William Hall - Titter Ye Not!

His letter came out of the blue.

It landed on my desk on a breezy March morning in 1966 as I stood by the window of the London Evening News looking down on the bright yellow vans parked the length of Tudor Street, just another envelope in the batch of morning mail.

Except that this one was different.

The address was badly typed, and unevenly spaced. But inside was an unsolicited letter from a comic I had found side-achingly funny, even when I wasn’t all that sure exactly why. Frankie Howerd had always made me laugh, usually in fits and starts and abrupt bellows rather than prolonged mirth. He had that quality of surprise that kept you on tenterhooks for the next line even as he jollied you along on some impossible foray into his own misadventures.

I had reviewed The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery for the paper, and liked what I saw of Frankie amid the flying gymslips and stocking-tops of the little horrors of Ronald Searle’s warped imagination. The letter of thanks that he sent me was a reflection of the man who wrote it, with an appealing honesty, a heartwarming naïvety of sorts, to which you couldn’t help but respond.

We met numerous times after that, usually in his dressing-room after a first night with the congratulations flowing, but also in his London homes. And amid the uncertainty and self-doubt that plagued him, just as it does every great comedian, you could sense the warmth of someone who needed to be wanted – or was it the other way around?

It was this warmth that came through and touched the hearts as well as the funny-bones of millions, capturing a whole new generation of young people in his later years. It made Frankie’s, passing all the sadder when it happened.

But this book is mainly about the fun times, the ludicrous moments, the paradox of a man who brought laughter to millions yet too often for his own good was a soul in torment.

A complex, fascinating figure whose like we will never see again. I hope you enjoy meeting him.

WILLIAM HALL

London, August 1992

1

Early Days

The first memory Frankie Howerd could ever recall was falling downstairs as a toddler and landing on his head, thus uttering the first ‘ Oooh … aaah!’ of the many that in later life would bring laughter to millions the world over.

He was almost two years old at the time, and it happened in the terraced house at No. 53, Hartoft Street, York, close to the City Hospital where he was born on 6 March 1917. It was young Frankie’s first bruising encounter with a world that would batter his emotions and his ego, turn him into a hypochondriac – yet provide the basis for a humour that in its own uniqueness will never be equalled.

At the start, who would ever have guessed it? His father Frank Howard – Frankie later changed the spelling – was a soldier, Private No. 6759 in the 1st Royal Dragoons, while his mother Edith worked in the Rowntree chocolate factory in the city.

Edith was petite, slim, with black curly hair that hinted at her Celtic background – she had a strict Scots Presbyterian upbringing – and possessed an appealing, almost soulful look that her eldest son would inherit and eventually exploit to its fullest advantage.

The portents were intriguing. Plotting his chart, Royal astrologer Penny Thornton would find that this particular Pisces with its Moon rising in Leo, a pronounced Jupiter, and Uranus and Mars in an opposing position to the Sun would all mean … that Francis was in for a rough old time.

‘He would be a born actor, sentimental, moody, volatile, quirky and acerbic. And predisposed to a certain irreverence and rebellion against authority,’ she asserted. All of which would prove to be spot on.

But at that point all he had was a headache. It was six months after the tumble that Francis Alick Howard, a lusty infant with a strong pair of lungs, was taken south with the family when his father was transferred to the Royal Artillery, promoted to sergeant, and posted to Woolwich. The family moved into a house at No. 19, Arbroath Road, Eltham, a terraced street in the poorer part of the area, much of it long since pulled down to make way for a housing estate on that faceless fringe of South London.

But in those days there was space, and plenty of it. Green fields, trees, hedgerows abundant with wild life, and a view that stretched away towards the Weald of Kent. The house had a large garden with a lot of lawn, and young Frankie grew up amid the greenery, playing happily for hours in the grass, inventing jungle games and becoming adept at climbing trees. Those early days would leave their mark on him, creating a fondness for the countryside that never left him.

Who else do you know who regularly rehearses his lines in front of a cud-chewing audience of cows? Frankie would go on to do just that, and describe them as highly appreciative of his talents.

But for now he was a chubby child with fair hair like his dad – Tennyson might have been writing about him when he penned: ‘Shine out, little head, sunning o’er with golden curls …’

Money was scarce in those early days after World War I, and the family were poor without being destitute. Sergeant Howard was based six miles away in the Woolwich Barracks, headquarters of the Royal Artillery alongside the imposing Royal Arsenal, founded by Henry VII, that took up a mile of choice Thames skyline on the south bank. Even though he would arrive home most weekends with the weekly pay packet, it was left to Edith to feed three mouths as well as her own – Frankie’s younger brother Sidney had come along, and a year after that his sister Betty was born. Frankie himself, who remained a bachelor all his life, always said he had a church named after him at his own christening: ‘York Spinster!’

Growing up into a tall and gangling lad, he saw relatively little of his father, and even less when Sergeant Howard was invalided out of the Royal Artillery and transferred to the Education Corps to supervise the academic training of young soldiers around the country.

His father was diagnosed as having a hole in his lung – brought on, like so many of his comrades, by the dreaded gas swirling around the trenches of Passchendaele in Belgium – another statistic of the War to End All Wars.

Frankie and his dad were never close, whereas he was his mum’s darling, and remained so until her death in 1962 at the age of sixty-nine. In fact, his father’s prolonged absences created a palpable tension in the family whenever Sergeant Howard reappeared out of the blue for a few days’ leave, and the barrier between him and his young son became insurmountable. ‘I positively resented his intrusion,’ Frankie would reveal later.

On one memorable occasion his parents did take him on a rare family night out – into the smoky interior of the local working men’s club, where little Francis, aged four, was given his first stab at fame: to go on stage, sing a song, and come away with a bag of sweets as a prize.

Frankie’s reaction? ‘I howled the place down. I was absolutely petrified, and struggled and screamed blue bloody murder to get off. But I still got the bag of sweets!’ He could have had no idea then, but it was the shape of things to come.

Stage fright would stalk Frankie for the whole of his career, often leaving him quivering in the wings or in his dressing-room, numb with terror, steeling himself to walk out and face the public gaze.

Growing up amid the rural Nine Fields of Eltham – a village, incidentally, that spawned another comic son in the shape of Bob Hope – young Francis found himself increasingly retreating into a solitary world of dreams and fantasy. He would go for long walks alone, creating his own scenarios like any imaginative young boy – but with a difference. His dreams took him out in front of applauding masses, bestriding the stage like a colossus, master of the theatrical manor and all he surveyed. At the age of ten he was even practising how to sign his autograph.