Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  Peter spent much of his life on the edge of authority. On military field days he, Michael Bawtree and others would find a hedge away from the proceedings and sit behind it, wetting themselves with laughter at the formalities being enacted on the other side of the privet. As an alternative to the detested rugby, he began to organise illicit football games at the end of a half-mile long forest track. The games multiplied until, by February 1955, the Radleian magazine was lamenting that ‘Every square mile of waste land is dedicated to the cult of association football.’ Any formal occasion, like dinner in hall, was a cue for Peter to send his schoolfellows into fits of laughter. ‘The fact that one of his major characters was based on the High Table ler, and that another was Warden Milligan, meant that every meal was an agony of suppressed hysteria’ says Bawtree.9 The Warden, who had arrived at the school soon after Dexter left, had gradually replaced the former Head Boy as Peter’s least favourite authority symbol. ‘For Peter, Milligan’s smoothness, his unctuousness, were pretty hard to bear. He found the man’s whole gushing public persona a piece of Old Etonian fakery. By this time, of course, Peter was a senior boy, so Milligan was less of a threat, and more a figure of fun, than Dexter. I don’t remember Peter ever mimicking Dexter, but he mimicked Milligan all the time.’

  It must be stressed, though, that Peter was not a revolutionary or an anarchist. He was certainly not left-wing. He had simply learned to manipulate the system to his own benefit. He may have disliked it, but he fully intended to succeed within it rather than go about the futile task of trying to replace it. Jonathan Harlow says of his immediate circle: ‘We were not rebels. Incidents or individuals we might deplore or scoff at. But I think that throughout our time there we accepted the system. It had, after all, a sort of serial democracy. Each year’s intake in turn would succeed by chronological progression to a growing degree of immunity, tolerance and privilege, enhanced opportunities for self-expression and, finally, authority for itself. And the traditionalism, the values which were simply assumed rather than spelt out, with the cloistering from any countervalues, exerted an insidious but powerful pressure to conform.’10 Much of Radley’s cruelty was inflicted on junior boys by senior boys, as part of the school’s policy of allowing pupils to govern themselves wherever possible; the upside of this cycle of brutality was an atmosphere in which genuinely talented senior boys had the freedom to flourish, as long as they did not actually try to buck the system.

  One of the measures of a good public school is its willingness to promote the artistic or academically-minded boy to positions of power, rather than simply handing over authority wholesale to the First XV. As a famous sporting school, Radley had a tendency to plump for the latter option, but there was always room for the occasional gifted non-sportsman to go all the way to the top. Peter was one such exception, as – despite his famous rugby injury – he could hardly be described as an athlete. Indeed, his only subsequent memorable contribution to the official sporting life of the school came when he was unable to complete a cricket match through being utterly helpless with laughter, after a novice discus thrower on an adjacent field spun round so many times that he lost his sense of direction and hurled his discus into the middle of the cricket pitch by mistake.

  Instead, Peter threw himself wholeheartedly into the theatre as an actor, in a series of increasingly extrovert and comic parts. One of Radley’s great attractions was its drama department, run by a humane, witty and liberal English master named Peter Way. Rather than content itself with a mere school play each year, Radley could boast an annual drama festival, together with all sorts of lesser productions at different times. In order to get round the fact that Sunday was the only free day for rehearsals, the drama department had negotiated an extension to bedtime for all those involved in a play, which in turn acted as a spur to recruitment.

  Peter’s first tentative steps on the stage came in 1953, in the wake of his mother’s decision to bas herself in England, when he volunteered for the role of the Socialist Duchess in Stuck in a Lift: a performance so unmemorable that the school magazine ignored it entirely. More convincing was his interpretation of Doll Common in The Alchemist in March 1954 (his willowy good looks and big eyelashes usually earned him one of the female parts). This galvanised the Radleian’s drama critic to credit him with a ‘a breadth and gusto which gave a richly authentic atmosphere to the whole production’. Nick Salaman, who played Subtle, remembers Peter’s performance as ‘Dashing. He made a very fine eccentric prostitute.’ It was clear that he was beginning to develop a talent for farce.

