommodation turned out to be not even worth the small sum they paid for it.

‘When we got there we found it was a terrible little caravan on the banks of Lake Windermere,’ said Mike Weedon. ‘We only got it cheap because it was falling to bits. It was parked right on the side of the lake and it was pretty miserable really, especially when I ended up getting left behind when my bike packed up.’

Despite his enthusiasm for high speed, David was usually a careful motorcyclist, yet he did come close to losing his life on his motorbike when he was racing back from Clacton with Mike Weedon riding pillion. It was a busy summer evening with the main roads so clogged with traffic that inventive David had picked a favourite personal short-cut, winding round a sequence of back roads.

As dusk fell, the two youngsters thrilled to the speedy journey and leaned energetically into every bend, until they reached a particularly sharp corner when David yelled to his passenger, ‘There’s too much gravel, I’m going to lose it.’

To Mike’s horror, David pulled out of the bend, straightened the screaming machine and went straight on over the bank at the side of the road. With enormous good fortune, they crashed violently through the undergrowth and found the road again on the other side. Then they hit the bank and the bike just took off. When they landed they were remarkably lucky to hit the road facing straight ahead and carry on unscathed. Mike breathlessly yelled to his daring driver, ‘Dave, Dave, stop. Let’s have a fag.’

But the daring young man on his flying machine was seriously scared himself. He yelled back grimly, ‘If I stop now, I’ll lose my nerve,’ and just kept on heading for home.

David’s love of speed was undimmed by the experience. He later exchanged his trusty 350cc BSA for a much more powerful 500cc Shooting Star, which could comfortably exceed the magical ‘ton’.

Mike Weedon recalls, ‘He really cherished that 500. He did the ton more than once. He loved high speed. He used to get quite excited about having gone more than 100mph. We had no farings to make us more streamlined in those days, so David would lie down as flat as he could on the bike to get up to those sorts of speeds. He loved it.

‘We used to race each other up the A1 and back down the Watford bypass, but it was nothing really serious. We just enjoyed racing for the fun of it and hoped the police didn’t manage to spot us.’

David plays down his high-speed youth and insists, ‘We were never real tearaways on the bikes, we were gentleman motorcyclists. There were the rockers but me and my mates had flat caps and goggles and we weren’t into all the Teddy Boy thing either. We were very shy and found it very difficult to talk to the ladies and we didn’t succeed in that department at all. So we concentrated on our motorbikes. I suppose that is what young lads do –find other ways to expend their energy. We used to strip them down, heat them up, and rebuild them.

‘I was so into motorbikes that in our outside toilet on the toilet roll holder was carved something like ‘While You Sit Here You Will Have All Your Best Dreams’, and I wrote underneath ‘Or A Super Road Rocket’. At the time, that was the Mercedes Benz of motorbiking.

‘Today, I drive a Jaguar XJS. In those days, a Super Road Rocket was as far away as the moon or an XJS because they cost about £750. We were earning £12 a week then. If I really pushed myself, I could save £2 a week which I did.’

The three lads also spent a few weeks with Bodgy’s grandfather down in Cornwall where they were all bedded down in the same room on a huge straw mattress for the night. Mike remembers, ‘It was in a little place called Mylor where there was a creek which led to Falmouth Bay. We all went out on a fishing trip in this rowing boat and tried to catch some mackerel.

‘Then the tide turned and we suddenly had to start trying to row in against the tide. For a long time we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, but finally we managed to get back into the creek and back to Bodgy’s grandfather’s place only to be told that the mackerel were out of season. We had been wasting our time.’

Mike and Bodgy finished the day drowning their sorrows with a few beers in the local, The Pandora Inn. On the way home, they had to climb a 1 in 4 hill. A combination of disappointment and alcohol had dimmed their concentration and they lost control and completed a difficult day by finishing up in a ditch. But David missed out on this final disaster because he had chatted up a young lady down by the seaside and had taken her out for the evening. He was starting to realise that laughter was a great way of breaking the ice with girls.

‘I could never impress a girl by being cool or sophisticated,’ said David, ‘even if I wanted to. But if I could make them laugh, they seemed to become more friendly.’

David was the first of the trio to take any interest in the opposite sex, although he was always careful to make sure that girls never came between him and his motorbike. He was always close to girl next door, Julie Pressland, who was just three years younger. ‘Julie was always sweet on David,’ remembers Mike Weedon, ‘but I don’t think there was ever any reciprocation there. We were just young guys, and girls never really came into our lives that much at the time, even David’s.’

