by Jon Pertwee
Inevitably, the day had to come when you were just right, but then there was always the grim question of your remuneration to go through.
‘It’s only a small part dear, you’ve played it before so you won’t need much rehearsal.’ (That meant, of course, that the Company wouldn’t have to pay so much.) ‘You’ll get your return train fare of course.’
‘Of course. How much does the engagement carry, Mrs Warner?’
(Note the avoidance of ugly words like ‘job’ and ‘pay’.)
‘Ah! Well I’ve discussed the matter with Mr Hanson most carefully, and he is prepared to offer you two and a half.’
‘Only two and a half, Mrs Warner?’
‘Yes dear, two pounds ten shillings – none of your fancy threes and fours.’
Fancy threes and fours? You could hardly make ends meet on four, let alone two and a half. It was said of an old actor who when faced with the same situation, declared to a friend, ‘Yes I know dear boy, it is not a large salary but I have it on very good authority that there is an excellent pork pie in Act Two!’
The next item on the out-of-work-actors’ agenda was lunch at ‘Ma’ Phillips’ ‘Olde Lanterne Cafe’ in Lower Wardour Street. Here you could obtain a first class home-cooked lunch of soup, meat-plus-two-veg, and a pudding, for one shilling and three pence (coffee extra). The ‘Olde Lanterne’ consisted of two rooms only, one in the back for the actors, and one in the front for the regular ‘Nobs’ who were obliged to pay two shillings and sixpence for the singular privilege of sitting at a private table and having two cups of coffee (inclusive). For the itinerant minstrels in the back room there was a very large pine table to sit around, the facing ends of which were permanently occupied by two ladies, one a large, busty, full-mouthed virago called Ione Kink-um and the other a slight, small-boned, introvert named Ella Starling. In all the years I patronised ‘The Olde Lanterne’ I never remember these ladies being anywhere or doing anything, other than sitting at that table.
In the opposite corner was a very small round table, for the very large round person of ‘Ma’ Phillips and her boss-eyed, greyhound-gambling husband Bill. ‘Bill is going to the dogs,’ said ‘Ma’, and on looking at him, even for a moment, one could see she spoke the truth. When ‘Ma’ could toil no longer at serving table, she would sink her splendid haunches on to a minuscule stool, and cry out ‘Nellie, take over the front! I’ve got to rest me “plates”.’ In her hand she held a large wet dishcloth and God help the poor sinner who made the mistake of letting drop a single swear word other than ‘damn’, for before the epithet had properly left the lips she’d strike the offender across the mouth with the cloth with the speed and accuracy of a spitting cobra.
‘We’ll have no more of that filth, thank you, Mr Pertwee! Another one like that and I’ll ban you for a week!’
That threat would’ve steadied Hitler, and all talk from then on was tempered with extreme moderation.
Above the table was a blackboard and on this ‘Ma’ would write in chalk any messages, or tips of jobs going. The film-extras casting office often rang ‘Ma’ and requested actors and actresses for ‘special’ work, where, because you provided your own clothes, the salary was more.
There was one ‘regular’ from the front room known only by the nickname of ‘Prompt’. Twice a week ‘Prompt’ would invite an actor or actress to ‘take luncheon’ with him, and it says something for the mystery man that his invitation was never spurned. The invitee waited patiently in the back room until the host arrived, and then passed proudly into the front room to enjoy the rare privilege of sitting at a private table for two, and indulging in that extra cup of coffee. We were never able to suss out ‘Prompt’ (a military man, perhaps??), childless, unmarried, ‘straight’, not gay, and undoubtedly of means. Otherwise how could he have possibly afforded paying out five shillings twice a week? At an outlay of ten shillings – 50p – he would’ve had to have been extremely well off.
Upstairs there was a little Jewish tailor called Mr Bloom, who, sitting cross-legged on the top of his work-table, kept his young actor friends’ clothes in a reasonable state of repair. He wore thick pebble glasses to no apparent purpose, as they rested permanently on the top of his head and were never to be seen on the end of his nose. Mr Bloom and ‘Prompt’ became contender ‘hosts’, a situation we played on to the full as it afforded us a double chance of being ‘entertained’. The only trouble was that Mr Bloom and ‘Prompt’, for reasons of rivalry, insisted on ‘cutting’ each other, something which the tailor performed with considerably better skill, naturally.
