Moon Boots and Dinner Suits

by Jon Pertwee

  ‘Let’s go up and see old Jon,’ they said, ‘he’s a first class chap, and so amusing.’ I didn’t suffer any delusions however, and knew exactly where the real attraction lay.

  Beneath my bedroom window was an area of the pavement most popular at night with ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the road’. There would come ‘Old Molly’, ‘Tiger Tim’ and ‘Brown Paper Jack’ to lay themselves down and sleep.

  ‘Old Molly’ was an infamous alcoholic known to every Magistrate in London. Her tipple was a mixture of ‘Big Tree’ Burgundy and methylated spirits, which did her absolutely no good at all. Settling down for the night she opened her sack, and laid out neatly before her all the important things she would need during the next few hours. Two sardine tins, four odd pieces of string, some apple cores, several empty boxes of matches, a mummified orange and a Kia-ora bottle of her special concoction, known in the trade as ‘Red Biddy’. After consuming but half of this nectar, ‘Old Molly’ was roaring and having to get up at 5:30 in the morning to go to the film studios, I opened the window and shouted, ‘Put a sock in it, Moll, there’s a love. I’m trying to get some sleep.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ came the ladylike reply, and unable to top that, there was nothing else for me to do, but obey.

  Tiger Tim was so named because he communicated not with words but by roars.

  ‘Good morning Tim, lovely day,’ I’d say.

  ‘Roooaaagh,’ he’d reply.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Roooaaagh,’ he answered. If one was lonely and felt in need of verbal intercourse, then the toing and froing of conversation with Tiger Tim inclined towards the monotonous.

  One was far better served by talking to Brown Paper Jack. He came by his name for the obvious reason that he preferred to dress in brown paper and string, than in ordinary layman’s clothes. Swathing himself in brown paper had many advantages, in that: –

  1) It was adaptable to all weather conditions - in winter six more layers could be tied on, and in summer three or more layers taken off;

  2) Wrapped up nicely, dirt couldn’t get in, making the washing of his person unnecessary; and

  3) If it rained and the paper began to disintegrate, a few fresh layers would quickly put the matter right.

  The only real disadvantage was that Jack was a fire hazard. Nightly, against avuncular advice from passing members of the Constabulary, Jack would build a fire for the combined purposes of warmth and cuisine. He could produce a ‘fry-up’ on the lid of a biscuit tin that was, so I have been informed by previous honoured guests, unsurpassable.

  The only trouble was that if ‘Old Molly’ had been amongst the invited she would treat Jack to a few slugs of the Biddy by way of gratitude for the excellent repast. This was inclined to have disastrous results, as Jack, after a few snorts, would fall forward into his fire and instantly turn himself into a human torch, only to be extinguished by liberal cups of tea thrown over him by the other guests.

  Shortly after the war, the Director of a picture I was working on needed a tramp.

  ‘I know the very man,’ I said, describing Jack. ‘Bung us a few quid to give him and I’ll make sure he turns up on the right day.’

  Jack had moved to his country residence under the bridge at Chislehurst, and it was here I found him, crouched over his fire, in a crisp new brown paper suit.

  ‘How would you like to be in a film, Jack?’ I asked.

  ‘Does it pay?’ said Jack suspiciously.

  ‘Four pounds,’ I replied, ‘plus your meals and rail fare.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mr Jon, my sister’s got a jam-jar. She’ll bring me down, and I’ll save a oner.’

  ‘6:30 then, Jack, and don’t be late.’

  ‘Don’t you worry none, Mr Jon, I won’t let you down.’

  By 7:30, the Director was worried. By 8:30, frantic!

  ‘The whole day’s shooting hinges on the tramp,’ he screamed. ‘Where the hell is he?’ Once again I searched the ‘extras’ dressing room. There was no sign of Jack, only a little man in an ill-fitting blue serge suit, with a short back and sides, sitting in the corner.

  As I made to leave the room, he got up and said, ‘Are you ready for me yet, Mr Jon?’ It was Jack. Jack, as few had ever seen him. It transpired that as I had completely neglected to tell him that he was wanted as a tramp, he assumed that he was wanted for his looks and his talent. In order not to let me down, he had had a shave, a haircut and borrowed a fifty-shilling suit from his brother-in-law.