Julie insists she and David were only ever very good friends. ‘I was never his girlfriend, or in love with him, or any of the other nonsense that has been suggested. I know he did have girlfriends but to me he was always so single-minded about making it as an actor that I don’t think there was ever any room for a serious romance or marriage. As long ago as I can remember, he was so dedicated to making it that nothing was going to get in his way. I think he always thought, deep down, that you could either have a normal family life, a marriage and children and all that, or you could be a successful actor. He just didn’t believe you could do both. He felt if you tried to carry a wife and children along as an actor, they would somehow fall by the wayside.’

Julie was perceptive enough to know that the real and enduring love of David’s life was to be his acting. Certainly, he enjoyed passing flirtations with girls quick enough to follow his sharp sense of humour but he never had the obsession for the opposite sex that drove so many young men to devote their lives to the pursuit.

David reflected later, ‘When I was 16, the only thing my mates were interested in was the pub, the dance hall and girls. The last thing they were interested in was acting. You had to have guts to run against the tide.’

The acting bug had bitten David for real and all his efforts were channelled into making his appearances with the Incognitos as professional as possible.

When he left school, David was wary of leaping straight in and following his brother into the precarious existence of struggling to make his way as a would-be actor. Arthur was first persuaded by their parents to take a ‘sensible job’ as an apprentice butcher but, like David, he knew he really wanted to act and launched boldly into the competitive world of weekly rep. David was happy and enjoying his amateur performances with the Incognitos and agreed to follow his parents’ considered advice that he should get a trade behind him first. His forceful mother Olwen typically insisted, ‘Actin’? That’s not respectable. You need a job. You need a trade.’

David’s first job was as an apprentice garage mechanic but he did not take to that, later recalling unhappily that his initial attempt at a sensible career consisted largely of, ‘Lying under cars in mid-winter, this stuff dropping on you, the wind whistling up your bum.’

He left after a year and decided to train as an electrician, while still pursuing his acting interests on an unpaid basis, and joined the London Electricity Board as an apprentice but the Board made him redundant. ‘I was 20 when I was made redundant by the LEB,’ he recalls. ‘It was an awful thing but it was not the end of the world. It was difficult for me. I had spent my life being employed by people. So my mate and I started our own business.’

David decided that if no one else would employ him, he would have to work for himself and, with a friend called Bob Bevil, he set up B and W Installations, after Bevil and White. But David sums up in one word his efforts to become a businessman.

‘Pathetic. As an amateur, I was acting every night of the week in those days. I formed my own electrical business so that I could be more of a free agent. But I was doing so much acting, I was always having to take time off from work to get home, get changed, learn lines. I was packing up work at about four in the afternoon to get ready for an amateur performance at eight.

‘I was getting more and more unhappy at work. I was only really happy when I was acting. We did not want to sit around and blame the Government. We were very disappointed and unhappy and we had to earn our wages as we were living at home but still needed money. We cleaned cars, did decorating, anything.

‘Then, one day, I got an offer to go to drama school. I was about 21 and well into amateur dramatics. I was spending every night of the week in the theatre. I was working during the day and more or less every night I would be down at the theatre rehearsing and acting; rehearsing plays seemed to be what I did the entire time. As an amateur you did it for nothing.

‘Then I won this award and the adjudicator – I think it was Anthony Von Gyseghem, a very well respected man – said, “I would never recommend anyone to take up the theatre but there is one man who has a possibility of making a career out of it,” and he named me. My head was so big I couldn’t get out of the room. I was absolutely over the moon.

‘But at the time I was sort of engaged to this girl. My young lady lived in Lee Green, the other side of Lewisham, which is the other side of London from my home in North Finchley. It was a long way late at night in the rain. I used to take her home on my motorbike so you can tell how besotted I was, and then I had to turn round and come back home.

‘I had not bought her a ring but we were unofficially engaged. We were just waiting for her eighteenth birthday to announce it. On the journey to her house that night of the award I was full of it and I said to her, “What do you think? Perhaps I could become an actor.”

