John Fisher - Tony Hancock - The Definitive Biography

When asked by the journalist Ray Nunn in the summer of 1962 whether he thought his father’s death had had a lasting effect on his personality, he replied, ‘I prefer not to answer that.’ With respect for the response, Nunn moved swiftly on to his next question, ‘What do you hate most of all?’ ‘Any form of cruelty,’ said Hancock. Osborne’s Jimmy Porter had been ten years old when his father had died: ‘For twelve months I watched my father dying … he would talk to me for hours, pouring out all that was left of his life to one lonely, bewildered little boy, who could barely understand half of what he said … you see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry – angry and helpless.’ It would be wrong to read such intimacy into Hancock’s situation, but Damaris Hayman, who sensed the love Tony had for him, recalled an emotional moment when he told her his father reminded him of the stag in Bambi , the moment when the young fawn acknowledges him as his sire and his mother explains, ‘Everyone respects him … he’s very brave and very wise. That’s why he’s known as the Great Prince of the forest.’ ‘Obviously,’ says Damaris, ‘his father was an almost god-like figure to him.’

On that same appearance with David Frost, Hancock reminisced about one of the songs his father used as a closing number. He couldn’t remember the words, but a member of the viewing public later obliged and he was invited back on the following evening’s show to interpret them. The song was called ‘First Long Trousers’ and it took the son some emotional effort to get to the end:

Say, young fellow, just a minute,

These are your first long trousers, eh?

Your little grubby knee breeches

Are for ever put away …

… Gee, you look well in them, sonny!

I can’t believe my eyes.

It doesn’t seem a year ago

When you were just – this size!

A little pink cheeked youngster,

Why, you toddled more than ran

Every night to meet your daddy –

Now you’ve got long trousers on.

Oh, I don’t know how to tell you,

But I want to, yes I do,

That your mummy and your daddy both

Are mighty proud of you.

And we’re going to miss the baby

That from us this day has gone.

But that baby we’ll remember

Though he has long trousers on .

By that time there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

It was only after his father’s death that Tony was sent away from home to school. He had spent the autumn term of 1929 at Summerbee Infants School, now the Queen’s Park Infants School, at Charminster, about half a mile from the family laundry. A conversation between Hancock archivist Malcolm Chapman and a fellow pupil revealed that he turned up in a smart brown suit, which was most unusual at a time when most parents in the area could not afford that kind of apparel. When the family moved into the hotel trade, his education climbed a notch up the social scale. Saugeen Preparatory School, founded in 1873, announced itself to prospective parents as ‘a preparatory school for boys for the Public Schools and the Navy’. It could boast of John Galsworthy as an old boy and had links with Robert Louis Stevenson (Lloyd Osbourne, the stepson for whom he wrote Treasure Island , had gone there as well). Coincidentally, the building in Derby Road is now occupied by another hotel, the Majestic. Coincidentally again, Treasure Island provided a leitmotif that would resonate in Hancock’s stage act down the years. The young Tony was now obliged to adopt a school uniform that comprised Eton collar, short jacket and black pinstripe trousers. The establishment provided the choristers, the young Hancock among them, for St Swithun’s Church only a few hundred yards away both from his parents’ second hotel venture and the school itself. In the spring of 1935 Saugeen School relocated to nearby Wimborne.

Events moved quickly in Hancock’s life after his father died. On 1 January the following year his mother remarried. A few days later he followed in the footsteps of his elder brother, Colin, and was enrolled as a pupil at Durlston Court School in Swanage. That he made the move halfway through the academic year suggests his mother may have needed to regroup and give herself the additional space to manage the business and her new life. It may merely signify that Saugeen School – had he continued to attend its new Wimborne location – closed down or was about to close down around this time. In his will Jack Hancock left the gross value of his whole estate of £13,961 to ‘Billy’ for ‘her unstintable [ sic ] and loving kindnesses during my life’. The remarriage so relatively soon after her first husband’s demise caused some consternation among many of the family’s friends. George Fairweather had little time for Robert Gordon Walker, twelve years his wife’s junior, the electrical contractor involved in the renovation of Durlston Court Hotel. A man of athletic appearance, he had played for Boscombe football club as a semi-professional for ten years. Within six months of the marriage he had sold his electrical company and was registered as a joint director of the hotel.

According to Roger, however, there was little question of his becoming a major presence in the lives of the three brothers: ‘My mother always said, “You mustn’t have anything to do with him. You’re my son and I’m the one who makes all the decisions. You’re not to take any decisions from him.” She rather put him down.’ When years later Roger himself married, he took his bride down to Bournemouth to meet his stepfather: ‘I’d always been put off him by my mother. When Annie met him for the first time, she said, “I think he’s lovely.” And for the first time in my life I realised he actually was a very nice person, but I’d always been talked out of it by my mother.’ It is understandable to imagine that any guilt or embarrassment Lily felt in the circumstances may have been channelled into brainwashing her children in this way. In her lifetime she married three times, but as Roger stresses, ‘Never for money! Never for money! Except the last one, who dropped down dead at her feet. He was a multi-millionaire. They were about to be married. There was going to be a fourth.’ One thing he will never take away from her is the intensity with which she threw herself into running the business: ‘She worked so bloody hard. Twenty-four hours a day.’ If she was not in the office, she was in the kitchen. Not that she was without back-up staff. Her youngest son recalls the Swiss chef who used to chase everyone around the kitchen with a knife when his anger was roused. Colin was by now managing the accounts, when, that is, he was not indulging his passion for tap-dancing. When questioned about the social contradiction in how a relatively modest family could afford to process three offspring through private education, Roger can only point to her industry: ‘I wish I had known my mother better. She was so supportive. She paid all the school fees. But children don’t think of that at the time. It wasn’t as if they were well off. She grafted so hard.’

Tony Hancock remained at Durlston Court School in Swanage until the summer of 1938. When he joined, there were around sixty-five boys on the register. Converted in 1903 from a large mid-Victorian private house, it occupied a commanding position overlooking the bay and the resort’s monumental Great Globe, 40 ornamental tons of the Portland limestone that characterised the area. Between 1928 and 1965 it could boast the redoubtable Pat Cox as headmaster, immortalised later by another Durlstonian, the scriptwriter and producer David Croft, as the part-inspiration for Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army . ‘It’s not that he was a pompous man,’ David recalls, ‘more that he represented all the best characteristics of being British, loyalty, and the old school.’ Cox had been a junior officer in the Durham Light Infantry during the Great War at the age of seventeen. ‘It’s not if we win the war, it’s when we win the war,’ he would pontificate during the later conflict. Croft arrived just after Hancock left. He recalls that the mistress in charge of the junior school had with some foresight told Hancock that if he didn’t sit up straight and hold his head erect he would grow into a round-shouldered old man. Sadly he did not need to reach old age to fulfil the prophecy. According to Roger, himself an old boy, the school’s motto, engraved on its crest beneath the imperial Roman eagle, was ‘ Erectus Non Elatus ’. This quickly translated into ‘Upright, not boastful’. Hancock might have preferred the line from the old George Formby song: ‘I’m not stuck up or proud – I’m just one of the crowd – a good turn I’ll do when I can!’