Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  Our first list, launched in September 1973 and put together at great speed, set the pattern for the future: the serious, the literary, the so-called worthy sitting side by side with the more popular. Thus The Thoughts of Chairman Alf (Garnett) twinned with a political biography of Henry Kissinger, Dick Emery in Character with a book on Edgar Allan Poe, and Harry Secombe’s novel Twice Brightly with a book of conversations with the American poet Robert Frost, and so on. That is not to denigrate the popular and the humorous, for humour was to become one of our strengths, with such stellar writers as Alan Coren, Miles Kington, Jill Tweedie and Frank Johnson flying our early flag. I have always maintained that if you are passionate about something you can make it work, and that’s what we tried to do. When, much later on, we were offered a book on the mathematics of everyday life by Rob Eastaway, we jumped at it, and tens of thousands of copies later were pleased we had, and that we had changed the title at the last minute from How Fast Should You Run in the Rain? to Why Do Buses Come in Threes? It made all the difference. It would have been so easy to say when offered that book (as I hear time and again these days), ‘It’s not really us’ – not a mantra I’ve ever subscribed to. Everything can be ‘us’ if you want it to be, and sometimes life is full of rewarding surprises. For this reason, our more popular, commercial titles have often rubbed shoulders with books that took us in different directions – volumes such as Calling for Action by Donald Soper, the legendary Methodist minister famous for his soapbox orations at Hyde Park Corner, or Related Twilights, an illustrated memoir by the Polish artist Josef Herman, known for his paintings of the Welsh miners he lived among for some years, or A Hundred Years of Railway Weighells, a colourful family history by the outspoken former General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, Sidney Weighell.

  Invitation to our first book launch – for the very popular Dick Emery’s In Character.

  Harry (later Sir Harry) Secombe, our highly commercial early contender, was one of the most open-hearted, genial and talented of men, who lifted everyone’s spirits the minute he entered the room, and his wife Myra was just as special – warm, down-to-earth and always welcoming. They had met at a dance in Swansea at the Mumbles Pier Dance Hall, and afterwards Harry escorted her to the station, having arranged to meet her at six o’clock the following night outside the Plaza cinema. Harry wrote:

  The next morning I had quite a hangover, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember what my date for the evening looked like. I decided I’d arrive early at the Plaza, get behind one of the pillars outside the cinema and keep a furtive watch. If I didn’t fancy what I saw I’d stay where I was and forget the whole thing. It was a quarter past six when, tired of waiting, I stepped out from behind my pillar to go home, just as Myra daintily made an appearance from behind hers. And in this atmosphere of mutual distrust, our courtship began.

  Apart from his great comedic gifts and startling tenor voice, Harry loved to write and contributed regularly to various magazines including Punch. He went on to produce several more comic novels, a series of children’s books and two volumes of autobiography, all of which we were lucky enough to publish. I say lucky, since his Twice Brightly was very nearly contracted while I was with Frank Cass, but on hearing I was leaving, Harry’s daughter Jenny rescued it and brought it to us. At that time Jenny had her own publicity company, but in due course she joined the publicity department at BBC Television, eventually becoming publicity commissioner for entertainment, managing the team responsible for all the comedy/light entertainment output on television. Jenny was extremely close to her father, and she generally handled his publicity. Who better?

  Twice Brightly followed the struggles of a young comedian through his first week in variety and conjured up that vanished world of oddball novelty acts, shabby digs, strict landladies and hard-to-please audiences. ‘Audience with me all the way, managed to shake them off at the station,’ wrote Harry in a later autobiography, recalling his own first week in variety, when his act consisted of shaving onstage in various comic ways. ‘I’ll not have you shaving in my time,’ bellowed the humourless manager, sending him packing.

