THIS IS THE first ever photograph taken of me, as far as I know. I can’t be certain, I don’t remember much from back then. It’s 1928 in Edmonton, north London. Judging from the size of little Bruce Joseph Forsyth-Johnson, it must be March or April as I was born on 22 February. By the way, just so it’s clear right from the beginning, Forsyth-Johnson is my name – it was just a bit of a mouthful for a career in show-business, so for professional purposes I shortened it.
The girl holding me is my sister Maisie. She must be ten or eleven years old. She was a darling, lovely person, very much like my mother, with a wonderful sense of humour. Everyone loved her. Many years later, when I was performing in Summer Season and then on television, Maisie used to organize bus trips for groups of her friends to come and watch her brother perform. She was so supportive.
Don’t I look adorable? I think so and I’m sure my sister would have agreed. I wonder what she would have said if asked the same question a few years later, after chasing me along our street for the umpteenth time following another Brucie tantrum. I remember making my family laugh a lot at home, but I could also be a horrible child. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.
You see, from the age of eight or nine I used to love going to the local picture house, especially if a Fred Astaire movie was playing. My parents, Florence and John, would often take me, but occasionally they preferred to go alone. Don’t ask me why. When they did, there was hell to pay. My mother had to hide her hat and coat in my father’s car before setting off, because if I saw her preparing to leave I would go crazy. And Lord help them (and Maisie) if I spotted the car leaving without me. That would send me into a mad rush, tearing out of the house after them, yelling at the top of my voice, as if there was a fire, with my sister soon in hot pursuit.
Maisie would eventually catch up with me and haul me back home, kicking and screaming. In my world, not being allowed to go to the movies was the end of the world. Quite simply, my parents were being disloyal. And if they had decided to take my brother, John, and I caught a glimpse of his head popping up in the back window of the car, well, that just added to my fury.
On those occasions poor Maisie then faced an evening trying to pacify me, which she often did by reading stories out loud. I loved Aesop’s Fables, but even with those wonderful tales being brought to life, it would still take an age for me to emerge from my bad mood. She had the patience of a saint, my darling sister.
FOR MANY, MANY YEARS, most of my life in fact, I wondered why I had never seen a photograph of my mother holding me as a baby. I always suspected it was because I was such a little horror and drove her mad, even then. While researching this book, however, I found this treasure tucked away in an old envelope at the bottom of a dusty box. As you can imagine, I was thrilled. Perhaps I was an angelic infant after all. I hope so.
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE I was ever a terror when, as you can see opposite, I look so innocent in that most fetching bathing cap! I’m sure the photo was taken in Newquay, where we almost always went for our summer holiday. ‘Golden days’ is how I would describe our Newquay holidays. There were always new rock pools filled with tiny fish to explore, little coves to discover and new friends to be made. As kids we had so much freedom. Of course, our parents kept a watchful eye on us, but from a distance.
My parents paid for these two-week vacations through a holiday club, depositing small amounts every week into the fund. And, boy, was it worth it. Newquay was beautiful and unspoiled in those days, a stunning seaside resort, simple, with gorgeous bays when the tide came in and huge expanses of beautiful sandy beaches when it receded. The whole family loved it there.
We always stayed in the same boarding-house, with me sharing a room with John, who was five years older. The place was run by a woman who, I swear, would have won Masterchef hands down purely on the strength of her roast potatoes. The amazing aroma drifting out of that kitchen, oh, my word, and the taste … I am struggling to think of anything since that has made my mouth water in the same way. Absolutely delicious. Perhaps I’m looking back on those Cornish holidays through a misty lens, but I don’t think so.
I NOTICE IN A lot of these early photos that I’m sticking my chest out, as I’m doing here. I think I was so conscious of my physique, my skinniness, that I was determined to make myself look bigger. I wanted to look like a man, just like my brother John. You can see his broad shoulders in this photo. He took after Mum; I was more like my father, very slim.
