Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  An early photograph of him astride his tricycle outside the house in Fords Road suggests that the clear Devon air had its desired recuperative effect. He had obviously taken the vigour of the valleys with him in his veins and we see a child destined soon to be a dead ringer for Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’. He would reminisce of the occasion around this time when his mother took him into an ironmonger’s. Suddenly she noticed a crowd peering into the shop window. There seated on a toilet seat, part of the window display, was young Thomas. ‘Come off that,’ yelled his mum. ‘I can’t,’ replied her son, ‘I haven’t finished yet!’ After receiving his early education at the Comrie House Prep School a hop, skip, and a jump away in Willeys Avenue, he was sent to Mount Radford School at 56 St Leonard’s Road, on the other side of the city. Established in 1827, it was advertised during Tommy’s sojourn as a ‘boarding and day school for boys, recognized and inspected by the Board of Education, Headmaster Theodore Ernest Vine, M.A., assisted by an efficient staff of resident and visiting masters.’ Every day Tommy would cycle the couple of miles there and back. It is significant that the pupils were fee-paying.

  When I asked the surviving members of his family how on earth his parents could have afforded this, cousin Betty did not demur: ‘His mother was from moneyed folk, see. Very lady-like, Aunt Gertie. Posh-like and she worked very hard. She was good with money, born into a family used to handling it. My cousin and I used to do sewing too, but we never charged for it. Aunt Gertie said, “You must charge and then people will appreciate the work.”’ Zena Cooper saw no difficulty either: ‘His father’s pension was very good. Even after his death (from chronic bronchitis and emphysema in a Southampton nursing home in 1963), the army looked after his mother very well.’ Further research reveals that it might not have been so expensive. Upon its foundation one of the objects of the school was stated as ‘to reduce the tuition fees to as low a scale as would defray the expenses of the establishment and afford a fair remuneration to competent masters.’ The school closed in 1967. The solid two-storey building with its imposing portico and white Georgian façade still stands in compact splendour in its leafy suburb today. It is now office accommodation.

  Mother wasted no time in instilling a sense of thrift in her son, a trait that would have lasting, even paranoiac effects on his character in due course. Bernard Diggins recalls how when he was being despatched on an errand or sent to visit his Welsh grandparents by train, his mother insisted that any money on his person be distributed through his various pockets, so that if some went missing from one, he would still have some left in the others. Betty has even witnessed the money being sewn into his clothes. At the end of the decade, on 10 June 1930, David John would be born, a brother for Tommy. This time the birth certificate lists the father’s profession as army pensioner. The ice-cream was still profitable, but there were other pressures on the family finances in addition to the new mouth to feed. His mother’s financial skills were needed more than ever as his father’s chronic gambling habits left them without a roof over their heads. According to his niece, Betty, the trait was always perceived by the family as the forgivable backlash to the tragedy of his first wife and child. Now he had literally gambled the house away.

  Tommy’s daughter, Vicky recalls her grandmother describing the unhappiest day of her life when with baby David in her arms, Tommy and her husband at her side, and a single suitcase holding their worldly possessions they had to walk away from the house in Fords Road. The Depression notwithstanding, the scene suggests some persecuted eastern European country rather than the balmy south coast of England in 1933. They relocated to the village of Langley, a scraggly rural backwater on the edge of the refinery town of Fawley on the east of the New Forest in Hampshire, with Southampton seven miles away on the indefatigable Hythe Ferry. One of the earliest memories of Tommy in those days comes from Kathleen March, his fellow pupil at Fawley Junior School. She recalls Cooper Senior working at the nearby RAF camp at Calshot, and cites this employment as the reason for their moving to the area, a fact that has not been verified. More vividly she remembers Tommy’s mum as a rather strait-laced lady who would cycle the couple of miles of gravelly roads to meet Tommy from school with his younger brother perched in a child’s seat on the bicycle. A mischievous child, he was constantly reprimanded by their teacher, Miss Nightingale, ‘Stop pulling that girl’s hair.’

