Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (6 page)

When war was declared, Southampton became one of the major targets of the Blitz. His parents made frequent visits back to Devon and Caerphilly to stay out of harm’s way with family and friends. When peace arrived they appear to have
lost their appetite for the semi-rural community. They moved from ‘Devonia’ around the beginning of 1948, ploughing all their resources into a shop at 124 Shirley Road, a major thoroughfare out of the centre of Southampton to the North West in the Romsey direction. Today the premises accommodate ‘Johnny’s Fish and Chips’ emporium. The nearby Rotrax café and cycle store are no more, while the tattoo parlour a few doors down has survived all trends. It has been said that Tommy set his parents up in the shop, but this is not the case, since they were up and running with at first a fresh fish business long before he achieved lasting success. The fish business did not prosper. Zena Cooper recalls how on a Saturday her father-in-law would sell the fish left over at the end of the week for next to nothing. In the end the neighbourhood got wise and bought nothing earlier in the week. Gertrude had to put her foot down and any fish not sold at full price by the end of Saturday she buried in their little postage stamp of a garden. Obviously a lady of amazing industry, she once again kept the family buoyant financially by harking back to her dressmaking skills. Within a short time she converted the shop into a haberdashery to act as a front for them, with alterations and repairs a profitable sideline.

In these final years of their lives the surviving memories of those who knew them give us further insight into the characters and eccentricities of his parents. Members of Gertrude’s family recall that to deter shoplifters she used to tie all the stock together with some of her son’s invisible thread, so that if someone sneaked something away when she wasn’t looking, all the rest would come with it. Mrs Spacagna, who had a hairdressing business in the vicinity, remembers her as a very private person, but a brisk business woman, always distinctive on her own shopping round from the long black cloak she wore. I have a memory too. As a child brought up in
Southampton’s Shirley district in the Fifties, no sooner had I heard that the mother of my television hero had a shop less than a mile from where I lived than nothing could hold me back from making the pilgrimage to seek her out for myself. I could not summon the courage to enter, but remember peering through the window past the displays of knitting needles, zip fasteners, ribbon, braid, and buttons galore to spy sitting behind the counter what could have been a smaller version of Tommy Cooper in drag. It all looked dusty and higgledy-piggledy. I could have been peering into a pantomime set. I was later told she was only too happy for people to go in to talk to her about her son, of whom she was rightly proud. Photographs of his career festooned the walls, and albums would be brought from the back room at the merest beckoning. I regret missing the opportunity.

Michael Legg, who worked nearby, was called into the shop one day and told by Mrs Cooper that ‘Dad’ wanted to speak to him. He was shown into the living quarters at the back and Mr Cooper asked if he would call in each day on his lunch break to take a betting slip down to the betting shop in nearby Park Road: ‘I always remember he had wads of notes in his waistcoat, trousers and shirt, as he did not believe in banks.’ Their nephew, Bernard Diggins remembers a narrow passage shut off from the road running down the side of the shop: ‘He grew his own tobacco and had strung up a line on the wall on which he was hanging the large tobacco leaves to dry.’ Thomas died on 2 December 1963, his death certificate listing his occupation as ‘night watchman (retired)’. This reminded his daughter-in-law that he did spend a spell at the nearby Atherley cinema, and may even have been a projectionist there. It would help to explain the notes sprouting out of his pockets, while the tobacco leaves provided their own poignant footnote to his death, which, as we have seen, was due to bronchial troubles.

Tommy’s mother survived her husband by over twenty years. By the early Seventies the dressmaking had become too much for her and she shifted the emphasis of her stock to costume jewellery, although to anyone looking inside it was still the same ramshackle repository it had always been. According to neighbour Marian Rashleigh, necklaces and brooches were now hung in the windows ‘like net curtains, but I don’t remember them ever being cleaned or changed for more modern pieces. I can’t remember when the shop was vacated, but by then cobwebs adorned the necklaces.’ In fact it was vacated twice. When Gertrude became seriously ill in her mid-eighties Zena began to clear the stock. Both Tommy and David had offered their mother a home, but she valued her independence and they found themselves putting it all back to give her something to do! As her niece, Betty says, ‘She was still in the shop at 88 years. It was time she closed up. But she was an obstinate old woman.’ She died of a heart attack in the Royal South Hants Hospital on 13 February 1984 two weeks before reaching her ninety-first birthday and just two months before her elder son.

