For Gwen the worst part was seeing her husband having to get up at five o’clock in the morning, even earlier if longer distances were involved. If he didn’t arrive at certain markets between five and six he lost all hope of a stall for that day. The routine would have been even more tiring if he had performed a show the night before, but those who observed him in those days claim he was kept afloat outwardly by – in Bobby Bernard’s phrase – a puppy dog enthusiasm. Larry Barnes, a contemporary of his in early variety, attempted to explain his special kind of energy: ‘When you were in his presence you were always slightly worried that you were letting him down, that you were seen not to subscribe to his sunny side of life.’ Much of this outward attitude was unquestionably down to Gwen’s role as puppet mistress. There can be no doubt that she helped to bring out the extrovert in him in a social situation, triggering the ability to relax in other people’s company without a trick in his hand. To many performers it can be far harder to walk into a crowded room – unprotected, unjustified, unnoticed – than walk onto a stage before a thousand people. Meanwhile she also controlled the purse strings, taking pains to ensure he did not fritter away what little money he did earn.
According to Val Andrews the first professional stage job Tommy had back in England was not performing his act but working as a stooge for Harry Tate Junior, the son of the great music hall sketch comedian. Val recalls how funny he was in the wan make-up and the flat cap, playing the tall gormless caddy with a wheel on a stick in the golfing sketch: ‘Doing nothing, but doing everything’, all for two pounds ten shillings a week. There was some sporadic film extra work and three humble bottom-of-the-bill weeks in variety, at the Manchester Hippodrome, the Brighton Grand, and the Playhouse, Weston-Super-Mare during the middle of 1947, but not much else. Morale was kept up by the camaraderie of many of those in the same predicament. Once a week he would get together with a group of ex-servicemen who had committed themselves to comedy as a profession, a prospect that before the war would have seemed as unlikely as turning base metal to gold or fighting Hitler single-handed.
The number who not only made it in a relatively short space of time, but also stayed at the top is staggering. Wisdom, Edwards, Emery, Bygraves, Bentine, Milligan, Secombe, Sellers, Sykes, Howerd, Hancock, Hill, they all contributed to a seismic effect on British comedy that has not happened since and may be comparable only with the revolution in popular music a decade or so later. They did not all achieve a similar success. The names of Joe Church, Harry Locke, Norman Caley, Len Marten, Robert Moreton – all stalwart pros – failed to register in the national consciousness in the same way. Luck as well as talent had a part to play in the longevity of a career, but at the moment they all shared the same heady dream of household name stardom. It was certainly not the most congenial time to be contemplating such a future. The variety circuit was in a shaky condition, radio in spite of ITMA and Band Waggon had yet to find its golden age in comedy terms, and television had not established itself sufficiently before the service was curtailed on the outbreak of war for anyone to know whether it held out any lasting prospects at all.
Each of these now famous names needed his own personal Mister Sandman to conjure dream into reality. The key to this was being seen, a procedure with its own built-in Catch 22: unless you already had a representative, how were you to secure a decent booking where you could be seen in the first place? One answer was the Nuffield Centre, a club for servicemen in Adelaide Street in the back of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A favourite haunt of agents and producers, it provided a free and easy showcase for many a comic emerging from the war. With or without this solitary oasis, talent would find a way and before long Norman had found a professional soul mate in an agent named Billy Marsh. Max discovered an advocate in Jock Jacobsen, Benny in Richard Stone, and ‘the lad himself’ in Phyllis Rounce. In each career one can point to one such strong individual working behind the scenes. As far as Tommy was concerned, Gwen could give him encouragement and guidance, but she did not have the professional qualifications to go the whole way. Miff Ferrie was waiting in the wings.
Miff was born George Ferrie in Edinburgh on 10 March 1911. A musician during his early life, he acquired his nickname in homage to the American trombonist ‘Miff’ Mole. The Thirties saw him recording alongside Roy Fox, Ambrose, Jack Hylton, Lew Stone and Carroll Gibbons at the height of the dance band craze, before deciding temporarily to set aside his trombone to form a permanent vocal trio. When Band Waggon hit the airwaves in January 1938, Miff Ferrie and the Jackdauz [sic] found themselves billed alongside comedy stars, Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch as one of the resident vocal attractions on the series. Encouraged by this success, he then formed his own combination featuring the vocal group as part of a seven-piece orchestra, The Ferrymen. With regular radio work, a Parlophone recording contract and tours of Great Britain and the Continent in his date book, Miff was riding high. Airs and Disgraces was a short-lived series based around his talents. One imagines him as a chirpy little showman in a dour sort of way. Many years later brilliant Scots comic, Chic Murray made an art form of the contradiction. Then the war intervened. Invalided out of the army, Miff acted as Musical Adviser to United States Organization, Camp Shows. His USO work involved him in auditioning hundreds of musicians and other performers as well as production administration.
After the war Miff and his band became the resident attraction at the Windermere Club at 189 Regent Street, his activities extending to those of ‘Entertainments Director’, in which capacity he was responsible for booking the cabaret. One Friday afternoon in November 1947 a nervous Tommy Cooper went along to audition for the floor show. Few places can be more dispiriting than a performing venue without its audience, the cold emptiness a cruel champion of fear. Tommy later said, ‘Unfortunately, the act I did that day was not suitable, but Miff made a few suggestions and told me to come back in a week or two. This I did, and to my amazement I made the musicians in the band laugh. I was working from then on.’
It is hard to know what he was thinking. His first audition act majored on a series of impressions of Hollywood stars, the comedy magic playing a minor role. The idea of the hysterical Cooper presenting a convincing parade of Jimmy Cagney, Charles Laughton and Edward G. Robinson defies belief. The route to show business as an impressionist was the most hackneyed of them all. Moreover, it was a difficult genre to burlesque. Accuracy was the keynote to success, unless you were Tony Hancock, a frustrated pretender and buffoon of a different kind, who made a big feature of his own lugubrious attempts to mimic these very names in his own stage act. Indeed he persisted with them into the mid Sixties by which time the originals were passing out of fashion. That he did so was criticized by some, but seen as an accurate reflection of what the quintessential Hancock character would purvey in a comically jaded variety act by others. Whatever, one does wonder whether somewhere along the way he witnessed the Cooper act at this stage and the idea was sewn.
The impressions aside, little did Miff know that the trick or two Tommy also managed to fumble that Friday afternoon were the tip of an iceberg of material already waiting in the wings. The return audition was not necessarily the challenge it might have seemed to the man requesting it. In later years Miff would himself take credit for suggesting to Cooper the idea of the burlesque approach to magic, to the extent of having Tommy apparently voice the claim himself in much early publicity, interviews that Miff in fact gave or provided copy for on his client’s behalf. There may have been a genuine misunderstanding – Tommy was now too busy and too increasingly successful to be bothered – but the claim was not based on fact, as we know from the approach Tommy had already adopted in the services and at his BBC audition. More importantly, at that second