This feud placed the invited one in a most difficult position, for if he cut Mr Bloom when being entertained by ‘Prompt’ or vice versa, the chances of being invited again were remote in the extreme. It was best to let the ‘cutters’ have at each other alone and find something fascinating to observe on the ceiling until the ‘joust’ was over.
After an ‘everybody out’ from ‘Ma’ it was ‘everybody in’ to the accommodating Blue Posts pub next door, to prove one’s heartiness and manhood by downing, with elbow well up, one pint of bitter. It was seldom more than one, due to the necessary financial outlay, but you had to kill time somehow until ‘Ma’ once more opened up her portals for tea.
For one shilling, you got a pot of tea, buttered toast or toasted tea-cake, jam and pastries, the favourites of which were ‘Ma’s’ magnificent strawberry tarts. There, we sipped, nibbled and talked until closing time at six.
Sad to say, I don’t think establishments like that exist any longer. And even if they do, the characters certainly do not!
For an occasional change of scenery, there was always the ‘S and F’ in Denman Street. This was a totally different ball game, for here, you had to have two requisites, a supply of pennies and an old play script.
Armed with these two essential items, you sauntered casually into the restaurant, purchased a cup of coffee (then considered outré), sat down at the counter bar, sipped the coffee and, turning the cover back so that no-one could see that the play was of an age, pretended to read it.
This afforded the reader a great opportunity for histrionics, loud laughter (to oneself), frowns, whispered exclamation of ‘No, no, no’ with accompanying clucks! and tuts! This performance was of course to convince other out-of-work-actors, that you were, as always, in work, and had just been given the script of a new West End play to read and consider.
Now came the moment critique. When all envious eyes were upon you, you advanced to the telephone booth (yes, that’s what the pennies were for), and making sure you had left the door open, dialled, ostensibly, your producer or agent but in reality a friend or relation. Pressing button A you said, ‘Larry? or Ralph? or Binkie? or Emile? Or Prince? or Jack? This is Jon’ or whoever. ‘Yes I’m reading it now – what? Well, it’s not bad, but I’m not sure it’s really me. Let me sleep on it, I’ll let you know in the morning. What? Oh all right I’ll try and finish it tonight and I’ll ring you at home with my decision.’ (A nice touch that, hinting at an intimate knowledge of the recipient’s ex-directory home telephone number.) ‘Bye, give my love to Jean, or Barbara, or Rosalind or Jimmy!’
The phone would be replaced and the ‘chicaner’ would exit, smiling broadly at the envy he had successfully evoked in his green-eyed audience.
Strange to relate, I never met anyone who believed in the veracity of those performances for one single moment, yet they continued unabated until the outbreak of war and then suddenly it was ‘Tomkins here, sir. Speak German sir? Fluently, sir! In plain clothes as usual, sir?’
From then on, as far as the actors’ daily agenda was concerned, you were on your own, though for preference you endeavoured to make sure it was otherwise.
I had come to accept my daily visits to the offices of repertory agents Miriam Warner and Nora Nelson-King as part of my life’s rich pattern, and went through the ritual each morning as one in a trance.
This particular morning however, in answer to the call of ‘Next’, I went
into the office, dutifully uttered my polite ‘Good morning, Mrs Nelson-King,’ and found to my astonishment that no longer was she wracking her brains for my name. Indeed, she knew it! And no longer was I ‘too short’ or ‘too tall’, ‘too young’ or ‘too old’. In every respect I was perfect. Yes, Mrs Nelson-King was about to offer me my first engagement in Repertory – ‘Repertory’ meaning then a different play every week.
Chapter Five
The engagement was with J. Baxter-Somerville’s Repertory Players at the Springfield Theatre, Jersey. With a salary of three pounds per week, and sharing digs in a dairy with Macdonald Hobley, or as he was then known Val Blanchard (his family name), I was a very happy young man. Our landlady, Mrs Le Mesurier (pronounced Ler Measurer) owned the dairy, and tipped the scales at some eighteen stone. One day in a fit of tactless exuberance, I asked her how she came to be so fat, and she replied, ‘By laughing, my dear, just by laughing so much.’ What a wondrous sight it was, to see all those 250 pounds of her shaking and quaking and shivering and quivering with uncontrollable mirth. Mrs Le Mesurier’s theory of laughter causing fatness may well have been true in her case, but with me, it was a resounding failure. I laughed a lot but ended up looking like a beardless Don Quixote.