This is Newquay again. Before we set out on our holidays my father could often be found tinkering away in the garage he owned, making sure the car was ready for the trip. Dad was a skilled mechanic and he ran the garage, which was situated right next to the house in which I grew up, as a business, with petrol pumps and a repair shop.
My mother would have us all dressed and ready to go first thing in the morning, but by late afternoon he would still be at it. As the evening drew in, she would pack us off to bed, fully clothed, until Dad was ready to go. It might be ten or even eleven at night before we finally set off from our small terraced house.
Every year we would stop on Bodmin Moor for a break. My father would unpack his little Primus stove on which Mum cooked eggs and bacon, often in the early hours of the morning. There has never been a better-tasting breakfast anywhere in the world! Something about sitting there with my family, the open landscape stretching as far as the eye could see, breathing in clean fresh air, made it so special.
Dad owned an Armstrong-Siddeley car for a couple of years and on one of the journeys to Cornwall we suffered a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere. With no spare, what could we do? We stuffed the tyre full of grass and carried on, stopping off every now and again beside a convenient field to top up the bits that had fallen out.
FOR ONCE THIS IS not a Newquay holiday, instead we are at Southend-on-Sea – or, as we used to call it, Southend-on-Mud. We thought that was very funny. It didn’t have the beaches of Newquay – Southend’s were pebbly, as you can see – but it was still a super place for a day trip or weekend away.
One of the great pleasures of our trips to Southend was a visit to the Kursaal, which was a funfair with the largest (in my mind) big dipper and roller-coaster in the world. Fear, excitement and joy wrapped up in a three-minute ride. Exhilarating.
When the time came to head home, us kids would be miserable, but not for long. Before we left for Edmonton, Dad would take us to one of the seaside stalls along the front, where he would buy saveloys and pease pudding for our supper. The smell as we ate it in the back of the car … another special childhood memory.
That’s my mother in the middle, with my sister on the right and a cousin on the left. What I like about this photograph is that I have obviously been in yet another bad mood. I have a distinct memory of acting like an absolute horror one day in Southend. Everyone is clearly ignoring me and I look as if I’ve been crying. One of my nicknames at home was ‘Boo-Boo’. I wonder why?
Anyway, I seem to be cheering up a little. It’s hard to make out but there is a coin in my hand, probably given to me by my mother to go and buy my favourite treat – a penny bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. I’m sure she hoped it would calm me down. And get rid of me for a bit. Can’t say I blame her. My bad behaviour in those days obviously wasn’t my fault. How could it have been? No, I was merely a victim of circumstance, having been born the youngest of three and desperate for attention … or perhaps I was just a right little monster. One of those options sounds more plausible than the other.
I guess I am about five years old here, which would make this 1933. That’s important because it’s before I took up dancing. Once I started, almost immediately I had something in my life I could latch on to. I adored dancing, I just loved it. From then on I was good as gold. Well, that’s how I remember it.
HERE I AM AT Brettenham Road Elementary School, just around the corner from our house. Can you spot little Brucie? No? I’m the handsome devil on the far left of the back row, with the big smile. Now that tells me something. This photo certainly wasn’t taken on my first day. I would not be sporting such a happy grin if it had been. In fact, I wouldn’t be there at all as I ran home before lessons had even begun, risking life and limb dodging buses and cars to cross a busy main road. I just didn’t want to be separated from my mother. In time I got over that, helped by the fact that we received a free bottle of milk every morning, and I ended up enjoying primary school.
OH DEAR. I KNOW exactly what’s happening here. My poor mother used to go through hell when we were on the beach because I was the most embarrassing kid when it came to changing into my trunks or bathing suit. I was so shy I would never risk the humiliation of exposing myself. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone seeing my skinny body. It was almost a complex with me. I would insist on getting changed beneath a towel.
