Tattered regimental banners, worn with age and damaged in battle, hung down from the nave of St Margaret’s, and I wondered whether the standard of the Second Battalion, the London Regiment, was among them. Popularly known as the Two-and-tuppences, this was the regiment my father joined in 1915. He’d volunteered as soon as the Great War broke out the previous year, but as a spotty fifteen-year-old couldn’t convince the red-sashed recruiting sergeant that he was ‘sixteen, coming on seventeen’. Twelve months later he enlisted as a boy bugler and was posted to Malta, where he was introduced to the seamier side of life in the quarter of Valletta the troops called the ‘Gut’. There were peep shows where for a penny you could see a naked lady, but Dad was perpetually hungry and preferred to go instead to the Salvation Army. They gave him a cup of tea and a fairy-cake in return for him standing on the roof of the building, bashing a tambourine and pointing at the red-light district. ‘That’s the way to the Devil,’ he’d shout, ‘and this is the way to the Lord. Come on in!’ And whenever one of the lads followed his advice Dad would get another fairy-cake.
From Malta he sailed to the Dardanelles, where a desperate engagement against the Turks was being fought. He later recalled that as he clambered down the troopship’s side to wade ashore off Cape Hellas, a huge Marine asked where his rifle was. Touching the musician’s badge on his arm, Dad replied, ‘I don’t carry a rifle. I’m a bugler.’ The Marine snorted, ‘There’s only one bugler around here – that’s Gabriel. He’s in heaven and you’ll soon bleeding well be joining him without one of these. Catch!’ With that, the Marine threw him a rifle and Dad became a serious soldier. Unable to move inland from the beaches, under constant Turkish shelling and German aerial bombardment from Taube biplanes that dropped steel darts to skewer you to the ground, Dad spent weeks sleeping in the freezing rain amid the bodies of his comrades and scurrying rats. He grew up during that doomed and brutal campaign. There was precious little chivalry around; the Turks mutilated prisoners and the Allied soldiers sometimes retaliated by hurling hand grenades into the POW cages where the Turkish prisoners were held.
Dad’s mother didn’t know he’d been posted abroad until she got a home-made Christmas card from him. He’d drawn a soldier holding a Christmas pudding with a bubble coming out of his head that read, ‘With thoughts of home from your loving son, Will.’ It was postmarked the Dardanelles. She nearly had a fit and started proceedings to buy him out of the army, an option open for boy soldiers. It cost thirty pounds, a king’s ransom, but somehow she scraped the money together. However, by the time the army’s bureaucracy creaked into action the Dardanelles expedition had ended in disaster and Dad was evacuated with everybody else. On the way home he helped stoke the boilers on the old three-funnelled battleship Mars, which was on its last voyage to the breaker’s yard via Southampton. When the Mars docked Dad queued up with the rest of the complement, clutching his pay-book. His turn came and the paymaster smiled sardonically, ‘Run along, son, I’ve got no chocolate.’
He had to find his own way home from Southampton. By this time the family had moved from Westminster to Kilburn, so he caught a train to Victoria then a bus up the Harrow Road, where he met a postman doing his rounds at ten o’clock at night. He asked the man if he knew where the Cotton family lived. The postman looked at this boy with a pack and rifle, obviously exhausted, and immediately said, ‘Yes, I know Joe Cotton’s house; it’s a bit of a walk but I’m going that way.’ While this wasn’t entirely true, he nonetheless picked up Dad’s kit and helped him home.
Dad was given a hero’s welcome but found a huge gap in the family he’d left. His elder brother Frederick had been in a reserved occupation as a draughtsman at Vickers. When he saw Dad leave for the army he couldn’t bear not being in uniform, and told his mother he too was going to enlist. He was killed in France within a fortnight.
Being a returned juvenile hero held no attraction for my father, so at the age of seventeen he again volunteered, this time for the Royal Flying Corps (later to become the Royal Air Force). When it was suggested during the interview by one of the board that Dad was too young to be commissioned in the RFC, the presiding officer said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, if he’s old enough to fight in the Dardanelles, he’s old enough to fight in the RFC.’ So Dad began a lifelong love-affair with flying and became a pilot, though because of a crash in training he never fought in the air – which probably saved his life: on the Western front, the life-expectancy of RFC aircrew was measured in weeks.
He left the RAF with a gratuity of two hundred and fifty pounds, spent ninety of it on a belt-driven Norton motor cycle and started looking for work. He tried motor-cycle racing in Ireland; then tried being a mill-wright’s assistant; and finally got a steady job as a bus conductor. Throughout this time he was playing football regularly. He played in the Middlesex Senior League and eventually got a trial for Brentford, whose manager with gritty realism told him, ‘Remember one thing. Brentford can’t play football so we make bloody sure nobody else does!’ Dad was not a professional and whenever Brentford didn’t pick him he got a game for Wimbledon, which at that time was an amateur side in the Athenian League.
Army buglers were also trained drummers, and Dad decided to cash in on his experience by joining a part-time band called the Fifth Avenue Orchestra – not Fifth Avenue, New York but Fifth Avenue, Queen’s Park. He played the drums badly until the best musician in the band, the pianist Clem Bernard, suggested the sound would improve if Dad quit the drums, stood in front and waved his arms about in time to the music – which he did brilliantly for the rest of his life.
In 1921 he married my mother, Mabel Hope Gregory. She too had a brother killed in the war and her mother was an invalid, so she played a vital part in her father’s business (he owned a chain of butcher’s shops in which my father worked for a time). He was less than entranced about his Mabel marrying a penniless musician-cum-amateur footballer, but eventually accepted the inevitable. Dad and Mum took a couple of rooms behind a barber’s shop in Kilburn Lane, where they were poor but happy. Sometimes of an evening, coming home from a gig at a dance hall, they would toss a coin to decide whether they should eat or ride home on the bus – it didn’t matter which way the coin fell, they always chose to buy something to eat and then walked home, lugging a set of drums between them.
Then Dad and the band were offered an engagement at the Regent, Brighton which was part cinema and part dance-hall. He decided that the Fifth Avenue Orchestra needed a more sophisticated name now they had hit the big time, so they became the London Savannah Band. After Brighton came Southport, then the Astoria on Charing Cross Road, London, and finally Ciro’s Club. By now, instead of playing for dancing they had become a stage band, putting on a show including vocalists and much clowning around. Billy Cotton had emerged as a showbiz personality in his own right; he was no longer just the leader of the band, he was its chief attraction.
Dad was now able to indulge his favourite pastimes. He gave up football but played cricket for Wembley when his engagements allowed, and he’d take me and my brother Ted with him. The whole family was there the day he scored a century, and my mother said it meant more to him than when he appeared in his first Royal Command Performance.
But he couldn’t wait for the day when he would be able to afford to race motor cars at Brooklands. When the time came he bought a clapped-out Riley Nine and got it tuned by an Italian mechanic called Charlie Querico. Being a professional, Charlie had a healthy