I’m afraid to say that I didn’t last very long with Mr J. Baxter-Somerville’s Company, due to a slight coolness that developed between me and the leading man Mr Peter Glenville, son of the famous principal boy Dorothy Ward, and now an eminent stage and film Director. We were performing a Dorothy Sayers ‘Peter Wimsey’ play, with Peter as Lord Peter and myself as the Vicar. In one scene I had to enter downstage left and warmly shake the hand of Mr Glenville. It occurred to me that it might be rather droll to have a raw egg in my hand on the first night. I, therefore, with a fresh brown one obtained from Mrs Le M’s dairy secreted in my palm, shook Lord Peter’s hand and chuckled merrily to myself when the yolk went up his sleeve and the white went down his trousers. The audience roared but Mr Glenville didn’t, and thought it to be a very thin piece of fun. Trembling with anger, and without my knowledge, he at once phoned Mr J. Baxter-Somerville in England, and informed him that he would not remain any longer in a Company where he was expected to perform with buffoons.
‘J. B.’ taking his life into his hands straightway took a flight in a ten-seater twin-engined de Havilland from Croydon Airport, and landed perilously on the sands of St Heller. This was not an error of judgement on the pilot’s part, but before the airport was built the beach was the only way of getting in.
That night, quite unbeknown to me, J. B. sat at the back of the Dress Circle to observe unobserved the threatened misbehaviour of this tiresome young man. He and Peter Glenville had been hugely unamused by the raw egg ‘business’, and were to be amused even less by what was to follow.
On summing up the case at the end of the last act, Lord Peter Glenville demonstrated that the murder had been committed in a most unusual manner. A hanging brass flower-pot containing an aspidistra, and suspended from the ceiling by a long chain, had been pulled back by the murderer and released at the precise moment his victim was passing the bottom of the stairs, the heavy pot swinging across and crushing the skull of the unsuspecting murderee. To prove his point, Lord Peter made a dummy of the victim by use of a large Victorian plant stand for a body and a cabbage for a head. Once released, he said, the brass flower pot would swing fast across the stage and to the horror of all assembled would strike the cabbage head such a blow that it would fly from its ‘body’.
To achieve this splendid piece of Theatricalia, it was necessary for the long chain of the flower pot to be tied off in a perfect ‘dead’. An inch out on either side and the pot would miss striking the dummy head entirely. That was precisely what I intended it to do. An hour before the show, when no-one was about, I shifted the ‘dead’.
‘And this, my friends, is how that swine killed poor Mr Arbuthnot,’ explained Lord Peter with panache, and releasing the flower pot, was given the treat of watching it zoom down, missing the ‘victim’s’ head completely and continue swinging backwards and forwards like the giant pendulum in Edgar Allen Poe’s classic story. The laughter in the audience was tremendous.
But, as could have been expected, there was no laughter in the dressing room after, only censure and disapprobation. To no-one’s surprise, including my own, I was once again summarily dismissed.
*
I had never expected to speak to J. B. Somerville again, nor he to me, but some years later, after the D-Day landings, I was sent by my then section of Naval Broadcasting to Jersey, to interview the locals on what their life had been like during the German occupation.
It was sad to see this normally sparkling isle so colourless, empty and depressed. The Jersey people were desperately hungry and short of everything. Having virtually no postage stamps, they cut two-Penny ones in half and used them as pennies, and so on up. I bought a number of these stamps and later made quite a killing.
One evening I took a stroll up to the Springfield to have a look at the theatre where I had started my career. The park itself was jammed with German vehicles. Mercedes 540K open-tourers, superb Horchs and BMWs. Big BMW motorcycles with and without sidecars and a plethora of Volkswagens of every description, but there was one remarkable thing that all these vehicles had in common. There wasn’t a car or motorbike with a full set of tyres on it. Unable to ship or fly any in during the last year of the war, the occupying German troops had resorted to binding strips of rubber cut from the walls of worn-out tyres around the rims, sometimes, in the case of the bikes and Volkswagens, even wiring on sacking. It was most undignifying for the Classic Royalty among them, to be so commonly shod. What a fortune lay there for a man of enterprise. Sad to say we will never see the like of such motor vehicles again.