According to his daughter, Tommy’s relationship with his parents was fragile. His father complained that he never visited his Mum as much as he should, and when he
did
go there always seemed to be a blazing row because they’d argue about why he didn’t go more often. Their worlds had not unnaturally drifted apart. They had no proper grasp of the erratic working hours and travelling that show business entailed. However, while the Shirley haberdashery was an unlikely environment in which to picture Tommy, another local resident, Sonia Blandford has an affectionate memory of him there:

Tommy may well have been embarrassed himself, but whatever decisions he had made about his professional approach to magic in the works canteen, it is encouraging to know that twenty years later he could still empathize with the sense of wonder that magic pure and simple could arouse in a child. Indeed, throughout his life he stayed a kid at heart.

The idea of Trooper Cooper resplendent in the plume and pomp of The Royal Horse Guards astride a charger with sword held to attention is a sublime comic image. But in later years he was always keen to downplay the impression: ‘I’ve done sentry duty in Whitehall many times. Khaki uniform though – nothing fancy.’ His basic training at Pirbright was interrupted by the outbreak of war and Tommy found himself learning to ride a horse sooner than he expected. Riding army fashion – that is riding one horse, while leading two others – in Rotten Row at 6.30 in the morning became another established part of his early routine. With his fast gained reputation as ‘The life and soul of the NAAFI’, it is hard not to imagine him trotting down the Mall, boots burnished and spurs glinting, without his mind wandering to the latest gags and gimmicks to be shopped from the magic supply depots, the practical joke with which he could bring uproar to the barracks that evening.

Tommy’s height made him a natural for the Blues. He joined as a private and took seven years to achieve the rank of sergeant, by which time the fighting was over. He always said that what he liked best about the early years was the boxing.
There were 100 guards in his unit and he stood out among them. He claimed never to have won any championship, contrary to reports that he did win a heavyweight title, sufficient to be offered a contract to turn professional at a later date. However, the sport did teach him how to look after himself, giving the lie to his later claim that he spent so much time on canvas that he was going to change his name to Rembrandt. His nose
was
broken, but not in the ring, rather when he slipped alongside an army swimming pool. In later years his son, Thomas, reminisced about his dad’s prowess in this area: ‘Everyone thought of him as a big softie who would not hurt a fly. In fact he was capable of laying you out with one punch and would not hesitate to do so if he thought someone had asked for it. He hated trouble, but I remember one time in a pub in Golders Green when three yobbos were giving the landlord a bad time. One broke a bottle over the counter and went to stick it in the landlord’s face. And dad, who had been standing at the bar minding his own business, just turned round and flattened the yobbo with a right-hander on the chin. The other two looked on in amazement and scarpered.’

A less valuable legacy in civilian life was his proficiency on horseback, although he always retained a love for horses. Zena Cooper recalls that when Tommy returned from the war he would go riding with his brother, David, in the New Forest and show off by emulating feats better associated with the Cossack riders, passing under the belly of the mount and up again the other side while at a gallop, even riding backwards. Not that he would have won any regimental trophies in this area. He made a veritable party piece out of the detail of one catastrophe: ‘I remember one Christmas, at a full-dress ceremonial parade, there were one hundred of us neatly lined up by the sides of our horses. Now, as a recruit I didn’t know this, but when you get on a horse, when you put the girth
around the horse, the horse blows himself out because he doesn’t want to be tight. So you’ve got to wait. Well, I didn’t know this, and he looks at you. He’s a little bit suspicious, you know what I mean? Then all of a sudden you have to go quick and he goes “Ooh!” But I didn’t know this, so as a recruit I just went like that with the girth and he went out with his stomach and I thought I was tight. So the order came, “Prepare to mount” and I put my foot in the stirrup and they said “Mount” and the saddle went underneath. Ninety-nine of us rose as one man and I’m in a heap on the ground.’ The look of dismay on his big, baffled face as he gathered himself up from the floor would have been worth the price of admission.

