Tourist Waiter Stanshall was engaged aboard the liner Orsova at Tilbury in Essex, on 12 May 1961. He was blossoming into quite an imposing young man in every way: as well as hair worn long for much of his life (even when it began to fall out), he had very delicate hands, like those of a classical pianist. They seemed incongruous against his large frame, and he always took great care of them, particularly his right hand: he was ambidextrous, but this was what he called his ‘magic hand’.
The Orsova set sail for Hong Kong, Singapore, Borneo and Sydney, Australia from Southampton. On board he refined his ability to drink, belch, fart, smoke and fight, which would be vitally important in his career with the Bonzos. He also developed a lifelong interest in knives, inscribing one with ‘AS’ for ‘Anthony Stanshall’. There was plenty of time to indulge a voracious appetite, which played havoc with his waistline. He would amaze his seafaring chums at lunch by devouring four pork chops, held between the greasy fingers of one hand.
Tourist Waiter Stanshall was demoted mid-cruise for spilling hot soup down a passenger’s neck and banished below decks to join the ‘U Gang’ (‘U’ for ‘Utility’). ‘Down there were all the most useless, terrible, vulgar sort of people,’ says fellow-Bonzo Rodney Slater. ‘They were all the “geezers” who weren’t allowed on deck to be seen by the public. They were confined to the bowels of the ship and were only let out after dark! He loved those guys, the stokers, the guys who cleaned out the latrines, the hard cases below decks.’ At least below decks you didn’t have to worry about how you looked. Vivian recalled, ‘You didn’t have to mix with the passengers and could grow a beard.’2 Because of his height, he was encouraged by his shipmates to try deck boxing. Vivian got his face punched in every time.
‘He had to do it, yet he hated it,’ explains his son Rupert. ‘He was a dreadful coward really. He went through with the ordeal but he’d go down with the first punch. The guys would be telling him, “Go on, you can do it. You’re a big lad!” And then they’d put money on the other guy. Dad suggested that I went into the Merchant Navy myself at one stage but I didn’t fancy that.’ When the liner docked, there was an opportunity to get away from the ship’s discipline. In far-off Port Moresby in Papua, New Guinea, Vivian said he went through a blood-brother initiation ceremony with a tribal people.
‘The bushes parted and a savage face peered out and somehow intimated that he would like me to follow him,’ Vivian later told a journalist friend. ‘Being a young man, I went.’3 How many of the magnificent tales of nautical adventures and outrageous exploits were strictly true was a matter for conjecture among his friends back in England. He told the stories well, kept his audiences captivated and so the accuracy really did not matter to them.
‘I got the feeling the story changed as time progressed,’ says Monica. ‘Eventually the story encompassed the entire world, but I’m not sure that the trip did. He certainly liked the idea of initiation ceremonies.’ He also liked to bewitch friends with the account of his visit to a restaurant in Hong Kong where he had monkey-brain soup. He described sitting there surrounded by monkeys in cages mounted on the restaurant walls. ‘You ordered soup and these monkeys knew what was coming,’ he related with ghoulish delight. ‘The chef pointed at one and the monkey screamed its head off.’
Seaman Stanshall was discharged from the Orsova on 16 October 1961 at Tilbury. Armed with the savings from his life at sea, he became a fully-fledged art student and began to lead the kind of life his father had warned him about. After a stint at West Essex School of Art, Vivian, aged nineteen, enrolled at London’s Central School of Art, off Kingsway, in the autumn of 1962. He was overjoyed at his new-found freedom as a student living in town and his parents were there to help him choose digs. He did not like the first flat at all. ‘Vic and Anthony went in,’ says Eileen. ‘Well, it was about four minutes later that Anthony came out, put his hankie to his nose and said: “I couldn’t live in there. Terrible smell, Mum.”’ They had better luck with the next flat and Vivian had better luck with the landlady.
‘After a while he came home one weekend, and I said, “How are you getting on with that woman?” He said, “She’s wearing me out. I’ll have to dump her. I can’t stand it.” So what he got up to with that woman I don’t know. I didn’t like to go into it any further. But he never had any bother getting girlfriends. They all seemed to like him and it seemed as if he knew a lot of people.’ Vivian settled in well and proceeded to eat his way through his grant very quickly, forcing him to rely on friends to supply fish and chips. He spent much of the rest of his money on unusual brass and stringed instruments. Vivian had more than thirty instruments, including ukuleles, mandolins, recorders, ocarinas, and – most cherished – a tuba and a euphonium.
Vivian commuted to college on the underground. He regularly created public situations filled with tension to see what people’s reactions would be, a fascination with pushing the boundaries which stayed with him for most of his life: ‘I started testing people when I was travelling by tube to Central School of Art,’ he said. ‘I bought some stuff called Wasp-Eez, which I bought for the name. I would scratch or roll up my trousers and apply Wasp-Eez and then I would find that the carriage would empty or they’d move away, and it’s like the old one, if you start scratching, everyone starts scratching.
‘I became very fast with the Evening News and the Evening Standard crosswords, which are cryptic. Since I’m left-handed, I write on the side. So everyone sits on the train doing the same crossword and I would fill in completely the wrong answer, but near enough to look convincing, which would bugger up the guy next to me. What becomes difficult is fitting in other words or getting a word to fit. But if you do this with confidence then he is truly thrown.’4 On other occasions, Vivian would slowly and deliberately black in the whole of the crossword, square-by-square: ‘and that was disturbing’.
He later teamed up with college chum and future Bonzo drummer Larry Smith to play more involved pranks. ‘I have a rubber hand. This is an idea I got from a Victorian pickpocket, who would go to church and have false hands in prayer in the front while she was dipping her fellow-worshippers,’ explained Vivian. ‘I would have these obvious false hands and have Larry next to me and pick his bag, steal things very obviously to see if anyone would stop me. And people wouldn’t do a thing! They would continue to read and if I looked at them, fixed them, to see if I was caught, they would return to their newspapers. They didn’t in any way want to be involved.’5 This was what struck Vivian. An individual could be in any kind of trouble or distress and everyone would pretend that there was nothing happening.
‘I mean, we staged hangings,’ he said. ‘I came in with a hangman’s noose and put this on top of one of the strap things and put it around my neck and stood on the seat ready to hang myself and jump off and it would be too long, you see, so that would be a nuisance. I’d keep shortening the rope and people would just watch this, they wouldn’t try to intervene – it was absurd.’6
There were plenty of other like-minded new friends at the college. Roger Wilkes was a fellow-musician who taught Vivian to play trumpet properly. Rodney Slater got to know him through the tight-knit art students’ social circuit. Pop Art was becoming fashionable, which meant that a poor student keen on collecting could pick up the relics of the jazz age for next to nothing: ‘Nobody wanted all the memorabilia like the old sheet music and gramophone records,’ says Rodney. ‘The grown-up world was the world of your parents, which you didn’t want.’ The students saw nothing of much interest in the blossoming teenage movements.
‘Kids