by Ted Kessler
Despite my dad having a long career in the spotlight, he wasn’t particularly showbiz away from his work. The most showbiz thing that happened to my family was my parents being introduced by Eric Morecambe. My mother used to sing and dance in West End musicals. She’d done pantomime with Morecambe and Wise a few times and was good friends with them. She’d seen my dad on telly – he had his own series, which Morecambe and Wise had been on, and she had taken a shine to him. So she said to Eric once that if he ever got the chance could he introduce her to Roy Castle. The next time my dad did a show with them, Eric Morecambe brought my mum into the dressing room and said, ‘Roy, this is Fiona and she is in love with you,’ and then he left. And that was it, there was never anyone else.
I didn’t really know who Eric Morecambe was, growing up, other than the man who would have our whole family crying with laughter when we went round to his house for lunch. Eric died when I was ten, so the talent to have everyone from a nine-year-old boy to adults in their fifties in stitches with an off-the-cuff comment was a kind of true genius. That was another privilege of having Roy Castle as your dad: lunch with his best friends, Eric Morecambe and Harry Secombe.
My dad never talked about his career at home. It was only after he died that I discovered the albums he had made. And he never mentioned the films, such as Carry On Up the Khyber. I only found out about it when I was staying at a friend’s house. We went to bed, and then his mum woke us up, saying, ‘Quick, come and watch this!’ I remember the brilliant feeling of me and this other family laughing hysterically at my dad and Sid James being covered in plaster as a ceiling fell in on them on television. Having said that, all my friends wanted to meet my dad because Record Breakers was one of the shows that everyone watched. It was a strange thing when he’d pick me up from school and everyone was asking for his autograph.
He broke a lot of world records on Record Breakers and when you start to list them it seems utterly bizarre that one man, my dad, could have done it all. They’re so random. When it started they got him to break a few just to get it going. He broke one for playing the most musical instruments at once and also for playing the most taps in a second, which is twenty-four. Then, because he was the face of the programme, if there was a generic record to set he’d attempt it. He was the head helmet of the most white helmets standing on each other as a triangle on top of a motorbike; paragliding under the most London bridges. That kind of caper. He did the death slide from the top of Blackpool Tower, despite being petrified of heights. He also did the wing walk over the English Channel. Many years later, I was stranded on a plane in the snow next to this lady who started telling me about all the times she’d been stuck in airports. She told me about the one time she’d been stuck in Cairo airport because bloody Roy Castle was wing-walking in the wrong airspace and nobody could take off. She said she’d never loathed a man more than Roy Castle that day. I left my ticket in my seat for her to see my surname. Hopefully she googled me.
My dad’s advice to me was to find out what I thought I was good at and stick to it. He always felt that, because he did so much, nobody knew what he was best at. Different generations remember him differently. For some he was a comedian, for others he was an actor or a jazz musician, and for my generation he was a children’s TV presenter. But he felt his main thing was singing. That was his passion. Frank Sinatra gave him an album deal with Reprise. I found the telegram from Sinatra welcoming him to Reprise when Mum was moving house. Frank said he would be a global superstar, and the album is absolutely brilliant. But it was the early sixties and Elvis and the Beatles were about to change music. Big-band crooners didn’t stand a chance.
From the outside, he was an enormous, multi-talented success, but when you’re in it you don’t necessarily feel that. There’s always more you could be doing. Sinatra had said they’d make movies together, and when you’ve had that suggested to you then you wonder if you’ve fulfilled your potential. But, in Dad’s words, maybe if he’d done all that he might not have had the family life we enjoyed.
I remember his diagnosis. My parents had been away in Australia on holiday over New Year. When they came back he had these terrible migraines that he’d never had before. All through the night he’d be pacing up and down along the corridor because he couldn’t settle. He went and got tested for all sorts of things but they couldn’t work out what it was, so they put him on various different diets. Eventually they found out he had a shadow on his lung and it was inoperable cancer. It was chemo or radiation only. I had a band rehearsal in the garage when he was at the doctor’s and I came up to the house to find out. I knew from their faces the news wasn’t good. When the words came out of his mouth the world caved in.