  Within a couple of years their resources had improved to the extent that they were able to build a modest bungalow of their own. Scarcely half a mile from their temporary home in Home Farm Lane, ‘Devonia’ was tucked away at the distant end of the little developed Lea Road. His father was now allocated a strict allowance of pocket money – ‘a couple of shillings to bet on the horses’– and any scheme he might devise to raise extra cash was not discouraged. A vast acreage to the side of the abode that doesn’t appear to have belonged to anybody in particular fortuitously provided him with the opportunity of raising turkeys and chickens. In time his son would joke about the family diet: ‘We had chicken every day. We always looked forward to Christmas for the vegetables!’ There is no doubt that poultry exerted a nostalgic fascination for Tommy to the end of his days: for one of his last television appearances he made an unforgettable entrance wearing chicken legs. But Zena Cooper recalls it wasn’t an easy trade: ‘Make a lot of noise and the turkeys all die.’ Whatever the hazards, the poultry business did not last long. Besides, her mother-in-law hated the things.

  An old school chum of Tommy’s brother, Roy Storer, recalls helping their father with his work sheets when he was employed as a truck driver engaged in demolition work making way for the construction of the new Fawley oil refinery after the war. He remembers a man with thick, wavy, grey hair, a pronounced tan and a facial appearance like Sid James; in contrast, his wife always struck Roy as ‘tall, dark, and mysterious’. One morning he told Storer quite excitedly that he had just received some photos of Tommy from Egypt. He proudly shared them with his young colleague, but said he couldn’t understand why Tommy was wearing a silly hat with a tassel. For Roy, the funny hat with magical connotations was not necessarily out of keeping with the boy his family remembered. The defining moment of Tommy’s childhood had come one Christmas in Exeter when at the age of seven or eight he was given a box of tricks by his Aunt Lucy, on his mother’s side. Lucy Westcott lived not too far away on the Exeter to Sid-mouth road near Aylesbeare, where she used to breed Samoyed dogs. The gift instantly captivated him and remains, alongside his West Country burr, the great legacy of his Devon years. When Commercial Television reached Wales and the West Country in January 1958 he paid his bright and breezy tribute to her when interviewed by radio comedy stalwart, Jack Train for the opening transmission, The Stars Rise in the West: ‘Auntie, if you’re watching, thank you very much for that magic set, but I still can’t do the tricks.’

  In the late Twenties the likelihood is that the gift came from one of the Ernest Sewell range of conjuring sets. Sewell was a private ‘society’ entertainer who came to have almost a monopoly in this specialized area of the toy trade. His credentials were proclaimed from the lids of these enticing cabinets: ‘whose entertainments have been presented at Windsor Castle before members of the Royal Family.’ If anyone had told Cooper then that within twenty-five years he would have been performing his own stylized form of hocus pocus at the same venue he may have run scared from conjuring for the rest of his life. Tucked away in the neat cardboard recesses of the interior would have been the playing card that mysteriously changed into a matchbox, the coin that disappeared when dropped into a glass of water under cover of a handkerchief, and the perennial nail through the finger ‘mystery’. Here were intriguing devices for conjuring a borrowed coin into the centre of a ball of wool, for plucking a never-ending stream of cigarettes from the air, and for secretly divining the age of compliant audience members.

  If Tommy had been lucky enough to secure the set at the top of the range he might well have encountered for the firs
t time elementary versions of those classics of magic that became shorthand references to his own act in the years to come: the linking rings, the egg and bag, and the ‘Passe Passe’ bottle and glass. In time it became a mark of a successful commercial magician to endorse his own box of tricks. In Cooper’s career there were no fewer than four attempts made by prominent toy companies to package similar compendiums under his name. He always claimed to be unhappy with the poor quality of the proposed contents – ‘I didn’t want children to be disappointed, you see’– but in at least two instances a failure to secure favourable business terms was the answer. The simple props in cardboard, metal and string that had appealed in his childhood had moved into the plastic age. But Tommy overlooked the fact that it was never about the quality of the materials, always about the dream offered by the colour, the glow, the expectation, when the lid was raised.

