Bill Cotton - Double Bill (Text Only)

Bud was a great joker. I remember Dad treating me and some school pals to lunch at the Moulin d’Or. You’d see all the big stars there – it was the place to eat, and to be seen. Bud was at another table, and when we got up to leave and our coats were handed to us he jumped up and started shrieking, ‘Stop! Call the police!’ I was embarrassed beyond belief as he proceeded to tip out of our coat pockets knives, forks and spoons he’d bribed the waiters to plant in them.

I loved going with the band when they did cine-variety, playing between film-showings at two cinemas such as the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road and the Trocadero, Elephant and Castle. They started at two in the afternoon and by the time they finished at ten p.m., they’d done seven shows. Though I was allowed to travel with the band, I don’t think they were all that keen on having me aboard because my father didn’t tolerate bad language in front of his family. When I appeared the band members would pass the word along: ‘Ham sandwich’ was their warning they’d better watch their tongues. Why ‘ham sandwich’ I don’t really know; perhaps it was rhyming slang for ‘bad language’. Another code word was ‘Tom’, their private name for Dad so they could discuss him without outsiders realising who they were talking about.

It was around this time that Dad adopted ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ as his signature tune. When asked why he said the idea had been put into his head by his nephew Laurie Johnson who was in the orchestra. On one occasion Laurie had observed Dad standing on the edge of the dance-hall floor, turning every dance into an excuse-me whenever a pretty girl whirled past him, and said to him, ‘You’re always stealing somebody’s girl!’ Dad responded by singing him a verse of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’, and one thing led to another.

Dad was constantly on the move and the family didn’t see as much of him as we would have liked. He had become involved in what were known as Blue Star Flying Visits to the various Mecca dance-halls all over the country. The proposal had come from a Dutchman called C.L.H. Heimann who had heard Dad’s band in one or two theatres and been very impressed. He had just bought a chain of Mecca cafés and proposed to turn them into dance-halls. He engaged Dad and supplied a state-of-the-art motor coach to take the band on one-night visits to every Mecca venue. Thus was born what later became an institution of British popular culture before, during and immediately after the war – Mecca Dancing.

Dad soon began to take the idea of flying visits literally and bought himself a second-hand Puss Moth, a wooden aircraft, very reliable and simple to fly. In it he flew to the nearest aerodromes to the towns where the band was performing – I was thrilled by the drama and excitement of it. I recall my cousin Laurie telling me of an occasion when he flew with Dad to a booking at Great Yarmouth Pier. They flew to the Boulton and Paul aerodrome at Norwich where a car collected them and took them on to the coast. The next day they drove back to the aerodrome, and while they were sitting in the club house an official came in and told them they ought not to fly because the weather was deteriorating. The misty rain and murk for which the Fenlands are notorious was closing in.

Dad chose to ignore the weather warning and fly on to Leicester, where the band was performing that evening at the Palais de Dance. Visibility was nil and in those days the only available navigational aid was a bubble and compass. In such conditions the single course open to aircraft was to ‘Bradshaw’ – follow the railway lines. But railway lines to where? Dad was hopelessly lost and realised that he was also low on fuel. He decided to hedge-hop in the hope of spotting a familiar landmark. He pushed down the stick, and the aircraft was swooping towards the ground when Laurie screamed through the voice tube, ‘Look out!’, whereupon Dad hauled back the stick and just missed a place in the history books as the man who demolished Peterborough Cathedral.

He had just enough fuel left for a quarter of an hour’s flying, so decided to land at the first flat field he saw. It turned out to be the jumping arena of a stables, complete with fences he had to sail over one by one until he came to a halt. Plenty of horses had taken the jumps but this was the first time an aeroplane completed the course. The owner came out to greet them and Dad introduced himself; they had a drink together then pushed the Puss Moth, wings folded, into a shed. The owner’s driver took Dad and Laurie to Melton Mowbray station, from where they caught a train to Leicester. The next day Dad returned, collected the aircraft and flew it back to Croydon. The joys of flying in those carefree early days! Little wonder that Dad was my childhood hero when his life was punctuated by escapades like these.

It was much to our delight that for one period in the 1930s Dad spent much more time at home. This was while he and the band were the resident orchestra at Ciro’s Club in London’s Park Lane. It was a very upmarket, even exclusive, establishment, quite different from the general run of variety theatres in which Dad spent much of his professional life. Entertainment correspondents of various newspapers were astounded at the appointment and predicted that it would be a very brief engagement – just long enough for Dad to open his mouth, as one unkindly put it. Because Ciro’s was a very select place the band had to play very quietly, muffling the brass by stuffing scarves and handkerchiefs down the bells of their instruments. The clientele didn’t want to hear the band so much as feel it; it was an accessory, like the vastly expensive flock wallpaper or the periwigged flunkeys in knee-breeches who manned the cloakroom and served the drinks.

When Dad returned home from nights at Ciro’s he would tell us about some of the more exotic or distinguished people he’d met. For a while the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was an habitué. He was fond of night-life and partial to the club’s dark, romantic atmosphere. Though flattered by HRH’s presence, the owners of the club found him a bit of a pain because he would arrive with an entourage and insist on being treated like royalty, killing an evening stone dead. All the other guests sat in respectful silence as the Duke chuntered his way through the wine list, ate his meal and eventually left (which he’d do after requesting the Billy Cotton Band to play his favourite tune, the Waltz Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana – not a theme calculated to set feet tapping or bring the crowds onto the dance-floor).

The third time the Prince requested the same piece Dad, exasperated, said to the club manager who’d brought the message, ‘Go and ask the silly so-and-so if he knows any other tune.’ The following day Dad was summoned to the presence of the chairman of the board, Lord Tennyson, who told him that although he and the band were popular with members, they did expect a little more courtesy. ‘You mean “servility”,’ replied Dad. ‘That’s not my style. I certainly believe in greeting people in a proper manner, but they’ll get no bowing and scraping from me.’ Lord Tennyson then broached the subject of HRH, pointing out that even among club staff the heir to the throne was not to be referred to as a silly so-and-so. ‘The problem is, Cotton,’ said the noble lord, ‘that you are too outspoken. You’ll be calling him that to his face next.’

The upshot was that Dad and his band were banished to Ciro’s in Paris for three months, in a role-exchange with the club’s resident band, the Noble Cecil Orchestra, and he found the clientele there much more responsive and uninhibited than their London counterparts. Cecil’s band was initially greeted with shock at the London Ciro’s, because every one of its players was black – though nothing unusual these days, the fact was considered scandalous at that time among the club’s many ex-colonial members.