by Michael Munn
He was born 1 March 1910 in Belgrave Mansions, in Grosvenor Gardens just around the corner from Victoria station. It’s an area of London where many film and TV stars have lived, and over the years I’ve often been in the neighbourhood to visit actors either socially or to conduct interviews or discuss some other business.
For many years his place of birth had been given as Kirriemuir in Scotland. When he died, some obituaries named Scotland as his homeland. Even The Macmillan International Film Encyclopaedia still puts Kirriemuir as his birthplace.
I think it was Sheridan Morley who first revealed publicly that David was born in London when he wrote his excellent biography of Niven, The Other Side of the Moon, in 1985, but by then I already knew that. Sheridan told me once, ‘I think David came to believe many of the fictions that either he or the studio came up with. He acted as though he wasn’t sure where he was born, but I think he chose to gloss over that subject.’
When I asked David how his father died, he said, ‘There was a battle with the Turks. My father was a second lieutenant in the Berkshire Yeomanry which went ashore at Sulva Bay in Turkey. The Turks had laid barbed wire in the sea, and there was machine gun fire as they tried to get ashore. Most of them were killed. My father’s body was never found.’
He said that he heard the news of his father’s death when his family was living at his father’s house, Carswell Manor, in Berkshire. ‘He was a landowner, you see,’ David said. ‘Before that we lived in Scotland – after I was born.’ They did actually live in Scotland. ‘We had all the trimmings; a butler, footmen, gamekeepers, maids. My father was rich when I was born, but he lost a good deal of his money backing the wrong horses. He had his own bookmaker too. So some of the land had to go. But he kept Carswell Manor. That’s where I was, with my sister Grizel, when we heard the news our father had been killed.’
David’s account can’t be true because William Niven sold Carswell Manor in 1910 to help pay off debts he had run up. The family moved to a farm in Cirencester and then to Fairford Park in Gloucestershire by the time war broke out in 1914, and it was most likely there that David lived when the news came.
It doesn’t really matter where David was when he heard of his father’s death, and I don’t think Niven was purposely lying. He was, after all, only five when the news came, and the family moved about a lot.
When I asked him if he could remember how he felt upon hearing of his father’s death, he said, ‘I don’t think it made too much of an impression on me. I hadn’t seen that much of him. Children were seen but not heard in those days. So I was little seen or heard by my father.’
In 1982, he told me, ‘My father was not my father.’
That didn’t so much as take me by surprise as shock me into silence for what was probably only several seconds but seemed like minutes. I said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘My father – my real father – was Thomas Platt. He’d long been in love with my mother.’ Thomas Walter Comyn Platt was a Conservative politician.
David’s mother was Henriette Degacher. She came from a long line of British military officers on her mother’s side. Her grandfather had been a general, so had her great uncle. Her father had been a captain who fought in the Zulu wars.
She had given birth to three children before David was born; Joyce who was 10 years old when David was born, Henry [nicknamed Max], who was seven, and Grizel who was three. ‘I don’t know if they really were my father’s children,’ David said. ‘I mean by that, if they were Thomas Comyn Platt’s. I think Joyce and Max were William’s. But they didn’t look like Grizel and I. I always thought she and I looked like Thomas.’ David had always referred to Thomas Platt as ‘Uncle Tommy’.
‘My mother wasn’t completely unhappy when my father died,’ David said. His feelings about his mother were often mixed. When he was a child he was convinced that she didn’t care for him, and there were times in his life when he maintained that she didn’t love him.
He said, ‘She was very beautiful and quite unconcerned with me. I never saw a lot of her. Grizel and I were looked after by our governess. We had a wonderful lady called Whitty who loved us and brought us up. My mother was too busy, but what with I couldn’t say. She didn’t seem to do anything.
