They could keep it up for hours. The gag was still running in 2001 when Sir Thomas presented John, CBE, with his BAFTA fellowship.
John’s trip home after one year at RADA was very different from after the first term. The Burnage flat was given a rare clean by Jack and Ray ready for his arrival, but when they opened the door, they were shocked. There stood a man with a goatee beard, cravat and long cigarette holder, and a posh accent.
‘Is that you, John? What have they done to you?’
Presumably even RADA were not pleased with this transition stage, for his report said, ‘He would be better if he could get the plum out of his mouth.’ Harvey Bryant saw the difference in his friend and was slightly embarrassed by it. Harvey’s new girlfriend had never met anything like this fellow who, at one point in the coffee bar where they met, leaped on to a chair and declaimed some verse. He mimicked a lot of actors they’d never heard of and used colourful language. They buried their heads in their hands, conscious of the rest of the clientele gawping, but John didn’t seem to notice.
By their second and final year, Tom and John had become the shining hopes of RADA. They both triumphed in their RADA performance of Faust, in which John played Mephistopheles and Tom Faust.
The institution was at last aware that agents were now looking for actors to cast the New Wave movies, plays and TV. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning came out with Albert Finney in 1960 and he also opened in Billy Liar in the theatre, both showing working-class England as it really is and using the genuine article to portray it. The laughable depictions of cockneys and eeh-bah-gums in the old English films were no longer acceptable.
Tom did a musical at RADA written by Ned Sherrin, Caryl Brahms and Anthony Bowles called Shut Up and Sing. He played a Teddy boy, a performance that had agents begging for his services. John drew the short straw having to learn 400 lines of blank verse in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but the pluses were that it was directed by the kindly James Roose-Evans and had Sarah Miles slithering around as a serpent. John, Geoffrey and Michael had a whale of a time, John relishing such defiant lines as ‘Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven’.
29 June
John entering Edward VII Hospital for kidney biopsy on another suspected cancer. Not best pleased with the Queen Mother’s favourite hospital. When we arrived a dithering doctor asked John what he was in for. I told him tersely to read his notes. Then he said, ‘Oh I see, biopsy of the right kidney.’ No, you prat, the left. Then a nurse came in and twittered a lot when she saw John and asked for his autograph. I was incensed. The man is here for a life-or-death test, you silly mare. He’s not Inspector Morse. He’s John Thaw and he may be dying. I didn’t say that of course but I did a lot of glaring. We agreed it would not rate very highly in the Rough Guide to Hospitals we intend to write after this experience. We seem to have had visits to all of them one way or another.
The conventional world still tried to tame them. A producer complained when Tom went to meet him wearing a donkey jacket. He was required by his agent to buy a respectable suit. Geoff, Mike and John accompanied him to Burton’s Fifty Bob Tailors and tried not to mock the ill-fitting result: ‘It looks the business, kid.’ Tom was also ordered to get his rather charming uneven teeth straightened. Months of torture ensued. John was again supportive: ‘You look fine, kid, and you’ll soon learn to speak with them.’
Towards the end of their training John and Tom visited Stratford-upon-Avon with a student production of Knights of the Burning Pestle, or Knights of the Burning Pisspots as they called it. Peter O’Toole was giving his Shylock and Petruchio during the young Peter Hall’s first season as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. King of the rabble-rousers, O’Toole was delighted to meet these ‘two little scamps, two scoundrels’ outside the actors’ favourite hostelry, The Dirty Duck. Never happy with state theatres and ‘subsidised rubbish’, Peter found the pub the only thing he liked about Stratford, and spent a good deal of time there, away from the ‘biscuit factory’. He invited the two boys to the matinee and bunged them in the front row, thinking they would loathe such establishment fare, but as luck would have it, the lights failed and the afternoon was blissfully anarchic. Peggy Ashcroft struggled to play Katharine while Peter was driven to wild excesses by the boys’ hoots of laughter.