  The allotted publication date for Harry’s book – 9 October – was not the most auspicious, since the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had called an election for the following day. Naturally, all the media wanted was discussion about politics, but nevertheless we managed to get the popular Harry on several programmes. As he, Jenny and I arrived at the BBC for one of these radio appearances, the lift doors opened and out marched Wilson with various aides, including his controversial political secretary, Marcia Falkender. Seeing the beaming Harry, Wilson stopped and said, ‘Look here, Harry,’ pointing to the cufflinks he was wearing, which Harry had apparently given him. They wished each other luck, Wilson perhaps needing it more than Harry, as he scraped home with a majority of just three. Plus ça change…

  Fortune was certainly smiling on Harry when Punch magazine made headlines with their coup in getting the Goon-mad Prince Charles to review Twice Brightly, and what a rave it was. The papers splashed it as a news story in a big way and the orders rolled in. Harry was already a sought-after speaker at literary lunches, but now there were even more requests – hardly surprising given that he was very witty, and often ended on a high C in a bonus cabaret performance! At one Yorkshire Post literary lunch, a man came up to Harry as he was signing books and said, ‘You nearly had me laughing.’ He certainly had Harry laughing on the drive back to London, as he recalled the northern working men’s clubs where he’d cut his teeth and they’d say, ‘If you please ’em here, you’ll please ’em anywhere.’

  ‘It’s fun being a turn,’ Harry would quip as people queued up to talk to him or ask him to appear at a charity do somewhere or sign autographs in the pouring rain. He was a joy to be with and I still laugh when I recall how he started one after-dinner speech at a Birmingham hotel: ‘I have fond memories of coming here some years ago, and particularly of the head waiter.’ Pause. ‘When he died, they inscribed on his tomb, “God finally caught his eye”.’

  Harry’s second novel, Welsh Fargo, about a man called Dai Fargo who ran a rather ramshackle bus service in South Wales, landed us in a brief legal confrontation when someone in Wales claimed we were mocking the real bus service he ran (called Wells Fargo, as I recall) and, what’s more, accused Harry of impugning the sexual morals of the proprietor’s wife, since there was a little bit of innocent hanky-panky in the story. I wish I still had the long telegrams we received from the complainant’s solicitors, which read like a Goon Show script. But the matter had to be taken seriously, and we sought the advice of a leading QC, who told us, ‘I’ve never said this to anyone before, but I give you a 100/1 chance of winning any action.’ One robust response from our solicitor, Anthony Harkavy, and the claimant backed down at once.

  Harry was naturally always in demand for signing sessions in Wales, and after one in Cardiff, while walking with me back to his car, he stopped in front of an intriguing shop that sold penknives, peering into the window like an excited schoolboy. ‘Just what I need,’ he said, stepping inside – to the delight of the shop owner, who of course recognised him instantly and quickly laid a whole array of knives on the glass counter. ‘That’s the one for me,’ said Harry, pointing to an expensive Swiss Army knife that had blades galore, plus a bottle opener, a corkscrew, screwdriver and something to take stones out of horses’ hooves. ‘Would you like one?’ he suddenly asked, turning to me in his generous way. I tried to say I didn’t need one (which I didn’t) but he insisted and I too ended up with one of those all-singing, all-dancing knives in my pocket. And now it lies in the glove compartment of my car as a permanent memento of Harry, just waiting for a horse with a stone in its hoof to limp across the road so I can jump out, penknife in hand, and come to its rescue. Climbing into the front seat of his car next to the driver, Harry turned to me as I settled down in the back and asked if I’d like to hear a track from his new recording, which he’d just received
but hadn’t had a chance to listen to. And so, with that magnificent voice and an aria from Turandot ringing in my ears, we sped down the motorway to London.

  Wherever he went, the exuberant Harry was always centre stage, always gave at least 100 per cent of himself. I recall a heady lunch in the basement of a restaurant off St James’s, where we found ourselves sitting near a table occupied by the sales directors of William Collins and their Australian agents. Fatal! Within minutes Harry was deep in lively conversation with them, swapping stories, the laughter infectious. I’d hardly staggered back to the office when I received a phone call from Helen Fraser, then head of Fontana, Collins’s classy paperback imprint, saying she didn’t know what had happened over lunch but all her sales people were telling her she had to buy the paperback rights of Harry Secombe’s books from us, and she did.