‘There was no reply at first and then she said, “Look, if you want to be an actor, you go and be an actor, but don’t think you are going to marry me. You’re not. That is not what I want out of life. I want a man who is going to come home and spend a certain amount of time there. I want a husband, a two-up, two-down house, a steady income and a family. I want a reliable chap with a steady income, a car, a couple of kids.”

‘So much for love,’ said David. ‘Anyway, I was so terribly in love with this girl that I didn’t want to go to drama school because I wanted to get married to her.

‘At that point, I gave up the idea of becoming a professional actor. I was more interested in her at the time. But that sowed the seed and because I was totally involved as an amateur actor and no one was going to take that away from me, I went back to being a happy amateur. Within a year, we had a terrible row and we split up. I have never seen her since. I only know from a friend of mine that she did eventually get married many, many years ago. Really, the split was not over what she said, exactly, but she was a catalyst.

‘By the time I was 23, I knew I was no longer going to get married. I would get close to girls and then have this fear of being tied down. It gradually became more apparent to me that I could have a go at acting and if I wasn’t really any good I could go back to being an electrician. I couldn’t bear the thought of reaching 35 without having had a shot at what I really wanted. I started to think, “Right … this is the time. I have no ties. I must have a go at being an actor.” If I didn’t, I knew I would never forgive myself.’

But the rejection really hurt. A former workmate said, ‘David was really gutted to be knocked back like that. He wasn’t really ever a great womaniser, but women liked his lively sense of humour and he always seemed to be the one in charge of the relationships. Suddenly the girl, and she was only very young, gave him the elbow and he really didn’t like it. I thought he was always strange and a bit more remote with girls after that.’

Both Douglas Weatherhead and his wife Peggy were impressed by the youngster’s enthusiasm and eagerness to learn. And they noted his cheeky sense of humour, too. Douglas remembers, ‘I think it was mainly at his mother’s insistence that he got his trade as an electrician. She wasn’t having two sons who were both in this acting business. David was always a laugh. We were doing this play all about Greek and Roman senators for one of the youth festivals and David was playing a character called Didimus Hippocrates.

“At the same time, we bought a new washing machine which was being plumbed in and we asked an electrician friend to wire it in for us. We did not know that it was to be David who was working for our friend who actually did the job. That is, we didn’t until we got home and found a big notice on the wall which read ‘Didimus Hippocrates worked and slept here’.

Douglas and Peggy roared with laughter. Peggy remembers that, ‘David was a very dedicated lad. He wasn’t really interested in anything else but acting. But he was full of fun. He used to pull funny faces and lark about all over the place until it was time to go on stage when he would be as good as gold. He wasn’t particularly interested in girlfriends at all.’

David has always loved to leave his mark. Colin Williams, a fellow Incognito member from those days, also worked at the same trade as David for another north London electrical firm. He recalls, ‘We often met through work. I remember going to one of our friend’s houses where they were having an extension done to the kitchen. David had chased all the walls and put the cables in and then he couldn’t get back there so he called me in. When I went into the kitchen the first thing I saw, in David’s handwriting, was ‘Kildare was here’ scrawled right across the wall. The room was to be redecorated so it didn’t matter, I suppose.

‘I know he wouldn’t mind me saying that he was always a much better actor than an electrician, so I am not surprised that is why he is so successful.’

Working with the Incognitos certainly provided David with excellent training in putting on a show with the minimum of backing. The energetic Douglas Weatherhead had his young team travelling all over London by public transport, just for the chance of competing in as many drama festivals as possible.

‘David never minded hard work,’ says Douglas. ‘Once we had to take all our props to the other side of London on the bus. I remember David and I struggling up the narrow and awkward spiral staircase on to the top deck of a double-decker with a Welsh dresser. We just laughed about it all.’

David was always desperately eager to get on stage and one evening in his enthusiasm he walked into a jagged piece of corrugated iron on one of the ramshackle buildings outside. He staggered into the tiny theatre with blood pouring from his head and said, ‘I’ve had a bit of a bang.’

Amateur actress Vera Neck said, ‘David would never walk if he could run anywhere. He came in bleeding from this nasty gash in his forehead and he dripped blood all over the stage for the rest of the evening. We all felt he should go and have stitches but he wasn’t going to let a little thing like that make him miss his rehearsals. He was always supremely careless about his appearance so blood rushing down his shirt was nothing out of the ordinary.’

David would often race to rehearsals straight from work and sometimes his grubby clothes raised eyebrows among the more senior and established members of the Incognitos.