Their student days were drawing to a close – apart from Jennifer who had another year to go. John and the rest of his gang had to prepare to face the real world. They had good showcase parts in their final term at RADA, so their careers were well launched. Geoffrey went off to get experience in various rep companies and then into television. Blackham, angry as ever, moaned about getting a role in a pot-boiler called Come Blow Your Horn. ‘Well, you should know how to do that, kid.’ Whilst the others kept in touch for a while after they left the Academy, Blackham disappeared. ‘Whatever happened to Michael Black-ham?’ they asked one another. Tom, on the other hand, was very visible. Equipped with his new teeth and suit, he landed the lead in a major film, The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner, in which John had a small part. Tom also won leading roles with the Old Vic and then took over from Albie in Billy Liar. The world was his oyster. John was never, for one moment, jealous but he called Tom ‘Golden Bollocks’. His own were silver, at the very least, because he landed the two top RADA prizes, the Vanbrugh and the Liverpool Playhouse Prize, much coveted because it provided a year’s contract with one of the country’s leading companies.
30 June
Today I was actually making pacts with the devil, in the hopes there is one. What would I give to have John fit and well?
For me to die when he does? – Done.
For me to die in agony? – Done.
To lose all worldly wealth? – Done.
(Although I’m not too sure John would approve of that.)
Jack to be ill again? – No deal.
Any of my grandchildren or children to be harmed? –
No deal.
My career to end? – Done.
And so on.
7
The Young Woman
YOUR FIRST JOB IN the profession indicates your career path. Kick off with Juliet at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and you are set fair for damehood. My first job after leaving RADA in 1951 was in twice-nightly repertory at the Theatre Royal, Oldham, playing in quick succession the leads in Pick-up Girl, Reefer Girl and The Respectful Prostitute. The last must have been a terrible shock to the management who, attracted by the title, did not realise it was an obscure play written by Jean-Paul Sartre. When I gave my mother some earrings bought from my first earnings she was grateful but urged me to try to find some ‘nice’ parts. I did my best.
3 July
The press have been wonderful since our statement asking for privacy but today at the post office two photographers started snapping at us. John was feeling peaky and just sighed but I was like a wild animal. Luckington has never seen such an unseemly display. The woman used her camera as a weapon, holding it at her face flashing it at me as I approached screaming. She muttered, ‘I have to earn a living.’
‘That’s what the commandants in Nazi Germany said.’
A tad OTT perhaps. Offered to pay the man whatever he would earn for the photos. He actually blushed and said, ‘Oh Sheila,’ and slunk away. John was deeply embarrassed by my performance. As was everyone in the post office. Nobody mentioned it as I bought my stamps, but I bet it will be all round the village.
While teenage John was rocking round the clock in Manchester, I was doing the rounds of the agents wearing a smart rig-out made by my mother with obligatory hat and gloves for London. Day after day I traipsed up and down Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, where the agents hung out. Only one showed the slightest interest. Miriam Warner was the doyenne of tatty agents. She crouched in a filthy office in Cambridge Circus, her short, fat body enshrouded in shapeless velvet garments, with a squashy hat permanently concealing a suspected bald head. Occasionally she waddled through to the
outer office and berated her staff and the waiting assembly for bleeding her dry. Regardless, her assistants, Pauline, a blonde ex-chorus girl, and Smithy, an ex-comic, both covered in cigarette ash, served tea and comfort to the footsore actors crouched round the spluttering gas fire in the fug of the outer office. Miriam sent me along to several general auditions known as cattle markets. A queue of actors forms outside a theatre and they gradually filter on to the stage. From the dark of the auditorium a voice yells, ‘Next,’ and that is your cue to walk off the other side and go away. Sometimes you are greeted with ‘What’s your name?’ and, if you are lucky, ‘OK, what are you going to do for us?’ If you are extraordinarily lucky you get to finish your audition speech, but more usually it is cut short with ‘Thank you, we’ll let you know.’ I never got beyond ‘Next’. Eventually Miriam persuaded me to return to Oldham for a season. At least they wanted me and it would be good experience.