Shedding a bitter tear, I walked into the large area under the auditorium of the theatre, to find that since the occupation, it had been used as a storage shed for the sacks of flour and grain employed in the making of bread for the occupying forces. No wonder the German troops looked hungry, for there was only one ten foot high wall of sacks left, and they’d obviously been eking them out. In a flash of memory I remembered that behind that wall was the scenery store, where all J. Baxter-Somerville’s sets and props had been kept. So summoning an Army Sergeant I asked him to get some of the POWs to clear the wall of sacks from the door as I wanted to go in.
In twenty minutes the big scene door was clear and I entered the bay, the first man to do so in several years. It was Aladdin’s cave. The Store was exactly the same as when the company had left it in 1939, full to the brim with the ‘old oak set’ and all the other repertory theatre scenery clichés. There were skips filled with props and roll-cloths depicting hideously garish gardens and landscapes and many hundred-weight of timber for the construction of further horrors.
During the occupation, for want of fuel, the Germans had burned every sliver of wood that they could lay their hands on, including hundreds of beautiful mature trees. If they had known what was hidden away behind their grain sacks they would have burned the lot. So in order to protect my long-suffering old boss’s property, I had the ‘Soldaten’ build up the grainsack wall again.
When I got back to England some three weeks later, I contacted J. B. Somerville and gave him the good news.
‘Is that Mr Somerville?’
‘It is.’
‘This is your erstwhile enfant terrible, Jon Pertwee here.’
‘Oh yes!’ His voice took on a colder tone. ‘And what can I do for you?’
‘Its more a question of what I can do for you. Would you believe that I could metaphorically put hundreds of pounds back in your pocket, with just one simple sentence?’
‘No, but tell me just the same.’
I told him and he was beside himself
‘What can I do to repay the bringer of such glad tidings?’ he asked.
‘Just give me another chance in one of your Rep Companies after the war, sir. I’ve gr
own up at last and wouldn’t let you down again, I promise,’ I replied.
‘Then a position awaits you, Pertwee, you have my word on it,’ said J.B. But the way things went for me professionally, after the war, I was unable to take him up on this offer, and sad to say, we never met again.
*
My dismissal from Jersey was followed by a somewhat thin period. Maybe my reputation as a jester had gone before me. I was obliged therefore to accept very small roles at Birmingham, York and Liverpool in the ‘Tea is served, Madam’ and ‘The carriage awaits without, Milord’ genre. I was also once given a script which read ‘The curtain rises at Act One, in the library of the Duke and Duchess of Dillwater, where Elphinstone (me, of course) is discovered dead.’
*
As all good things come to an end, so do the bad things if you persevere, and my lean time finished in April 1938 when I was given the chance of joining the Rex Lesley-Smith Repertory Players, situated at the end of the West Pier in Brighton.
I was delighted to be living and working in this lovely Regency town, from which so many of my family had stemmed.
I was paid the splendid remuneration of three pounds, ten shillings a week and lived with a Madame Penison in the Victoria Road. I had a very comfortable room with crisp, clean French linen, and as this was the summer season, fresh flowers by the bed.
In the evenings if it was cold, there was always a crackling, coal fire to study by. Officially I had three meals a day, but in reality, far more, because the kitchen was always open if I felt like ‘a little something’.
On Saturday nights, after the last show, two other lodgers from the company and I went down to the station, and at one o’clock in the morning collected Monsieur Leblanc, who was not only the chief chef at Frascati’s Restaurant, Oxford Street, but also the lover of the voluminous Madame Penison. He would come with an enormous skip filled with all the ‘goodies’ he had purloined from Frascati’s during the week, which were, he assured me, a chief chef’s ‘perks’. It contained half bottles of excellent claret and burgundy, spirits of every kind, and liqueurs. There were pieces of duck, pheasant, fish and salmon and sometimes the occasional dollop of caviar; profiteroles, tarte aux pommes and cheeses of every kind were in abundance. We lived like the proverbial lords. On Sundays, when my father asked why I didn’t come home, I said with undisguised amazement, ‘Come home? Come home and miss Ma Penison’s family lunch? You must be mad!’