My dad was a Yorkshireman who grew up in a one-up-one-down house, sharing a bedroom with his parents until he was fifteen. He was a stoic man. He wasn’t someone who was prone to showing too much emotion. So to see him cry was a very unusual thing. It was huge. He was only given six months, although he managed to live for two and a half years.
Those two and a half years were exhausting, emotionally. A series of hopeful periods and setbacks. We never courted any publicity throughout but it had obviously touched people’s hearts because he was constantly in the newspapers. That was an embarrassment to him.
There was a point when the doctors were happy that it had gone away. That was just amazing. The all-clear: what a moment. My dad used to drum on the table a lot, though. He did a show about George Gershwin and he knew that Gershwin died of a brain tumour. Gershwin had noticed it because his left hand wasn’t as fast as his right hand when playing the runs. We had some guests round for dinner and my dad finished drumming on the table and said, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to go to the doctor and they’re going to tell me I have a brain tumour.’ He was right. He got very ill.
That was such a huge blow, although maybe not quite as hard as it might have been had we not still been wearing our armour from the first diagnosis. To misquote Alan Partridge: needless to say, we laughed through it all. In our family we’ve always laughed, even in the darkest moments. Dad was so positive. He was either on, out campaigning, or he’d be collapsed. Sometimes he needed to be wheeled around. But as soon as he was on stage or on camera he was bright as a button. My dad used to call that Dr Footlights.
Towards the end he went round the country on a train campaigning about lung cancer and increasing awareness of passive smoking, which is what the doctors had put it down to. It was just the final few weeks when he wasn’t well enough to leave the house and gave that up. He was unstoppable otherwise. It was exhausting to watch.
The older I get, the more I understand him. The more I relate to him. I would love to ask him all kinds of questions about what he did because I feel like we are very similar in some ways. People say how alike we are, and that’s a bit embarrassing, but I do feel a real connection with him now. I used to do gigs with him, from the age of nine. I’d play clarinet. He’d written this thing which was a comedy routine with music. I’d play a piece of music, he’d accompany me on the piano, and then we’d get faster and faster until he waved a white flag. It was very generous of him. That was the moment that I thought, I love this. I very rarely get nervous now on stage because of that apprenticeship.
Looking back, it seems like an idyllic childhood. At the time I didn’t realise it, but talking to friends I now see how lucky I was. I’m so incredibly grateful. I have one brother and two sisters and we’re still a very close family. We still go round to my mum’s for Sunday lunch. We all just wish he was there too.
Ben Castle is a musician and lives in London.
HERE I WAS, THE APPRENTICE TO THE MASTER
Wally Downes by Wally Downes Jr
Trying to live up to your dad’s expectations is one thing. Trying to do it when he’s your boss is another. Attempting both while in the midst of a relationship hiatus (blazing row) is a Shakespearean tragedy wrapped up in a Monty Python sketch.
I was given an apprenticeship at
Brentford Football Club after finishing school, despite being an inch off dwarfism and about as quick as treacle. It was like nothing you could ever imagine: an actual paradise. Living rent-free indoors, getting fed and clothed by the club and having a Professional Football Association card that ensured we could get into the local nightclub three times a week as VIPs – I’d not long packed up my paper round.
The only thorn in my side was that my old man was the boss. He wasn’t at the start, oh, no. At the start it was easy. I would trundle along with my pals, giggling from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. while cleaning boots, getting beat up, larking about, lifting weights, laughing and playing football. But a few months in, Dad got the job as manager.
Him and Mum had split up the year before so I was the man of his vacated house. I was having sex at least once a week and earning forty pounds just as regularly and I had nine average GCSEs to fall back on whenever I saw fit. I thought I would demonstrate my new-found worldliness and machismo as often as possible.
I can’t remember what we rowed about initially. A feud of any kind is a doddle to bring on, isn’t it? You ignore calls and emails, you maybe stop going to a certain pub, you de-friend someone on Myspace. Yet here I was, the apprentice to the master, and we weren’t talking. I must have walked past him fifty times a day, made him cups of tea and cleaned his boots, all with a solemn vow of silence. God knows what it must have looked like to the other boys around me – there was enough to mock me for without a soap opera unfolding before them.