Doing a play a week had to teach you something. Mainly the ability to get away with it. In Oldham I learned and rehearsed one three-act play at the same time as playing the current one twice every night and three times on matinee days. The only direction there was time for was, ‘Say the words and don’t bump into the scenery.’ The eminent critic Michael Billington thinks Harold Pinter’s directorial approach of cutting the crap stemmed from his rep days. Pinter is quoted as saying, ‘A rehearsal period which consists of philosophical discourse or political treatise doesn’t get the curtain up at eight o’clock.’
I had neither time nor, as yet, inclination for political discourse but my social conscience was stirred by the conditions I found in Oldham. Kindly Smithy sent a note to the company manager Bryn Roberts: ‘A little girl named Sheila Hancock will be joining the company for On Monday Next. Try to help her find digs.’ What Bryn found was a room in just such a house as John had spent his childhood in. One outside loo between four houses, gaslight, black coke stove for cooking, no bathroom or hot water or heating. Every cobbled road seemed to have an illegal betting shop and a pub dedicated to serious drinking.
Ethel and Bert made me as welcome as their abject poverty permitted. Eventually I deciphered the Oldham accent and during the year I was there I grew deeply fond of them, especially Ethel. Bert’s Saturday night ritual of getting viciously drunk and beating up his wife made him less easy to love. This was an accepted part of their marriage routine until one day I suggested bolting the door against him until he sobered up. He was a tiny man from a Lowry painting, and after a bit of shouting and banging slithered down the front door, out to the world. We lifted him on to the settee in the front parlour and left him to sleep it off. I think Ethel thought it was rather dull compared with their usual Saturday night.
When I saw the conditions under which he and Ethel worked at the local mill, I could understand, if not condone, Bert’s impotent rage. They worked in day and night shifts. In the small hours of the morning a knocker-up rapped on the bedroom window with his pole. I was in bed learning my script by candlelight. The sound of the clogs clattered down the cobbles to the cotton mill at the bottom of the hill. Inside the mill the heat and steam were stifling and the din of the looms meant the workers either bellowed or communicated with their own sign language.
6 July
Bliss to be in France for a few days. We have mastered changing his chemo bag between us. He reads the directions and I do it, rubber gloves, sterile everything, drawing off blood, etc., etc. I pretend to be a nurse trying to seduce him. It’s like a Carry On film. I bought him a nice notebook to write his worries down. He can destroy it if he wants to but it will help to get it down on paper, I think. He says he will but I have my doubts. We barbecued sardines today, sat in the sun in a café in Saignon. He said, ‘I keep forgetting I’m ill.’ I fear I don’t. It obsesses me, wondering about the future. I dread going back. But I don’t let on.
The workers in the mills and the local iron works were paid a pittance, as was I. Our staple diet was chips and mushy peas. Occasionally someone would bring a hotpot to the stage door because they thought I looked too thin. It was my first experience of the extraordinary fondness the public could offer me.
The audience in Oldham sat in the leaking, decaying theatre, sometimes with umbrellas up in the stalls, lapping up our escapist rubbish. My diary during that year’s engagement has entries like: ‘A horrid little piece, My Wife’s Lodger. I spent my whole time writhing with shame and shrieking with laughter – it was so bloody.’
Again: ‘Ma’s Bit o’ Brass. A bloody awful perf. In a bloody awful play, bloody awfully done.’
‘Terrible, terrible play, Murder on the Nile, I stink to high heaven in it. I’d like to do something violent to Agatha Christie.’
I played every age and type. Whenever the part demanded it, I did my best to bring some glamour to Oldham. My orchidaceous make-up was embellished with hot black, a block of wax melted and applied with matchsticks to elongate the lashes. We had to provide our own clothes for the shows. One homemade evening dress served several plays with the ingenious addition of a tulle overskirt, long gloves or a feather boa. To keep my spirits up, I treated myself once a week to a visit to the local bathhouse. It was a bleak place with concrete floors and chipped white tile walls. It echoed with the shouts of women doing their washing. The cubicles with the stained baths were not much used. The fierce woman who handed out a threadbare cloth and slab of carbolic soap was affronted by my rejection of them in favour of my own fluffy towel and Mornay pink lilac bath cubes, soap and talcum powder. It confirmed her opinion of the lardy-arses from the south.
