The Fun Factory

by Chris England

  Charlie Athersmith, for instance, and Jimmy Crabtree, who each played for England above a dozen times, and were in the legendary Aston Villa team that had won the League Championship five times back in the nineties, not to mention the double in ’97. Crabtree’s sartorial quirk, if you like, was to play in a neckerchief, while Athersmith had been known to grab an umbrella from the crowd when it was raining, and carry on galloping up and down the wing underneath it.

  The outside left for England opposite Athersmith when he was in his prime was ‘Flying’ Fred Spiksley of The Wednesday, and he was another Karno regular. Then there was Billy Wragg, a great slow beanpole of a centre half, who won the Cup with Nottingham Forest in ’98, Tommy Arkesden of Derby County, Joe Clark of Hibernians, Jack Weat of Birmingham City – all pretty much guaranteed a round of applause in their respective home towns.

  By and large, these footballers were in their mid to late thirties, and had finished their playing careers. All of them belonged to the first generation of professional players to reach the end of the road and realise there was still a living to be made for a few more decades. If you got them all together for a pint they could really wear you down talking about money.

  The greatest pleasure of all for me, though, was that all of these greats of the game were introduced onto the stage by the referee, who was none other than Mike Asher, my old mate from Jail Birds, who reckoned I still owed him a few pints for saving my life on that tour, and I didn’t argue.

  “Did you know?” he said indignantly as we relived that escapade, “that every Jail Birds company now has a ‘Lumpy’ in it? And do we get any credit for that? Do we heck as like! I reckon Syd told ’em it was all his idea!”

  So, come the first night of the show – well, the first for Charlie and me – the two of us had got together some bits of business to kick things off with a bang. We still hadn’t been vouchsafed a single rehearsal with Harry Weldon himself, indeed the great man didn’t even arrive until midway through the evening’s bill, and the stink of beer on his breath was strong enough to make a unicyclist wobble unsteadily as she passed through a cloud of it in the wings on her way onto the stage.

  Up goes the curtain, and there are the Midnight Wanderers all ready to go through their paces. Ratty the forward – yours truly – steps forward to lead the session. Except I can’t find my shorts, and so I borrow Stiffy’s, which are too big for me, so that every time I raise my arms above my head down they come to half mast and I have to snatch them up again. When the rest of the team, behind me, begin to copy my actions exactly, then you had a training routine like nothing you’d ever seen before. It was a simple gag, but it had the place in a roar.

  I glanced into the wings to give Charlie the nod to enter, and caught sight of Weldon, pop-eyed with amazement, his big mouth wide open, and T. Ellis Buxton standing next to him laughing fit to bust. On comes Charlie as the villain, in a typical Edwardian villain’s get-up: the top coat, the cane, the spats and a voluminous Inverness cape. He has his back to the audience at first as he sneaks around our exercise room, then he suddenly turns to reveal a bright red nose, which brought him a big laugh. Then he falls headlong over a dumbbell and catches his cane on a punching bag, becoming involved in a fight with it when it swings back and hits him in the face.

  I saw Weldon’s great red face slide slowly out from behind the tab, like a sunrise turned through ninety degrees. His eyes were out on stalks: he couldn’t believe what was happening. There’d never been so much as a snigger before his entrance, remember, and now there was a veritable riot! All he could think, in his beerfuddled brain, was to stop it, somehow, anyhow.

  So out he comes, far too early. He’s not been introduced, so all he can do is stand there, while Charlie whirls about him, looking for a button which has popped off his trousers. Charlie picks something up, then throws it away in disgust. “Those confounded rabbits!” he cries, and Weldon grabs him hard by the arm, trying to hold him still so he can bring him into focus.

  “Quick! I am undone!” Charlie says to him, ad lib. “Have you a pin?”

  And Weldon just stands there, looking at him, lost. He doesn’t know if he has a pin or not, or whether he’s even supposed to have one. He thinks he might not even be in the right theatre…

  Afterwards the other members of the troupe patted us both on the back and were fulsome in their praise, especially Buxton, who was in full flow when Harry Weldon stuck his big, angry face into our dressing room.