  For the young Cooper that Christmas Day was also Annunciation Day. Tommy said, ‘I took to magic straightaway. All my spending money went on new tricks and all the time I could spare went on practising them.’ According to his school friend, Peter North, he eagerly awaited the next issue of boy’s comics like Rover and Wizard, but not for the sharp-shooting, goal-scoring heroes of its inside pages. His attention was drawn immediately to the back page, which was dominated by an advertisement for Ellisdons, the High Holborn firm that proclaimed itself to be ‘the largest mail order house in the world for jokes, magic and novelties’. In the manner of many a young conjuror before and since he would commandeer his mother’s dressing table with its all-seeing mirror as a practice zone; squeeze every last magical function out of every potential scrap of spare tissue, ribbon, cardboard he could find; and, when elementary manipulation skills failed him, despair constantly of dropped balls, eggs, and playing cards until his bed was called into play as a safety net.

  No one has more intimate memories of the young Tommy from his Langley days than Peter North. They reveal a complex child, on the one hand reclusive and lonely with few friends, himself the butt of people’s jokes, who would rather run from than face up to a situation – ‘A lot of people would shun him, not want anything to do with him.’ – on the other obsessed with fun for himself and, so he hoped, for others with a liking for the centre of attention this provided. Eventually when Peter first saw him on television he couldn’t believe that he appeared ‘so forward. He’d always been the outsider. Never one of the gang, you see. Never went out with the lads. We could never fathom what he did with his spare time.’ Such is the consuming power of a hobby as fascinating as magic. Who needed the fleapit up the road in Hythe with its three changes of film a week?

  His solitude would have been intensified by having no brothers and sisters of a playable age and, according to Zena Cooper, a mother who found it difficult to express love to her children: ‘In fact she was as hard as nails. She was not an outwardly loving woman and had shown him little affection as a child. There were no cuddles and grandpa was just a laugh. That’s why Tommy had to have the applause. And that need extended throughout his life. He had to be loved and was always afraid that one day his audience wouldn’t love him.’ Vicky, his daughter recalls her grandmother as a very stern person with a brisk business manner who ‘talked in a strange way – she had a kind of speech impediment as if she were talking with pursed lips like through a drinking straw.’ This may have been due to her deafness. The specifics aside, it is a not unfamiliar background to the psychology of the entertainer, the difference being that in Tommy’s case his solitariness provided the crucible in which his future métier would be fashioned so early. The nearest he ever came to voicing parental rejection was when he recalled performing his tricks on his parents: ‘I’d do it and then I’d say, “Did you see how it was done?” And they used to say, “Yes.” Then I used to cry.’

  Aspects of his childhood would mirror themselves in the years of his greatest success. ‘Loner’ was the first word to come to Barry Cryer’s mind in a discussion of his nature offstage: ‘In real life he looked so singular and strange, he always seemed alone, even in the middle of the crowd.’ But the need for an audience was always there. ‘He could sit and sulk a bit if he sensed the attention that he felt justified to himself was not forthcoming. This usually meant he had a trick he wanted to show you while everyone else was deep in conversation about sport or politics or whatever. Then once he got his opportunity and had enchanted you with this piece of magic or convulsed you with that gag, all was right with the world.’ Many is the discussion of the economy or of Manchester United’s chances in Europe that has ground to a halt because Tommy had a pack of cards in his pocket, the latest joke shop novelty up his sleeve: ‘Look, this is funny!’

  Especially engaging about Cooper the performer on stage was the child that stayed locked within him, coupled with the child he brought out in every one of us. It is a cliché among magicians to state that children are the hardest audience to fool. There is a complementary side to that view that is seldom ever voiced, namely that the child magician thinks his own audience is the easiest to deceive. Anyone who owned a magic set or placed an order with Ellisdons can recall the pride and wonder with which we set out to mystify our senior family members, buoyed along as we were by their willingness to applaud our elementary efforts. Common sense tells us now that there was little to perplex an adult mind among those most basic of tricks, but still they applauded and possibly, unlike Tommy’s mum and dad, feigned amazement. And at one level that is what happened when audiences watched Cooper. Surely nobody was really fooled as the spoon on the end of the thread jiggled about in the jar or the unsophisticated little black bag was turned inside out to show the egg had vanished? But everyone entered the fantasy.