Vera Neck says, ‘He sometimes turned up in dirty, grubby things. I remember being shocked at the colour of his underpants when we were rehearsing one of those ‘Sailor, Beware’ things and he had to drop his trousers.

‘There were all these elderly ladies among the cast – I suppose he was about 20 and we were 30 something – and they all went ‘Tut-tut-tut-tut’. And he couldn’t blame his mum. She used to ‘do’ for me and she was a clean little body. But I’ll never forget those grubby underpants.

‘The play had a bit of rough and tumble and he disappeared over the back of a couch with his bum in the air. He had these psychedelic patterned pants with an underlying grey hue.’

Vera Neck lived in Torrington Park, Friern Barnet, and Olwen used to clean for her for three hours every week. ‘She was lovely,’ remembers Vera, ‘very concerned for her family and very particular about her job.’

They had many conversations about David’s dramatic ambitions. With his older brother Arthur, who had got into acting while doing his National Service in the Army, already struggling in the uncertain world of rep, Olwen worried greatly about her second son’s ambitions.

David loved the atmosphere of earnest enthusiasm among all the members of the Incognitos and it was not long before he was snapping up some of the prime parts. He said, ‘I was encouraged to act at school. I was a natural at playing the fool. I loved it with the Incognitos. I wasn’t showing off, it was about entering a Walter Mitty sort of world where you could do anything, be absolutely anybody.’

He was still just 15 years old in July 1955, when noted local critic Bill Gelder from the Barnet and Finchley Press warmly praised his performance in Robert’s Wife by St John Ervine. David deeply appreciated Gelder’s comment: ‘David White did well as a young chap wanting to do the ‘right’ thing by a girl.’

But it was a guest appearance for the nearby Manor Players when Bill Gelder hinted publicly that the youngster might one day earn his living from his acting. Gelder wrote: ‘… the extraordinarily precocious schoolboy by David White, looking like a young James Cagney and playing, though only 16, with the ease of a born actor … possibly the highlight of the evening which was bright enough in all conscience.’ The acclaim delighted David. He carefully cut out the review and made sure it didn’t escape his parents’ notice.

His mother, who still considered that one son risking his future in such a risky profession was more than enough, proudly noted the critic’s perceptive opinion but was still insistent that David persevere with his electrical qualifications.

‘It was very nice to get praise from Bill Gelder,’ says David. ‘He was always considered the best drama critic of the lot. If you got a good review from him, it counted. Most of the local press tend to praise the whole cast for fear of offending someone. I suppose they can’t say so-and-so is a load of rubbish, but Bill Gelder could be quite hard and quite cutting and he was always respected.’

Not that David took life too seriously in those days. Julie Pressland remembers a young man who was always terrific fun to be with. ‘It was great to be in David’s company,’ she says. ‘I used to love to go around with him. He had determination. We all enrolled for some evening classes or other but most of us dropped out soon afterwards. But David was very single-minded, he carried on with his amateur dramatics. He went for it. David always believed that you should decide whatever you want to do and then go for it.

‘But he was a laugh as well. It was in 1962 when David took me for my first Chinese meal. I had never had Chinese food before but he talked me into it. He said it was delicious and really raved about it. I remember I had a new suit for the evening and when we got to the restaurant and the food arrived I thought it was the most dreadful slop I had ever seen in my life. The first time you see Chinese food it can look disgusting. I kept saying, “It’s very nice, it’s very nice,” because I didn’t want to offend David.

‘When I got home, I was sick all over this new suit and I never touched Chinese food again for about 15 years after that. I will never forget that night. I pretended all evening that I liked the food as muchas he did. Then, at the end, he said, “Oh, we must finish off with some jasmine tea.” I thought, “My God, that will certainly finish me off.” I told David the next day that I had brought up his Chinese all over my new suit and he just burst out laughing. He thought it was hilarious.’

But he was also honest enough to admit later that, during those early stages of his amateur career, ‘I really didn’t think I had the ability to turn professional. Most people who become actors are so confident. They know for certain that they are right and everybody else is wrong. I was the opposite. I was very, very insecure – mind you, I think I’m still insecure, but I’m not as bad as I was.’

