Chris Welch - Ginger Geezer - The Life of Vivian Stanshall

The London Blitz was past its peak, but the country still faced danger from the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s V1 and V2 revenge weapons. Shillingford did not escape the bombs, because it was between two air-force bases which were under fire, particularly at night. Young Anthony’s Oxfordshire adventure ceased when the war ended. It was a mixed blessing to have Dad back. Anthony later said that he could remember almost nothing from the age of three until he went to art school, perhaps an attempt to block out parental criticism. Ominously, his father came back with ideas. He decided he was officer class. This attitude manifested itself in his belief that it was important to speak ‘correctly’ in order to get on in life, a trait Eileen had first noticed in Vic’s mother. In turn, Anthony’s dad instilled the same into his family.

‘He was fearfully middle-middle-class,’ says Mark Stanshall. ‘We all spoke with this awfully posh accent.’ Commendable, perhaps, but totally out of place when the family moved away from the tranquillity of Oxford and back to the urban sprawl of London’s Walthamstow. For the rest of his life, Anthony would remember the incongruity of learning received pronunciation. ‘I didn’t even know any upper- or middle-class kids, but I was saddled with a posh accent that was totally unjustified by my background. I didn’t really know which side I was on.’ 5If he was reticent in applying himself, he had the voice ‘thrashed’ into him by his father. 6Vivian began to split his persona between the tough talker of the streets and the polite conversationalist at home.

For all that, Walthamstow was not too bad. They had a corner house at 173 Grove Road. ‘We used to grow sunflowers out in the back garden and keep tortoises,’ says Mark Stanshall. In 1953, the family settled in Westcliffe, between Southend and Leigh-on-Sea. For a time they had a flat above a shoe shop in Westcliffe’s broad shopping street, at that time the smartest area of the town. They moved into a house in Beech Avenue seven years later. Anthony became more streetwise in Southend, still veering at will between the tough talk of the local lads and the Home Service, BBC tones his father required. Immediately after the war, Vic’s ambition was to become a chartered accountant. Eileen recalls that he worked near Fleet Street for a finance company involved in the South African diamond trade. As with so much else, he was never forthcoming to his family about his work.

‘No one knew what he did exactly but it was something to do with unit trusts,’ says Mark. He was not as grand a figure in the City as he made out, never inviting Eileen up to London to meet his partners. Ex-officer Stanshall (now balding, like all the male Stanshalls) was always smartly dressed when he went to work. He took plastic Paca-Macs for added protection, which Mark remembers ‘we always thought were ridiculous’.

Anthony was both impressed and intimidated by the spectacle. ‘He polished his shoes so shiny that when you looked down you could see all the way up to his suspenders – or up skirts, if you fancied it. And then he covered his shoes with protective rubber galoshes and with bowler hat rammed tight and brolly grasped, he would every morning roller-skate from Walthamstow to the City.’ 7A wonderful image, this Stanshallian flight of fancy has roots in reality, as his mother confirms: ‘A lot of people did roller-skate during the bus strikes. He might have tried it once or twice. I remember there used to be loads of strikes even when I worked in London and I used to thumb a lift to the office. It was quite fun. Everybody was doing it.’ Mr Stanshall, however was unaware of any humorous aspect to the ritual of work. Like many of his generation, he was not adept at handling emotions of any kind. Anthony was ‘downright terrified’ of his father and would continue to be so, even after the man’s death almost forty years later. The boy keenly felt the lack of any conspicuous display of affection. Eileen is quite sure that his father loved him. ‘A lot of men are like that. They love the babies,’ she said, ‘but when they get to be boys and they see the wives giving all their time to them, they get a bit jealous. There’s no denying; they just do. And then they lose interest in the children.’ 8Mark was more accepting of his father. ‘I didn’t have a conversation with him myself,’ he says, ‘but I suppose he was good because he always put the food on the table for us.’ He shared one of his father’s few interests, football. With father a season ticket holder at Arsenal, six-year-old Mark would be taken along to see the side play.

It was only years afterwards that Anthony began to understand his father a little better: ‘He’s quite remarkable in his respect for authority, which was good for me because I think that is lacking now. He is upright and righteous and has an inflexibility of behaviour which borders on the old Catholic Church…[and] a set of values with which, for the most part, I completely disagree, but it is something I can measure myself against and I think that it is a sad thing that most children don’t have that sort of rigidity.’ 9Decency, though, meant little without affection, and the boy felt that everything he did was a disappointment to his father. Vic wanted his son to be a footballer, but Anthony showed no interest in the game. He relished other sporting challenges. Every year there was a seven-mile swim from the pier at Southend to the cockle sheds of Leigh-on-Sea. Sixty hopefuls set out to brave the waters and Anthony was among the dozen or so swimmers who finished. Two-thirds were knocked out by a severe underwater current. He was also rather fond of throwing the javelin, and would go on to have a lifelong interest in sharp, pointy weaponry, often to the alarm of his friends and colleagues.

Anthony’s relationship with his mother was uncomplicated. Eileen adored him, providing support whenever he faced a crisis in his life: ‘Mark was much more independent,’ says Eileen, ‘but Anthony had to have his mother on the end of the phone.’ As a child, Anthony was, he admitted himself, ‘freakishly precocious’, speaking from the age of five months. In a sweet shop Eileen explained to the owner that her son always took a long time to choose what to have. ‘I doesn’t,’ Anthony piped up. The man looked at mother and child and said, ‘How old did you say he was?’ By the age of ten months, Anthony later claimed, he was able to hold a conversation. Such was his energy, baby Anthony was strapped into his pram, and such was his loathing of doing nothing that the very smell and feel of the leatherette pram would stay with him for the rest of his life. He hated restraint: ‘We had a dining room and a lounge at Walthamstow and he’d get out of his playpen and walk into the hall, round to the kitchen then back in again,’ adds Eileen. ‘He just wanted me to see he could do it.’

On holiday in Hastings as a toddler, he caught the attention of a seafront clairvoyant, who told his mother that the child would either be an actor or an admiral. Eileen asked the psychic how on earth she could tell. ‘I got the vibes,’ she was informed. ‘Anthony would later joke that the response was, ‘Your pram is sinking and he’s saluting as it goes down.’ 10Wherever these mystical portents came from, they identified part of his career with a fair degree of accuracy. As for the nautical part, he joined the Merchant Navy and later both owned a houseboat and settled on a converted ship.

Like most children, Anthony was first and foremost a rascal, and Eileen regularly fended off irate neighbours complaining that the boy was running wild in their gardens. ‘He was always up to something and always thinking about something,’ laughs Eileen. There was much opportunity for messing around on the seafront. ‘I used to kick sandcastles over when I was a kid. Horrible boy,’ he later said. ‘On the other hand, I suppose that’s the closest most people are going to come to sculpture in their lives. Apart from their haircuts.’ 11