Dad soon began to take the idea of flying visits literally and bought himself a second-hand Puss Moth, a wooden aircraft, very reliable and simple to fly. In it he flew to the nearest aerodromes to the towns where the band was performing – I was thrilled by the drama and excitement of it. I recall my cousin Laurie telling me of an occasion when he flew with Dad to a booking at Great Yarmouth Pier. They flew to the Boulton and Paul aerodrome at Norwich where a car collected them and took them on to the coast. The next day they drove back to the aerodrome, and while they were sitting in the club house an official came in and told them they ought not to fly because the weather was deteriorating. The misty rain and murk for which the Fenlands are notorious was closing in.
Dad chose to ignore the weather warning and fly on to Leicester, where the band was performing that evening at the Palais de Dance. Visibility was nil and in those days the only available navigational aid was a bubble and compass. In such conditions the single course open to aircraft was to ‘Bradshaw’ – follow the railway lines. But railway lines to where? Dad was hopelessly lost and realised that he was also low on fuel. He decided to hedge-hop in the hope of spotting a familiar landmark. He pushed down the stick, and the aircraft was swooping towards the ground when Laurie screamed through the voice tube, ‘Look out!’, whereupon Dad hauled back the stick and just missed a place in the history books as the man who demolished Peterborough Cathedral.
He had just enough fuel left for a quarter of an hour’s flying, so decided to land at the first flat field he saw. It turned out to be the jumping arena of a stables, complete with fences he had to sail over one by one until he came to a halt. Plenty of horses had taken the jumps but this was the first time an aeroplane completed the course. The owner came out to greet them and Dad introduced himself; they had a drink together then pushed the Puss Moth, wings folded, into a shed. The owner’s driver took Dad and Laurie to Melton Mowbray station, from where they caught a train to Leicester. The next day Dad returned, collected the aircraft and flew it back to Croydon. The joys of flying in those carefree early days! Little wonder that Dad was my childhood hero when his life was punctuated by escapades like these.
It was much to our delight that for one period in the 1930s Dad spent much more time at home. This was while he and the band were the resident orchestra at Ciro’s Club in London’s Park Lane. It was a very upmarket, even exclusive, establishment, quite different from the general run of variety theatres in which Dad spent much of his professional life. Entertainment correspondents of various newspapers were astounded at the appointment and predicted that it would be a very brief engagement – just long enough for Dad to open his mouth, as one unkindly put it. Because Ciro’s was a very select place the band had to play very quietly, muffling the brass by stuffing scarves and handkerchiefs down the bells of their instruments. The clientele didn’t want to hear the band so much as feel it; it was an accessory, like the vastly expensive flock wallpaper or the periwigged flunkeys in knee-breeches who manned the cloakroom and served the drinks.
When Dad returned home from nights at Ciro’s he would tell us about some of the more exotic or distinguished people he’d met. For a while the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was an habitué. He was fond of night-life and partial to the club’s dark, romantic atmosphere. Though flattered by HRH’s presence, the owners of the club found him a bit of a pain because he would arrive with an entourage and insist on being treated like royalty, killing an evening stone dead. All the other guests sat in respectful silence as the Duke chuntered his way through the wine list, ate his meal and eventually left (which he’d do after requesting the Billy Cotton Band to play his favourite tune, the Waltz Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana – not a theme calculated to set feet tapping or bring the crowds onto the dance-floor).
The third time the Prince requested the same piece Dad, exasperated, said to the club manager who’d brought the message, ‘Go and ask the silly so-and-so if he knows any other tune.’ The following day Dad was summoned to the presence of the chairman of the board, Lord Tennyson, who told him that although he and the band were popular with members, they did expect a little more courtesy. ‘You mean “servility”,’ replied Dad. ‘That’s not my style. I certainly believe in greeting people in a proper manner, but they’ll get no bowing and scraping from me.’ Lord Tennyson then broached the subject of HRH, pointing out that even among club staff the heir to the throne was not to be referred to as a silly so-and-so. ‘The problem is, Cotton,’ said the noble lord, ‘that you are too outspoken. You’ll be calling him that to his face next.’
The upshot was that Dad and his band were banished to Ciro’s in Paris for three months, in a role-exchange with the club’s resident band, the Noble Cecil Orchestra, and he found the clientele there much more responsive and uninhibited than their London counterparts. Cecil’s band was initially greeted with shock at the London Ciro’s, because every one of its players was black – though nothing unusual these days, the fact was considered scandalous at that time among the club’s many ex-colonial members.
However, whereas at home Dad was ‘one of us’ and expected to behave as such, Noble Cecil and his orchestra got away with murder. As Dad himself acknowledged, all the noisy, catchy tunes he had been barred from playing, the Cecil band blasted out – and the clients, including the Prince of Wales, came to love them. When the two bands swapped venues again, Dad found he was able to play his own kind of music, the Billy Cotton sound, trombones blaring, saxes wailing and drums thumping out the rhythm. He also enticed one of Noble Cecil’s band to stay and work for him: trombonist Ellis Jackson was still playing in the Billy Cotton Band and doing a credible tap dance well into his eighties.
I was absorbing the ethos of show business through my skin when I was still a boy. I learned a lot; things like the significance of the running order on a variety bill. In those days the Billy Cotton Band would be one of perhaps three or four star attractions whose names were emblazoned in huge letters across the posters, but I also watched from the wings as the names in little letters – the supporting acts, especially comedians – performed. With desperation lurking behind the laughter in their eyes, they worked frantically to get some response from audiences who were waiting impatiently for the big stars and daring these lower-order comedians to make them laugh. Their act done, they’d leave the stage to the hollow sound of their own footsteps, head for the bar and demolish half a bottle of whisky while they waited to die the death again in the second house. Comics suffered this ritual humiliation year in and year out in the hope that one day there might be a talent spotter in the audience who would pluck them from obscurity. It amazed me how few stand-up comedians gave up in despair; they all seemed to be incorrigible optimists.
A boyhood spent standing in theatre wings watching the contrasting scenes before me – stars excited by roaring crowds and also-rans withering at the sparse applause of bored audiences – bred in me an empathy I have never lost towards showbiz performers. When eventually I became a BBC Television executive and had the power to employ musicians and entertainers, though I couldn’t let my professional judgement be distorted by sentimentality, every time I auditioned a TV hopeful I willed him or her to succeed. In my mind’s eye I could see some miserable comedian gloomily staring into an empty whisky glass waiting for the call of destiny that would never come.
In the late nineteen-thirties we were living in a family house in Willesden which had a large garden, stables and a proper snooker room. There Dad entertained an eclectic mix of the kinds of personality who occupied the gossip- and feature-columns of the day’s newspapers. There was the motor-racing set, many of them the younger sons of the aristocracy; flying aces like Amy Johnson; show business stars; music publishers; and the sporting mob – footballers, cricketers and boxers. One regular visitor was the world snooker champion Joe Davis, who would play a dozen of us at once and we’d get just one shot each before he cleared the table. The only