‘If she was busy it was probably with lovers. She flirted outrageously and showed more attention to other men than she ever did to me.’ David would often claim that he was brought up in near poverty. ‘After my father was killed, he left everything, including his debts, to my mother. She was just able to afford a house in South Kensington [in London]. She had rather a merry crowd of young men about her, and Uncle Tommy was foremost among them. He got knighted [in 1922] and he hyphenated his last two names, so he became Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt. But we called him Uncle Tommy. He’d been around mother for many years and they got married.’
The wedding was in May 1917 at the House of Commons’ own parish church St Margaret’s, in the grounds of Westminster Abbey.
David remarked, ‘Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt was not a stranger to my mother even when she was with my father.’
I asked him just how long Platt had been around Henrietta and he said, ‘Since 1904, at least. He wrote love letters to her.’
‘What makes you think he was your real father?’ I asked.
‘For a start, I look more like him than I ever did my father.’
‘But have you proof?’
‘My God, yes. He didn’t like having me around, that’s for certain. Grizel and I were a nuisance. She and I have always been close. Right from our childhood. Max was a fine chap, lots of fun, but he was off to join the Navy when Platt married my mother.
‘I’m afraid I didn’t care for Joyce. She was always telling Grizel and I what to do. She was the oldest and very bossy. I used to think my mother didn’t like me because she once told me, “I wish you’d never been born.”’
‘She actually said that to you?’ I asked.
‘Just the once. I had got in her way and she said, “You are the only mistake Tommy and I ever made.” I was eight and didn’t understand what she meant at the time. It’s as clear as crystal to me now.’
I asked him if he was sure that’s what his mother had said, and he answered, ‘I never forgot it. I didn’t understand it when she said it, but I never forgot it. Grizel also believes he was our real father.
‘He once said to me, the last time I spoke to him during the war, “I’m as proud of you as any father could be.” I saw a look in his eye. It was the look of a proud father. Officially he was my stepfather. But a real father looks at you with a very different eye. And then he said, “You know our secret, don’t you?” and I said, “That you’re my father? Yes, I do.” And he said, “I hope you understand why we could never tell anyone, what with my position as a Member of Parliament.” I said I understood perfectly, and we parted on good terms.’
That was in contradiction to what he had written in The Moon’s a Balloon when he maintained that he last saw Sir Thomas before he went off to Hollywood and that there had been some unkind words from Comyn-Platt and they never saw each other again. All his life, David had kept up the pretence about the true nature of his relationship with Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, but as he edged towards the final months of his life, David Niven was revealing the truth.
I asked him, at that time, if he thought William Niven had known. ‘I have no idea,’ he answered. ‘I’ve often wondered that and I’ve talk to my sister about it. We just don’t know. And it’s something we agreed to keep to ourselves.’
‘Then why are you telling me?’ I asked.
‘Because when I’m dead, and God knows how long Grizel will live for, no one will know, and somebody should. You should.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because, as I said, you’re a friend, an author and a priest.’ And then he added, ‘But not necessarily in that order.’
He had been convinced as a child that his mother and Tommy had done their best to get him out from under their feet. ‘I
think I was rather badly behaved as a child,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t into anything criminal. But I did run riot, which is why Tommy and my mother sent me to boarding school. They thought it would instil some discipline in me. It didn’t, you know.’
He told me that his time at a private prep school in Worthing was ‘one of the worst experiences of my life. The older boys and the masters there bullied the younger boys.’ He talked of being whipped with wet towels by the older boys and being hung out of a window by a school master.
‘I was terrible in most subjects,’ he said. ‘I was terribly bad at mathematics, and I was rebelling even though I was really scared.’
In 1979, during the ‘angry interview’, David told me, ‘I had things done to me that were simply horrifying. Younger boys were often abused by boys who would do the most disgusting things. I mean, sexual things. I call them sadistic, not sexual. Sex is a pleasure. This wasn’t pleasure. I felt that I would never forgive my mother and stepfather for sending me there.’
