Events moved quickly in Hancock’s life after his father died. On 1 January the following year his mother remarried. A few days later he followed in the footsteps of his elder brother, Colin, and was enrolled as a pupil at Durlston Court School in Swanage. That he made the move halfway through the academic year suggests his mother may have needed to regroup and give herself the additional space to manage the business and her new life. It may merely signify that Saugeen School – had he continued to attend its new Wimborne location – closed down or was about to close down around this time. In his will Jack Hancock left the gross value of his whole estate of £13,961 to ‘Billy’ for ‘her unstintable [sic] and loving kindnesses during my life’. The remarriage so relatively soon after her first husband’s demise caused some consternation among many of the family’s friends. George Fairweather had little time for Robert Gordon Walker, twelve years his wife’s junior, the electrical contractor involved in the renovation of Durlston Court Hotel. A man of athletic appearance, he had played for Boscombe football club as a semi-professional for ten years. Within six months of the marriage he had sold his electrical company and was registered as a joint director of the hotel.
According to Roger, however, there was little question of his becoming a major presence in the lives of the three brothers: ‘My mother always said, “You mustn’t have anything to do with him. You’re my son and I’m the one who makes all the decisions. You’re not to take any decisions from him.” She rather put him down.’ When years later Roger himself married, he took his bride down to Bournemouth to meet his stepfather: ‘I’d always been put off him by my mother. When Annie met him for the first time, she said, “I think he’s lovely.” And for the first time in my life I realised he actually was a very nice person, but I’d always been talked out of it by my mother.’ It is understandable to imagine that any guilt or embarrassment Lily felt in the circumstances may have been channelled into brainwashing her children in this way. In her lifetime she married three times, but as Roger stresses, ‘Never for money! Never for money! Except the last one, who dropped down dead at her feet. He was a multi-millionaire. They were about to be married. There was going to be a fourth.’ One thing he will never take away from her is the intensity with which she threw herself into running the business: ‘She worked so bloody hard. Twenty-four hours a day.’ If she was not in the office, she was in the kitchen. Not that she was without back-up staff. Her youngest son recalls the Swiss chef who used to chase everyone around the kitchen with a knife when his anger was roused. Colin was by now managing the accounts, when, that is, he was not indulging his passion for tap-dancing. When questioned about the social contradiction in how a relatively modest family could afford to process three offspring through private education, Roger can only point to her industry: ‘I wish I had known my mother better. She was so supportive. She paid all the school fees. But children don’t think of that at the time. It wasn’t as if they were well off. She grafted so hard.’
Tony Hancock remained at Durlston Court School in Swanage until the summer of 1938. When he joined, there were around sixty-five boys on the register. Converted in 1903 from a large mid-Victorian private house, it occupied a commanding position overlooking the bay and the resort’s monumental Great Globe, 40 ornamental tons of the Portland limestone that characterised the area. Between 1928 and 1965 it could boast the redoubtable Pat Cox as headmaster, immortalised later by another Durlstonian, the scriptwriter and producer David Croft, as the part-inspiration for Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army. ‘It’s not that he was a pompous man,’ David recalls, ‘more that he represented all the best characteristics of being British, loyalty, and the old school.’ Cox had been a junior officer in the Durham Light Infantry during the Great War at the age of seventeen. ‘It’s not if we win the war, it’s when we win the war,’ he would pontificate during the later conflict. Croft arrived just after Hancock left. He recalls that the mistress in charge of the junior school had with some foresight told Hancock that if he didn’t sit up straight and hold his head erect he would grow into a round-shouldered old man. Sadly he did not need to reach old age to fulfil the prophecy. According to Roger, himself an old boy, the school’s motto, engraved on its crest beneath the imperial Roman eagle, was ‘Erectus Non Elatus’. This quickly translated into ‘Upright, not boastful’. Hancock might have preferred the line from the old George Formby song: ‘I’m not stuck up or proud – I’m just one of the crowd – a good turn I’ll do when I can!’
It was inevitable that he would apply himself to the drama life of the school. He made his first public appearance cast as the ‘celebrated, underrated nobleman, the Duke of Plaza-Toro’ in an end-of-term production of The Gondoliers. This required him to lead a train of noblemen on stage and announce with great dignity, ‘My Lords … the Duke!’ On opening night, the nobility was assembled, the audience was expectant, and his moment came. Hancock raised his hand in an impressive gesture, his lips parted, but the only sound that emerged was a strangled gargle. The voice of a master from the prompt side urged him to go off and come on again. The crocodile traipsed back into the wings. At the second attempt things were even worse. Tony recalled, ‘My jaws worked hard – like a gramophone without a record on it. Not one other sound could I raise but for a mouse-like squeak. “All right, Hancock,” said the teacher, “you’ve had your moment of clowning.”’ The school magazine reported, ‘The part of the Duke had to be played silently in mime!’ He progressed sufficiently to be offered a part in the next production, The Pirates of Penzance. Tragically, between auditions and casting his voice broke, ‘which was just as well considering what little I had done with it in its intact state,’ wrote Hancock. ‘I sounded like a cross between Lily Pons and Paul Robeson.’ The master, knowing full well that parents were paying large sums for small boys to flaunt their exhibitionist tendencies in this manner, clutched at a particular straw: ‘What I really want is a good stage manager.’ But Hancock’s determination knew no bounds. By making a nuisance of himself he was allowed to join the chorus on strict instructions: ‘Remember, Hancock, you can whack your thigh. But you must not sing.’ Eventually he was reduced to demanding roles like falling out of cupboards and wardrobes: ‘I can claim to have died the death in more ways than one at Durlston Court. The odd thing was that the more I failed as a child actor the more I determined to succeed as an adult … setbacks and adversity in general have always stiffened my resolution and it was so maddening to lie there on the stage being stepped over and prodded for heart beats when I felt I had it in me to make people laugh.’ There was little doubt about that. Many years later his mother told an Australian newspaper that he had been a ‘funny little lad’ since the age of three: ‘He used to do such funny little things that had everyone laughing and always had a funny saying at the tip of his tongue.’
For the moment he was markedly more successful on the playing field. The school records reveal that as a victim of measles in his first term he got off to a slow start both academically – coming twelfth out of twelve in his class – and athletically. He rallied sufficiently to win the school’s welterweight boxing final ‘by a narrow margin – he is quick and hits very hard and showed that he can take as well as give punishment’. He went on that year to excel on the cricket field, taking thirty-five wickets with an average of 6.3 including seven for six against Old Malthouse School. At soccer he scored twenty-two goals in fourteen matches. The following year saw cricket figures of seventy wickets in thirteen games, including one return of eight for twelve. A member of the school shooting team, he was awarded his First Class marksmanship badge in his final year, and on sports day 1938 the Victor Ludorum Cup. His final cricket season revealed figures of fifty-seven wickets at an average of 4.3. The headmaster wrote, ‘In Hancock, A. J. we have one of the best bowlers Durlston has ever had.’ He had been more specific at an earlier date: ‘He always bowls a good length with plenty of nip off the pitch and swings in from the leg rather late.’ As for lessons, he managed to win the prizes for English and French in his final year and to achieve 76 per cent in the Common Entrance Algebra exam to secure his place at public school.
He moved on to the long-established Bradfield College, near Reading,