I wanted a fan at that time like a hole in the head, and we had only an hour before our onward flight, but you don’t turn down prime ministers, and I agreed. The sheik, for such he was, agreed to meet us in our hotel. We met him in a room with three thrones. He sat on the central throne, dressed in a beautiful cream silk robe. We sat on the thrones beside him, in our towelling dressing gowns and flip flops, dripping water on to the marble floor.
And there, in that bizarre scene, the sheik revealed that he could actually recite most of the plots of Sorry. Then he waved over an officer from the armed guard, and he presented Anne and me with little boxes containing gifts. He gave Anne a Bahraini pearl necklace and me a Rolex. Such are the strange rewards that television brings.
There was a third reason why Ronnie and I didn’t see each other very frequently when we weren’t working together. Although we had so many similarities in our temperaments, we had very different leisure interests. He was a collector, a hoarder. He loved to go round little antique shops, even in Australia, where there weren’t many antiques, and everything you bought in an antique shop in Australia had come from here in the first place, and you were taking it all the way back again. And in the limited touring we did with the stage show before we brought it into London, he would spend the days going round the shops, antique shops and bric-à-brac shops, and getting little bits of tea sets, and teapots, and teacups and little saucers; the Antiques Roadshow would have been right up his street.
He loved to collect illustrated books, prints, objets d’art, posters, anything that cast a bit of nostalgic light on a vanished Britain. He particularly loved the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Most of the stuff was small and easily stored, although he did buy three American pin-tables when he was in Australia.
Ronnie always felt that collecting was in his blood. He had in his possession a postcard sent to his mother from hospital before World War II, and a King Edward VIII Coronation souvenir handkerchief (not a product destined for huge success).
Chance played a great part in feeding Ronnie’s collector’s appetite. In the fifties, when he was working at the Apollo Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue (at the time when he was in two shows every evening), he had to pass a little book barrow near the stage door. In the end he stopped to take a glance, and he was hooked. He picked up a little book crammed with illustrations of times past, found that it had been printed in 1815, and forked out a whole sixpence for it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it had to be rescued and given a good home.’
One purchase led to another, of course, and in the end Ronnie was invited to have a look at the storeroom of the man behind the barrow. He went up the stairs to that musty wonderland, and came down a while later with thirty-nine Victorian picture books, for which he had paid two whole pounds. He was hooked. He was a collector.
But his main area of fascination was postcards, and his greatest pride as a collector was his superb collection of them.
This too began entirely by chance. In the late fifties he was appearing in Lysistrata, based on the Ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes about peace-loving women in wartime denying men sexual favours unless they gave up fighting. A kind of ‘No sex, please, you’re brutish’.
He was sharing a dressing room with Peter Bull, and as ancients they had to darken their bodies. They did this with an earth-based liquid make-up called Armenian bole, which was once used as an ingredient of antiseptics. Now, if you belong to that vast majority, the non-Armenian-bole-users, you won’t know that it has to be painted on very thoroughly.
So there were these two large gentlemen – let’s face it, these two too large gentlemen – trying to apply their Armenian bole at the same time in their little dressing room. The inevitable happened. Things that shouldn’t have been painted got painted. Among them was a postcard (ah!) which Peter Bull had tucked into the mirror.
Peter Bull didn’t seem too concerned about the ruination of one postcard, but Ronnie wanted to make amends, and went searching for postcards along the King’s Road. He soon found a box of them on a tray outside a little shop. There were scenic postcards, comic postcards, all kinds. A few minutes later, Ronnie was the proud possessor of a hundred of them, bought for a few shillings.
He intended to give the lot to Peter. He was the card enthusiast, after all. Ronnie began to sort through them, and found that he liked them. He wanted some of them.
He decided to give only half of them to Peter.
His long run in Irma La Douce sealed his fate. There was another barrow in Cambridge Circus, run by a former ballet dancer and specializing in postcards. These were a bit pricey – fourpence each in old money – but over the long, long run of the play they formed the basis of Ron’s collection.
