Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic. Graham McCann

he could commit himself with a clear conscience, however, he knew that he would have to find a way to win his mother’s blessing. This did not seem likely to be easy. Edith, after all, had set her heart on seeing her son acquire a good education and then pursue a suitably upright and worthy religious career; now he was set to dash both of these treasured hopes at a stroke. Frank’s great sense of guilt grew even worse when he reflected upon the many sacrifices that had been (and still were being) made, not just by his mother but also by everyone else in his family, so that he could see through his education at Shooters Hill.

      The loss of the ailing Frank Snr’s Army salary, occurring as it did right at the time when the country was deep in the depths of the Great Depression, had forced Edith to find work as a cleaner in order to help pay the mounting pile of bills. A further, and far more painful, consequence of the family’s shrunken income was the fact that it had made it impractical for either Sidney or Betty to match the length (or the quality) of their elder brother’s education: both, it had become clear, would have to leave school as soon as they reached the then minimum age of fourteen (Sidney, as things turned out, for a career in the Post Office,⁶ and Betty for a job in an office⁷). Everyone, it seemed, had suffered for the benefit of young Frank, and now young Frank was ready to risk it all on RADA.

      â€˜Children are inclined to take a tremendous amount for granted,’ the adult Frankie Howerd would come to reflect, ‘and for my part I never fully appreciated […] the degree of the hardship involved in keeping me at Shooters Hill.’⁸ The teenaged Frank Howard, however, in spite of his youthful self-absorption, knew enough to know how great a blow the news of his apparent recklessness would be, and how easily his sudden change of plan could be taken as a betrayal. He hated telling them, but he had to.

      When he did, he could not have been more pleasantly surprised by his mother’s outwardly calm and remarkably compassionate reaction. Instead of initiating a bitter debate or administering a furious rebuke, she just sighed, smiled resignedly, and said: ‘That sounds like a nice idea.’⁹ Frank’s relief and gratitude were immense: if his redoubtable mother was still on his side, then she would ensure that the entire family remained on his side. ‘I think she was disappointed that I wasn’t going to enter the Church, after all,’ he would recall, ‘but since her primary concern was for my happiness, she gave me all the support she could.’¹⁰

      He returned, suitably emboldened, to his coach Mary Hope, and started working hard – ‘harder than I’d worked for anything in my life’¹¹ – in preparation for his forthcoming RADA exam. There were three set pieces to master: one a short speech from a contemporary play, and two soliloquies from Shakespeare. With the momentous event only a matter of months away, the schedule was unrelenting: day after day, week after week, the context of each discrete piece was studied, the character of each speaker explored and the rhythms of each line assessed. Hope also worked with Howard on keeping his nerve, controlling his stammer and coping in general with the unfamiliar experience of being up there on show all alone. Rehearsal followed rehearsal, critique followed critique, until both of them were happy that they had secured a strong start, a solid centre and a suitably big finish. When the time finally came, Frank Howard felt sure that he was ready.

      The big day started cold and grey. Rising from his bed early, having barely slept throughout what had felt like an impossibly long night, Frank washed, fussed over his fine curly hair, and then put on his best, barely worn, brown suit – which hung limply off his tall, skinny frame like a large sack would have done from a stick. Studying the effect in the mirror, he thought that he looked rather good. There was just time to go downstairs for a quick cup of tea in the kitchen and some welcome words of encouragement from his mother, and then he was up, out and off to meet his fate.

      Clutching the packet of cheese sandwiches that his mother had made for his lunch, he caught the train from Eltham to Holborn Viaduct, and then, with a growing sense of trepidation, walked slowly through Bloomsbury, with all of the lines from the three speeches rattling around inside his head, until he arrived outside the entrance to the grand-looking RADA building at 62 Gower Street. What happened next was an experience that Frank Howard would never, ever, forget.

      Shuffling inside, he found himself at the back of a vast room that appeared to be almost full of his fellow-applicants. It only took one quick glance over at them – smart, smug, matinée idol types – and one furtive glance back at himself – suddenly revealed as a scruffy, shambling, ‘sweating oaf’¹² – for all of the old demons to come crashing back. The others looked as if they belonged; he felt that he did not. As he stood there, rooted helplessly to the spot, he held on tightly to his packet of sandwiches (‘I had to cling to something’), and felt sure that he could hear more than a few mocking laughs.¹³ He knew what he had to do, but at that singularly vital moment, in spite of all of those months of lessons and learning and desperately hard work, he knew that he had lost all faith in his ability to do it.

      Called in for his audition, he walked over to his spot, still clutching his packet of cheese sandwiches absent-mindedly to his chest, and then, sensing that he was having some trouble in keeping still, looked down and noticed that his left leg had started to tremble. The more he tried to stop it, the worse the quivering became. When he looked up in embarrassment at the examiners (one of whom – the imperious actor Helen Haye – he recognised immediately as the haughty wife of the master villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s recent movie, The 39 Steps), he found that they were all staring back not at his face but straight down at his leg. Panicking, he took his right hand (which remained wrapped around his squashed packet of sandwiches) and slammed it down hard and fast against his left knee, praying that the violent gesture would at least bring the shaking to a stop.

      It did not. The hand did not stop the knee; the knee started the hand. All that the attempt to end the action achieved was to provide the row of open-mouthed examiners with the even more peculiar spectacle of a crumpled young man and what was left of his crumpled sandwiches being shaken ever more wildly by a wildly shaking left leg. It looked a bit like a dance, and a bit like an exorcism, and a bit like a fit, but it was definitely a disaster. When, eventually, his leg, and the rest of him, finally came to a halt, his sandwiches had showered the examiners in a mixture of shredded cheese and breadcrumbs, and his suit was in almost as bad a shape as his frazzled nerves.

      â€˜Begin,’ he was told, and so, red-faced and reluctantly, he did: ‘Yes … Well … Um … To-to-to … er be … or not-not-not to … um … Yes, well … To be … Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? …’ He was well aware that it was already over, right there and then, but, somehow, he struggled on to the bitter end: ‘I should have thrown up my hands and run for my life,’ he would recall, ‘but beneath the panic lay that hard subsoil of determination, and so I stumbled and stammered and squeaked and shook my way through all of the three set pieces.’¹⁴

      They thanked him. He thanked them. He went out. The next candidate came in. The grey day turned black.

      Howard spent the train journey home slumped deep inside ‘an anguish of desolation and shame’: ‘I’d let everyone down: my mother, my headmaster, my schoolmates, Mary Hope – and myself. I was a complete and utter failure.’¹⁵ When he arrived back in Eltham, he found that he simply could not bear to face anyone, not even his mother, and so he went instead to a field at the back of his house, where he sat down in the long grass and started to sob. ‘Never before or since,’ he would say, ‘have I wept as I did on that day.’