  “I was just saying, Harry,” cried Buxton enthusiastically, “that I can’t remember ever seeing the show go down so well!”

  Everyone looked at Weldon, and I had the distinct impression that he’d come in to tear a strip off our hides but couldn’t now do it without losing face.

  “Aye,” he said, after a heavy pause. “That were … all right.”

  And if looks could kill, Charlie and I would both have left the theatre that night feet first.

  Touring the country with The Football Match took us right into the summer of ’09, and Charlie and I were at daggers drawn with Harry Weldon more or less all the way. Harry was a Northern comic with a thick accent and what Charlie called a ‘cretinous’ style. His speech also came with a strange trademark gurgling noise in his throat, possibly due to the fact that he seldom took to the boards without pouring at least eight pints of ale down it. In the North he would go down well, whereas in Plymouth, Southampton and Bristol he was a lot more hit and miss, shall we say.

  In Belfast the audiences didn’t take to Weldon at all, and neither, as it happened, did the press. The paper there gave him a terrible panning, calling him an “incomprehensible boob gargling away like a broken pump”, while Charlie and I were described as “bright” and “promising” and we were the ones given credit for “bringing the house down”.

  At the theatre that evening Weldon was incandescent, as well as pretty much tanked to the gills. He was supposed to give me, as Ratty, a couple of slaps, to liven me up after taking too much of the ‘training oil’. On this night, driven to fury by the critic of the Belfast Evening Telegraph, he let me have it full in the face. I saw stars, I’m telling you, and the blood streamed from my nose and down my jersey, which fortunately was a red one.

  Later, in another scene outside the turnstiles at the football ground, he suddenly stepped backwards, knowing full well that Charlie was close behind, and crushed him against the wall. Charlie slumped down to the floor, making an extra laugh out of it, but we could all see he was badly winded.

  Afterwards there was a dreadful scene. Charlie was beside himself, and tried to brain Weldon with one of the dumbbells. I had to get between them to break it up, even though I wanted to floor Weldon myself for the thump he’d given me.

  “Leave him be,” I said to Charlie. “He’s only jealous.”

  “Jealous?!” Weldon scoffed. “Of you two? Why, I have more talent in my arse than you have in your whole bodies!”

  “So you have,” I retorted. “You can use yours to talk out of.”

  The footballers, too, were not particularly fond of our leader. They were a venal bunch, and Weldon never let an opportunity go by to taunt them about how much money he made. The bad feeling all came to a head the week we were at the Exeter Hippodrome. One night after the show, the footballers beckoned me, Charlie and Mike Asher over to their smoky cabal in the pub.

  “Eh up, boys,” Fred Spiksley whispered. “You fancy mekkin’ a bob or two?”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Exhibition game.”

  From time to time as it travelled the country the Football Match company would play against a local team, to drum up publicity or goodwill, and we’d usually get a decent crowd along to see our handful of ex-internationals play. They liked to see as well whether the comedians had two left feet. I’d played in a couple of these matches and not done too badly. Scored a goal in off my knee in Bury, I did.

  “It’s all sorted out,” Fred said. “Arthur Chadwick, the manager of E
xeter City, he played for England alongside Jimmy Crabtree there. Nah then. We’re getting a bet down with Chadwick and his lads. They’ll match what we put down, and we play winner-teks-all wi’ t’ gate money on top. Now, are you in?”

  Mike, Charlie and I looked at each other.

  “How much?” Mike said.

  Crabtree blew a column of smoke up to the ceiling and eyed us coolly. “Twenty quid. Each. We’re all in for t’ same. And when we win you’ll triple it, easy.”

  I exhaled slowly. Twenty quid! That was more than a month’s money, and it would about clean me out if it went wrong. I looked at Mike and Charlie, and they were clearly thinking the same.