As a stout dwarf I was determined to lift heavy weights and would get in early to bench-press myself senseless. One morning I was casually trying to lift my own body weight without any assistance. Aiming for five reps, I got three in and my world started to cave in: arms buckled, veins bulged, and slowly I could see a pair of flip-flopped socks and WD-initialled shorts meandering towards my stricken body.
And there he stood, hovering over me like the Lord Almighty, wafting above my spasming body as the bastard weights bar hung over me like the sword of Damocles. Fuelled by his presence I somehow knocked the last reps out and he toddled off, muttering something ever-so-casually under his breath that was the perfect blend of praise and condescension, like, ‘You’re quite good at that.’ I was so glad I got it up – and pissed off I was still the little div so eager to impress the boss, I mean Dad, I mean boss . . . Him.
I look back and cringe. It was the height of embarrassment. Every morning the boss would stroll in and greet the dozen herberts sat in the dressing room discussing their latest conquest, and I would maintain a stoic silence – a real challenge given the level of lairy obnoxiousness I was operating at the rest of the time.
One Christmas he cornered me in the tea room at Griffin Park, Brentford’s ground, and lovingly presented me with an envelope filled with vouchers for the latest trendy shoe shop in Chiswick – clearly unaware that at the start of my second year in football the pay was bumped up to a lofty forty-five pounds and I was walking around in the grooviest size sixes in town. I politely refused. In a faux-vicious attack he threw the envelope in my direction but, in the unpredictable way only an envelope can fly, it immediately darted to the right, about four foot in front of me, smashed into the wall and slowly slid down. I stifled a giggle at the spectacle but he was having none of it. I’m sure he wanted to laugh, really.
I’d still get horrible pangs of love and loyalty especially when fans at Brentford would harangue him from the sidelines. I was desperate for him to do well and hated hearing chants of ‘Downes Out’. But I was all bravado and felt I had the upper hand. I was pushing heavier weights and getting more hirsute by the day, and my recent acquisition of a National Identity Card meant I could venture from Kingston and sow my oats as far away as Hammersmith and Putney.
Of course, it all came to a juddering and almighty collapse. I was injured at the time but I remember seeing a load of the boys walking in from their latest session looking grey. All but two of the gang had been released there and then by the youth team manager and two of my best pals were among them. Seeing those fellas cry in the dressing room was horrible and I completely melted.
I knew it was all over and the idyllic bubble we lived in had burst. I walked out of the Tolworth base devastated because my friends had been let go, and I was never going to return as their talent far exceeded mine. Just as I thought my sob-ridden dash to the 281 bus stop was a clear run, Dad caught up with me, and the bolshy little twerp – all Jean Paul Gaultier aftershave and John, Paul, George and Ringo attitude – reverted to embryo.
All the iron I’d been pumping couldn’t pull me out of his bear hug, and all the Dax hair wax I had caked into my locks did not deter him from nuzzling into the pathetic-looking creature he had spawned. Through a torrent of tears and snot I howled how unfair it was that my pals had been axed and the cold manner in which it had happened, paying no attention to the stony wall of silence I had erected in front of my dad for so long. I let it all out, he didn’t say much, and that was that.
I toddled off with my wounded mates to get drunk, and the next day Dad had work for the three of us lined up from the minute we sobered up and pulled ourselves together. The phone calls got answered, I taught him how to use email and we started to frequent the same pubs.
It’s all been plain sailing since. We fuck up and forgive and repeat the well-trodden route over and over now. Landmark moments, like successful driving tests and graduations on my part, and what seems like a relentless stream of Premier League promotions on his behalf have been joyfully shared with raucous laughter instead of begrudging hush.
Perhaps the memory of that deafening silence is what prevents a recurrence. We’re not exactly quiet, Dad and me. And while the scent of tobacco and Brylcreem reminds me of my granddad, it’s the old man’s wall of sound I associate with him most. And that prolonged self-enforced silence might be why there’s rarely a quiet moment between us now and why I dread the day when there’ll be no more phone calls at silly o’clock in the morning, telling me he’s wiped everything off his iPad and I need to rush round.
