by John Fisher
His surreal sense of humour extended out of the school arena into the surrounding environs. Roy Storer can clearly recall Tommy riding his bike down nearby Hampton Lane holding a newspaper in both hands and appearing to read it at the same time. This appeared to be quite a feat given the rough surface of the road and the fact that not surprisingly the saddle was adjusted to its highest point. Roy recalls his disappointment when he learned that he managed the feat by virtue of two holes cut in the newspaper to give him an approximate view of where he was travelling. Roy’s mother kept the grocery shop in the Lane, half a mile from where Tommy lived. She has known him to enter with a huge suitcase wearing a turban and long silk dressing gown, blacked up like a renegade from a minstrel show: ‘He kept repeating “Veree cheep, veree cheep” until my mother had to insist, “I don’t want anything today Tommy,” and he would go on his way.’
So much of it came down to his size. When Spike Milligan made the comment that when God made Cooper he got it wrong, he was not far from the truth. Size and shape have long been accepted as key components in a comedian’s armoury and Tommy was no exception, his individual body parts contributing to the living cartoon his outward appearance presented from an early age. In later life he would joke that he could palm an ostrich. The outsize hands made his misplaced dexterity all the funnier, the feet his walking – not to mention his cycling – all the more peculiar. He once admitted to his daughter, Vicky, an amazingly easy tendency to blush when he was a boy, recalling how when still at school his mother would take him into a shoe shop and ask for a size thirteen. All the shop girls would snigger at the thought of someone so young endowed with feet so enormous. That he was still in short trousers at the time didn’t help matters. In later life he could still feel the heat suffusing his cheeks. When Vicky asked how he dealt with the situation, he replied that he developed a tendency to turn away from it either facially or, if possible, with his whole body, a form of psychological ducking and diving. To this day Vicky wonders whether this motor response survived in some degree in her father’s constant motion on stage, first this way, then that, as he went from table to table surveying which prop to display next in his comedy of indecision.
In January 1935 Tommy moved from Fawley Junior to the new Hardley Secondary School two miles away. He completed his education only a couple of months later, leaving school at fourteen to take up an apprenticeship at the British Power Boat Company in nearby Hythe, the principal employer in the area, where for a short while his father undertook menial work in the saw mill. According to Peter North, who was close behind in entering the company, Tommy was among the ten per cent of the new intake whose parents subsidized the arrangement by paying a premium for their son to be taken on, a practice common among moneyed families who wanted their boys to have a trade: ‘An awful lot of premium apprentices had double-barrelled names.’ Presumably his mother’s financial acumen and family resources secured for him the privilege. His mum and dad would certainly have perceived it as the best they could do for Tommy amid the limited work opportunities in the area. Not that the small town was anything but prosperous. In 1936, of the approximate working population of 1,800 in Hythe and Fawley combined, only sixty-four were unemployed. When compared with the average northern industrial town that had up to seventy per cent of its workforce idle at this time, the figure was impressive.
The agreement would have been for seven years and according to Derek Humby, who joined as an apprentice at the same time as Tommy, the starting pay was a staggering two and a half pence an hour in old money, or ten shillings for a forty-eight hour week, rising by two shillings per week for the term of the apprenticeship. Fully qualified men were earning half-a-crown or two shillings and sixpence as the hourly rate. The firm specialized in producing torpedo boats and similar vessels and its motto – ‘Tradition, Enterprise, Craftsmanship’ – was known for miles around. At about the time Tommy joined, a new scheme was brought in based on the so-called ‘Three Principles’ of good time-keeping, good discipline, and progress in craftsmanship. According to Bill ‘Hoppy’ Wilson, who set up the scheme, apprentices were awarded ten points on attaining each principle: ‘For ten points they were given a voucher to purchase a tool for their trade free of charge. Higher points were given a voucher of greater value. These were granted every three months and by the end of the apprenticeship they had a complete tool box.’ Initially three months at a time were spent in each department, the chromium plating division, the carpentry shed, the coppersmith’s shop, the electrics area, and so on. There is no record that Tommy acquired even a single screwdriver!