He got a terrible boil from bad food which became infected when the school matron cut it off with a pair of scissors and he ended up in hospital. His mother removed him from that school and placed him, in 1919, at Heatherdown, an expensive private school at Ascot, where, he said ‘all the snobs went. But it was a good school with kindly masters and good food. I was happy there. My mother must have been up to her ears in debt but I suspect Uncle Tommy handed over some money for not just my schooling but for all of us. Max was at Dartmouth, and Grizel and I were both at boarding schools.’
David revealed that his mother wasn’t so poor after all when I had lunch with him and actress Lynne Frederick in London in 1980. During a rather morbid conversation about inheritance – Lynne had just become a millionairess following the death of her husband Peter Sellers – David rather carelessly said, ‘We were lucky because my mother had inherited quite a bit from my father and could afford to take care of us very well indeed.’
I told him, ‘But you always said your mother was poor and you were always going without.’
He looked sheepish and said, ‘Yes, I did say that. It’s Flynn’s fault.’
‘Errol Flynn?’ I asked.
‘Yes! Him! One of the first things he said to me was, “Tell them a good sob story, sport. They’ll love you the more for it.” So my sob story was that my mother struggled with money. But she had done really well from the inheritance my father left her.’ I reminded him that William Niven had lost a lot of money through bad debts, to which he replied, ‘Oh, not all that much. There was plenty left for my mother, and there was also money from Uncle Tommy as well.’
In 1982 I remarked that it would have been natural for his real father, Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, to have paid for his schooling.
‘Yes, that’s true,’ was his response. ‘But I never wanted to acknowledge that. It was very hard to accept that the man I always called Uncle Tommy was my father and was the one who forked out for my education.’
His mother was able to afford to buy a house at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight where the family spent summer holidays and where David discovered a love of sailing. Sir Thomas rarely joined them, preferring to stay in London where he owned a large house in Chelsea.
As a child, David was an attention seeker – something I think never changed. ‘I was a clown at school,’ David said. ‘I was addicted to playing pranks, and it got me into a lot of trouble.’
There was the time when he stole a huge marrow from the nearby girls’ school in an attempt to win a prize in the annual Flower Show for the best kept garden which each boy had. He told me, ‘I didn’t win but I did get the cane for stealing.’
‘How did you get found out?’ I asked.
‘Probably because some snitch couldn’t keep his mouth shut. You see, I didn’t keep my pranks a secret. I did them to entertain the other boys. By then I’d discovered that by making the other boys laugh, I became popular, and I admit that I wanted to be liked. Well, don’t we all? I was liked because I made them laugh. I think they laughed more when I got caught and caned. The pain seemed worth the admiration I received. I think, to be truthful, that it was like an addiction. I still have it. I must be the centre of attention. I love making people laugh.
‘When I arrived [at Heatherdown], I thought all the other boys were frightful because they were such snobs. I think they all went on to Eton. I felt out of place but had this strange overwhelming need to please them, and the only way I could do that was to play pranks and make them laugh. I still want to please everyone.’
In 1982, in a brief moment of re-evaluation, he asked me, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be best remembered as someone who made people laugh? Made them happy? Or for just doing your job reasonably competently?’
I answered, ‘There can’t be anything more important than making people happy.’
‘Then it’s all been worthwhile. If people laughed then, yes, it’s been worthwhile.’
During one interview, he recalled one of his finer pranks.
When I turned 10 my voice broke. I was the envy of many boys who still had their soprano voices. Our headmaster was a wonderful man called Sammy Day. There was a group of boys I liked a lot, and they were being given a hard time by some other boys. So I told my friends to follow me to the nearest public phone box where I made a call to Sammy Day.
In my deepest voice I said that I was a local shopkeeper in a popular sweet shop and that some of the boys from his school had been pilfering. I was able to give a good description of each of the boys. My friends were listening and giggling.
