When the fighting drew to a close he joined the Combined Services Entertainment Unit attached to the War Office giving shows for the troops left scattered throughout the Middle East. With a restless conscript army, morale boosting was as essential at a time of keeping the peace as it had ever been while the greater distraction of fighting was taking place. It was now that Tommy decided he wanted to dedicate his life to being an entertainer. It was also in Cairo that the performance took place that must come close to the one in the Hythe canteen for qualifying as the most defining of his career. As Jack Chambers has explained, it was a cardinal offence for a soldier to be improperly dressed, even down to not wearing your cap: ‘So if you can imagine one thousand troops sitting there and onto this stage comes a chap wearing very scruffy shorts and socks down to his boots – well, it was a masterly stroke and he just stood there with this gormless grin on his face and then he’d do the laugh.’ To add to the anarchy he wore a pith helmet, a cloak, and had the word ‘hair’ written across his chest. One night at the YMCA at RAF Heliopolis he forgot the pith helmet and at the expense of cliché the rest is history.
Tommy told the story a zillion times of how this night he mislaid the helmet and happened to pinch the fez from the head of a passing waiter. It is unlikely that the move was premeditated and it paid instant dividends, adding even further inches to his height. In the company of the Guards he would have become less self-conscious about his size anyhow. As he stood there, this gangling giant of good humour, he had no idea that before long his new headwear would, as a badge of recognition, rival the bowler and trilby to which comics as diverse as Chaplin, George Robey, Max Miller and Tommy Trinder held allegiance. In addition, Arthur Askey had his forage cap and Bud Flanagan his battered straw hat. Cooper would now forever be associated with the fez. The kind he wore was originally burgundy coloured and much taller. Some time around the Sixties Tommy came to favour a brighter, more compact version. In her years with Tommy, one of Mary Kay’s unofficial duties was to serve as Mistress of the Fez. In a letter to me she wrote: ‘The shorter ones were his favourites and the colour of the early ones was too dark. I must have made a dozen nice bright fezzes over the years, but they weren’t easy to make and if you notice some are taller on one side than the other! I always secured the tassel into the top of the fez so that it didn’t fling about when he bent down. Also the felt had to be a nice, pinky red.’
Different versions of how it all came about have been recorded. In some early interviews he let slip that he got the idea when he was in Port Said: ‘I bought one for ten piastres – about two bob then – and when I came home and needed a new one I had to pay thirty-five shillings.’ Down the years more than a few reminiscing servicemen have claimed that they gave him theirs. None of this is necessarily untrue. He would eventually have bought his own and acquired others, while Port Said may have been the scene of his decision to run with the idea as a permanent fixture. What surprises so many is that he was far from the first magician to wear one, a detail of which he would have been well aware.
A conversation on this very theme at The Magic Circle one evening resulted in an impromptu competition to see who could come up with the most names to have beaten Cooper to the fez. In fact there was a time when it became an unofficial part of the uniform for every other small time magician and children’s party entertainer. There were also more than a few acts with fezzes prominent on the variety circuits of the Thirties and Forties, although Tommy would not necessarily have known of them all. Among those who could have given his fez a run for its money from those early days was Eddie Songest – ‘With a Couple of Tricks and Colossal Nerve’– who used to boast that his was ‘a trophy won in a competition in which he consumed twenty-five boxes of Turkish delight in the world record time of thirty-seven and five eighths of a second’. Tommy would certainly have been familiar with Sirdani, with his ‘Don’t be fright!’ catchphrase and a stage identity that was a strange hybrid of Arab and Jewish. He made a name for himself on radio during the war explaining simple magic tricks and puzzles as a regular feature on the programme, Navy Mixture; every publicity photo I have seen of him reveals the squat purple flowerpot hat. Len Gazeka from the Midlands had an unusual gimmick to go with his fez. He would enter with his magic carpet under his arm, which he then proceeded to unroll on stage. Whenever he stood on the rug the tricks worked; whenever he failed to do so he found himself in Cooper territory. Possibly predating them all was Ben Said who had played at Maskelyne’s as a comedy magician in the early Twenties. He had known better days as an illusionist in the grand manner, under the name of Amasis. In the files of Tommy’s manager, Miff Ferrie was a poignant letter from Said from the Fifties with a brochure attached asking for work. ‘There is only one Funjuror’, the publicity proclaims. Miff must have noted the fez in the photograph. Ali (of Ali and Yolanda), Alex Bowsher, Johnny Geddes, Chris Van Bern, Percy Press; all have their place in the roll call of fez honour.
As British magical stalwart, Pat Page has explained, ‘Everyone had a fez.’ By coincidence, at about the same time as Tommy came home from the war in 1947, the magician Roy Baker was starting to market his original version of the egg and bag trick in which a fez was substituted for the bag. It was named ‘Abdul’s Fez’ and hundreds must have been sold over magic shop counters down the years, but there is no record of Tommy ever performing it or adapting his own fez for the clever variation of one of his favourite tricks, although in due course he did rise to the comic possibilities the hat offered him. There was the time he took it off and white chocolate drops cascaded over his shoulders: ‘I’ve got terrible dandruff’; the occasion at a Royal Performance when he came on with a weather vane attached: ‘I’ve been struck by lightning!’
Conceivably it would be harder for a young performer to come out on stage wearing a fez now had Cooper and the others not done so. In our politically sensitive world, football fans travelling to Turkey in recent years have been asked to leave their Tommy Cooper impressions at home. Apparently Turks have regarded the fez as insulting since the wearing of such hats was banned by Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, in 1925. Bizarrely there was even one occasion in June 1967 when the organizer of a private function where Tommy was booked to appear requested that he leave his trademark headgear at home for fear of upsetting the largely Jewish clientele. Others have adopted a more practical attitude to it. Val Andrews told him early in his career that he should take the fez off at the end of his act: ‘People will think you’re bald and you have a great head of hair and this is an asset and when you reveal it, it’s a surprise.’ To Val’s delight, he always did.
The Middle East also provided a milestone in his personal life. It was there that he met Gwen. They first came together on a troopship travelling from Port Said to Alexandria, or maybe from Naples. Her accounts vary, but the romantic detail remained precise: ‘The very first time I saw him I didn’t speak to him. I had a shocking attack of flu and I was sitting in a deckchair all wrapped up in blankets and I saw this big man in battledress – he was a sergeant by now – standing against the ship’s rail with his back to the sea. The first thing I noticed was that the blue of the sea caught the blue of his eyes. He had the most magnificent physique I had ever seen. He was terrifically attractive in an ugly-attractive sort of way.’ When she asked someone who he was, she was told, ‘His name’s Tommy Cooper and he’s doing a show on board.’ Because of the flu, Gwen watched the performance from outside through a glass door. She couldn’t hear a word, but she saw enough to formulate an opinion: ‘I thought he was the funniest man I’d ever seen. This man’s got star talent, I told myself. One day he’ll be a big name.’ Upon arrival in Egypt Dove went her separate way to Cairo, not realizing that within days their paths would cross again. Gwen was a civilian entertainer attached to CSE and on Christmas Eve 1946 she found herself having to accompany Tommy on the piano at a concert in Alexandria: ‘I said to him, “Let me see your dots.” He didn’t know what I meant. I said “Your music.” He said, “Just play the first few bars of ‘The Sheik of Araby’.”’
On their way back in the army bus he sat next to her. ‘Can I put my head on your shoulder?’ he asked. ‘Certainly not,’ she declared. The relationship began at that point and two weeks later he proposed: ‘I don’t suppose you’d marry me, would you?’ ‘I