Anthony was also creative, with a passion for music. Anthony just had music in him,’ says his mother. ‘He was always playing something and my father was like that. I had two brothers who were musical and just like Anthony they could pick up an instrument and get a tune out of it. My brother Tom could play the violin. My mother used to encourage music in the family and my father played an instrument as well.’ Mischief and music coincided in young Anthony. The front room at Beech Avenue, a spacious, semi-detached house, was separated from the street by a forecourt and a hedge. The boy sat in the front room with the biggest trombone he could find. He lay in wait for passers-by and walloped them with the trombone’s slide.
Art was another burgeoning talent in Anthony, one for which he had a much stronger instinct. One reason the family made their move from London to Southend was to enable Anthony to attend the local art school. He was always keen on art: at the age of two he was ‘mixing boxes of paint trying to make blue sky’, says his mother. ‘He could draw anything you asked him, even when he was little. He’d drag me into art shops and I’d buy him artists’ materials.’ Eileen encouraged her son’s self-expression through his interests while agreeing with her husband on matters of family discipline. ‘Anthony was well brought up and did as he was told. He had to. My mother brought us up rather strictly and if she said, “Go out and get me something” you went. There were no arguments. Nowadays you see kids of seven arguing with their parents. My mother wouldn’t put up with that.’ Eileen ensured the boys were brought up as Catholics, just as she had been. Between primary school and Southend High School, Anthony attended convent school, ‘being taught a lot of perverted, one-sided rubbish by nuns who were otherwise quite OK, and I got by as the clever boy who built match-book galleons they could display on open days’.12
In church, Anthony could barely contain himself at Communion as the other church-goers, eyes closed and tongues hanging out, waited to receive the Host. The bishop, a firebrand Irishman, caught him giggling and sent him back to his pew with a slap round the face. He lost interest once Mass was translated into English. ‘I didn’t understand it any more. Really, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘It had no cadences, there was no longer any chime in me. It had been demystified to a point where it had been made base and ordinary – and, certainly, spiritual life is not ordinary.’
His mother, with ‘quite a deal of perspicacity’, thought he should have been a priest. Later he said himself that artists and priests were similar, ‘because – this is going to sound awfully pompous and silly – you are communicating to share a spiritual enjoyment of life…I mean priests in an ideal sense, what I understand is a shamanic priest, a guru, a spiritual leader, not necessarily someone who dishes out three Hail Marys and ten how’s-your-fathers.’13 His son Rupert says that he even flirted with the idea of converting to Judaism. Faith was always important to him, despite his reputation for irreverence. ‘He had a picture of Christ on the wall,’ says Rupert. ‘It was conditioning from when he was a kid. Somewhere in him there was some respect for religion, without question.’
Anthony passed the 11-plus examination and attended Southend High School. He became friends with a boy named Pete Wiltshire, who impressed him through knowing how long it took to dissolve mice in nitric, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids: ‘Of course, I warmed to him.’ Pete also met with Eileen’s approval. Like her son, Pete was tall and both boys felt uncomfortable with the old-fashioned short trousers. The school strictly enforced a uniform of grey trousers, black shoes, white shirt, a house tie and green blazer. Pete’s dislike of the uniform was shared by Anthony, who came in one morning wearing black-and-white check trousers, black-and-white shoes, a white coat and a bow tie. He was sent home. The school did not have him down as a real troublemaker; he was simply an intelligent, rather cherubic boy who did not fit in, and there was no room for individualism in the classroom.
‘Even when I was at school I never looked normal,’ he recalled. ‘To avoid being beaten up I would have to devise gags and strokes and pranks, or behave in an outlandish manner, in order to be taken under the aegis of bullies. Perhaps I was therefore purchasing by my behaviour self-protection, so I suppose after a while that becomes natural.’14 There was not the flexibility in teaching to cope with him. As one of his teachers said, ‘We didn’t have many eccentrics at school. The system wouldn’t allow it.’15 The boy thought of the system as constraining, reductive and empty. It produced ‘Normals’, he later explained to Melody Maker. ‘Normals are all about you. They leave signs on the streets that give you clues. They are just people entirely formed by their environment. They are not necessarily middle-aged, middle-classed people. It’s the clothes they choose to wear and the way they choose to speak. They imagine they are ordinary, yet they are really dreadful freaks – terrifying. They are people bound by convention, “Normal” is a paradoxical term.’
The poor relationship with the school brought out the prankster in Anthony. ‘He was always in trouble,’ says Mark. ‘He was the one who always had a mouse in his pocket or organized some form of anarchy.’ Eileen went to the school in the end and convinced them to let him go to the art college instead. Anthony remembers he was just about to be expelled when she intervened. The constraints of the education system were too much for the inventive youngster. It left him with a ‘hatred of the system which did its best to put me off Shakespeare and any poetry, painting…stuffed down my throat things that were obviously unsuitable and made things that were exciting to me unpalatable by making reverent, dead things out of them’.16 Vic Stanshall went along with his wife’s plans for Anthony to attend the art college. For all his insistence on speaking properly and behaving well, he did not have that much influence. ‘Oh, Vic did as I’d tell him,’ laughs Eileen. ‘He wasn’t daft, though. If he thought something wasn’t right, he wouldn’t have done it. I knew as soon as Anthony was born that he was going to be different. I didn’t want him to have a job he wouldn’t like or enjoy. If he didn’t get his own way, people would dislike him, because I knew he’d play them up.’
Both Stanshall boys indulged a lifelong passion for accumulating rubbish and junk from sales. ‘I collected glass and bits of silver and pictures,’ says Mark. ‘We were always bringing stuff back home.’ By the age of fourteen, Anthony was amassing a collection of 78 r.p.m. records. He had bought a gramophone with the old-fashioned horn amplifier for 17s/6d on which he played a selection of numbers which formed the basis for the Bonzos’ act. ‘I remember he bought a record by the Alberts called “Sleepy Valley”, which was played on the Phono-fiddle,’ recalls Mark. Bonzo member Neil Innes also nurtured an affection for this ghastly instrument: ‘The solitary string was raised by something that resembled a violin bridge and only vigorous pressure from a violin bow could entice sounds that ranged from a low, thin, melancholic wail to an utterly unattractive high-pitched shriek.’17 Needless to say, young Anthony loved it.
During the school holidays, Anthony was a part-time bingo caller in Southend, where he learned all the patter. The focus for carefree childhood memories was the beloved Kursaal funhouse. It had, he later said, an ‘antique fin de siècle charm about it, with a grey-and-pig’s-kidney-coloured colonnade. Then there’s quite a lofty dome atop that, with a kind of mosque-ish top. A pleasure dome.’18 He started his fairground career collecting pennies from the slot machines. Inside the building he worked on the dodgems and eventually got to guard