John Fisher - Tony Hancock - The Definitive Biography

I’ve come here to give you a story

Of the rip-roaring wild woolly west,

Where the Indians chew nails and drink liquor

While the men grow sweet peas on their chest.

In the township of Toenail City

Lived the Sheriff, a man of good class,

But he drank like a fish did the Sheriff,

Till his breath burned a hole through the glass .

But the pride of his life was his moustache –

It was famous as Niagara Falls

And his missus when washing on Fridays

Used the moustache to hang out the smalls.

His moustache was so long and whippy

People spoke of it under their breath

And the old-timers said that the Sheriff once sneezed

And it practically flogged him to death.

But whenever the Sheriff was shaving,

You could see him all covered in gore.

His whiskers just blunted the razor,

So he hammered them back in his jaw.

’Twas with Hortense, the bartender’s daughter

That he finally found his romance

Till one day she sat down beside him

She got one of his spurs in the pants.

She walloped him hard in the pants,

Her temper was starting to foment,

But the Sheriff’s false teeth just flew out with a pop

And bit her on the spur of the moment .

Then Hortense turned round on the Sheriff

And kicked him real hard on the jaw

And hearing the cowboys applauding

Pulled the hair off his chest for encore.

But the Sheriff at last found his false teeth

And shoved them in reverse in his head,

So that when he attempted to talk to Hortense,

He chewed lumps off his back stud instead.

Then up rode Hortense’s fiancé,

It was all he could do to keep standing.

He was so thin his landlady had to take care,

Lest the cat got him out on the landing.

The gorgeous beast jumped from his mustang,

And said to the Sheriff, ‘Desist!

‘Unhand this poor innocent maiden,

‘Or I’ll come and slap you on the wrist.’

The Sheriff just drove him so deep in the ground,

His face turned quite yellow with terror.

He went so deep that coalminers lunching below

Chewed the soles of his gumboots in error.

’Twas a shame for Hortense’s fiancé,

He was only just out of his teens.

He was too full of holes to be buried,

So they used him to strain out the greens .

The first reality to confront him upon leaving Bradfield was far removed from the 1930s’ variety stage, although it had everything to do with the comedy he would make his own in later years. He soon became involved in life at the hotel and brought all his powers of observation to bear upon a different world: ‘It was the kind of place which attracted little old ladies. They used to set out for the dining room at 11.30 and get there just in time for the gong at one.’ The intake seemed to be dominated by ‘several dowagers who used to sweep in like galleons under full sail, with their frigates of female companions, bouncing along nervously in their wake. What those companions put up with for the sake of a winter at Bournemouth!’ Christmas provided an exceptional opportunity to observe the idiosyncrasies of the British at play. Lily poured her heart into making sure all had a good time, but not all went to plan. As her son remembered, they had to drop a game dubbed ‘Woolworth’s Tea’: ‘The idea was that everybody came to tea wearing something they had got from Woolworth’s which, in those days, meant it had cost not more than sixpence. Then your partner had to find out what it was. Fine, until somebody nominated a lady’s priceless family heirloom. End of Woolworth’s teas!’ The Christmas fancy head-dress party proved more popular: ‘There was the man who came as a Christmas pudding … he wore the plate round his neck and on his shoulders like a ruff and encased his head in a papier- mâché pudding complete with sprigs of holly on the top. And he refused to take it off. He sat throughout dinner feeding himself through a visorish trap door in the front. We tapped on the side between courses to make sure he was all right. It must have been very hot in there … pity, because he didn’t even win a prize.’ One of his jobs was to write out the daily menus: ‘The soup was the same every day – it sort of accumulated over the years. We used to do it geographically. I used to call it Potage Strasbourg, Potage Cherbourg . Then we got into the West Country and called it Potage Budleigh Salterton and Potage Shepton Mallet . It all tasted exactly the same and was repulsive.’

The hotel business gave him the opportunity of learning all he needed to know about petit-bourgeois gentility: how fierce, precarious and destructive it could be, while always open to comic interpretation. Nothing escaped Hancock as he turned over in his mind the potential for characterisation in comedy. He even observed that the old ladies marked the levels of their marmalade jars. Lily was well aware of her son’s comic perspective: ‘It wasn’t the way he told jokes. It was the way Tony saw the world. The way he never forgot anything.’

He was now fifteen, his only distraction from such matters provided by his decision to enrol for a commercial skills course in shorthand and touch-typing at the Bournemouth Municipal College. Records state that he signed up for the course the day after war was declared at the beginning of September, so he did not waste time. It was while, in his own words, he was ‘fondly beating out the old a-s-d-f-y-;-l-k-j-h to music’ that he decided to announce to the world what he had known for a long time, that he wanted to spend his lifetime making people laugh. This in spite of the fact that he soon acquired speeds of 120 wpm for shorthand and 140 wpm for typing!

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