He began by specializing in comic cards and bygone sweethearts, especially Edwardian and twenties glamour girls, but in the end he widened it to take in old views, which were often the only surviving records of old buildings and streets that had since been razed to the ground.
From those humble and chance beginnings, Ronnie built a collection of 53,000 postcards, some so valuable that they had to be stored in vaults.
One instance of Ronnie’s collecting habit occurred when we were performing our stage show in Bristol, polishing it before going on to the Palladium. It involved my old friend Ron Waverley
Ronnie found, through a small ad somewhere, a lady who was selling a collection of dolls, and he found out where she lived, and he told me how he went along to see this lady in her little house.
‘She took me up the stairs,’ he said, ‘into this attic that she’d had converted, and there were what looked like hundreds of period dolls.’
It was a magnificent collection, and Ronnie was so taken with it that he offered her ten grand for the lot, and she accepted; she was very thrilled.
He took away, as a token, just one doll, a sailor doll, which he carried back to his digs, and he was going to arrange for the transit of the rest of her magnificent collection two days later.
The next day she rang up in tears. She said, ‘I can’t let you have them. I cannot part with them.’
He was very disappointed, of course, but he said, ‘That’s no problem. Just tear up the cheque and we’ll forget the deal.’
But then she said, ‘And would you bring the sailor back? I do miss him.’
The doll was a china doll some three feet tall. Ronnie wrapped it in brown paper, and then in a blanket, and handed it to Ron Waverley, who was in his car at a crossroads. Unfortunately the blanket had red paint stains on it, so the whole thing must have looked most suspicious. Poor Ron Waverley found it really embarrassing waiting at traffic lights, worrying that people would look in and see his sinister bundle.
I’ve shown how Ronnie enjoyed his food, but I don’t think he took a particular interest in it in the way that I do. He enjoyed good restaurants, but he wouldn’t seek them out. And I don’t think he cooked.
I enjoy cooking, and especially baking. It’s in the blood. And I love taking pains. I think there’s a bit of my father in me when I do this. I recall him in the bakehouse in Edinburgh, preparing his vanilla slices, iced buns, chocolate sponges and lovely Madeira cakes. He would take me to the bakehouse at the weekend and do his jobs with the various doughs he was setting up, and I was able to run wild in this Aladdin’s cave. I loved the wonderful rolling ovens and the trays piled with cakes and doughnuts and breads and rolls and pies and tarts and short pastry and puff pastry and rough puff pastry and marzipan and decorated cakes. All this comes back to me when I bake my bread or make my Béarnaise sauce – I’m particularly proud of my Béarnaise sauce! I like to do it as carefully as he did.
When I was in the kitchen, being very precise with my ingredients and my timings (timing is important in the world of bread as well as in comedy), I used to think of Ronnie poring over his old books and cards, and I can see in us both a careful, meticulous, almost finicky approach common to our hobbies as well as our professional life.
I don’t think Ronnie wa
s ever terribly interested in cars. They were things that took you from one antique shop to another. I’ve always been keener, and in 1973, after Cinderella in Bristol, and with The Two Ronnies going into its fourth year, I decided that I was doing well enough to be able to splash out on a Rolls-Royce. I had already owned a secondhand Rolls, but now I fancied a new one. Anne and I went to the Rolls-Royce headquarters in Crewe, where they made a fuss of us, gave us lunch and invited us to choose our colour. I don’t mind admitting that I thoroughly relished every moment, after my modest beginnings and my years of struggle.
We chose one in Le Mans blue, with a pale cream roof. Le Mans had such an irresistible ring about it for a motoring man. The whole family gathered in Eastbourne, where I was doing a summer season, for the arrival of this splendid status symbol. There was only one snag. No car.
It turned out that the chauffeur bringing the car to Eastbourne for me had decided to pull in to a layby to straighten his cap. Quite right too. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing properly. Unfortunately, however, what he pulled into wasn’t a layby. It was a pit of gravel, for vehicles to escape into if their brakes fail. The poor man found himself sinking in my magnificent new Rolls. Imagine him sitting there, up to the hub-caps in gravel. I shouldn’t think he even had the heart to straighten his cap. The car had to be pulled out and taken back to Crewe on a lorry.