  One of the most telling moments in his entire repertoire occurred when having failed to produce the promised bouquet from the empty vase on the plinth, he surreptitiously activated the secret switch on the top of the pedestal with an expression that dared the audience not to see a thing. It is as if he literally expected us to edit from our visual experience anything he did not wish us to see, corresponding to every occasion a child magician ever fleetingly turned his back to the audience to make the crucial move that, if spotted, will give the trick away. In the process to the very end of his days he thus summed up the wonder and optimism of every child who ever woke up to discover that box of tricks at the foot of his bed on Christmas morning.

  In an interview with Ken Dodd, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare professed: ‘There is about a lot of comedy a regression. It is a negative word, a return to childhood. In fact it’s the endorsement of childhood values, of fun, of anarchy, of colour in a grey and dull world.’ The comment pinpoints the spirit of play that characterizes Dodd’s humour; it applies equally to Cooper. The world he came to create on stage can be seen as a metaphor for what his childhood became with its desperate frustration to get his magic right, and when he could not engage an audience by baffling them, at least to leave them laughing. Roy Storer’s adopted sister, Joan, recalls how the kids would gather in a circle around Tommy in the school playground to witness an impromptu magic show. As his confidence increased he staged more formal displays for a halfpenny admission in the shed in the garden of ‘Devonia’. Even then, according to Joan, he took the practice of his magic seriously. He certainly had picked up on his mother’s philosophy that a service, a commodity became more important if you had to pay for it. More importantly he discovered that magic provided his ticket to a form of social acceptance: he admitted in later life that it was only when he started to do conjuring tricks that he found the other kids took any notice of him.

  The days when parcels arrived from Holborn were red letter ones, although Peter North recalls, ‘he’d always rush to perform the tricks before he had mastered them, like the one with the egg cup with a lid and the ball inside. People would laugh at him then. But he never seemed to mind. He just laughed it off.’ Peter intimates that the teenage Tommy might not have been bright enough to appreciate what was reall
y happening here. Like the scarecrow on the road to Oz, he was a nonstarter academically: ‘He used to sit next to me in class and copy my answers in maths. I had no idea he was looking over my shoulder. But in addition to the answers you had to show the stages that brought you to your conclusion. Tommy always had the bottom line correct, but merely inked in the intermediate figures at random. He just gave himself away! And, of course, whenever I was wrong, Tommy was wrong. The teacher only had to see the exercise books side by side.’ The same teacher used to give his hair a disciplinary tweak a hundred times more than anybody else. Maybe unwittingly she set the style for the protruding tufts that later on added definition to the fez.

  By way of compensation for his intellectual shortcomings he went out of his way to promote himself as the high panjandrum of practical jokes, all the while endorsing the old Will Rogers adage, ‘Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.’ Some were jokes you could order through the mail, like the giant spring snakes that jumped out of jam jars (a mainstay of his act for years to come); the noisy metal plates that sounded like a window shattering whenever they were dropped (Tommy was never without these in his back trousers pocket); the sneezing powder that made everyone in the class sneeze but you (if you blew it in the right direction); and the mysterious imitation ink blot left on desk or windowsill for someone to report to teacher (‘Who’s upset the inkwell? It must be Cooper!’). Other gags needed more careful stage-managing. He would prevail upon Mrs Knight, the owner of the local sweetshop to give him any spare imitation chocolate bars used for window display purposes. To one of these he would attach a long length of invisible thread – magician’s parlance for a fine, black filament scarcely visible to the naked eye – and place it in a prominent position in the school playground. Keeping hold of the other end he would hide behind the toilet building and patiently wait for the first person to discover the chocolate, at which point he would jerk the thread away to leave his school colleague as perplexed as Tantalus. By now Tommy would be running away, laughing his head off, just as the other kids would guffaw at him whenever he set off down the road on his bicycle, his big pelican feet spread out like flippers. He could never ride in a straight line, since his knees were constantly clashing against the handlebars.