Unfortunately for my dear mother, this modesty-saving routine was not confined to our trips to the beach. At the age of about nine, I started to attend dance lessons at Tilly Vernon’s school in Tottenham, a bus ride from our house. By then it had become clear to my parents how much I loved to dance – I hero-worshipped Fred Astaire, and my impromptu ‘tap’ routines on the linoleum at home were a big giveaway. Being as supportive as they were, they offered me the chance to turn that passion into something more than a hobby. The cost of the lessons was a stretch for Mum and Dad, but they knew how much it meant to me and they managed. That’s how lucky I was to have the parents I did – they made everything possible for me.
I took to dance quickly and was soon ready for competitions. This is where the towel comes back in. There were never any other boys entering the competitions, which meant I had to change into my homemade outfits (it took my mother hours to sew on all the shiny sequins!) in the girls’ changing rooms. Mum would let me know when the girls were all out, then usher me into a corner and hold up her coat to shield me as I undressed. This was not a speedy process. I required constant reassurance that I was not being spied on. ‘Now, put your trousers on, Bruce, there’s a good boy. No, no, I’ve checked. No one’s here. Yes, of course I’ll look again … All clear, I promise.’ Goodness knows what the judges thought, having to wait for this rake of a boy to make his grand appearance.
At twelve, I decided that Tilly had taught me all she could. In fact I had started to give dance lessons of my own in my father’s No. 5 garage. A shilling a lesson and the local girls – with a handful of boys – had the privilege of sharing my years of experience. Lucky them. From Tilly I moved on to a teacher that my mother had heard about, Douggie Ascot, whose daughter, Hazel, had appeared as a child tap-dancer in a couple of films in the late thirties. To me, attending Douggie Ascot’s classes seemed like a big step forward in terms of what I was going to learn, with a hint of ‘celebrity’ thrown into the mix for good measure. I might meet Hazel, for goodness’ sake, Britain’s answer to Shirley Temple, so they said.
There were two problems, however. Douggie was an excellent teacher, no question, but his studio was in Brixton, a long way from Edmonton. Door-to-door, it took about two hours to get there, requiring a trolleybus ride, a long tube journey and a steep walk at the end. My mother used to come with me and never once complained about how long it took us. She wanted the best for me.
The second problem, and this is the main reason I didn’t spend as long with Douggie as I had imagined I would, was that he taught English tap. Thanks to Mr Astaire and the US stars, I had fallen in love with the American version. The difference was significant. In English tap you are very much ‘on your toes’ whereas across the Atlantic there was a more relaxed, natural style, with bent knees and your weight more on your heels. That’s what I wanted to master. And I soon heard of a place where I could make it happen.
Buddy Bradley was an American teacher who taught dance just like I’d seen in the movies. His studio was in Denman Street, just off Piccadilly, which was far more convenient for Mum and me than Brixton. The downside was that we had to cope with some rather unwelcome interruptions from time to time.
This would have been around 1940–41, when air-raid sirens were an all too regular addition to the city’s soundscape. Buddy’s classes took place on the top floor of the building, so when the warning sounded we had to rush down to the basement for shelter. The moment we heard the all-clear, we would charge back up the numerous flights of stairs to continue our lesson. The Germans were not going to frighten us off.
I loved those classes, learned so much and, as an added bonus, I also met one of my dearest friends there, John Shackell, with whom many years later I would perform professionally. I owe Buddy a very big thank-you for that introduction.
I ADORED PLAYING ON my Lilo. In Newquay Dad would take me around the corner to Fistral Bay where there were big waves. People still surf and hold competitions there, but to my mind being on a Lilo was more exciting. I would be riding the top of the wave rather than inside it. To me it was almost like flying, and absolutely thrilling for a young lad.
MY FATHER’S GARAGE, ALTHOUGH it didn’t always look like you see it below. I remember, long before this photograph was taken, there being only one petrol pump, which you operated by hand.
When he was younger, my father worked for the Ford Motor Co., repairing the three-wheeler bicycles that were used for deliveries, bread and suchlike. As a qualified and skilled mechanic he rose to the level of foreman before leaving and opening his own garage.
