Bill Cotton - Double Bill (Text Only)

I confess I swelled with smug pride whenever my father visited Ardingly College on open days. He would sign up for the Boys versus Parents cricket match, knock out a quick half-century, bowl some unplayable balls and then dash off to Croydon where he kept his aeroplane, fly back and, to the delight of the boys, buzz the school. No doubt some sniffy parents thought it was all outrageous exhibitionism, but Dad was so artless in his desire to give people pleasure it would never occur to him that anyone could think he was doing it to stroke his own ego. In spite of his great fame, there was an engaging innocence about him; he had no pretensions about his importance. He was, for example, terrified of Ardingly’s headmaster, Canon Ernest Crosse – of course, we all were in our early days in the school. Even when I became a sixth-form prefect and counted Canon Crosse more as a friend than a teacher (he later conducted my marriage service and baptised my children) Dad never lost his apprehensiveness about having to make conversation with him. ‘He’s your headmaster,’ he used to say. ‘You talk to him.’

After I’d been at boarding school for a couple of years, World War II broke out and Dad, who was on the Reserve of Air Force Officers, was called to a board at Uxbridge which tried to decide the best use to make of him. Obviously he wanted to fly in combat; they on the other hand decided that although he was a very fit forty-year-old, he should become adjutant to an RAF squadron at Northolt. Dad was outraged – Billy Cotton a pen pusher? The Air Marshal who presided asked him why he was wearing glasses. ‘Is it true that you have a defect in your left eye?’ Dad had to agree that he had sight problems, and that was that. They spared him an office job and recommended that he and his band should be loaned to ENSA to entertain the troops in France during that first cold winter of the war. Then, after Dunkirk, he was seconded to the Air Training Corps and spent the rest of the war trying to keep up morale on the home front as well as doing his bit to ginger up the teenagers who enlisted in the ATC as the first step to service in the RAF. It was my brother, Ted, who did the family’s stint in the RAF.

When I came home for school holidays, my Dad often took me touring with him. People needed something to take their minds off the war, so the theatres were packed. The band played patriotic songs like ‘We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’ and ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ over and over again. Petrol was rationed and we had to travel everywhere by slow train. The hotels were unheated and the food was pretty basic but I still enjoyed myself. Many of the younger stage performers were in the forces, so the old stars came out of retirement to do their bit. I got the chance to see the likes of G.H. Elliott, who was truly a show-business legend. He was known as the ‘Chocolate Coloured Coon’ because he wore black face make-up. I heard him sing ‘Lily of Laguna’ and watched his soft shoe shuffle; it was an education in stage technique. Even in old age he was a song and dance virtuoso.

A great friend of my father’s was Jack Hylton, probably the most famous of the pre-war band-leaders. By the time the war began, he’d become an impresario and got the rights to do stage versions of two hit radio shows, Tommy Handley’s ITMA and Garrison Theatre which was set in an army base and fronted by the actor Jack Warner, later famous for his lead in Dixon of Dock Green. Jack introduced variety acts and kept lighthearted banter running through the show. On radio these two shows were great successes but good theatre demands action and spectacle – the eye as well as the ear has to be entertained – and Jack Hylton realised he needed to add an extra dimension, so he engaged the Billy Cotton Band to bolster the stage show.

Thanks to Tommy Handley’s genius, ITMA did well in the wartime theatre. Garrison Theatre, though, was a real turkey, so when it transferred to Blackpool, Hylton persuaded Tommy Trinder, one of the biggest comedians of the time, to join the show for a limited season. Then began the great dressing-room saga. Contractually, my father was entitled to the No. 1 dressing room and Jack Warner to No.2. These pecking-order squabbles might seem trivial to outsiders, but they mattered a great deal to stars whose self-worth as well as bankability could depend on a detail such as the number on a dressing-room door. Where was Tommy Trinder to be accommodated? As he was a great pal of my father’s, it was suggested that Tommy should move in with him. (Jack Warner had no intention of moving out, and who could blame him?) Instead, Tommy insisted on having a special dressing-room built out of scenery on the side of the stage.

During one performance, Jack Warner was on stage doing an impression of Maurice Chevalier, which had a certain poignancy because France had just fallen. The band played the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, quietly in the background while in ringing Shakespearean tones Jack Warner declaimed that France would rise from the ashes again. At this point Tommy’s voice rang out from the makeshift dressing-room, ‘A drop of hot water in No.9 please’ – a well-known catch phrase in public bathhouses at the time. Jack was beside himself with fury, Tommy assumed an air of innocence and couldn’t understand what the fuss was about, and my father as usual tried to be the peace-maker. Then a stray German bomb dropped near the theatre, which besides playing havoc with bookings put these silly artistic tantrums in perspective.

Dad may not have achieved his dearest wish and flown in combat, but he and the band were subject to the dangers of travelling around Britain during the war, playing as they did in towns and cities that got a pasting from the German air force. In Plymouth, both the theatre where they were appearing and the hotel where they were staying went up in flames. The band got out just in time and spent the night on the moors overlooking the city. Dad was having supper at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool when it was hit by a bomb. He escaped injury and for the rest of the night travelled backwards and forwards on the Mersey ferry, on the principle that it was harder to hit a moving target.

During the blitz, a bomb dropped in the garden of our Willesden house and blew the front off, so we had to move out. We stayed at Farnham Common for a while with a good friend of my father’s, Jimmy Philips, who was a music publisher. We eventually found a house nearby and we’d frequent the local pub, the Dog and Pot. It was there that my father and Jimmy first heard a German song which was a favourite of Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the desert. The Eighth Army lads had adopted and adapted it, adding some pretty ribald words. Both Jimmy and my father were struck by the tune and got a song writer called Tommy Connor to put some lyrics to it. It was called ‘Lili Marlene’ and became immortal.

At about this time Leslie Grade, who had become my father’s agent, went into the RAF. His brother Lew took over the agency and with his other brother, Bernard Delfont, created one of the greatest show-business dynasties of the century. The Grade organisation represented Dad until he died. There were plenty of heated discussions between client and agent over the years. Leslie used to tell the story of my dad pitching up in his office and demanding more work in London. When he was told that there weren’t any more theatres left, that they were either booked up or bombed out, Dad hit the roof and shouted that he’d had enough, their partnership was forthwith dissolved. As Dad stormed out of the door Leslie shouted, ‘You’ll be back!’ – and sure enough, he was. He’d left his hat behind.