Tommy and Derek saved up their pennies to enable them to take the ferry into Southampton every Saturday. They would invariably target Canal Walk – notoriously known as ‘The Ditches’ – in the rough part of the old town where ‘Tommy White’s’ served the best faggots and peas around. They then made their way to Chiari’s café and ice-cream parlour across the street. In addition Chiari was a landscape painter who incorporated a gallery into his establishment, as well as an amateur magician. He fascinated Tommy with the tricks he knew and taught him several, including the one where you wrap a marked matchstick inside a handkerchief, ask someone to break it through the cloth, and then produce it whole again. When they couldn’t afford the price of a cup of tea, Tommy would be allowed to perform for the patrons in lieu of payment. On one occasion Chiari promised Cooper he would teach him the secret of the Indian Rope Trick. The tuition never materialized, but its promise ensured Tommy’s constant return. On those Saturdays when Derek was unable to accompany him, he would head straight for Chiari’s. The following Monday he would always confront his friend with a cheery, ‘I’ve got a good one to show you today.’
On the work front Tommy’s concentration did not hold up for long. Every new trick in his pocket was an excuse to disrupt work in the boatyard as his mates gathered around to be amused and amazed. The constant downing of tools intimated that he must even then have had a quality that held the attention of observers, even if his bosses were less than tolerant. Humby recalls the occasion he caused an official stoppage of work. He and Tommy were officially designated tea boys with responsibility for readying the tea for the workmen during their dinner breaks, a task for which they received an additional three old pence a week. One day the formidable canteen lady, Mrs Youren, was pouring the tea for them when Tommy took three of her cups and proceeded to show Derek his version of the centuries-old trick with the cups and the balls. She was not amused and threatened to stop pouring if he didn’t stop messing around. It all sounds like a storm in one of her teacups, but Tommy persisted, the men veered from cheering to jeering, and it was hard to know who was on whose side. In the end the foreman had to be called to reprimand him before the normal day’s work could proceed.
It was in that very canteen – little more than a wooden shack – where one of the most widely reported incidents of his career took place, marking as it did a shift of allegiance from performing serious magic to burlesque conjuring. It was Christmas and the management had insisted Cooper should rise to the occasion by performing in a more organized way. Tommy described the occurrence many times over the years. Stage fright had turned his body to jelly, his throat to sandpaper. His props and his table went flying in all directions. The egg that should have disappeared was left dangling on elastic from his sleeve. The big trick where the milk was supposed to stay suspended in its upturned bottle failed to work. As he remembered it, ‘The stage was swimming with milk. I dropped my wand. I did everything wrong. But the audience loved it. The more I panicked and made a mess of everything, the more they laughed. I came off and cried, but five minutes later I could still hear the sound of the laughter in my ears and was thinking maybe there’s a living to be made here. When I joined the forces I began to do some shows in the NAAFI and started to do tricks that all went wrong.’
Tommy never lost his passion for straight magic and once established as a star relished those moments when he could turn the
tables on his audience by sneaking in an example of genuine skill and, to his apparent surprise, a miracle would result. We can never be sure how black and white things appeared to him that day back in the British Power Boat canteen, but the escapade can certainly be pinpointed as the occasion when he first entertained the idea of an act based on incompetence, even if at that stage he could have had little inkling of where he would get to perform it. From that point on his ineptitude was deliberate. His friend and fellow magician, Val Andrews, has commented, ‘From the very start of his performing career Tommy worked extremely hard to ensure that everything he touched would break, fall over, refuse to work, or by arranged accident reveal its secret. Years of hard work and experience went into honing the perfect comic article.’ At other times, as the mood of the interview took him, Tommy would shift the scene of the Hythe catastrophe to a service concert in Egypt or a postwar audition in a London nightclub. However, there can be little doubt that his comic agenda was set that Christmas lunchtime. Derek Humby had been there to witness the fiasco. Nor was he the first comedian to be switched on to his trade in this way. As Eric Sykes has observed: ‘What people fail to realize is that you don’t decide to be a comic; the audience decides that you are a comic.’ Juggler W. C. Fields, fiddler Jack Benny, aspirant thespian Frankie Howerd, frustrated pianist Les Dawson all accidentally discovered a talent for laughter when their original talents failed to make the grade.