Wally Downes Jr comes from a family of
esteemed sportsmen but – after a near-death
experience with pyloric stenosis – he shunned
athletic glory for sports reporting.
HE WOULD BE QUIETLY IN THE BACKGROUND
the only wog in the world by Tjinder Singh
my father was in many ways there, but not there at all. not that he was a rogue like a lot of men i can remember growing up, but like Peter Sellers in the Party he would be quietly in the background, trying to keep away from trouble when he was outside the house, and like Enid Blyton’s Uncle Quentin he secluded himself when he was at home.
we had a very decent upbringing in Enoch Powell’s Wolverhampton, and my father, the youngest man at that time to ever make it to the grade of Headmaster in the Punjab, decided to go to England and bat for the India First XI. metaphorically that is. as he was a man of learning and few words it was really when he passed away and left the crease that I started thinking more of him, of him more, and probably like most people who have had a child or two, or go through a few perilous times or twenty, these thoughts start to cement over time.
massaged into his conversation were all of life’s stories retold in no particular order, and it’s that lack of order and piecing together that makes it that much more compelling to hear again and again, until even the most un-attentive bastard commits. very similar to listening to the best music albums, you complete dimwit.
he never swore. he was never dishonest. he never laughed much but when he did the whole of the Black Country laughed with him.
as his teacher re-training never quite got him back to the standard he had achieved in India, he lived a life in the shadow of what life should have been, and was rather disappointed with his lot as the overs passed away. yet in his kids’ eyes, in which he was too consumed to find any solace, he was the only wog in the world.
there were a few summ
ers when he would come and watch us play cricket, or more precisely inspect a clump of mound to see what makes it mound. nowadays i join him there sometimes, just shy of the boundary, walking with our arms behind our backs, and holes in our conversation. i hope that ball is not coming our way.
Tjinder Singh is the singer, songwriter and producer with
the group Cornershop.
HIS IMMINENT DEMISE WAS PROPHESIED WHEN HE WAS ONLY 35
David Michael Griffiths by Joanna Kavenna
My father, David Michael Griffiths, was a bold and brave man who refused to listen to prevailing advice from doctors. He really confounded medical experts the length and breadth of the nation. His imminent demise was prophesied when he was only thirty-five. The edict was reiterated, with greater force, when he was forty. Thereafter, his life was tenuously sustained in increments – three more years, five more years. At fifty, he was told it was absolutely certain he wouldn’t live to sixty. With bloody-minded determination, he continued. His Houdini evasions of adamantine medical fact became so daring and unlikely that when he died at the age of sixty-nine, in 2014, it was even a shock. He had fended off so many crises in the past, one crisis, then another. It was only when everything went wrong, when his organs all failed at the same time, that he finally surrendered.
My father was born in Reading, on the fifth day of the fifth month, 1945. When the war ended, his parents moved to north London. He was a brilliant child, much loved and applauded – the lone prospect of a rambling Welsh family that had largely forgotten to produce heirs. His grandfather, James Griffiths, was born in a hovel on the Pembrokeshire coast – on stormy nights the waves broke across the hearth. At the age of twelve, James was expelled from school for putting gunpowder in his teacher’s pipe; after that he ran away to sea, survived two shipwrecks off the Cape of Good Hope, and rose to the rank of captain. Later, this formidable seafaring maniac went back to Wales, and became a fervent campaigner against social injustice and poverty and, eventually, a Labour mayor of Cardiff. My father’s uncles were sailors too, and served on naval convoys during the Second World War. This heritage, and my father’s early life in the bomb-damaged city of London, affected him greatly and determined his ensuing course. He was obsessed all his life with the history of the Second World War. He eventually became an expert on avionics and radar technology. He made his way by sheer hard work and cleverness; he was the first in his family to get the chance to go to university, and – to the amazement of his parents – won a scholarship to Cambridge.