Talking of the Ford Motor Co., the first car I ever drove was a Model T – I was about fourteen. We were on our way home and had just turned into our street when my father suddenly said, ‘’Bout time you learned to drive, son.’ With that he stopped the car, stepped out, came round to the passenger side and indicated for me to slide behind the wheel. It was a stretch but I could just reach the pedals. I felt very grown-up indeed.
Three years later, in 1945, I obtained a provisional licence and when the war ended the authorities announced that they were converting all provisionals to full licences. Which means I have never to this day passed a driving test! Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.
In truth, having the garage so near to home was a bit of a problem – mainly because my father was always at the beck and call of customers. We’d often be having supper when a knock at the door announced that someone had run out of petrol. Dad would leave the table, go down to the garage, open up and pump petrol into a can for the stranded traveller. Or it might be a motorist whose car had broken down, resulting in my father driving out to tow it back for repairs. There was no escape for him, yet he still never made any real money from the business. Enough to keep the family going, yes – we didn’t have to worry about food or clothes – but that was it.
MY FATHER WAS A hard-working man, who loved his job and loved cars. As you can see here, he was meticulous, taking great pride in his work.
In the repair shed he had an acetylene torch, which was primarily used for welding, but for my father it had a secondary function. The long flame proved ideal for lighting his cigarette, which was sometimes just a small dog-end. How he never set fire to his moustache I’ll never know.
Having learned to drive, my only real role in the garage was to move the cars around. Other than that, I never became much involved in Dad’s work. That was his choice, and a wise one. On one occasion I wandered in to ask if I could help and tripped over a jack that was supporting a car. Thank goodness Dad wasn’t underneath as the car crashed to the floor. As for me, I didn’t escape entirely unscathed. As I stumbled, the jack flew up and smacked me in the face, nearly knocking my teeth out.
‘Get out of here, son,’ my father said, once I’d recovered. He then held up his hands, ingrained with oil and grime. ‘One day you’re going to be on the stage so I don’t want you finishing up with hands like these.’ My father respected my ambitions and was determined to ensure I had every chance of realizing them. Clean hands were part of that. Or perhaps he was merely interested in self-preservation.
FUNNILY ENOUGH, I REMEMBER this being taken. My parents wanted a photograph of me in my Life Boy uniform. I was indoors when they called me out to the back garden, and was in such a rush that I didn’t have time to find my whole outfit. Still, I am clearly as proud as can be, standing here with my cap on, sticking my chest out. Of course.
I enjoyed the Life Boys, which was the junior section of the Boys’ Brigade. I can still do a reef knot. It’s handy when I have to tie two pieces of string together. Which, come to think of it, isn’t very often. I remained in the Life Boys for a few years, working my way up the ranks, eventually earning a pink lanyard, which was the ranking system they used. I think it was the equivalent of a sergeant, or maybe a corporal … At that stage in my life I entertained thoughts of a life in the navy or air force, until dance began to dominate my world. Soon after I began lessons, I realized dancing wasn’t a game to me and a career onstage beckoned. All other notions went out of the window.
I LOVE THIS PHOTOGRAPH, even though I don’t know where we are or why we’re dressed up. It was a long time ago.
My mother is holding some flowers. That brings to mind her garden, her pride and joy. It wasn’t large by any means, just normal for a small terraced house, but she made it so lovely. It was her space, just like the garage was my father’s. When I was older I used to drive her crazy by practising my golf swing on our little patch of lawn. And, of course, I always replaced my divots. Mother might have been watching!
The way my mother treated me was amazing. She knew I was interested in show-business and she supported me in every way she could. I can honestly say she had more ambition for me than I had for myself, but she never pushed. She didn’t have to.
For once I’m striking a pose here, rather than sticking out that little chest of mine. I think that’s because I’m wearing a jacket, which made me feel very mature. As a result I am more relaxed in this photograph. Next to me is John. It makes me smile, looking at him – he’d obviously outgrown his jacket some time ago. Look at the sleeves and the tight fit across his chest. It wouldn’t have been long before that suit was mine. Hand-me-downs were very much part of our family life.