At twenty I fell desperately in love with my much older, married leading man. Being a well-brought-up virgin, and fearful of hurting his long-suffering wife who was also in the company, it never went beyond a stolen kiss outside the pub after the show, and anguished playing of love scenes on stage. Ethel and her friends from the mill commiserated with me, sitting on the whitened front stoop, metal Dinkie curlers hidden in turbans, hands warmed on pint pots of tea. Their pungent views on men shocked and educated me.
After a year, with the confidence the Oldham audiences had given me, I decided to go back to London and try to get some more high-class work. That meant signing on twice a week for the dole. Chadwick Street in Pimlico was a branch of the Labour Exchange frequented almost entirely by actors, so it was quite a jolly experience. My parents could not get the hang of the new welfare system and were horrified that I seemed to be deliberately living off the state. A letter from my mother says: ‘I hope you decide to earn some money, not keep out of work, be sensible and not too artistic for a while.’ The puritan work ethic was deeply embedded in them. I persevered for a while in my quest for better-quality work, mistakenly relying on my only ally, Miriam. One day, just before Christmas, she summoned me to the office. I arrived in my best outfit, to be told excitedly that she had the perfect job for me: ‘Wolf – skin provided’.
10 July
John was in sparkling form today. His mimicry is inspired. He makes me laugh so much. Walking through Apt he growled, ‘This place is full of chien shit.’ Sitting in the Grégoire Café he contemplated a drunken waiter who looked a bit like Alec Guinness playing Herbert Pocket and went into a long riff about the venerable knight visiting Apt to blow up the bridge in front of the café and, inflamed by the fornicating frogs in the river bed, leaping on a local barmaid, after a duel for her favours with Laurence Olivier who got lost in Apt on his way to Agincourt. His sad lovechild turned to drink, not knowing his father was a famous actor and it was our duty to tell him. I had to restrain him from doing so.
Even if I had had a decent agent I doubt if I would have found much better roles than pantomime wolf at that time. The West End was then ruled over by the management mafia of H. M. Tennent, run by Binkie Beaumont and John Perry, two witty gentlemen who presented plays with pretty people. After a few humiliating months of pounding the audition beat, I succumbed to my mother’s plea, ‘Really, darling, ambition is not worth all the anxiety yo
u are causing yourself and others who love you and are your true friends.’ I retired to the drudgery of weekly rep and tatty tours for another eight years of obscurity.
Miriam managed to wangle me into a set-up run by two sub-Binkie-type impresarios, Barry O’Brien and Michael Hamilton. Their companies were an improvement on Oldham, mainly playing seaside resorts like Bournemouth, Torquay, Ryde and Shanklin. Michael Hamilton was a plump, red-faced, pursed-lipped individual with a very short fuse. He liked my versatility as it saved money to have one girl who could cover leading lady, juvenile and character parts.
All went well until I joined one of his shows in Bath. The day I arrived I went into the pub near the Theatre Royal to meet the company. There, in the saloon bar, was a Greek god. Curly hair, brass-buttoned blazer, open-necked shirt with casually tied cravat and a debonair way with a cigarette, he was leaning languidly on the counter, holding court with smooth charm.
I didn’t dare approach although I realised this was the highly regarded Barry O’Brien leading man, Alec Ross. I didn’t think for a moment that he would cast his divine lopsided smile in my direction. But after one week’s rehearsal and halfway through the playing week of our roles as lovers in Duet for Two Hands, he did. As with my first Greek god at school, Alan Coast, it was my acting that did the trick. That and the fact that by then he had probably exhausted the charms of the other female members of the cast, and probably most of Bath.
Alec was ten years older than me and his sophistication bowled me over. Back in London for a week out, he took me to the Salisbury pub in St Martin’s Lane, seething with theatrical folk, all of whom he seemed to know. Jack’s Club, Gerry’s, the Buxton and the shady Kismet were full of out-of-hours heavy drinkers, among them Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Peter Finch. They were all his friends. I was gobsmacked. So was he, because, like a good working-class girl, I was saving myself for marriage, in compliance with my father’s rule that there would definitely be ‘none of that there ’ere’.
The Two of Us Page 8