Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic. Graham McCann

of a vast hall (still reeking of yesterday’s soggy vegetables and watery gravy), and, far away at the other end, a stem-faced officer who had worked before the war as a part-time conjuror. Instantly, the old RADA feeling returned.

      He suddenly realised just how helpless he was without a proper audience with which to interact. Alone in front of this single distant figure, in a room where every ‘ooh’, ‘aah’, and ‘er’ was left to die a lingering death of lonely echoes, Howard was beaten before he started. The left knee trembled, the stammer took over, the mouth dried up, the wide eyes glazed over: he conveyed nothing to the interviewing officer apart from the unbearable intensity of his frustration and fear.

      He failed. Worse still, he went on to fail no fewer than four auditions in all. When the last of them was over, Howard went back reluctantly to the cockles and corrugated iron of Penclawdd, nursing an ego that had been badly bruised by the realisation that the very men who had been detailed to ferret out fresh talent ‘didn’t think I was worth ferreting’.⁴³

      He began to feel desperate. After having made so much progress as a performer, here he was, stranded in a rusty little Nissen hut in South Wales, shuffling papers and filling in forms. He had grown up coping stoically with just the lows, but now, after experiencing his first real high, the lows felt worse than ever. At the start of March 1944, following one too many dull and drizzly days, he cracked, and marched off to see his CO: ‘[C]an I please do something positive for the war effort,’ he pleaded, ‘even if it [is] my destiny only to get my name in the papers as one of yesterday’s casualties?’⁴⁴

      The Commanding Officer smiled indulgently – he had grown used to this sort of thing by now – and assured Howard that the problem had already been solved. Earlier that very morning, he revealed, a new batch of orders had arrived on his desk – and one of them (relating to preparations for the imminent Allied invasion of France) entailed, among other things, a new posting for Bombardier F.A. Howard. He was off, without delay, to Plymouth: ‘For the big show,’ the CO added with the suspicion of a smirk, ‘and I don’t mean telling jokes, what?’⁴⁵

      A Commando course in Devon was not what Howard, in a cool hour, would have requested by way of a radical change, but, like everyone else in the services, he had to accept what he was assigned. It was just a relief to be doing something, anything, other than sitting around an office. Always fitter than he looked, he coped rather well with all of the shinnying up and down ropes and scrambling over assault courses. With neither the time nor the energy for the usual pursuit of stage-based activities, he got on with the job in hand, and the general opinion was that he did it ‘jolly well’.⁴⁶ Indeed, such was his burst of enthusiasm (and temporary physical felicity) that he won a promotion to the rank of Sergeant, and was then sent off on a driving course.

      That move precipitated a dramatic reversion to type: he proceeded to drive a large lorry full of soldiers through a hedge and into a tree. A certain loss of nerve was suffered as a consequence – not just on Howard’s part, but also on that of his superiors – and he was shunted discreetly sideways to a role in which he could be trusted to do less damage.

      There was little time, however, for further mishaps – at least on English soil. On 6 June 1944, Howard and his comrades boarded a merchant ship and set sail for Normandy as part of the D-Day dawn invasion force. Heavy seas prevented the vessel from disembarking its troops, and so it was left to wallow in its swell for no fewer than eleven days while the first wave of the invasion pressed on ahead. Howard – who was meant to be up on a conning tower manning a Bren gun – spent much of this frustrating and unnerving period coiled up on the floor, suffering from a combination of suspected influenza, undeniable seasickness and a mild form of malnutrition.

      When, at last, he was back on dry ground, he was informed that he was being posted to Lille in northern France. ‘Anyone speak French?’ enquired an officer. Howard, somewhat impetuously, replied that, as he had been to a half-decent grammar school, he could manage the odd word. ‘We’re a bit short, Sergeant,’ the officer said, ‘so you’re an interpreter.’⁴⁷ Before Howard had a chance to splutter any kind of protest, he was transferred to Brussels as part of the Military Establishment.

      â€˜Who are we governing?’ he asked an officer when he arrived. ‘The Germans soon,’ came the confident reply, ‘because we’re winning the war.’ ‘Well,’ said Howard, looking only a little less anxious than before, ‘that’s one blessing, anyway.’⁴⁸

      There were plenty of scrapes and narrow escapes. On one ostensibly straightforward assignment, for example, Howard accompanied a Major to a nearby village in order to ascertain how many women there were pregnant (and thus qualified as a priority for the soon-to-be-distributed food). The snag was that Howard the interpreter had absolutely no idea what word was French for ‘pregnant’, and so, in haste, he assumed a heavy Charles Boyer-style accent, improvised a phrase that he believed mistakenly to mean more or less the same sort of thing – ‘Nous voulons savoir si une femme voulons avoir un enfant?’⁴⁹ – and ended up asking a succession of women not if they were having a baby, but, rather, did they want to have a baby. Unsurprisingly, he and the Major were chased out of the village by a group of angry husbands brandishing cudgels, pitchforks and shotguns, and then, on their way back to camp, they almost got themselves lost hopelessly in a dense sea of fog.

      The next thing that Howard did was to appear to liberate the Netherlands. As usual, it happened by accident.

      The Germans were in the process of capitulation, and, on 5 May 1945, a convoy of Allied vehicles was due to set off from Brussels to enter the Dutch legislative centre. When the dawdling Howard was urged to hurry up and get into one of the cars, he chose, without the slightest hesitation, the one right at the front: ‘It seemed logical.’⁵⁰ At some point en route, however, all of the vehicles lining up behind fell foul of navigational errors and disappeared from sight, leaving Sergeant Frankie Howard to enter The Hague alone in a chauffeur-driven staff car and be mobbed by a mass of grateful citizens (‘the most appreciative audience I’ve ever had!’⁵¹).

      As this surreal little period continued, Howard was sent with a young Army Captain to Stade, near Hamburg, to form a two-man Military Government. The Captain, facing one taxing challenge too many, promptly suffered a nervous breakdown, leaving a panicky Howard to tap out a signal for help. Reinforcements duly arrived, swelling the risibly under-manned Government of two to a risibly over-manned Government of 200. Howard, relieved to find that his services were no longer urgently needed, redirected his efforts towards the far happier task of entertaining.

      He organised yet another concert party. He tried, unsuccessfully, to inveigle a fleeting appearance in a movie – Basil Dearden’s The Captive Heart – that he heard was being shot further ‘up the road’ in the British Occupation Zone. He performed the occasional one-man show. He did all of the things that he most enjoyed being able to do.

      As far as Howard’s Commanding Officer was concerned, he was pushing at an open door. During the summer of 1946, the War Office began a process whereby all of the old individual service entertainment bodies – including ENSA, Stars in Battledress, Ralph Reader’s RAF Gang Shows and the many and various concert parties – were gradually merged to form a new, all-embracing, post-war organisation called the Combined Services Entertainment unit (or ‘CSE’ for short). With more than thirty separate shows to stage, the need for new talent was acute, and Howard’s CO, hearing that the next audition was about to be