  Then there was the evening Harry came to our office to talk to our reps, joining Carole and me and one or two others for a quiet meal afterwards at the small and convivial Trattoria La Torre around the corner. A quiet meal? With Harry there was no such thing, and no sooner had Dino, one of the owners, started to sing Neapolitan songs, accompanying himself on his guitar, than the powerful Secombe voice rang out. As the wine went down so the high notes soared higher and higher, and as the restaurant shook, we and the other lucky diners were treated to a thrilling cabaret that went on into the small hours. How did Harry explain that to Myra, I wondered?

  When the Secombes lived in Cheam, Harry would arrange a charity cricket match every summer, and what fun these were. The teams always consisted of well-known cricketers and sportsmen together with a good sprinkling of showbiz personalities. Naturally, the high spot was when the short-sighted Harry went in to bat, the bowling suddenly becoming slow motion to allow him to score a run or two, and great cheers erupting around the ground as Harry raised his bat in triumph. No wonder he was universally loved! Although he was immensely proud of being honoured with a knighthood for his services to entertainment and charity, he was never one to take himself seriously, always referring to himself as ‘Sir Cumference’, and the motto he took for his coat of arms was ‘Go On’. Dear Harry – as Max Miller used to say of himself, ‘There’ll never be another.’

  There was one alarming moment in the long-laughing Secombe saga, when, in 1982, Harry took seriously ill on a flight to Australia. Diagnosed with peritonitis, he underwent a life-saving operation and was warned that if he didn’t lose weight, his days would be strictly numbered. As a result, and with his wife Myra reading the riot act, Harry went on a medically controlled diet and lost almost five of his twenty stone in six months, joking that he’d seen his knees for the first time in years, and that he no longer had to get sail makers to make his shirts! Needless to say, there was a book in it, The Harry Secombe Diet Book, and, promoted by its much-loved, slimline author, it shot up the bestseller lists, which was an unexpected tonic for us all.

  Fast forward to 1998, and we’d just published Harry’s Arias and Raspberries, the first of his two volumes of autobiography. At that time, This Is Your Life was one of the most widely viewed TV programmes, and the show’s producer approached our publicist, Cheryll Roberts, about getting Harry on the show. Michael Aspel was the presenter, following in the footsteps of Eamonn Andrews, and the format of the show was simple: a celebrity or interesting person would be surprised at an appropriate venue by Aspel carrying a large red scrapbook and declaiming, ‘This is your life.’ The surprised subject would then be whisked away to a studio, where an audience would be waiting and the show proper would begin – with people from the many strands of that person’s life being brought on in turn to share a memory or recall an encounter: long-lost friends or family, often flown in from a distant part of the world, and so on. In the case of a showbiz person, there would invariably be stars he or she had worked with. The reunions could be very moving, and it really had to be a total surprise – if the ‘victim’ got wind of what was afoot, it would all be shelved.

  We discussed it with Harry’s wife and daughter, as their agreement and involvement in the necessary deception was vital. Myra and Jenny gave us the green light, and arrangements began. It was decided that the easiest and most natural thing was to surprise Harry at a signing session for his book. Since he was doing a number of these, there was no reason for him to suspect anything, and there was one coming up at Bentalls department store in Kingston, which seemed the perfect venue. Preparations were elaborate, with the TV company producing huge posters displaying the book cover as a backdrop for the signing… and at a given moment a hidden panel in one of these would be removed and Michael Aspel would step through, announcing, ‘Harry Secombe, this is your life.’ The startled Harry would then be led away for the rest of the show.