In fact, the black moods of frustration that would sometimes descend on the generally perky young man do date right back to his youth. A workmate said, ‘David was a great guy to go out with because normally he was a laugh a minute. But he could suddenly turn. One night, we were in a pub in Finchley and he had been working hard at chatting up this very pretty young girl. Then an old boyfriend of hers arrived, a very well spoken chap dressed in a smart blazer and cavalry twills. I think he was home from the Army. All of a sudden, she just turned away from David and started talking to this posh bloke. David was livid. He hardly said another word all night. When I mentioned it the next day he gave me a really menacing look and said, “I hate those stuck-up bastards. They think they own the world.” I was surprised because he was still seething with anger. He wasn’t that keen on the girl – it was just the way he had been dropped. He couldn’t bear that.’

The ability to get laughs that he had displayed so often at school was swiftly transferred to the stage. He had enormous straight acting talent but always preferred comedy. Vera Neck says, ‘He did do quite a variety of straight roles, but if there was a chance to drop a tray, sit on his bottom or drop his trousers, he was there.’

Vera is a statuesque lady of 5ft 7in, which caused some amusing moments when she and David were cast as lovers in a Spanish play. ‘We had to devise ways of making me look a bit shorter than David,’ recalls Vera. ‘I sat at his feet rather a lot. We didn’t have many love scenes because we were physically so ill-matched. On the few occasions it did happen, we just had to cheat it.

‘I found him quite affectionate. We had tremendous warmth and rapport on stage. He had it with everyone. He is such a lovely actor. We chanced on a time in our group when there must have been half-a-dozen people who could, in ordinary circumstances, have earned their living as actors, had they been tempera-mentally suited to it. I wasn’t – I had the talent but not the temperament. But the feeling that flowed between those few people who were there at that time was wonderful.

‘David was the leading light. We loved him. He used to come to all the parties and he was always the life and soul in a muck-about way. He was a clown. He just liked mucking about.’

Another of David’s regular leading ladies was Barbara Dunks. Again, she was an inch or so taller than he was, so a fair amount of knee-bending and sitting down was called for. Barbara became another firm friend and a devoted fan of the poverty stricken young hopeful. She remembers, ‘He was such a callow, gangling youth when I first saw him, but I knew straight away that he had that magical something that all actors yearn for … presence.

‘He was so full of life and even at 15 you knew he was special. But he was such a monkey at making you laugh at all the wrong moments. When you were in the middle of a terribly serious interchange in rehearsals, he could just look at you and you would just break up. He just had that twinkle. The producer would be going mad but there was nothing you could do about it. He was always very serious and proper when we were doing it for real, but in rehearsals you could never be sure he wasn’t going to produce a piece of mischief.

‘It was so sad, though, that it seemed he could never take the hero’s part because he was so short. Instead, he was automatically put into the comedy parts which he was brilliant at. But other boys, who frequently did not possess a millionth of his talent, so often became the tall hero.

‘I always felt that the height thing did bother him. Knowing David, he would say it didn’t, but I have seen him watch a play with the hero or leading man in a scene and I just knew that he would have loved that part.

‘The trouble was that, even in amateur things, you get typecast, people start to forget you might be able to do anything but comedy. If ever there was a funny part they would think, “Oh, we’ll get David to do that and 6ft Henry to do the hero.” Sometimes it was simply the wrong way round. You could see it was.’

Barbara recognised that David had decided he did not want to get involved with any girls. ‘He was friendly with the girls in the club but he did not seem to want to get serious about anybody. He used to come down to the theatre in his little van. We used to pull his leg about being an electrician, say he was enough to give anyone a shock.

‘We were in a revue together, early on in his time with the Incognitos and we had to sing “Bye, Bye Blackbird”. I remember we were in hysterics in the wings because it was so bad. Well, we thought it was bad but in fact the audience loved it because they knew us all from the serious plays and thought for us all to be in this light-hearted revue singing this silly song not very well was great fun.

‘It was a real joke for all of us and, although we were all supposed to behave ourselves, we thought it was a huge joke. We were all togged up ready to sing this bloomin’ song, but in all the giggling and larking about in the wings just as we were supposed to dance on, I happened to stand on poor old David’s bootlace and he rolled on to the stage in a heap. Being David of course, he carried the mistake off brilliantly – he could always do that – and I’m sure the audience thought it was all supposed to be part of the show.