  In Thompson’s entry for the November 1954 drama festival he was cast as the Wicked Fairy in Peter Ustinov’s Love of Four Colonels. Peter Raby, who played the Good Fairy, remembers his performance as ‘Wonderful. He dominated the production quite naturally with his comic energy and timing.’ A role in Milton’s Comus was followed in March 1956 by the part of Don Adriano de Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost. By now the Radleian was going into raptures: ‘Peter Cook was the very recipe of a fantastic: a measure of Malvolio, an atom of Aguecheek, and a pinch of Polonius, the whole garnished with sprigs of Shallow, Jacques and Quince. Here was a wonderful display of virtuosity.’ Peter filled the role with exaggerated Spanish mannerisms, great swooping bows, contortions and swirls of his hat, and delivered the whole in a comic parody of antique Spanish speech – ‘Just on the edge of being totally overdone but not quite’, according to one of the audience, Alexander Hamilton. Even his English master was moved to describe the performance on Peter’s school report as ‘A delightful creation, a model of fluent gesture and comic overstatement.’

  By 1955 Peter was sufficiently confident to start mounting his own self-penned revues. A Cook revue became an event not to be missed, particularly as each production contained a number of delicately veiled parodies of members of staff, using jokes and catchphrases that only the boys were privy to. Terry Hathaway, now a London cab driver, whose older sister was on the Radley staff, remembers how she used to urge the whole family to come and see one of the revues, in order to catch sight of this hilarious schoolboy performer. The most original of Peter’s creations was his leading role as a dung beetle; the most memorable, though, was the semi-improvised Gold Mine Revue of December 1955, which stuck for ever in the minds of all who saw it. In this production, Peter appeared in a double act for the first time ever, with Paul Butters taking the stooge role later filled professionally by Dudley Moore. Explains Butters: ‘Our moment really arrived in the autumn term of 1955, when, as usual, the school hired critics from the BBC to come and judge the Social plays. On this occasion that old trooper Geoffrey Keen, together with a colleague, Desmond Llewellyn, came down and, as often happens when there are two commentators, they made somewhat of a hash of judging the eight plays. At the end of that term Peter and I decided to put on a Christmas revue, and we came on at the end as the top billing, as Geoffrey Keen and Desmond Llewellyn, unable to remember which one was which. It was the first time that Peter had really found his niche. He needed no more than an adequate foil to demonstrate his genius.’

  At this point in the performance, Peter took over proceedings. A. Hill, who had appeared earlier in the show in a jazz quartet and had by now slipped eagerly into the audience, relates whafollowed: ‘Peter’s act was unexpected, brilliant, and apparently totally unscripted and unrehearsed. It left me and the rest of the audience holding our sides and aching all over from convulsions of laughter. The curtains went back to reveal a very complicated and unlikely set, the most prominent feature of which was a vast fishing net draped from the top right to the lower left of the stage. Peter began to present a criticism of an imaginary production. His brilliant observation of the dress and speech of the real adjudicator and his inventive comments on what was clearly an absurd ‘play’ were priceless, as was the way in which he moved from serious criticism to total farce. Needless to say, at one point he advised the rearrangement of the set and, in illustrating the advantages to be gained, he became hopeless
ly entangled with the fish net. The curtain fell with Peter scarcely visible inside a tightly wound ball of netting, rocking gently on the stage. The audience screamed for more. It was a truly memorable performance.’

  Peter had judged correctly that an open lampoon of the outside BBC adjudicators would not be so close to home as to offend the school authorities. His report concluded that ‘Although he is never afraid to be controversial, this has been a very successful term.’ Thompson added, ‘More and more Peter fulfils our hopes intellectually and imaginatively; he’s naturally happy in this achievement and therefore more open-hearted than of old.’ Towards the end of 1955 Peter was appointed Head of his Social and School Prefect; but Thompson had a warning for him. As well as his ‘sparkle and wit’, he would require ‘a sympathetic understanding of, and interest in, people of all sorts and conditions, many of them very different from himself’.