  I never saw Jack again and was saddened by his disappointment at not becoming a ‘film-star for a day.’ Perhaps I was responsible for his retirement from the road and his adoption of standard dress in preference to brown paper and string.

  *

  In his bachelor days, the splendid character actor Sydney Tafler frequently borrowed my flat for Trysts and Assignations and his astonishing virility could be readily ascertained by counting on the bedroom floor the number of circular pieces of pink paper that separated the pessaries in his tubes of prophylactic ‘Gynomin’. Sydney pretended to be a bit put out when joshed about this, but in actual fact he was preening!

  *

  The years of 1938 and ’39 were a busy time for me. I obtained a small part in Judgement Day, a heavy drama concerning the trial of Van Der Lubbe, the wretched pawn in the Berlin Reichstag fire trial. It starred young Glynis Johns in one of her first leading roles in the West End, my cousin Jill Esmond, Leon Quartermaine, W. E. Holloway, Andrew Osborne, the late Peter Bull and a mort of others whose names escape me. But the uneventful run was made memorable by the highly original wit of Peter Bull who played the mentally retarded Van Der Lubbe. Peter always made me laugh inordinately and I was forever saying so to my wife Ingeborg. One day years later whilst we were parked in the Kings Road, Chelsea, Peter, whom I had not seen for many years, came breasting down the street towards us. Peter being made of considerable stuff did not walk, he breasted.

  ‘Look,’ I cried to Ingeborg in delight, ‘here comes Peter Bull, you know, the man I’m always telling you makes me laugh so much.’ Ingeborg looked dubious as the alleged humorist breasted abreast of my car.

  ‘Peter, Peter, how are you?’ I cried in pleasurable anticipation of some witty repartee. Stopping and bending his not inconsiderable bulk to bring his face down level with the windows to see who it was that had so enquired after his health, he said, and remember I had not seen him in four or five years, ‘Ah, there you are!’

  I at once collapsed into quite helpless laughter, almost sinking under the steering wheel. By the time I had sufficiently pulled myself together to talk with him, he had typically gone, making me go off into yet another bout of hysterics. Ingeborg, whose colloquial English was not very good at the time, never cracked a smile, and to this day fails to find Peter’s statement to be as truly humorous as I have always found it.

  *

  The other memorable part of the judgement Day run happened in the last act, when one of the judges, despairing at the travesty of justice unfolding before him, turns a pistol on himself and blows out his brains, rather than be a party to any further legal impropriety.

  On this unforgettable occasion, the veteran actor W. E. Holloway made his impassioned speech in defence of true justice, said, ‘Farewell’, turned the gun to his head and fired. There was nothing to be heard but a metallic click of the trigger – a misfire. He re-cocked the gun, and again said, ‘Farewell’ – louder this time. ‘Click’, another misfire! Nothing daunted, the many years of experience took over, and taking the gun by the barrel the old gentleman proceeded to set about himself with the butt, intent on beating his brains out. Unfortunately, as the final killing blow struck home, so did the panic-struck Stage Manager pull the trigger of the spare pistol kept in the wings for such an emergency. The result of that loud report going off, at the precise moment that Mr Holloway made the ‘killing’ contact on his cranium, was one of shameful hysteria which would have been quite correctly reported in the media as ‘
There was laughter in court.’

  *

  In the same year, my father’s new play To Kill a Cat was being cast, and I begged to be allowed to audition for it. Luckily I didn’t have much competition and landed the juvenile lead. The stars were Clifford Mollison in one of his first non-dancing roles and the sexy Enid Stamp-Taylor. The Director was the comedy star Henry (Harry) Kendall, who, when given the opportunity, preferred to approach young gentlemen from the rear, as opposed to another lady in the cast who preferred to approach young ladies from the front.

  During a love scene where I was supposed to take this lady’s face in my hands and kiss her, she turned to Mr Kendall and said, ‘Harry, don’t you think it would be more in keeping if I took Jon’s face in my hands and kissed him?

  ‘Wonderful, darling, an excellent suggestion, do it!’

  It might well have been ‘more in keeping’ with her way of life, but it certainly wasn’t ‘macho’ in mine.