I THINK OF THIS as my Billy Elliot photograph – just like in the film, I am the ordinary boy who took dancing lessons.
It must have been taken in the autumn of 1939, not long after war was declared. I’m eleven years old and a new boy at secondary school, wearing what looks like my Higher Latymer School blazer … and slippers, naturally. I would dance in anything! By then I’d been going to Tilly Vernon for a couple of years, and I may even have been dancing with joy here, having recently made my first ever television appearance. Yes, at eleven years old I performed a song-and-dance routine on a morning TV programme called Come and Be Televised live from Radiolympia. Soon after my debut, BBC Television came off the air for six long years. I don’t think the two events were linked.
My mother arranged for me to be on the show. Jasmine Bligh, the presenter, conducted short interviews with people who wanted to perform and then invited them to show the viewers what they could do. Unfortunately there is no recording, but I remember my reply when asked about my ambitions: ‘I want to dance like Fred Astaire, be a star and buy my mum a fur overcoat.’
I wonder how many entertainers performing today can say they appeared on the BBC before the war? Not many, I bet. But looking at this photograph now, I suspect I could easily have pocketed a few bob even earlier than I actually did – I would have walked away with first prize in any knobbly-knees competition!
My parents were very musical people. In their courting days they had both been members of the Salvation Army. My father played cornet and euphonium and ran the children’s drum and fife band, while my mother possessed a beautiful voice. On Sundays when she sang with the Salvation Army band on Edmonton Green passers-by would stop just to listen to her.
MY PARENTS WERE VERY MUSICAL PEOPLE.
At home my sister was a great collector of records – 78s – and every Sunday morning she would pull out our wind-up gramophone and play a selection. I loved listening to those tunes with Maisie. My favourite was a truly awful song called ‘Me And Jane In A Plane’, with simple, silly rhyming words about young love. I can only assume that, when I was a little boy, it was the glamour of the subject matter that appealed, rather than the quality of the lyrics. I hope so.
We all loved music. My brother was a very good pianist and his interest lay more on the classical side. My father took up the piano in his sixties, bless his heart. What Dad loved more than anything, though, was a brass band. If the Black Dyke Mills Band was playing on the radio he would never miss them.
Having said all that, sing-songs around the piano were rarely part of life at home, except at Christmas when the extended family would meet up for a party in the evening. Lots of my aunties would do a turn, although rarely my mother. I think she preferred to let the others have a go, even though she undoubtedly had the best voice.
One of the highlights of our Christmas ‘variety show’ was Uncle Eddie, who was an excellent – wait for it – whistler. Nobody seems to do that any more. Uncle Eddie would stand in the corner and entertain us with a whole range of numbers while someone accompanied him on the piano. An absolute delight, it really was.
Needless to say, I got involved. You’ve heard of a song-and-dance man? Well, I was the song-and-dance boy at those parties. Then, when I was a little older, my friend Jimmy Perry (no, not the fantastic sitcom writer) and I would perform little comedy routines from shows we had seen, things like Sid Field’s famous golfing sketch. At the end of the evening, once everyone who wanted to had done a turn, we would all link arms and enthusiastically kick our legs to a rousing rendition of ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’. I’ll tell you what, I wish I had the same energy now!
My father didn’t really take an active part in any of this – he was quieter than the rest of the family and tended to hide his emotions. This was apparent even when we went to the theatre. My parents used to take me to two shows every week – whatever was playing at the Wood Green Empire, part of Sir Oswald Stoll’s variety-theatre circuit, and the Finsbury Park Empire, a slightly better theatre, on the rival circuit run by Sir Edward Moss. Throughout all those raucous, funny shows, I never heard my father laugh out loud.
Now don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean he was having a rotten time of it. As the audience around him screamed with laughter, Dad would sit there calmly with a mile-wide dazzling smile lighting up his face. He enjoyed every moment of those shows. Dad was a wonderful man, the best father imaginable, but if I had faced audiences full of people like him in the early days, I would never have got anywhere!