His regimental misadventures could fill a book or certainly an episode of one of those forces comedies that, in the Fifties, Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko brought to a comic zenith worthy of Cooper himself. In the British theatre of service comedy it is easy to picture William Hartnell as the sadistic sergeant going the rounds to prod Cooper and his cohorts out of their slumbers for roll-call at four o’clock in the morning. As Tommy remembered it, “‘Good morning.” “Good morning.” “Good morning.” And he had a bayonet in his hand!’ Outside it was pitch black and the corporal used to emerge with a huge hurricane lamp. ‘Good morning, men,’ he’d shout. ‘Good morning, lamp,’ Cooper would answer back. It was a fair response. They were too blinded by it to see him. Michael Medwin or Harry Fowler would have been spot-on casting for the barrack room lawyer who led the protest when the sergeant insisted on a rifle inspection no less than ten minutes after they had come back from a route march and flopped exhausted onto their beds. His departure was the cue for said barrack room lawyer to lay down their rights: ‘I’m not going to clean mine at all. The King’s rules and regulations say we’re entitled
to half an hour’s rest. It says so – under section twenty-nine, subsection six.’ ‘I listened to him, I did,’ said Tommy, ‘I believed him. Then the sergeant came in. He said, “Right, get your rifles ready.”’ Cooper stepped forward and stood up to him through clenched teeth, ‘We’re not cleaning them.’ The sergeant was taken aback. ‘We’re not cleaning them, are we fellows? Are we fellows?’ As his voice became more questioning, the realization dawned that the rest of the troop behind him were working away like the clappers. It is unlikely that any member of the British comedy acting establishment could have done justice to the crestfallen vulnerability of our hero at a moment like this.

One incident in Cooper’s military career has practically assumed the status of an urban myth, although on separate occasions Tommy assured both Barry Cryer and myself that it did take place and that it happened to him. He was lucky not to be court-martialled. One morning in the early hours he was on sentry duty and dozed off standing up by the side of the sentry box. Within seconds the sergeant came round the corner with the orderly officer: ‘And all of a sudden I open my eyes just a little bit and I can see them standing there. So I’ve got to think of something now or otherwise I’m going to end up inside. So I wait for a second and I’m standing there and I open my eyes fully and I say, “Amen!”’ Assuming they noticed at all, it did the trick and nothing was said. Many years later the episode became the basis of a regular routine in his stage act, Tommy playing his dozy self and the fierce sergeant major in mimed counterpoint amid a flurry of ‘not like that’s’ and ‘like that’s’. But there was no denying the potential seriousness of the situation: ‘I fell asleep. I did. That’s a crime, isn’t it? You could go to the Tower for that.’

The comic capital he made out of the incident perhaps compensated for the downside of a life spent constantly standing
to attention and stamping on parade. He put many of his later health problems – varicose veins, phlebitis, thrombosis in the leg, ulcers too – down to his guardsman’s duties. In fact, he could have had treatment for the veins while he was in the services. He told his friend, Bobby Bernard of the occasion he went into the surgery to see the medical officer about the problem. Another soldier was standing there in his shorts. He turned to Tommy and said, ‘Look at mine. They’re getting better.’ According to Tommy, ‘His veins were worse than mine.’ ‘If that’s better, I’m going,’ shouted the cowardly conjuror.

In an article in the
Lancashire Evening
Post
in May 1974, his fellow trooper Ben Fisher provided a vivid recollection of Cooper the serviceman. No sooner had Ben joined the Blues in 1943 than he found himself sharing a tent with Tommy. Come morning, it quickly became apparent that his colleague enjoyed special privileges: ‘While all around echoed to the whacking of the duty Corporal of Horse’s cane on tent walls, we were left in peace, for this, as I was soon to learn, was “Cooper’s Tent” and as such apparently beyond the pale of military discipline.’ As their friendship grew, Fisher discovered that Tommy had developed a disarming flair for avoiding the more onerous military duties. Indeed, he can never actually recall Tommy being ‘on duty’, but there was no question that the most familiar name in the camp was ‘Cooper’: ‘It was usually shouted at the top of his voice by our Corporal Major. On hearing the call Tommy would emerge from some nook or cranny with the air of a man interrupted during some urgent assignment, and wanting nothing more than to get back to it.’ Fisher stressed that he never emerged empty-handed. There was always a bucket, a brush or some utensil or other dangling from his hand as proof of his unstinted industry.

In off-duty hours he would give impromptu concerts in front of the tent, not only performing his crazy conjuring, but also
comedy sketches: ‘Our favourites were “The Death of Robin Hood” and one about the Home Guard.’ In the latter, with possible echoes of his Uncle Jimmy, he improvised a one-man
Dad’s Army
. Arifle and tin hat with the lining removed so that it fell around his ears were the only props he required to pantomime his way through a series of disastrous drill movements. For the Robin Hood scene he would make a dramatic entrance from the woods around the camp, pretending to be mortally wounded with an arrow clutched to his chest. Staggering to the front of his tent, he would summon Little John to help him find a suitable burial place. Tommy would then switch to the other character. It is hard now to imagine him playing Little John as camp as he then did, a prissy individual, ‘fussy about keeping the camp tidy, making all sorts of excuses about why this or that spot wouldn’tdo’. After much pleading from the folk hero, the routine ended with Robin stumbling back to the trees in disgust, shouting the payoff line, ‘All right … all right … but it’s the last time I’ll ask you to do anything for me!’