‘There was no one better for getting you out of a mess than David. He had a mind like lightning for thinking things out whenever we went wrong. There was this scene when we were together in The Glass Menagerie. We had this dreadful old wind-up gramophone and at one point I had to wind it up and put the needle down to play a record.

‘But something went wrong and instead of lovely music we just got this horrible scratching sound. David came to the centre of the stage and just took control. He picked up the needle and made a remark that fitted in and cut out the need for the music and we carried on as though nothing had happened.

‘But it meant through David’s guidance we started in the middle of the scene and we went to the end and then back to the beginning. We were all terribly muddled but David was so brilliant that nobody even knew we had gone wrong. Apart, that is, from the prompter that night. She was so flustered at the end that she rushed on and said, “I’ve had four pingers in five fages. What’s happening?” She was in such a state she didn’t know where we were. David was never flustered. He just used to say, “Pick it up and keep carrying on.”

‘His brother Arthur was acting professionally by then and I always got the feeling with David that, although I knew he would love to become an actor, there was always this feeling of caution and reticence about him, especially at the beginning because, deep down, he did not really know whether he would be good enough. We all knew he would, but he didn’t.

‘He was so good and it all came so naturally to him. The technicalities of the stage never bothered him. Offstage he was just a very nice boy, always cracking jokes, always cheerful. But I think he was concerned about not having his share of serious roles. It was Brian Babb who first cast him in a leading, non-comedy role in Next Time I’ll Sing To You and, of course, he did it beautifully. People realised from then on that he could be a serious actor. The trouble was that all of the four or five leading ladies at that time were taller than David, so it was always difficult with us.’

David’s 21st birthday party was an occasion for the White family to really push the boat out. In order to cram in as many guests as possible on David’s big day, they took off all the downstairs doors to make more space. David prepared much of the sumptuous spread himself and the music of Johnny Tillotson, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers rang out down Lodge Lane.

‘It was a wonderful party,’ remembers Julie Pressland. ‘We all thought it was great having an open-plan house.

‘I went to David’s house a lot at that time. Me and David and his partner Bob Bevil and my friend Carol Haddock used to go to our local dance hall, the Atheneum in Muswell Hill, or up to Alexandra Palace for a drink and then come back to David’s.

‘We’d sit in his front room and talk and talk for hours on end. He had such plans and ambitions for the future, he just loved everything about acting and drama, he was so very determined to be good at every part he had. We were a foursome for a time but David and I never had a romance. I did have a crush on David but that was when I was five or six. He was literally the boy next door, a great pal.

‘That was when I began to notice a more serious side. He was still great fun and often he would be larking about of course, just like before. But also he would sometimes recite long bits of poetry or quotations from Shakespeare. He was becoming very well read and getting more and more into his acting. It seemed to dominate his whole life. He loved Richard Burton and his recording of Under Milk Wood in that wonderful voice. David could copy that voice brilliantly and the Welsh in him really seemed to come out. We all knew then that he had an amazing, God-given talent.

‘David had all the typical motorbike leather gear, but when he went out in the evening in his suit and tie he always looked impeccable. He had this gorgeous thick wavy hair and that cheeky grin. But even more, he had this remarkable personality where he could walk into a pub and just make everyone laugh.

‘It seemed so effortless. He could instantly have people eating out of his hand. It was obvious to me that he was going to do much more with his life than mend fuses. He always made jokes about not being very tall. I remember once he couldn’t get served in our local, The Torrington at the end of Lodge Lane, so he stood on the bar rail and just held his money out for a giggle. He didn’t mind everyone laughing at him being small, he stood up there to make us all laugh.’

Not quite everyone was captivated by the David White charisma. When the Lodge Lane off licence, just one door away from the White household, was modernised, young David was in his early 20s and less than impressed by the sudden wind of change. He walked in to find that the old beer pumps had been swept away in a major refurbishment. The elegant, polished wood serving counters had been replaced by gleaming new plastic affairs. The old-fashioned off licence had been turned into a modern mini-market.

Julie and David called in for an inspection. Julie recalls, ‘I asked David what he thought of the new look and he took one look round and said, “I think it’s awful.”He hated it and the way that all the tradition of the place had been swept away and walked straight out. The man who had done all the revamping looked crestfallen and said to me, “He’s a bit of an upstart, isn’t he?”’