Never mind. The following week it did arrive, and the cap was straight, and the car looked magnificent, and we were soon setting off for London in it. On the way we tested its many features. How smoothly and silently the windows slid open. How smoothly and silently they… remained open. Only a minor electrical fault. Nothing to worry about. Nice to feel the fresh air on one’s face.
I can’t remember now whether the rain was forecast, but it came. How it came. We reached London soaking wet. Was somebody trying to tell me not to be flash? Anne and I never thought of ourselves as flash, and I hope we never were. In the seventies it seemed natural to us, if we could afford it, to buy a Rolls. Things seem different now.
Motoring was a pleasure, but not a hobby. My hobbies are mainly connected with sport, especially golf. While Ronnie was in his antique shops, I’d be out on the golf course. I number several sporting personalities among my friends and acquaintances.
I’m keener on watching cricket than would be expected of a Scotsman, though perhaps not of a Scotsman who won a cricket bat at St Andrews at the age of five, and I thoroughly enjoy racing. I used to go a great deal more than I do now, because I was a very good friend of Geoff Lewis, the jockey, now retired, who rode for Noel Murless, and won the Derby and the Coronation Cup on Mill Reef, who was a bit of a legend in his own nosebag. I used to go to Lingfield and Folkestone with Geoff, and I even had half a horse with him – Ta Morgan – and I also had a half share in another horse, which we called Chatty Dolly, after Anne’s mother. Unfortunately it kept breaking away, and once it was hit by a car as it ran away, and had to have thirty-seven stitches down its front. Rascal! Racing didn’t make me a millionaire.
I’ve always been keen on football. I mentioned the Television All-Stars earlier. The full name was actually the Television All-Stars and Showbiz XI. And in my palmier days I used to play for them alongside Tommy Steele, Anthony Newley, Lonnie Donegan, Mike and Bernie Winters and others. We used to gather at what seemed like an unearthly hour outside Broadcasting House on a Sunday morning and be driven to the match by coach. It was all for charity, but we took it pretty seriously on the pitch. I was a rather nippy right winger, though I say it myself. Tommy Docherty was our trainer. Sometimes he even played for us. From time to time he refereed. Occasionally, being Tommy, he did all three at the same time.
A cousin of mine actually played for Hearts (that’s Heart of Midlothian for those of you south of the border) and he played alongside Tommy Docherty in the Scotland side in the World Cup in Sweden. His name was James Murray. If I wanted to impress people in my young days in Edinburgh, I would say, with a deceptively casual air, ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but James Murray is, in fact, a cousin of mine.’ I didn’t say it so much after I moved to Surrey. It didn’t seem to have the same effect.
Naturally I was a very keen supporter of Hearts and indeed I still look for their result, but for the last thirty-eight years or so I have also been a Crystal Palace supporter and indeed I went regularly to matches for most of that time. I would be picked up at home by another great sporting friend of mine, Brian Huggett, the Welsh golfer and former Ryder Cup captain, who lived at Limpsfield. He would also bring Colin Cowdrey’s two sons, Graham and Jeremy (not Colin, he was a Charlton man), and the four of us would have a grand afternoon out at Selhurst Park. Then Brian moved to Ross-on-Wye, and the little outings ceased, and I must admit I don’t go on my own, though I still watch them on the box whenever I get the chance.
Once, in the mid-seventies, I took Ronnie B. to Palace as my guest. Palace had a promotional idea with the slogan ‘Bring a Pal to Palace’. As a rather well-known supporter I felt I had to do my bit, and it would have seemed strange if I had invited anyone other than Ronnie. The speculation would have begun that we didn’t really get on. So I invited Ronnie, and the poor man had to come. It was a long journey across London, and I’m sure the last thing he wanted to do was to come all that way to see a game of football in which he had no interest and the result of which was a matter of supreme unconcern to him. I can just imagine his heart sinking as he woke up, and him thinking, ‘I wish I could go in character. Could I be Fletcher or Arkwright today?’ But he came, and of course once he was there everything was fine and he passed it all off with great aplomb.