  Jimmy Crabtree leaned over conspiratorially. “They’re expecting to beat us easy, like. Bunch of old crocks and actors like us. But Buxton reckons we’re getting Jack Fitchett next week, used to play for Plymouth, and Bob Sharp, who were Bristol City skipper not so long back. There’s the five of us regulars, you lads are decent enough, and that gives us a right good chance, I reckon, eh, lads?”

  The other four, Spiksley, Athersmith, Arkesden and Wragg, nodded seriously in agreement. Crabtree looked us right in the eye.

  “In?”

  After a beat, Mike, Charlie and I put our hands out.

  “In!”

  “Good, good lads!” said Spiksley. “Now all we need to do is make damned sure that silly arse Weldon don’t get wind on it!”

  There seemed a fair chance that he wouldn’t, as well, as he spent most days on a golf course somewhere or other. We reckoned without the deviousness of Arthur Chadwick, the Exeter City manager, though, who turned up at the theatre the night before the game, introduced himself to our number one and said how much he was looking forward to the match.

  Well, once Weldon knew there was a game he hadn’t been invited to he insisted on coming along. What’s more, he insisted on playing centre forward as well, and playing to the crowd with his slapstick antics. He barged his own teammates off the ball, he crocked Fred Spiksley with a boot to the ankle, he gave away penalty kick after penalty kick, and even though Tommy Arkesden and Charlie Athersmith were inspired the final score was Exeter City 6, the Fred Karno Company 3, with Weldon having contributed a hat trick of own goals.

  “That went well!” he cried as we trooped off the pitch at St James’s Park, beaten and flat bloody broke.

  That evening after the show we convened in the pub next to the theatre, Mike, Charlie, the footballers and I, nursing the frugal half pints of ale we could now barely afford, hoping against hope that some flush punter would feel like treating us. The mood was sombre, resentful, and when Harry Weldon, the big ginger goof, swaggered over to join us you could almost hear the teeth grinding.

  “So tell me again,” Weldon gurgled. “You lot played for however many years, and in all that time you had a maximum wage. Not a minimum wage, a maximum wage.”

  The footballers glowered at him. This was a sore point.

  “So none of you duffers has ever topped four quid a week. I make twelve times as much as that!” he cried. “That means I make more in a week than the whole Aston Villa team. Hey, I’ll tell you something else, an’ all. I could make twice as much again as I do now! No, three times as much!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I muttered sourly.

  “I could! What’s Marie Lloyd make? A hundred? A hundred and twenty a week? I know for a fact that Arthur Roberts gets a hundred and sixty. What do you think of them potatoes?”

  The footballers looked pretty sick, I can tell you.

  “Yes, but Arthur Roberts and Marie Lloyd, they’re solos, aren’t they?” I said.

  “Pah! I know that!”

  “Karno’ll never pay that sort of wage. The only way you could make that sort of money is if you left and set up as a solo turn yourself.”

  “Well, who’s to say I mightn’t just do that!” Weldon blustered.

  “You’ll never do it,” I said.

  Weldon puffed himself up indignantly. “I might!” he insisted.

  “No, you won’t,” I said. “You haven’t the nerve. You’re tied to Karno’s apron strings so tight you’ll never be able to let go.”

  “What do you know abaht it?” Weldon spat.

  “George Robey says so,” I said. It stopped him dead in his tracks.

  “Robey? George Robey said that, abaht me? That I’d never have t’ nerve to leave Karno?”

  “He did.”

  “When did he?”

  “Just before he said that you’d be nothing without Karno’s name on the bill,” I said, giving the knife an extra little twist.

  Weldon looked as though all the air had been let out of him, and he left for his bed shortly afterwards. I’d probably pay for baiting him, but he’d asked for it, and the footballers clubbed together and bought me a drink, which wasn’t like them. And whether what I said had anything to do with what happened later, well, who knows?

  21

  HE OF THE FUNNY WAYS

  FOR weeks after that ill-fated exhibition game Mike, Charlie and I were absolutely on our uppers. Losing twenty quid was enough to cause us all considerable grief in the belt-tightening area. The footballers seemed to spend all their free time trying to get Harry to bet with them, but he would always throw his hands up at the sight of a pack of cards or the little paddle they used for the three-coin toss.