I got carried away and started to give too much information. ‘I think I heard one of the boys call another Wainwright. And another went by the nickname of Monkey…yes, a boy with large ears…no, I didn’t catch his real name but there was also a boy called Ginger…yes, he had ginger hair.’
I thought I’d done a wonderful job, and my friends all congratulated me on my fine impression of the sweetshop keeper. The next day I was summoned before Sammy Day who had five boys in his office – the five I had turned in. Sammy Day said to me, ‘Would these be the five boys you were telling me about?’
‘Five boys? Told you? Me, sir?’
‘Yes, you, sir.’
I knew immediately I’d not fooled him for a minute. He presented them with the sight of me being caned. Six thwacks but it turned out it was worth every thwack because these boys were so impressed by my prank that they not only stopped giving my friends a hard time but they also bought me lots of chocolate and sweets.
Then came the fall from grace with some of the boys, Sammy Day and other masters. I had become quite a nuisance with my pranks, but the more I sensed irritation, the harder I tried.
His last and most audacious prank was to send a large chocolate box to a friend of his at a nearby school. Inside was a smaller box, and then an even smaller box until finally there was a matchbox with some dog’s mess inside. His friend was ill with pneumonia so the school Matron opened the box, and David was promptly expelled. ‘I was only ten and a half and already an outcast.’
His mother and Sir Thomas were beside themselves with angst and worry over their wayward boy. Because of his interest in sailing, they thought they might have better luck with his discipline if he was in the Navy so they planned to get him into Dartmouth Naval College for which he would need to pass a number of exams. But first they sent him to a school in Southsea which dealt with difficult boys, run by an ex-Royal Naval officer who, David claimed, punished boys by locking them in a dark cellar full of rats, and whose wife was an alcoholic who never fed the boys enough. In a rebellious and neglected state of mind, David joined a local gang of boys who stole from shops.
After a month in Southsea, David was enrolled in an expensive private school run by a vicar in Buckinghamshire where David was much happier, but after two years of schooling, he failed his maths exam which was essential for entry into Dartmouth.
That year, 1923, Stowe School opened at Stowe House near Buckingham.
The headmaster, John Fergusson Roxburgh, was to become the father figure David had long needed. He never considered Thomas Comyn-Platt to be a suitable father figure, and for many years he complained that ‘Uncle Tommy’ didn’t care for or about him, but it was Comyn-Platt who was able to get him enrolled, in September, at Stowe School which was a much sought after house of education.
It was only in 1982 that David was able to say to me, ‘I never knew it at the time but Thomas took great care of me, in his own way. I suppose a man who had a son who wasn’t legally his would try and do something for that boy. I could never call him father – he was always my stepfather – and I always called him Uncle Tommy. It was a farce. When it sunk in that he was actually my father, I think I came to resent and dislike him even more because I felt lost and confused, and I dearly needed someone to be a real father to me. My “real” father had been taken from me in the war, and now I had a stepfather who couldn’t even admit that I was his. But I suppose he loved my mother very much and he tried to do what was best for her and for me, and for Grizel. For all of us, really.’
He said, ‘I was lucky because I found someone who was the next best thing to a father. He was John Fergusson Roxburgh, the headmaster at Stowe School. He set me such a fine example that I tried hard to emulate throughout my life. He changed me for the better. Well, I couldn’t have got much worse. I had been turning into an evil little bastard, but going to Stowe School turned my life around.’
He was also influenced by Major Richard Haworth, the recipient of a Distinguished Service Order, who was master of the ‘house’ in which David was placed – Chandos House. Major Haworth had been a senior instructor at Sandhurst military college and was, said David, ‘a gentleman who received respect through understanding and kindness, but was never less that firm.’ He was David’s second role model figure at Stowe.
In the five years that David spent at Stowe School, he turned from an ‘evil little bastard’ into the young charming gentleman that became the hallmark of his screen persona. I asked him how this amazing feat was accomplished. He said,