  I was just about to protest, therefore, when she grabbed my face, pressed her full mouth to mine with unladylike fervour, and hurled herself on top of me, flattening me into the sofa. My muffled cries of protest went unheeded, until, with a sharp arching of the back, I was able to dislodge this aggressive limpet and send her flying to the floor.

  ‘Heavens to Betsy!’ cried Harry Kendall. ‘What on earth’s the matter with you? You’re behaving like a Vestal virgin!’

  There was little point in trying to explain the heterosexual’s point of view. The actress was furious at being baulked and Harry was later equally displeased by my humourless and hostile reaction to his frequent administration of the top dead centre ‘goose’.

  So what with this and that and my immature and bellicose response to being ‘fancied’ by a member of my own sex, I was downgraded, when the play opened at the Aldwych Theatre, to understudying the more pliable Mr Grey Blake. For some reason that I’ve never understood, the lady I had this disagreement with was also given the order of the boot, and her part was taken over by a clever young actress called Elizabeth Gilbert. She also happened to be married to my brother Michael, so perhaps I was wrong when I said earlier that my father would never tolerate nepotism.

  Another member of the cast was the tall, dark haired, dark eyed and statuesque beauty, Margaretta Scott. Her personal attitude to dress was highly original and she was often to be seen wearing a large wide-brimmed black felt hat with feather, and a voluminous black cloak. One day on entering the famous ‘Ivy’ Restaurant, she was spied by the most regular and famous of their customers, the wickedly witty Dame Lillian Braithwaite. ‘Ah look,’ she whispered, sufficiently loud for all the neighbouring sycophants to hear, ‘there goes the lovely Margaretta Scott, on her way to York, I see!’

  If it hadn’t been for my friendship with London’s youngest Stage Manager, eighteen-year-old Shaun Sutton, later to become my overall boss in Doctor Who, it would’ve been a very galling and theatrically frustrating engagement.

  In this same year, aged nineteen, I appeared in Goodbye Mr Chips at the ‘Q’ Theatre. On recently studying the programme, I found that in a very large cast, there was not a single name apart from the star, the late Raymond Lovell, that I recognised. I concluded that they were either dead or had retired from the profession – a somewhat alarming indictment of a life in the theatre.

  I also did my first broadcast that year, narrating Lillibulero with Leo Genn and Ralph Truman. This interesting piece, directed by Michael Barry, was produced in Northern Ireland and walking through the streets one evening, I was almost knocked off my feet by a tremendous explosion from a nearby basement. On enquiring what on earth it could be, I was calmly informed ‘Twill be the lads blowin’ up de masonic temple again, oi’ll be thinkin’,’ the reasoning for such dislike of ‘masonry’ being beyond my comprehension. As, equally, was the explanation given by a landlady in Dublin, at the discovery of a dozen or so holes through a wall in the bedroom. ‘Ah yes; well yer not to worry yerself about dem, Mr Pertwee, they’re just dere to remind us of the troubles.’

  During that stay in Belfast, presumably because of the import attached to the subject matter of the broadcast, we were invited to have lunch with the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland at Government House.

  For some reason, best put down to insecurity, I was completely unnerved at being seated to the Prime Minister’s left, and while he talked to the guest on his right, I sat silently rolling up bread pellets.

  Eventually, he turned to me and in an endeavour to put me more at ease, asked politely what I would like to drink.

  ‘Er j-j-just some w-w-w-ater, thank you, sir!’

  ‘Mary, pour Mr Pertwee some water will you,’ he said, utterly bewildered at such an unusual request. After all, he must have thought, I’m not exactly unknown for the quality of my cellar.

  The young maid, who was plainly as nervous as I was, went to the mahogany sideboard, picked up a beautiful Waterford decanter and poured me out a large goblet full. The inside of my mouth felt like a compressed beer mat, so I downed most of the glass in one draught. The effect of this action was immediate and awesome; my breathing stopped; I quickly changed colour from surprise pink to scarlet through to blue; my eyes stood out like a terrified Pekinese with Bright’s disease; and as I threw the glass over my right shoulder, my feet came up smartly under the table with such force that a large proportion of the silver, crystal and china left the surface by about six inches with quite disastrous results.

  After the panic resulting from this embarrassing exhibition had died down, and some semblance of order had been restored, the PM conducted an immediate inquest.