Yes, I loved football, but golf was the game, as it is for so many Scots. My dad was a good golfer, who played off a handicap of three or four, and my brother Allan is an excellent player too. I’m not as good, my handicap is sixteen, but I don’t mind, I just love the game, and I love to be on a golf course, whether I’m playing or not.
I was twelve when my dad first took me on to a golf course, in the Braid Hills in Edinburgh, and I’ve been captivated by the game ever since.
My best friend at school, Tom Fell, took me to see the Open Championship at Muirfield in 1948. I rode on the back of his brand new black Triumph 500 motorbike, and we saw Henry Cotton, perhaps the greatest of all British golfers, sweep to a great triumph. I can see him clearly to this day, looking so stylish in his dark grey flannel trousers, paler grey cashmere cardigan, an even paler grey sports shirt and white buckskin shoes.
Little could I have dreamt, in those exhilarating teenage moments, that one day I would become a member at Muirfield, have a house there looking out on to the course and get to know Henry Cotton well enough to borrow his caddy on one best forgotten occasion.
It was from Henry Cotton that my dad had his one and only golf lesson. It was in 1936 and he was giving twenty-minute lessons for ten shillings a time. He told my dad that his swing was perfect and he shouldn’t tamper with it. My dad thought that this was well worth ten shillings.
My dad actually died on the golf course. He was playing the fifteenth hole on the Prestonfield course in Edinburgh and he just collapsed and died. He was seventy-five. There can’t be a much better way to go, but it was a great shock to my mum, waiting at home with his tea, and to me. Anne actually took the phone call, just as I was about to go out to do an engagement in Hornchurch. She said it was nothing important – what an actress she would still have been – and only told me the sad news when I got home at midnight. I felt an awful bleakness. I had never felt far away from him, even when we were hundreds of miles apart. I thought about how even when we were on holiday he would drop in on the local bakery, ostensibly to buy bread and cakes, but actually to stand and chat about the more abstruse corners of the baker’s art. I recalled how, despite having a job that involved working all night long, he had found the time to take me to see the big parades which were a feature of life in Edinburgh, and to teach me golf. He also found time to be an e
lder at the church. He never thought of himself first.
My golfing life saw me become a member of the Stage Golfing Society, and I played in the Celebrity Golf series on television. I once played with that great comedy actor Jack Lemmon in a foursome with Lee Trevino and Sevy Ballesteros. I liked Jack Lemmon a lot, but I think he was even more nervous about the event than I was. Lee Trevino, of course, wasn’t nervous at all, and kept up such a stream of wisecracks that any outsider would have assumed him to be the comedian. I wonder if he ever played with Frank Carson.
I could go on and on about golf. Golfers can, as you probably know only too well. But I must end with the great Henry Cotton, my hero after his win in the Muirfield Open in 1948 and all the more so because of the link with my dad and my dad’s great admiration for him.
In 1969 we took a villa on the Algarve, and it was very near to the golf course at Penina, which Henry Cotton had designed himself. I discovered that Jimmy Tarbuck was staying near by, and the two of us decided that we would like to play Penina. We rang Henry to ask if we could play the course, and ended up being invited to drinks at his house, followed by dinner in a hotel.
The great man was wearing a wild-silk Nehru-collared jacket and a cravat, and his house was as elegant as he was. There was a reason for this. He was a great gambling man and used to play serious gambling golf matches with Bond Street dealers. He would play for a Chippendale table, or a pair of Louis XIV chairs. Not unnaturally, being a brilliant golfer, he had a very well-furnished house.
His wife, Toots, didn’t appear for drinks or at the hotel, but he didn’t seem the least put out. We learnt later that they had had a blazing row. Their relationship was always rather volatile. I just hope it hadn’t begun when she said, ‘You’ve not invited that bloody man Corbett!’
After dinner that supremely stylish man told streams of such racy stories that even Tarbuck had a job competing with him. It was a long night, and Jimmy and I have felt better in our time than we did the next morning at the course.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 14
