The family were domiciled in the claustrophobic attic flat at the top of the building. Tony and his brother Roger, who was actually born there on 9 June 1931, have both admitted that a business with an often chaotic twenty-four-hour claim on the attention of its owners did not provide the environment most conducive to a traditional family life style. His mother once explained in an interview: ‘Tony once asked why he couldn’t have a home life like the other boys. But it was impossible – I was busy with the customers all the time.’ For Hancock the answer to the impersonal, though unintentional, disregard by his parents was to raid the petty cash and find escape in the silver screen: ‘Will Hay was my favourite. A double feature, half a bar of Palm toffee, and three and a half hours in the dark – that was my idea of fun.’ At a later time and in different circumstances Roger would cope with a similar situation in the same way, claiming that the constant exposure to the cinema taught him everything he knew about judgement and material, the grounding for his successful career as a literary and theatrical agent.
If Hancock took his theatrical flair from his father, his energy and strong-mindedness must have come from his mum. Known to all as Lily – and, to the annoyance of her family, to her husband as ‘Billy’ – she had denounced Lucie almost as soon as she could talk. Lily survived her son and therefore came within the acquaintance of many of those who figured in his career. To the writer Philip Oakes she was funny and racy, with a warm practicality that cut to the quick of her son’s excesses: when on one visit to the Oakes’ home Tony’s boozy obsession for conversation and music showed little respect for the midnight hour, she finally drew herself up and turned to Philip’s wife: ‘I’ll put my gloves on … it always worked with his father.’ It usually worked with Hancock too. His agent Beryl Vertue first met her on a Mediterranean holiday and was immediately impressed: ‘You could almost see where he got some of his mannerisms from in terms of delivery and everything … she would strut across the beach, full of funny anecdotes and with a kind of feigned vagueness about how to tackle any particular problem.’ As her son ribbed her about her food foibles they became like a double act together. Lily’s friend, the theatrical hairdresser Mary Hobley, recalled for Jeff Hammonds the suddenness with which she would go from being jolly and bright to being serious: ‘She’d talk about life and all that – she seemed a bit mixed up in some way, but she was fun … Tony was like her in a way – he was very bright, but underneath there was this sadness.’
Their close relationship even spilled over into a mutual love of sport. He talked about her to the journalist Gareth Powell, in one of the last interviews he gave in Australia: ‘My mother is seventy-seven and a bit of a card. I telephoned her when I was sailing on the Andes. I said, “I think I’m going to play a bit of cricket with the Australians.” And she said immediately – and I’m talking to her on a boat, on the Andes – “Now I would suggest three slips, one gully, two short legs …!” and she went through the card on this bloody thing. And she’s got no right to do this. A very funny woman indeed. Seventy-seven years and fighting as she goes.’ Even sex was not off limits in their conversation. When, in an echo of Les Dawson’s hypochondriac travesty of a Northern housewife, she delicately referred in company to having something wrong ‘down below’ Tony couldn’t help himself. ‘Get your legs round a good man,’ he would guffaw. ‘That’ll put you right.’ Modesty dictated she would not be drawn further, although it is tempting to imagine the spirit of Tony’s friend Dick Emery, another fine comic transvestite, intruding on her behalf: ‘Ooh, you are awful!’ Indeed, looking at pictures of her in later life one surely gets some idea of how Tony would have looked in drag. The popping eyes and chubby cheeks are there, although school friend Ronald Elgood remembers the very domineering, almost Wagnerian presence of the lady who would collect her son at term’s end. Their love was unquestionable and she remained supportive of him until the end of his life, although others have referred to a negative side in their relationship. ‘She never let me grow up,’ he once said to Joan Le Mesurier. ‘Once we were out on a drive and she said to me, “Look at the choo-choo puff-puff.”’ When Joan queried what was wrong with that, he replied, ‘I was thirty-two at the time.’ Arrested childhood development would provide Galton and Simpson with another common trait in the years to come: finger games, matchstick men drawn on windows and the announcement of the sight of ‘Cows!’ as if they were Martians all dominate that wearisome television train journey to the North.
Roger was well aware of the closeness between Tony and his mother, and assesses his own standing in the triangle between them with honesty: ‘There was a sort of fixation there between the two of them and I was not part of that. It doesn’t worry me. I don’t feel any lack of affection. I think I’ve come out of this very well, actually. I could have been a screwed-up mess, but I’m not because I think I accepted the special relationship between them. It really was.’ Not that everything was always well between them. Lyn Took, Tony’s secretary at the height of his fame, found it hard to discern a maternal presence at all. His friend, the actress Damaris Hayman, thought she exerted a rather unhealthy hold on him: ‘He used to say that she was very fond of “my son, the celebrity” and she sort of dined out on it, to use the phrase.’ Roger is prepared to admit that she aggravated her son at times: ‘I can understand that, because she’d go off on cruises and she’d always sit at the captain’s table and she’d come home and say, “I don’t know why I’m sitting at the captain’s table.” And I’d say, “It’s because you’re always telling everyone who you are and dishing out signed photographs of Tony into the bargain. Why else do you think you are?” She was the cruise queen. He paid for them. He was wonderful to her and rightly so because she had been so wonderful to him. From my point of view it was totally understandable.’ Hancock became resigned to the humour in the situation: ‘One day I caught her in a pub distributing signed portraits of me all around the bar all in one quick, deft movement as if she were dealing cards at Las Vegas. There they were drinking their beer and playing shove-halfpenny and suddenly before I could do anything about it, they found a Hancock picture in their hands.’ More importantly, on his Face to Face interview with John Freeman Tony described as his most vivid memory of his mother ‘the encouragement she gave me to do what I wanted to do, though I showed no sign at all of being able to do it initially’. Roger is not prepared to admit that his mother may have seen more of the father – and the vicarious realisation of his father’s theatrical dreams – in her middle son. Tony, in the same interview, acknowledged the lead his father gave: ‘I think in many ways it was a deep thing with me to try and justify it. Because I believe he was pretty good.’
Roger scarcely knew his father. His only memory is a poignant one: ‘He was going upstairs and he paused half way up on his way to the top floor. I sort of indicated that I wanted to come up with him and he said, “No, don’t – don’t come up.” By that time he was dying, but I didn’t know. Why would I know?’ Jack Hancock died of peritonitis aggravated by both lung and liver cancer at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Boscombe, on 11 August 1935. He was forty-seven and had been ill for nearly a year, the last month in the hospital. By that time the family, spurred on by the resentment shown by the brewery to Jack’s extracurricular activities as an entertainer and promoter of his own shows around the district, had moved from the Railway Hotel to their own independent venture. By August 1933 they were installed at the Swanmore Hotel and Lodge at 3 Gervis Road East, a select