  It transpired that Mary, the young maid, was new to the job, and instead of pouring me fresh water from the jug, had poured me neat Kummel from a decanter, and I, in my nervousness, had gulped it down in one.

  ‘It’s sorry I am, sorr,’ she said, ‘but they both looked the same to me.

  She was right of course, poor soul, but by heaven they didn’t taste the same, nor were they the same proof.

  *

  In the cast of To Kill A Cat was a character actor by the name of John Salew. He was doing very well at the time, working in films, theatre, and on the radio. This was a medium that I very much wanted to crack, and in meeting John Salew in Whitcomb Street early one morning, fate must’ve taken a hand.

  ‘Ah Pertwee, just the man I wanted to see,’ he cried. ‘Can you do a West Country accent?’

  Could I? Dammit, I’d lived half my life down there. If I couldn’t do that dialect, I couldn’t do any!

  ‘Yes, Mr Salew, I think so.’

  ‘Then get yourself to this studio in Bond Street at once,’ he said, handing me the address. ‘Tell them I can’t get in today, I’m filming at Denham.’

  Now at the time Mr Salew was playing various parts in famous soap operas such as Marmaduke Brown (the Waggoners Walk of its day), Backstage Wife, Young Widow Jones, Mr Reeder and Stella Dallas. These fifteen-minute programmes were broadcast five days a week from Radio Luxembourg and Fécamp.

  Needing no further bidding, I tugged my forelock for Mr Salew and, thanking him profusely, shot off to the Bond Street Studio, and told them why I was there.

  The Producer was Jack Hayes-Hunter, a very live-wire American, who to put it mildly was not best pleased.

  ‘That bastard’s too clever by three quarters,’ he yelled. ‘What in Christ’s good name am I going to do now?’

  ‘Well you could try letting me have a shot at it, Mr Hunter,’ I suggested. ‘I’m here and you’ve nothing to lose.’

  ‘True,’ said Jack, and took me at once into the recording booth. The star, Ernest Clark, and the rest of the cast quickly put me at my ease, resulting in what I hoped was a reasonable performance.

  The next morning I received a phone call from my Agent, Maurice Lambert (by coincidence, also John Salew’s Agent), to inform me that Jack Hunter had been sufficiently impressed to offer me the part permanently at two pounds two shillings a programme – and, b
ecause he was so angry at Mr Salew’s ‘unreliability’ and ‘lack of professionalism’, all the rest of his parts as well.

  ‘You clever schmock,’ said Maurice, only employing such endearments to good friends, ‘I represent John Salew, as well as you, so how in Moses’ name am I going to explain this to him?’.

  ‘That’s your problem,’ I replied, ‘you’re the flesh peddler, not I,’ and although Mr Salew never spoke to me again, at least I had cracked the world of commercial radio. For the next two years, I did around twenty to twenty-five fifteen-minute shows a week and at two pounds two shillings a programme, I was pulling in between forty and fifty pounds. A fortune for a young actor in those days. This added increment enabled me to pay the price down on another motorbike, a V-Twin 1000cc Brough-Superior, refurbish the flat, buy two new suits from Hector Powe at three pounds ten shillings a go, and to afford the luxury of Miss Carlotta Joachim Sid’Kithan, a beautiful live-in lover. She was from Ceylon, half Dutch, half Singalese, and was by far the most exotic creature I had ever met. Usually gentle and soft of voice, she was at times as fiery as a Tasmanian Devil. She wore sarongs of silks and cottons and taught me the many ways to tie them. I’ve worn sarongs on the beach, on my boat and in bed ever since, and have collected lava-lavas, pareu clothes, lunghis, and kikois from all over the world – most useful and colourful garments. The Tahitians, who are very sexually orientated, say, ‘They are quick to put on, but even quicker to take off!’

  Carlotta was a great cook and taught me to appreciate the pleasures of good eastern food. The delicious smell of succulent curries wafted down St Martins Street to delight my home-coming, but probably vexed Mr Harold Macmillan, whose publishing house was right next door. Old Molly, Brown Paper Jack and Tiger Tim had no complaints, however, as they frequently came in for the left-overs and rice, which Jack would mix up with a threepenny tin of Heinz baked beans or a tin of pilchards.