‘What’s the trouble?’ he yelled over the roar of gunning engines.
‘Which gear do I start this thing in? I’ve forgotten,’ Dad roared back.
‘First, of course!’ shrieked Charlie. Then, seeing the old man grinning at him, added, ‘You’re bloody mad,’ and got quickly out of the way.
Memories … Dad’s had been a boisterous, generally happy life. He swept us all up – family, friends and fans – in his warm, jolly embrace. Wherever he was there was noise and activity – I’d never known him as quiet as he was that afternoon in St Margaret’s. For an instant I was tempted to shatter the solemn silence by shouting out his famous slogan ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ with which he had begun a thousand performances. But I knew that this time it was no use. He had dominated my life, now I was on my own. No more amusing incidents where people mistook me for my Dad or got our names mixed up. An extraordinary Double Bill had come to an end.
But that afternoon, as one does when reluctant to face a tragic present, I dwelled on happier days …
My father had two sons and each of us inherited different parts of his nature – which just shows what a larger-than-life personality he was. My brother, Ted, who was five years older than me, shared my father’s love of flying – just as Dad had piloted Bristol fighters in the First World War, Ted flew Mosquito fighter bombers in the Second. As Dad’s younger son and named after him, I was fairly good at sports such as football and cricket, but chiefly I inherited my father’s love of show business and some of his flair for popular musical entertainment – though neither of us could read a note of music.
I think my earliest memory of my father was of him being very upset. When I was about four years old we lived on a new housing development in Kingsbury, north London. There was still plenty of building work going on and a constant stream of lorries passed our front gate. Apparently, one day someone left our gate open; I ran out into the road and got pinned to the ground by the front wheels of a truck. Miraculously I wasn’t seriously hurt but a doctor was called and, so the story goes, I remained utterly silent while he used a fork to dig out the stones that had been imprinted on my back by the lorry’s wheels. When he’d done he gave me a couple of sharp slaps on the backside and I screamed the place down. My silence had not been bravery but shock.
Meanwhile, in the road outside, my father was lambasting the poor lorry driver who’d really done nothing wrong. When my father was aroused he could be frightening; he had a Cockney’s ripe turn of phrase and was a trained boxer – I once saw him knock a motorist who picked a fight with him right across Denmark Street. He wasn’t particularly proud of the bellicose side of his nature but he had learned as a boy in the backstreets of Westminster that you either stood up for yourself or went under.
In a way, it’s poignant that my earliest memory should be of him being fiercely defensive of me. I recall him as an unfailingly loving father; I remained secure in that knowledge even when he did things I found puzzling or even upsetting. When I was small I didn’t realise that he was a famous band leader. I didn’t know what he did for a living, he just seemed to live life the wrong way round. He would set off for work as Ted started his homework and I was being put to bed, and it’s a miracle we didn’t become chronic insomniacs for he had a habit of bawling up the stairs, ‘Anyone awake?’ at whatever time he got home. If he got any answer, he would carry us both down to share his supper. We were a tightly knit family, and always if it was humanly possible Dad came home. Even when the band had played miles away he would drive through the night to get back to his own bed.
Though Dad was my hero, throughout my childhood my favourite band-leader was in fact Henry Hall, whose BBC Dance Band broadcast every weekday evening from Savoy Hill. After I’d had my bath, brushed my teeth and hair and put on my pyjamas, I was allowed into the front room to listen to the programme. I loved his music, especially ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, which he made a hit. Years later, when I was running BBC TV Entertainment we did a programme celebrating fifty years of broadcast music. We got Henry Hall to conduct a band made up of all the top session-musicians, and they played a medley of the famous signature tunes of big bands of the thirties, which included amongst others Jack Hylton’s ‘Oh, Listen to the Band’, Jack Payne’s ‘Say It With Music’, Henry’s own signature tune, ‘Here’s to the Next Time’, and of course Billy Cotton’s ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’. It was a magical, nostalgic occasion. At the end the band gave Henry, by then in his eighties, a standing ovation, and he said afterwards that he’d never officially retired as a band-leader until that moment. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, including mine.
It was at the Holborn Empire that I heard Dad’s band for the first time. My mother, my brother and I caught a bus from Kingsbury which dropped us off in Oxford Street, from where we took a cab for the rest of the journey so we could arrive in style. For me the star of that evening wasn’t my father but my Uncle Bill, who happened to be the senior commissionaire at the theatre. There he was, dressed in a magnificent green uniform with gold piping, war medals clanking on his chest. He opened the taxi door, saluted and called me ‘Young sir’. I was speechless with pride. A page-boy took us up to a luxuriously upholstered box in the circle. I was about to see my first variety show; it included dancers, jugglers, comedians, a ventriloquist and a magician. Then the melody of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ rang out, the curtain went up and there was my father in white tie and tails conducting his band. When the signature tune ended he turned to the audience to do his opening patter and I couldn’t contain myself. I jumped up and shouted out in a loud voice, ‘Hello, Dad!’ Quick as a flash he called back, ‘Now, don’t give me away, son,’ and there was a sympathetic chuckle from the audience. I sat back proudly and clutched my mother’s hand.
A few years later when my brother went away to boarding school, Dad would take me on my own to any nearby theatre he was playing at. I would stand in the wings and when he took his curtain call run onto the stage and solemnly bow to the audience with him – the old girls in the front stalls loved it, but not half as much as I did. It was on trips like this that I met face to face some of the great stars of the day, especially at the Palladium. There would be American superstars like Joe E. Brown and Laurel and Hardy whom I had seen only on the screen of the local cinema at Saturday matinées. There was also home-grown talent such as Will Hay, Max Miller, the Crazy Gang and Bud Flanagan.
Bud was a great joker. I remember Dad treating me and some school pals to lunch at the Moulin d’Or. You’d see all the big stars there – it was the place to eat, and to be seen. Bud was at another table, and when we got up to leave and our coats were handed to us he jumped up and started shrieking, ‘Stop! Call the police!’ I was embarrassed beyond belief as he proceeded to tip out of our coat pockets knives, forks and spoons he’d bribed the waiters to plant in them.
I loved going with the band when they did cine-variety, playing between film-showings at two cinemas such as the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road and the Trocadero, Elephant and Castle. They started at two in the afternoon and by the time they finished at ten p.m., they’d done seven shows. Though I was allowed to travel with the band, I don’t think they were all that keen on having me aboard because my father didn’t tolerate bad language in front of his family. When I appeared the band members would pass the word along: ‘Ham sandwich’ was their warning they’d better watch their tongues. Why ‘ham sandwich’ I don’t really know; perhaps it was rhyming slang for ‘bad language’. Another code word was ‘Tom’, their private name for Dad so they could discuss him without outsiders realising who they were talking about.
It was around this time that Dad adopted ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ as his signature tune. When asked why he said the idea had been put into his head by his nephew Laurie Johnson who was in the orchestra. On one occasion Laurie had observed Dad standing on the edge of the dance-hall floor, turning every dance into an excuse-me whenever a pretty girl whirled past him, and said to him, ‘You’re always stealing somebody’s girl!’ Dad responded by singing him a verse of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’, and one thing led to another.
Dad