Vi was an extraordinary character. She put the kibosh on a tour Tommy made of Australia when they were both interviewed by the press on the airport tarmac before they flew home. Tommy rhapsodised about Australia, its wonderful climate, its beautiful scenery, its marvellous audiences … Eventually, a reporter asked Vi what was the best thing she’d seen in Australia. She said, ‘This aeroplane that’s going to take me back to my bulldog in Brighton.’ She hated the razzmatazz of show business, and I think she warmed to my dad because he was totally without any overweening self-regard. Fame left him totally unaffected. To the end, he remained a big-hearted, down-to-earth Cockney, noisy and affectionate.
My mother ran our family effortlessly. She’d inherited her father’s head for business and had the only bank account in the family, from which she doled out cheques to my father as he needed them. And she wasn’t dealing in loose change either – Dad made big money in his time, but since one of his famous sayings was ‘Money is for spending’, it was up to Mabel to keep the ship afloat. She was the still centre of a hurricane. There was noise and frantic activity all around her, and she went on calmly holding the family together while my father dashed about playing the theatres, driving racing cars, flying aeroplanes and sailing boats. She graciously entertained the big show-business names who blew in and out of our house, but she wasn’t overly impressed. All that was another world; what mattered to her was giving her sons as normal and loving an upbringing as possible, and looking after the old man.
That in itself was a full-time job. One day when I was quite small, Dad complained of pains in his arms and legs and developed a high temperature. Rheumatic fever was diagnosed, he became seriously ill and was looked after round the clock at home by two nurses. The house was darkened and Ted and myself were sternly enjoined to keep quiet. I was given the job of keeping guard at the entrance to our drive and waving down passing vehicles if they were going too fast or making a lot of noise – even the Walls ice-cream man was asked not to ring the bell of his tricycle or call out his wares until he was beyond earshot. For a couple of weeks it was touch and go as to whether or not Dad would make it, but he was as strong as an ox and once he turned the corner he quickly recovered. Whilst Dad was ill, though, the entire brass section of his orchestra, which included some of the finest trumpet and trombone players of the time, the best-known being Nat Gonella, was enticed away by a rival band-leader called Roy Fox. Dad screamed ‘Theft!’ and never forgave those who deserted him; the rest he rewarded with inscribed silver cigarette boxes which became known as ‘loyalty boxes’.
When I was nine years old I joined Ted at Ardingly College. As a new boy I wasn’t allowed to have any contact with him – we travelled there together, but as we approached the school Ted warned me that tradition decreed juniors mustn’t socialise with seniors during term-time. As is often the case with younger siblings, my elder brother had excited in me both admiration and envy, so I had been desperately keen to follow him to public school. But on that day, as Ted left me behind and strolled away chatting and joking with his contemporaries, I stood there alone, clutching my suitcase, gazing at this gloomy Victorian building which made Bleak House look like a holiday camp looming ahead in the dark winter afternoon, and I just wanted to be back with Mum and Dad. I lived for their visits and pursued a curiously schizoid existence. For one third of the year I mixed at home with the stars who made a great fuss of me, the other two thirds were spent in this miserable barracks of a place where the masters beat any cockiness out of me.
It was only when I had settled down at school and got to know my school-mates that I realised how famous my dad was, and I did quite a brisk trade in enrolling them as members of his fan club for two-pence each. I remember one weekend he visited Ted and myself in his state-of-the-art car, a Lagonda which boasted a car radio – a real novelty in those days. Every Sunday, Radio Luxembourg transmitted a programme – recorded in advance – called the Kraft Hour, which featured Dad and his band. On this occasion showing off the car, Dad turned the radio on, and hey presto! there he was on the air. Since these were the early days of radio, when pre-recorded programmes were rare, some of my astonished school-mates didn’t understand how Dad could be in two places at once.
I confess I swelled with smug pride whenever my father visited Ardingly College on open days. He would sign up for the Boys versus Parents cricket match, knock out a quick half-century, bowl some unplayable balls and then dash off to Croydon where he kept his aeroplane, fly back and, to the delight of the boys, buzz the school. No doubt some sniffy parents thought it was all outrageous exhibitionism, but Dad was so artless in his desire to give people pleasure it would never occur to him that anyone could think he was doing it to stroke his own ego. In spite of his great fame, there was an engaging innocence about him; he had no pretensions about his importance. He was, for example, terrified of Ardingly’s headmaster, Canon Ernest Crosse – of course, we all were in our early days in the school. Even when I became a sixth-form prefect and counted Canon Crosse more as a friend than a teacher (he later conducted my marriage service and baptised my children) Dad never lost his apprehensiveness about having to make conversation with him. ‘He’s your headmaster,’ he used to say. ‘You talk to him.’
After I’d been at boarding school for a couple of years, World War II broke out and Dad, who was on the Reserve of Air Force Officers, was called to a board at Uxbridge which tried to decide the best use to make of him. Obviously he wanted to fly in combat; they on the other hand decided that although he was a very fit forty-year-old, he should become adjutant to an RAF squadron at Northolt. Dad was outraged – Billy Cotton a pen pusher? The Air Marshal who presided asked him why he was wearing glasses. ‘Is it true that you have a defect in your left eye?’ Dad had to agree that he had sight problems, and that was that. They spared him an office job and recommended that he and his band should be loaned to ENSA to entertain the troops in France during that first cold winter of the war. Then, after Dunkirk, he was seconded to the Air Training Corps and spent the rest of the war trying to keep up morale on the home front as well as doing his bit to ginger up the teenagers who enlisted in the ATC as the first step to service in the RAF. It was my brother, Ted, who did the family’s stint in the RAF.
When I came home for school holidays, my Dad often took me touring with him. People needed something to take their minds off the war, so the theatres were packed. The band played patriotic songs like ‘We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’ and ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ over and over again. Petrol was rationed and we had to travel everywhere by slow train. The hotels were unheated and the food was pretty basic but I still enjoyed myself. Many of the younger stage performers were in the forces, so the old stars came out of retirement to do their bit. I got the chance to see the likes of G.H. Elliott, who was truly a show-business legend. He was known as the ‘Chocolate Coloured Coon’ because he wore black face make-up. I heard him sing ‘Lily of Laguna’ and watched his soft shoe shuffle; it was an education in stage technique. Even in old age he was a song and dance virtuoso.
A great friend of my father’s was Jack Hylton, probably the most famous of the pre-war band-leaders. By the time the war began, he’d become an impresario and got the rights to do stage versions of two hit radio shows, Tommy Handley’s ITMA and Garrison Theatre which was set in an army base and fronted by the actor Jack Warner, later famous for his lead in Dixon of Dock Green. Jack introduced variety acts and kept lighthearted banter running through the show. On radio these two shows were great successes but good theatre demands action and spectacle – the eye as well as the ear has to be entertained – and Jack Hylton realised he needed to add an extra dimension, so he engaged the Billy Cotton Band to bolster the stage show.
Thanks to Tommy Handley’s genius, ITMA did well in the wartime theatre. Garrison Theatre, though, was a real turkey, so when it transferred to Blackpool, Hylton persuaded Tommy Trinder, one of the biggest comedians of the time, to join the show for a limited season. Then began the great dressing-room saga. Contractually, my father was entitled to the No. 1 dressing room and Jack Warner to No.2. These pecking-order squabbles