  The Social Tutor had correctly diagnosed a certain emotional distance in Peter’s dealings with the other boys. Despite his increasing popularity and burgeoning confidence, the shy, unsure and vulnerable child who had arrived at Radley remained nervously beneath the surface. According to Noel Slocock, ‘He loved talking and he loved to have an audience and he particularly needed other people to spark off. But I think all that sprang in a sense from somebody who inside was quite a shy person.’ Christopher Leigh, another contemporary, recalls that Peter ‘seemed to be, in a way, a bit of a loner. I don’t think you actually ever got to know him really well, although one spent a lot of time with him.’ According to Michael Bawtree, behind his many voices ‘Peter always seemed vaguely uneasy, and blushing even: when he was not being funny in his brilliant, gothic, extravagant way, he was surprisingly awkward.’11 Peter’s second wife Judy is in no doubt that he ‘became a performer to release a part of him that was inhibited.’

  Nor, although it was well hidden, had Peter’s distaste for brutal authority and the people who delighted in exercising it evaporated upon attaining some power himself. According to Bawtree, ‘There’s no question, in my view, that even Peter at Radley was disposed to be black about life. He was scornful of people in authority, and particularly despised any kind of lordliness or unctuousness, or indeed any kind of self-importance or fat-cattery. His remedy for this contempt – and it was deeply felt, even violent – was to mimic and mock these people. And because he was good at this he made us laugh. And so he found a way of riding out the contempt, but he didn’t lose it – he merely neutralised it, and when the mockery and voices stopped, the disgust returned. The more extremeis laughter and mockery, the more effectively it was able to assuage the nausea.’

  Having, as he put it, ‘oiled’ his way to the top, Peter made an unusually gentle and humane prefect. He abolished all the detailed and ludicrous rules and initiation ceremonies that had made his own early days in Thompson’s so miserable, and put an end to Prefects’ Beatings: ‘We didn’t go to a master and say “This is a ridiculous system”, we just didn’t enforce the rules.’12 When ordered by a master to beat a boy, a task he abhorred, Peter would play loud music so as not to have to listen to his handiwork, and always put the minimum possible effort into it. He was approachable: one of the junior boys, Anthony Penfold, had been the victim of bullying. ‘I was in a bit of a state, aged fifteen, in tears etc. I went to Peter Cook as Head of the Social for help. Radley was a fairly tough place in those days and most other prefects would have sent me away with a flea in my ear for being wet.’ Peter, however, sorted the matter out quietly and kindly. ‘He was extremely popular, even though he wasn’t in the normal Ted Dexter mould of College Prefects.’ Or precisely because he wasn’t in the normal mould.

  One of the tasks of a prefect was to inspect the junior dormitory of his Social just after lights out, and punish anyone talking or moving about. Robert Carter Shaw, another Thompson’s junior, remembers that Peter would flick on a bedside light instead. ‘Then he kept us all agog by practising conjuring tricks, particularly one where he made balls disappear from between his fingers. At the end of term he put on a conjuring show for the whole school – the only time I remember a boy doing a special show for the school by himself.’ Thompson expressed reservations about the number of stage performances attracting Peter away from the Social, and about the absence of ‘an iron hand within the velvet glove’; but he also grudgingly admitted that the Cook method – ‘an individual (and on the face of it rather tenuous) course’ – had been a success. Peter had been sensible enough to balance this dangerous liberalism by gritting his teeth and leading the Social Rugby XV from the front: ‘His spirited Rugger for the Social has been an unexpected and most creditable contribution,’ gushed Thompson.

  Soon the Prefects’ Common Room had fallen sway to the new mood. Two of Peter’s friends, Michael Bawtree and Jonathan Harlow, had got in among the sportsmen, and together they argued to extend the abolition of Prefects’ Beatings across the whole school. The measure was agreed by all – ‘except for one bastard who continued to do it, and we didn’t talk to him.’13 The thick oak door of Pup’s Study only partially muffled the constant sound of uproarious laughter as Peter kept his fellow prefects amused with a constant stream of imitations and jokes. He would sprawl his long, gangly frame in a worn and dirty easy chair, one of his legs casually draped over the wooden arm, eating with a spoon directly from a warmed-up tin of baked beans, regaling the room with a near-continuous improvised comic monologue. On the rare occasions when the flow dried up, he would turn to the Telegraph or Times crossword, which he would polish off in just five minutes.