  “A fool and his money are soon parted!” he’d gurgle, backing away. “You lot should know that, with your maximum wage!”

  A little relief from penury came in the shape of my old friend Mr Luscombe. He was always eager for titbits about the world of the theatre, and so I had kept up a friendly correspondence with him. He had gone down from Cambridge that summer, after (by his own account) burning brightly in another Footlights extravaganza at the end of his last term, and he was now obliged, to his chagrin, to make a start in the family import-export (or it may have been vice versa) business.

  It was a surprise, then, when he presented himself at the stage door of the theatre we were about to grace with The Football Match in Sheffield, of all places, at the Empire Palace.

  “You made the piece sound so enthralling I just had to see it for myself,” he gushed.

  I introduced him to Charlie and Mike. “This is Mr Luscombe…” I began.

  “Oh, come come,” Luscombe cried. “No more of that master–servant nonsense. I have left the college for good and all. You may all call me Ralph, and jolly pleased I am to make your acquaintances!”

  He pronounced his first name to rhyme with ‘safe’, and that was the first time I ever knew it. After the show, which he adored, he wanted to have a late supper at a nearby restaurant. I tried to plead poverty, but he was adamant.

  “Don’t worry about that, it’s all on me,” he said, far too loudly. Charlie and Mike were almost audibly salivating, and the footballers seemed to have a sort of sixth sense where free food was concerned, so the upshot was that Luscombe stood a whole bunch of us a handsome meal, just about our first since Weldon’s dozy antics in Exeter had bankrupted us all.

  Now during the course of this splendid repast, the subject of Luscombe’s own theatrical endeavours came up, and Fred Spiksley had the notion of sneaking our generous host into The Football Match – probably, if I know Spiksley, in the hope that he might stick around and provide more free dinners.

  There were, of course, very nearly a hundred people involved in the act, and it turned out to be a simple – or perhaps I should say cheap – matter to persuade one of them, a super by the name of Claude, to stand down and let Ralph Luscombe take his place for a night.

  Luscombe wasn’t just standing onstage cheering, either; he actually had plenty to do. He was one of the fellows running around behind the back of the painted backdrop, clambering up and down the little ladders, sticking his head through the slits here and there to shout “Play up, Pie-Cans!” and the like.

  Well, he was the happiest soul you could ever hope to see.

 
“For I on honey-dew have fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise,” he beamed seraphically afterwards, reliving the sheer thrill of it all.

  I fully expected this to be a one-night-only treat, but the next evening he appeared at the stage door and thrust another ten bob into Claude the super’s hand, whereupon Claude the super trotted off to the pub to spend his windfall and Luscombe gleefully took his place again.

  He stayed with us all of that week, and all of the following week in Derby too, living the life of his dreams – as well as, I’m ashamed to report, being ruthlessly fleeced by my colleagues. But still, he was enjoying himself, and because we were using the backdrop I myself had painted back at the Fun Factory, onto which I had painted Luscombe’s likeness here and there, when he stuck his head through to shout his lines it really did look as though the painting was coming eerily to life.

  At the end of that second week, however, he came hurtling into our dressing room at the end of the act, face white as a sheet, a cold muck sweat on his brow.

  “In the audience!” he gasped. “I saw him! Large as life!”

  “Who, for goodness’ sake?” I said, holding him by the shoulders to get him to calm down.

  “Brother…!” Luscombe wheezed.

  “Your brother? What on earth’s he doing here?” I said, baffled. I knew Luscombe major, of course, as he too had been a student at the college. A painfully serious individual, who seemed to regard his time at Cambridge as something of a nuisance, keeping him from the business of import and export, profit and loss, for which he was born. Frankly, you’d have been as likely to find the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Palace in Derby as the elder Mr Luscombe.

  “Oh, he’s looking for me, of course,” Ralph Luscombe sighed, sinking into a chair. “They told me, my father and my brother that I should be dispatched to our South American office if I didn’t cease my infatuation with Dame Theatre. Oh, I’m for the high jump now!”