Julie herself got a shock the night David came home rather late from another hugely successful night with the Incognitos. She recalls, ‘I was 22 at the time and he gave me the fright of my life. I used to sleep in our front bedroom and I was woken up about three o’clock one morning by what I thought was the sound of someone trying to break into one of the houses. I looked out and it was David standing all forlorn with his toolbag. I opened the window as quietly as I could and he said that he was very late home from doing a play and his mum had locked him out.

‘I went downstairs and brought him through our house so he could climb over the fence and get in the back way. I was frightened because I was in my nightie and my mum and dad were asleep. I kept telling him to be quiet and he kept giggling and larking about. Then, when I got him outside he got on top of the fence and of all things he started reciting the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. I was really panicking by then because I knew if my mum came downstairs and found David there with me in my nightclothes she would never believe that I was just helping him to get home. I said, “For God’s sake, shut up. If my mum and dad hear you, we’ll both be dead.” But that was so typical of his humour, he always had a tremendous amount of fun in him.

‘We got on very well together and we were always amazed that our mothers also got on really well. Because while David’s mum was very broad Welsh my mum was just as broad Irish. They both had really strong accents and they used to have these incredible conversations. David used to say that the only reason they never rowed with each other was because they each did not have a clue what the other one was saying.

‘In our growing up years, everybody liked David. He was always very funny with a natural gentle humour that was never directed at anyone but himself. I know they say most people who are very funny are usually manic depressives, but David never was. You never saw him depressed or down. He just had a natural sunny good nature.

‘David was always very generous. He was one of the first of his contemporaries in Lodge Lane to get a car, a little Mini van that he and Bob used for their business. He was always ready to use it to help people out. When Ernie Pressland’s baby daughter Sarah was suddenly taken ill with a racing heart, David rushed her and Ernie’s wife Claire to hospital.

Ernie is still grateful. ‘Even in those days, they were homing in on potential cot deaths. My mother knew there was something wrong with Sarah because she had had two youngsters die herself. I was at work at the time and David took the wife and the baby up to The Whittington Hospital. They wanted to get her there as fast as possible and it was just as well David was around to help.

‘It turned out Sarah was born with two little pacemakers in her heart instead of one. Every so often, something will trigger off the second one and her heart would go ten to the dozen and she got a loss of blood pressure. She is fine now and has a young son of her own called Daniel. We will always be grateful to David.’

David was in action again with his makeshift ambulance when Ernie’s and Julie’s sister Maureen needed rushing to hospital to have her baby. And to complete the job he took Maureen’s husband Rob to bring her and the baby home.

Yet on arriving for the return trip, David could not resist a joke. As Maureen was coming out of the ward with the nurse who was holding the baby, David and Rob were approaching down a long corridor. Suddenly, David brushed past Rob and shouted, ‘Now we’ll see whose baby this is!’

It took Maureen and Rob a moment, but they did quickly realise this was a typical David White laugh. The nurse was not so experienced in this curiously quirky sense of humour and almost dropped the baby.

Only Fools and Horses hero Derek Trotter would have been deeply ashamed of David White if he had been around to see the young electrician buy his first car. He already had a share in the Mini van of course, a symbol of the struggling business partnership, but that did not quite fit the bill for the particular purpose the enthusiastic amateur actor had in mind for his motor.

‘I was desperate to get into cars,’ said David, ‘because I knew it was the only way to pull the birds. You can’t do it with your motorbike. So I went down to Colindale and bought a great, gleaming Ford Zephyr Six. It looked a lovely car but I was really, really ripped off. It was the most clapped out thing in the world. My real passion was for motorbikes and I sold my bike for £60 to buy the car and I got really ripped off on that as well.

‘I think I must be the most ripped off person in the world. The car salesman was a typical Boycie. He must have seen me coming a mile off. I fell in love with the Zephyr as soon as I saw it which must have been my first mistake. It looked fabulous and it would be worth a fortune now. It was a lovely car except that, of course, it was completely clapped out. But when you are getting your first car you know how it is. You’re so keen to get behind the wheel you don’t spend long enough looking underneath the bonnet.

‘But I soon learned an important and very expensive lesson. The gearbox was full of sawdust and so was the back axle, and the engine was totally knackered. I seemed to spend my entire life under the bonnet tinkering with the engine trying to get the blasted thing to go. I don’t think I ever had time to try to pick up any girls in the car. It never went for long enough without grinding to a halt.’