John Fisher - Tony Hancock - The Definitive Biography

Hancock was what might be called a deadline baby, in that his father left it forty-two days before registering the birth of his second son at Kings Norton register office, the maximum period allowed by law. When the child was three years old, the family, prompted by medical advice in the matter of his father’s bronchial troubles, relocated to the purer air and more temperate, more genteel climes of Bournemouth. In later times Hancock would recall the event with typical deadpan insouciance: ‘What a brave band we were, striking south that summer morning. Every hamlet, every village, every town we passed through accorded us a truly remarkable lack of attention, exceeded only by the complete anonymity of our arrival in Bournemouth itself.’ By all accounts his father was a thrifty soul, refusing to buy enough petrol to take them beyond Bath, where they had to refuel for the final leg of the momentous journey. He had an automatic refrain when questioned why he didn’t fill the tank up completely, the same words of morbid circumspection he used when his wife constantly queried his purchase of one Alcazar razor blade at a time, rather than a packet of six: ‘You never know.’ The move was made viable by the monetary support of Tony’s maternal grandfather, Harry Samuel Thomas, an enterprising printer and lithographer whose success provided him with the financial cushion to serve for twenty-one years as a director of Birmingham City Football Club. His photograph is contained in the handbook published to mark the opening of the St Andrew’s ground in 1906. It was said of him by Harry Morris, a chairman of the club in the 1960s, that ‘he was always a very good judge of a footballer’. His daughter, Lucie Lilian, had married her husband eighteen days after the outbreak of the World War on 22 August 1914 at the parish church of St Oswald’s, Bordesley. On the marriage certificate she is recorded as two years younger than her partner, the son of William Hancock, a foreman builder. The Hancocks originally hailed from a family of stonemasons in the West Country. John, or Jack as he became known, was born in the Bedminster district of Bristol on 14 December 1887 to William, a carpenter and joiner, and his wife, Elizabeth. The family subsequently relocated to Sutton Coldfield. Tony’s mother entered the world on 4 September 1890 at 323 Cooksey Road, Small Heath, the child of Harry and his bride, Clara Hannah née Williams.

The search by Tony’s parents for a combined work and investment opportunity – subsidised in part by a £950 profit on the previous sale and in part by Thomas, who also fancied the idea of Bournemouth as a retirement prospect for himself – resulted in the purchase of an unlikely business in the northern hinterland of the resort. The Mayo Hygienic Laundry was situated on the south side of Strouden Road at Nos 144 and 146, washroom and shop respectively, with living accommodation over the latter, in the district of Winton. Hancock found himself genuflecting to this aspect of his heritage only once in his comedy career. As he settles down on his flight to an alpine vacation where the yodelling Kenneth Williams will prove particularly irksome, he stresses, ‘I needed this holiday – it’s been hard work in the laundry lately.’ In spite of the enthusiasm Lily expressly put into what had been an ailing business – a secondary outlet to receive and redistribute washing in the centre of Bournemouth being a decided asset in this regard – there was scant likelihood that the genial Jack would flourish in an environment which presented so little opportunity for the bonhomie of the social world. When, at the turn of the new decade, Strong & Co., the Romsey-based brewery, presented him with a chance to become the licensee of a central hostelry, little time was wasted. It may seem a big leap from running a laundry to managing a public house, but both were service industries and both left a pungent reminder on the olfactory sense of the future comedian: bleach and hops would provide him with a mental trigger à la recherche du temps perdu to the end of his days.

A valuable eye-witness to these times was the aforesaid nanny, Elsie Sparks, who joined the family at the age of seventeen on a salary of £1 10s. a week. More than sixty years later in an interview for the Bournemouth Evening Echo she recalled Tony as ‘a lovely chubby little chap’ who wouldn’t let her out of his sight, although ‘you could always tell when he’d been naughty or done something he shouldn’t have done because he’d hide under the table. And if you ever took him to the park and there were other boys around, he’d run off and bring their caps back to you!’ Tony, like herself, was not too happy with his first impressions of the holiday town: ‘He couldn’t understand the accent, and the sea frightened him.’ It was through Sparks that Hancock had been christened Anthony: long before he was born she could not stop talking about the previous charge she had left in order to attend initially to his brother, Colin. Lily was convinced her second child would be a boy and made a promise that if correct she would call him by the same name to keep her happy. As his brother surged ahead of him, Anthony redivivus became her sole charge. On nature walks in the lanes and fields that encroached upon the new home, she soon observed an introspection and lack of confidence that she sensed was set off by the move south: ‘He disliked meeting anyone new, trying anything new … he couldn’t wait to get home. In fact, the only place he was really happy and relaxed was in the small, fenced-in back garden.’

By Christmas the unhappiness and heavy heart had been joined by a physical setback. The doctor soon diagnosed the swelling around his wrists and leg joints as rickets. Not funny at the time, the disorder left him with that hollow-chested, hunched-shoulder look that became part of his comic vocabulary throughout his adult life. An attempt in childhood to straighten himself out led to exercises that involved hanging from a bar until his arms gave way. The procedure came to an abrupt end the day he caught sight of his shadow: ‘I looked like a bloody great bat,’ he grumbled. It is also the consensus of opinion that he grew into an untidy child, a fact with which Hancock concurred: ‘Mother would take us out on a shopping spree and set us up in smart new suits, but so far as I was concerned she was wasting her time. Colin and Roger would arrive home looking as spruce as you could wish, but I always let the side down. My suits had a way of looking old and ill fitting the moment I got into them.’ The uneasy feeling with clothes persisted through the years of his greatest success.

In retrospect the move to Bournemouth with its bustling entertainment industry both in and out of season provided Hancock senior with the ideal milieu in which to vent his frustrated skills as an entertainer. He would soon be caught up again in the whirl of concerts, ladies’ nights and private bookings that had made life in Birmingham more bearable, culminating in November and December 1923 in two broadcasts, billed first as a ‘humorist’ and then as an ‘entertainer’, on the radio station 5IT that broadcast from the city between 1922 and 1927. Now as the landlord of the Railway Hotel at 119 Holdenhurst Road, near to Bournemouth’s town centre, he had discovered the perfect environment in which to combine business, the entertainment of others and the ability to socialise with the colourful parade of theatricals that frequented the venue, both as occasional drinkers and overnight guests. The hostelry epitomised the racy side that between the wars bristled alongside the more respectable image the resort has always seemed anxious to cultivate. In many respects it may be no different from other South Coast seaside towns with their palm court and putting green aspirations to genteelness, but where else but Bournemouth do you discover illuminations that still shun neon-lit vulgarity in favour of a flickering wonderland of candles each lit by hand in its coloured glass jar?