The variety theatres of Southampton provided Tommy with his first appreciation of magic as performed before a proper audience on a large stage. The great illusionists of the day passed through the stage doors of the Hippodrome, the Palace, and the Grand. Horace Goldin, Chris Charlton, The Great Carmo, and Murray the Escapologist were all major names who in the late Thirties visited the town that proudly billed itself as ‘The Gateway to the Empire’. One particular performer attracted Tommy’s attention, as he later confided to ‘Wizard’ Edward Beal, a kindly small-time local entertainer who found time to run a bookshop next door to the business Tommy’s family ran in Southampton in the late Forties. In his book Particular Pleasures, which contains an appreciation of Cooper, J. B. Priestley queried, ‘I wonder if he is old enough to have seen, even as a young boy, the wildly original act of the American, Frank Van Hoven.’ Van Hoven, billed as ‘The American Dippy Mad Magician’ and one of the first of the true burlesque conjuring acts, died in 1929. While Tommy did not see the original, he did see the man who copied his act, namely Artemus. The week of 20 March 1939 saw the Southampton Palace Theatre featuring a bill headed by ‘Artemus and his Gang – Juggling with Water, Eggs, and Ice.’
Van Hoven’s other billing had been ‘The Man Who Made Ice Famous’, placing due emphasis on his main prop, namely a huge block of ice, the slippery peregrinations of which kept audiences in uproar as it slithered across the boards, causing freezing havoc among the three stooges enlisted to hold it and to keep it in a state of perpetual motion with the table and the goldfish bowl slopping full of water that they were supposed to hang on to at the same time. A borrowed handkerchief also came into it somewhere: only when the block of ice was in fragments, the bowl emptied of its contents, the table smashed to smithereens and the audience reduced to hysteria did Van Hoven get a chance to explain that he had been trying to pass it into the ice. Those who saw both considered Artemus mediocre in comparison with the original, but those who came to him fresh would rave enthusiastically. He did vary the routine, substituting the production of real eggs from a hat in lieu of the handkerchief business. The accidental omelette that materialized as eggs smashed on the wet and icy stage made the surface even more hilariously hazardous. In later years, as we shall discover, Tommy made great play of a burlesque magician sketch in which someone else played the wizard and he played a stooge from the audience. Eggs were the operative prop on this occasion. Tommy was too practical to have to bother about ice and goldfish bowls. But, as he reminisced to Ted Beal about the act, there was no doubt that Artemus had impressed him. Assuming he saw him in March 1939 and not before, the experience postdates the Hythe canteen episode, but must have further heightened his perception of the burlesque conjuror in entertainment terms. Ted also confided in Tommy his special philosophy: ‘The trouble with so many magicians is that they are purveyors of puzzles without the humour’; but by the late Forties, Tommy had already come to that conclusion for himself.
Meanwhile he was getting nowhere fast at the Power Boat Company. He was totally unsuitable for the task – ‘I can’t even knock a nail in straight!’ – but they couldn’t give him the sack because the premium had been paid: ‘The course I was on was one you had to pay for, so I got off with a warning and being sent home.’ Afraid to tell his parents, he spent his time cycling to nearby towns and villages looking for odd jobs. It is hard to think that the situation could have continued for seven years, but world events intervened. As war clouds darkened and Chamberlain’s umbrella looked insufficient protection against the storm, a combination of patriotism and self-esteem found Cooper volunteering for the services. There is no way the Company could stand in his way and besides his height made him a natural for the Guards. His mother had the shock of her life when one day he arrived on the doorstep of ‘Devonia’ in uniform. That the Company could in fact tolerate his antics no longer was bypassed in the elation of the moment. And as Peter North says, ‘He wouldn’t have lasted there during the war. You had to tow the line. The work was classified as a restricted occupation and there was no mucking about then.’ In the circumstances, it is amazing that he did manage to accept the discipline of the army as he did.