Within a short time Tommy was sent overseas and the war became a reality. His section of the Blues was deployed to the western desert to a camp near Suez as a reconnaissance unit working with armoured cars and small tanks: ‘We used to go out first, see the enemy and then come back – cos we were cowards!’ He did not take kindly to having to sleep in a hammock – back home the army beds had been adjustable – but did develop a passion for hot climates that would inform his holiday habits for the rest of his life. He eventually received a gunshot wound in his right arm and ended up in Army Welfare. Tommy lost his A-1 rating, but his talents as an entertainer had not escaped the authorities. He was given the opportunity of auditioning – successfully – in Cairo for a travelling army concert party. In spite of the painful hard slog of his guardsman’s
routine and a minor injury into the bargain, it is tempting to suggest that only now did his service career become serious. He had at last found a proper, albeit frequently makeshift stage for his talents. He was not the only member of his generation of funny men to develop his skills entertaining his comrades in this manner. The system also provided greater scope for individuals who would not otherwise have visited a theatre to see an act like his, although with the variety theatres in decline it was too much to be hoped that they would cultivate the habit on a regular basis once Civvy Street reclaimed them.

Tommy was now in his element, although there were those in this newly acquired audience who might have had second thoughts. In his exhaustive study of service entertainment,
Fighting for a Laugh
, Richard Fawkes reported the recollections of the actor John Arnatt, under whose jurisdiction Cooper the trouper at one point found himself in Cairo: ‘In one of John’s shows was an unknown conjuror making a virtue of the fact that his tricks didn’t always work … he had not done anything before … certainly not as a professional.’ According to Arnatt, ‘He was a bastard to be with as an officer because he delighted in getting you up on the stage to help him out and then he would take the mickey out of you something terrible. He had the entire audience on his side and if you weren’t careful you came out of it looking none too dignified.’ Interestingly in later years Tommy almost entirely dispensed with audience participation on stage and left the mickey taking – always a dubious form of pastime when members of the public are involved – to others. For the time being the rough and ready forces environment was the perfect setting for such spectator sport.

He had the intuitive sense to deliver what the troops required, making great play of the trick in which some of the
cards in the packet held by the officer on one side of the stage magically found their way into the packet held by the officer on the other, becoming distracted along the way as he kept breathing on their pips and shining them all the while. The crowd roared. In later years he never lost his disrespect for military authority. The magician and writer, Val Andrews recalls seeing him lose his temper with people who insisted on using their service rank outside the military environment: ‘Colonel this! Major that! Tell everyone you’ve just met Sergeant Cooper!’ Back at base, echoing his childhood, he remained paradoxically a man isolated in his own world, immune to the popularity his extrovert performing talent should have won him with the rank and file. His colleague, Jack Chambers is on record that Cooper remained a man it was hard to get to know: ‘We’d be sitting together after the show – drinking cups of tea out of sawn down beer bottles – and he didn’t join in. He never had a mate or anything like that.’ All his personality was now diverted into his act. Had there been other magicians in the unit, I am sure he would have found a bosom pal for life.

When the fighting drew to a close he joined the Combined Services Entertainment Unit attached to the War Office giving shows for the troops left scattered throughout the Middle East. With a restless conscript army, morale boosting was as essential at a time of keeping the peace as it had ever been while the greater distraction of fighting was taking place. It was now that Tommy decided he wanted to dedicate his life to being an entertainer. It was also in Cairo that the performance took place that must come close to the one in the Hythe canteen for qualifying as the most defining of his career. As Jack Chambers has explained, it was a cardinal offence for a soldier to be improperly dressed, even down to not wearing your cap: ‘So if you can imagine one thousand troops sitting
there and onto this stage comes a chap wearing very scruffy shorts and socks down to his boots – well, it was a masterly stroke and he just stood there with this gormless grin on his face and then he’d do the laugh.’ To add to the anarchy he wore a pith helmet, a cloak, and had the word ‘hair’ written across his chest. One night at the YMCA at RAF Heliopolis he forgot the pith helmet and at the expense of cliché the rest is history.