  Sadly, it didn’t work out as planned: just a few days before the agreed date, Harry’s long-time manager and friend Jimmy Grafton died. It was at Jimmy’s pub, the Grafton Arms, that the Goons had first got together, and naturally Harry was very upset, so much so that both Myra and Jenny felt we had to pull the plug on what could be a very emotional programme. But what about the signing that had been arranged and widely advertised? Harry, who knew nothing about the original plan and not wanting to let anyone down, insisted on going ahead. For us, for our rep Keith Humphrey, and also for the directors of the store, it was a huge let-down, though the signing was successful enough. However, all was not lost because a few months later the show’s producer came back, proposing to set it up once more, and the family agreed. It seemed only right to give Bentalls first option of staging it again and they quickly consented. This time everything went ahead as planned. There was a good crowd, Harry signed, Michael Aspel surprised him in the middle of it all – and Harry really was surprised. But once he had reached the TV studios and was in front of an audience, he rose to the occasion like the true professional he was, joking and responding as the various people from his life appeared in turn and said their bit about him. One story Harry told was about returning to his school to see his old English master at a time when he was at the height of his fame – topping the bill at the Palladium, a Crombie overcoat, a Rolls, all the trappings of success – and the master simply said to him, ‘Harry, what went wrong?’

  Harry Secombe shares a joke with Jeremy Morris, our financial director, and editor Elizabeth Rose.

  Later, with characteristic modesty, Harry – by then Sir Harry – movingly wrote:

  All the average comic is left with at the end of his career are some yellowing newspaper cuttings, perhaps an LP record or two, and a couple of lines in the Stage obituary column. The best memorial he can hope for is that sometime in the future a man in a bar might say to his companion, ‘That Harry Whatshisname was a funny bloke, he always made me laugh.’

  That was Harry, that was his life.

  * * *

  Johnny Speight, author of the TV series Till Death Us Do Part, and another of our launch authors, was a rather more controversial personality. Johnny’s famous creation, the ranting, bigoted, loud-mouthed Alf Garnett, played with gusto and brilliance by Warren Mitchell, had created a storm of protest in some quarters when the show was first aired, Mary Whitehouse famously objecting to Alf’s foul-mouthed language and attitudes. ‘She’s concerned for the bleedin’ moral fibre of the nation,’ was Alf’s response in one episode, where he was depicted as a reactionary admirer of hers. Alf’s attitudes and language were dreadful, of course, but the whole point was that they were satirically intended and meant to send up and expose Alf’s outrageous opinions. They were not Johnny’s views, they were not Warren Mitchell’s – but you had to have a sense of humour to appreciate that. Fortunately, some twenty million viewers did.

  Johnny, who had written for a whole host of radio and TV greats, had a particular kind of genius, and the book he came up with for us, The Thoughts of Chairman Alf, was all Alf-speak. The producer of Till Death, Dennis Main Wilson, was also a kind of genius, but an eccentric one who always seemed to me like some kind of absent-minde
d professor. Dennis was a radio legend, having produced the first Goon Shows and the first Hancock Half Hours and given breaks to such stars as Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Griff Rhys Jones. How he got Alf Garnett past the BBC censors I can’t imagine, but he loved and admired Johnny and bubbled over with enthusiasm and wild ideas. Dennis quickly convinced us that the way to produce the book was for us to gather round, switch on a tape recorder and simply give Johnny subjects, on which he would instantly extemporise in the voice and character of Alf Garnett. It worked, and Johnny’s flights of invention would amaze us as he laughingly soliloquised on favourite Garnett themes – the royal family, the army, his wife (‘silly old moo’), foreigners, West Ham Football Club, the working classes, whatever. Liz, Dennis and I spent many joyous hours with Johnny, tape recorder at the ready, in our office and at Johnny’s house in Northwood, where we had to compete with his parrot, which would imitate Johnny’s stammer and interject a stream of unprintable words. Hilarious – unless you were up against the sort of deadline we were facing. Once Liz had transcribed and edited it all, Johnny would go over it, rewriting and tailoring, and the book, with the addition of illustrations by the cartoonist Stanley Franklin, was done.