When war was declared, Southampton became one of the major targets of the Blitz. His parents made frequent visits back to Devon and Caerphilly to stay out of harm’s way with family and friends. When peace arrived they appear to have lost their appetite for the semi-rural community. They moved from ‘Devonia’ around the beginning of 1948, ploughing all their resources into a shop at 124 Shirley Road, a major thoroughfare out of the centre of Southampton to the North West in the Romsey direction. Today the premises accommodate ‘Johnny’s Fish and Chips’ emporium. The nearby Rotrax café and cycle store are no more, while the tattoo parlour a few doors down has survived all trends. It has been said that Tommy set his parents up in the shop, but this is not the case, since they were up and running with at first a fresh fish business long before he achieved lasting success. The fish business did not prosper. Zena Cooper recalls how on a Saturday her father-in-law would sell the fish left over at the end of the week for next to nothing. In the end the neighbourhood got wise and bought nothing earlier in the week. Gertrude had to put her foot down and any fish not sold at full price by the end of Saturday she buried in their little postage stamp of a garden. Obviously a lady of amazing industry, she once again kept the family buoyant financially by harking back to her dressmaking skills. Within a short time she converted the shop into a haberdashery to act as a front for them, with alterations and repairs a profitable sideline.
In these final years of their lives the surviving memories of those who knew them give us further insight into the characters and eccentricities of his parents. Members of Gertrude’s family recall that to deter shoplifters she used to tie all the stock together with some of her son’s invisible thread, so that if someone sneaked something away when she wasn’t looking, all the rest would come with it. Mrs Spacagna, who had a hairdressing business in the vicinity, remembers her as a very private person, but a brisk business woman, always distinctive on her own shopping round from the long black cloak she wore. I have a memory too. As a child brought up in Southampton’s Shirley district in the Fifties, no sooner had I heard that the mother of my television hero had a shop less than a mile from where I lived than nothing could hold me back from making the pilgrimage to seek her out for myself. I could not summon the courage to enter, but remember peering through the window past the displays of knitting needles, zip fasteners, ribbon, braid, and buttons galore to spy sitting behind the coun
ter what could have been a smaller version of Tommy Cooper in drag. It all looked dusty and higgledy-piggledy. I could have been peering into a pantomime set. I was later told she was only too happy for people to go in to talk to her about her son, of whom she was rightly proud. Photographs of his career festooned the walls, and albums would be brought from the back room at the merest beckoning. I regret missing the opportunity.
Michael Legg, who worked nearby, was called into the shop one day and told by Mrs Cooper that ‘Dad’ wanted to speak to him. He was shown into the living quarters at the back and Mr Cooper asked if he would call in each day on his lunch break to take a betting slip down to the betting shop in nearby Park Road: ‘I always remember he had wads of notes in his waistcoat, trousers and shirt, as he did not believe in banks.’ Their nephew, Bernard Diggins remembers a narrow passage shut off from the road running down the side of the shop: ‘He grew his own tobacco and had strung up a line on the wall on which he was hanging the large tobacco leaves to dry.’ Thomas died on 2 December 1963, his death certificate listing his occupation as ‘night watchman (retired)’. This reminded his daughter-in-law that he did spend a spell at the nearby Atherley cinema, and may even have been a projectionist there. It would help to explain the notes sprouting out of his pockets, while the tobacco leaves provided their own poignant footnote to his death, which, as we have seen, was due to bronchial troubles.
