Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic. Graham McCann

had started to dry, a bright thought burst through the gloom. Perhaps, he reflected, he had not reached the end at all, but had merely taken a wrong turn. Sitting bolt upright, he then said to himself:

      You’re a fool. A fool … You must have courage. Courage. The way you’re behaving is absolutely gutless … Look, you believe in God, don’t you? And you know that God seems to have given you talent. You feel that to be true … Now God is logical. He must be, otherwise life is stupid. Pointless. Without meaning … OK, perhaps RADA and straight acting aren’t for you. What then is the alternative?¹⁷

      It did not take long for this characteristically brusque internal inquisition to summon up an acceptable response: ‘Comedy? Is that the alternative? If you’re not meant to be a great Shakespearean, are you meant to be a comedian? Is that it? … Why not try and see?’¹⁸

      There seemed only one answer to such a question, and that was: why not, indeed? ‘I didn’t have anything to lose,’ he concluded, ‘except my pride – and that was wounded enough already after such a traumatic day.’¹⁹

      He got up, dusted himself down and walked home, where his worried mother had been waiting most of the afternoon for her son to return. When he told her tearfully about his terrible day, she just held him for a while and gave him a consoling kiss on the cheek. When, a little later, he hinted at his belief that his ‘calling’ was now, yet again, about to change, and that this time it was set to be a career in comedy, she simply assured him that she still had ‘an unswerving faith’ in the inevitability of his eventual success.²⁰ Sensing how badly the fallen St Francis felt that he had already let her down, she did all that she could to discourage any further growth in guilt: ‘As long as you’re kind and decent,’ she stressed, ‘I don’t care what you do.’²¹

      According to the neat dramatic myth engendered by the memoirs, what the 16-year-old Howard did next was to leave school (‘I’d betrayed the faith they’d had in me there: the Actor was now the Flop. No, I couldn’t go back’²²) and find a job while he waited impatiently for the arrival of some kind of bountiful show-business break. The unromantic truth, however, is that he returned to Shooters Hill, subdued and semi-detached, and, reluctantly but dutifully, saw out the last two years of his secondary education.²³ Although his academic studies never recovered (he would leave with only a solitary school certificate to count as a qualification), his actorly ebullience most certainly did: according to the fond recollections of one of his contemporaries,²⁴ Howard managed not only to strengthen his reputation as a much-talked-about ‘character’, but also somehow contrived to ‘bring the house down’ with his portrayal of The Wall in the school’s 1935 production of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ (the play-within-a-play from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

      When, at long last, the day approached when he really was able to leave – at the start of the summer of 1935 – he intended to start scouring the local area for the kind of relatively well-paid but undemanding short-term job that would complement a young man’s pursuit of a career in comedy. Before, however, he even had the chance to commence such a fanciful plan, his father died, on 12 May, and all of a sudden Frank Jnr, at the tender age of eighteen, found himself elevated to the position of the senior male in the Howard household.

      Out of desperation, he took a menial job as a filing clerk with a firm by the name of Henry A. Lane, Provisions and Produce, at 37–45 Tooley Street in the East End borough of Southwark. The work was dull and the pay was poor (just £1 per week, which was meagre even for those days), and the only solace that Frank would find was within the walls of the nearby cathedral, where he spent most of his free time either sitting alone in prayer or sometimes listening to recitals.

      He lived and longed for the evenings, when he could still feel, at least for an hour or two, that he was pushing on with his ‘proper’ ambitions: performing in local plays, pageants, concert parties, benefits, balls and revues – anything, in fact, that seemed to carry even the slightest scent of show business. He not only remained a keen contributor to the various productions put on by his colleagues at the local church, but he was also now an extremely active member of the Shooters Hill Old Boys’ Dramatic Society (where he was free to test his acting talents on slightly more challenging forms of fare).

      Not even the playful evenings, however, could make up for the laboured days. As he sat there in Tooley Street, shuffling papers and watching clocks, Frank Jnr could feel himself turning slowly but surely into Frank Snr – another career clerk, another man without any discernible drive or dreams or pride, just going through the motions, just getting on with getting through life. It was demoralising – and it was made even worse by the man who was Frank’s boss.

      As far as Frank Howard was concerned, the bluebird of happiness had never even come close to perching on one of Henry A. Lane’s sloping shoulders. With wounds from the Great War that had left him with a tin plate secreted in his head, a patch wrapped over an eye and a limp in one leg, he was no stranger, Howerd would say, to moods of ‘bitter malevolence’.²⁵ The one in-house factor guaranteed to trigger the eruption of such moods, it soon became clear, was the blatantly bored and permanently distracted Frank Howard: ‘If a cup of tea stood ready to be spilled in his lap then I, in my clumsiness, spilled it. If a bottle of ink waited to be knocked over, I knocked it. He truly despised me and terrorised me, and the more sadistic his behaviour, the more of a gibbering idiot I became.’²⁶

      Lane was not the only one who found young Frank to be more than a fraction less than adequate. Most of his colleagues – noting his peculiar habit of suddenly making wild facial expressions in the direction of no one in particular, and his equally odd tendency to mutter, shriek and sometimes even squeak to himself behind the covers of a file – considered him slightly mad. The underlying reason for such eccentric behaviour was that Frank was actually spending the vast majority of each day’s office hours furtively studying his scripts (‘I simply had to,’ he later explained; ‘my nights and weekends were almost completely occupied with rehearsals and performances’²⁷).

      After ten weeks of trying to combine the day job with his multiple play jobs, Howard was tired, run-down and covered in a rash of unsightly boils. Something had to give, and it was no surprise what did. Thanks to the chronically distracted Frank, a large consignment intended for the United States of America ended up in the Republic of China, and a folder dispatched to Leningrad was found to contain, among other things, a programme for Frank Howard’s Gertchers Concert Party. Henry Lane snapped, and Howard was sacked.

      After he had endured the humiliation of a fortnight on the dole, his anxious mother intervened. Knowing that one of the wealthy people for whom she now cleaned was a part-owner of the United Friendly Insurance Company, she asked for – and duly received – a favour, and a suitable position as a clerk was found for her son at the firm’s head office in Southwark Bridge Road. Frank had landed on his feet: not only was the pay (thirty shillings per week) a little better, but the hours were better, too: ten to six from Monday to Friday, with half-day shifts on alternate Saturdays. He was also greatly relieved to find that his new boss – a single woman aged about forty – was as kind as his old boss had been cruel (‘I think she fancied me,’ he would later claim²⁸).

      There was still not the slightest danger, however, of him ever wavering in his show-business