  By his final year Peter was known and generally – although not universally – admired throughout the school. According to one pupil, Jeffrey Frost, of o;He was remarkable not least for his humanity, kindness and generosity. He could always be relied upon to listen carefully to an idea or problem, and then respond openly and helpfully, without irony. He was careful, never dismissive.’ Always, he managed the remarkable trick of combining absolute truthfulness with immaculate good manners. He usually refrained from using his celebrated wit as a weapon, but there is no doubt that the capacity to do so was there: on bad days he would occasionally be too sarcastic for his own good. ‘I was normally pleased to be in his company,’ said another contemporary, A. J. MacFarlane, ‘but he could make one feel very small if he felt so inclined. Mostly, though, he was good-natured, and he had a ready smile.’

  Whatever his inner doubts, the public face of Peter Cook was never downcast. When not writing sketches, he churned out comic articles and cartoons, and succeeded in getting one of his first efforts into the ‘Charivari’ section of Punch. ‘I was thrilled to bits, I got four guineas. I worked out I could live by writing two of these items a week. But then after that I couldn’t get anything into the magazine at all. Either I lost my sense of humour or they did.’ Ever-optimistic, Peter continued to send batch after batch of cartoons to them, which would inevitably be returned in the following week’s post. He also wrote a radio script, which was rejected by the BBC, principally because it was a thinly-veiled pastiche of The Goons. He received a kind letter from the BBC’s Peter Titheridge pointing out that it was actually a very good Goon script, but why didn’t he write something of his own? The script then landed on the desk of Spike Milligan, who was so impressed that he invited Peter up to London for lunch. This was a huge thrill, as Milligan and Sellers were probably his all-time comic heroes, although sadly neither Peter nor Spike Milligan could subsequently remember what was discussed. In fact Peter had developed the habit of falling mysteriously ill on Friday evenings, when The Goon Show was playing on the sanatorium radio. ‘The genial matron seemed quite unaware of this weekly pattern of feeling a bit under the weather,’14 he explained.

  There is no question that whatever reservations Peter may have had about Radley, he was finally beginning to enjoy himself. His school reports now rated his work as ‘outstanding’, with ‘a very lively critical intelligence, a capacity for sustained work, great powers of literary cre
ation and appreciation.’ He was ‘thoroughly enjoyable to teach’. He won many of the prizes the school had to offer, including the German prize and the Birt Prize for Public Speaking. In 1955 he entered the Radley Festival of Prose with a piece which had already won the Medrington Short Story Prize the previous year. Entitled ‘Bric-a-brac’, it was a horror story that – without delving too deeply into amateur psychology – perhaps carried a faint hint of disturbed depths on the part of the author. It told of a baby-sitter who wakes from a nap to find the child dead in her arms, only for the couple who hired her to be utterly unconcerned.

  The baby was sprawled over her lap limp and white, like a wet handkerchief. All the colour was drained from its cheeks and the blue eyes were glazed fishily. No breath warmed its blue tinted lips. The child was dead. An empty void clutched at her heart. The flabby chill of dead flesh seeped through the cloth. She could feel the outlines of the dead baby’s back pressing down on her knees. It was a sickening sensation, like holding a lump of cold carrion.

  Then again, most adolescent boys entertain a passion for the gothic.

  At the tail end of 1955, Peter received the good news that he had been accepted by Pembroke College, Cambridge, his father’s old college. Academically, he could afford to ease off the throttle a little. ‘I had a life of complete luxury in my last year. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much. I was already in at Cambridge. I had two fags. I had breakfast in bed. I used to go to the pictures and fish for trout in the lake. I did a bit of teaching, a bit of lying in the fields, and I organised bootleg games of soccer. It was delightful.’15 Finally, soccer even gained a limited measure of official recognition, when a Lower Sixth boy, Ian Robertson, persuaded some members of staff to take part in a masters v. boys match, despite a little official huffing and puffing. The Naval section of the Cadet Corps lowered the cross bar on the rugby posts to 8 feet, and the game – in which Peter played – was watched by the whole school.