Elgood was a contemporary of Hancock at both Durlston Court and Bradfield. His abiding memory, aside from the fact that there was nothing lugubrious about him – ‘that came later’ – is of a sense of mischief: ‘He was fairly streetwise. I don’t know if he came from a state school. I well recall a game of football with Tony at centre forward. We were naïve little gents and he tapped the ball with his hand when the referee wasn’t looking. We were amazed.’ His tone suggests that they also secretly admired his cheek. He is certainly remembered ‘as a good-natured boy, a nice guy’. To Pat Cox’s wife he was ‘just an ordinary likeable schoolboy’. To Peter Wilson at Bradfield he was ‘a cheerful soul – full of jokes and the joys of spring’. There is no evidence to suggest that he suffered adversely from the notion that it helps to build the character of children by the enforced separation from their loved ones in a repressive, potentially alienating environment, although his brother does point out that he was a shy child. Another Bradfield contemporary, Nigel Knight, observed a ‘complete and utter silence, uncommunicativeness (markedly towards groups)’. Tony admitted to John Freeman being an extrovert till the age of about fourteen, ‘and then it sort of packed up’. He had no idea why. Roger puts it down to public school: ‘You were kept away from the punters. Later I cracked it. I went to a party, at the House of Commons of all places, and I thought nobody knows anybody at this party. I’m no worse off than anybody else. So I started going up to people. But Tony was not particularly gregarious. He was shy. If he did crack it later, it was with the drink, but not without. But it was a wonderful education, particularly in the business my parents were in when you really had no home life. So you were going back to school and seeing your friends, which is really the reverse of what you would expect.’
Preparatory and public school, albeit minor, provided an unlikely background for a professional comedian who would go on to achieve mass appeal. On radio and television the Hancock character often goes to great pains to recover his imaginary past – scholastic, military, ancestral, professional – by asserting a status he apparently never had. Had his true educational history been common knowledge, the radio episode The Old School Reunion, in which Tony regales Sid, Bill and Hattie with his boyhood triumphs at ‘Greystones’ – ‘seven of the happiest years of my life: started off as a fag and worked my way up to head cigar’ – might not have been as funny, even if the dénouement does insist that he turned out to be the worst school porter they ever had. Galton and Simpson also indulged his passion for sport in many an episode. It is comforting that their grandiose Roy of the Rovers soliloquising on his behalf was rooted in a certain schoolboy truth: ‘Picture the scene – Wembley Stadium 1939 … the ball was cleared high in the air – I caught it on my forehead – balanced it there – tilted my head back and with my nose holding it in position I was off. Past one man, past two men, forty-five yards, the ball never left my head. I was holding the lace in my mouth …’ But his soccer skills were nothing to his cricketing ability. He claims he is known in cricketing circles as ‘Googly Hancock’, and not as Bill Kerr suggests because of the way he walks: ‘Perishing Australians! What do they know about cricket, anyway?’ snorts Hancock with disgust.
Cricket became something of an obsession, a passion that lingered until the end of his life. He developed into a fine medium-pace seam bowler, and one of his proudest moments came at a charity match in 1958 when with little dispute he bowled out Ian Craig, the Australian captain, lbw with only his second ball; unfortunately the umpire, acknowledging the crowd had come to see the touring side, gave ‘not out’. His mother recalled that as a boy, ‘He used to go round the hotel swinging his arms. He was always bowling at something.’ It also provided the defining bond between the two brothers, in spite of the age gap between them. ‘I suppose,’ says Roger, ‘that between seven and ten I got to know him better because we played a lot of cricket in the yard at the back of the hotel.’ His real-life athletic prowess would have especially pleased his father, who had engrained the love of sport in his son. Among his other accomplishments Jack had been an extremely good billiards player, a superb golfer and a boxing expert. He had coached boxing on an ad hoc basis at Durlston Court School and boasted a certain notoriety as a licensed boxing referee officiating at tournaments at the Winter Gardens, the Stokewood Road Baths, and elsewhere locally. His youngest son claims that he was ‘the most unpopular referee in Hampshire – as soon as he was announced, he was booed’. Tony had his own memories: ‘Regularly we trotted along to his fights, sat ourselves down in free ring-side seats and promptly stood up and booed every decision he gave. Very popular we were, I don’t mind telling you.’
In his Face to Face interview Tony made it quite clear why he left Bradfield: ‘I wanted to get into the theatre … I felt I could do it somehow … I don’t know why really.’ He emphasised to John Freeman that he had wanted to be a comic for as long as he could remember. Ever disparaging of his appearance, he added, ‘perhaps looking like this it was perhaps the only thing I could do’. He would not be the first comedian to turn such a deficiency into a workable option. At another level, however, one needs to jump back to when he was around six or seven years old to discover the emotional heart of the matter. There would have been no single moment of annunciation. Whatever the schools he attended, the most engaging, most enduring part of his education occurred as he fell under the continual spell of the variety artists who clustered around his father in the hotel bar in the early 1930s. In later life he revealed that he had the measure of them exactly: ‘They fascinated me. Those old pros were so much more extrovert than people in the business today. It seemed as if they would go into an act at the drop of a hat. They were different from any other kind of people I had ever met in my life. They seemed to get so much more out of life simply by being alive.’ In later years he would parody the world of ‘no business like show business’, but he never lost his respect for the professionalism of the variety trade that catered for a million eventualities in the tireless round from one venue to another.
It was a significant time in the development of British entertainment. A new breed of performer was breaking through in variety, a more sophisticated type whose talent, often nurtured in concert parties, had been lifted to success in the radio studios of the day. In comedy a more sophisticated approach underpinned humour that still somehow managed to remain accessible to a wider audience, as the Oxbridge satirical movement would