Dad may not have been demonstrative in that sense, but he had no trouble embarrassing me at the shows. After the curtain fell and we were getting out of our seats, if there had been a male tap dancer in the cast he would say, in a deliberately loud voice, ‘Boy, you could knock spots off that dancer we’ve just seen. You are marvellous compared to him.’ I was so embarrassed when people turned around to look at me. Deep down, though, I agreed with him.
FAST FORWARD A COUPLE of years from ‘Billy Elliot’. It is now 1941 and I am in the same school uniform, now with a gas mask tucked under my arm (you were told repeatedly that the mask was part of your person and you were never to leave it behind), and what may well be a mouth-organ in my top pocket. However, my education had not been the continuous thread these two photographs might suggest.
When I first attended Latymer School in November 1939, the Blitz was under way, and there were understandable fears that us kids could be caught up in the raids. The decision was taken to evacuate and my schoolmates and I were sent to Clacton-on-Sea. Normally they tried to billet children in twos or threes but for some reason I was placed on my own with a dear old lady. I found the experience very hard indeed, suddenly plucked from home, at eleven years old, and deposited in a strange house. I couldn’t stop crying.
My parents came to visit on the first Sunday after my arrival. I was so unhappy that when they drew up in the car I ran out, jumped on to the back seat and refused to get out.
My father didn’t know what to do with me, so he went round to my new headmaster’s house for a chat, where he was told in no uncertain terms that it would be much safer for me to stay where I was (I don’t think the headmaster meant the back seat of the car, specifically). Dad tried to explain this to me, but I was having none of it. I kept pleading and pleading to go home, until eventually my mother suggested that we find a café for a cup of tea so we could talk it over. As we drove into the high street, Clacton Pier was visible at the other end of the road … and right next to it was the biggest warship imaginable. Huge. My father took one look at this monster and said, ‘Blimey! He’s nearer the bloody war than we are! He’s coming home with us.’ And that was what I did.
Back in Edmonton, with Latymer closed, I attended a school in Enfield, two afternoons a week. That was the extent of my schooling for a couple of years, until the evacuees returned and Latymer reopened. The photograph with my gas mask must have been taken soon after that.
I KEPT PLEADING AND PLEADING TO GO HOME
DURING THE WAR YEARS my mother became secretary of an amateur variety show, made up of friends and neighbours, which put on charity performances to raise money to support various causes, such as the Spitfire Fund, or Aid to China and Russia. My father also helped out, rigging up spare car headlamps as spotlights powered by 12v batteries, and even making me a tap mat on our living-room table so that I had something to lay on the uneven floors of the factories and halls in which we performed.
In the photo opposite I am posing alongside a couple of drum majorettes in a uniform my mother made for me. This is the costume I wore for our big show-stopping patriotic finale, in which half a dozen other dancers and I would leap on to some drums and perform a wild routine in fervent support of our boys at the front. The Nazis never stood a chance.
For a lad barely in his teens, dreaming of a life in entertainment, with his name blazing in lights, this was great fun and a fantastic experience. The horror of war seemed remote as we travelled around and I performed my various routines, including a popular solo number entitled ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones’ in recognition of the major contribution the US forces were now making.
Back in Edmonton the devastating impact of the fighting was never far away, but it really only came home to me when a landmine parachuted from a German plane landed a couple of hundred yards from our house. The Home Guard spotted it, initially thought a person was hiding under the parachute and jabbed at it with their bayonets. Eventually they realized what it was and quickly sent for the naval bomb-disposal unit. During all this I was hiding behind a wall nearby, fascinated by the goings-on. It wasn’t until I saw the naval personnel retreat to a safe distance, leaving one officer to remove the mine’s detonator, that I grasped the real life-and-death danger of war. I was terrified and transfixed in equal measure as that incredibly brave young man crept forward to unscrew an outer panel and defuse the bomb. I still think of that event now, and wonder what became of a genuine hero.
AT FOURTEEN YEARS OLD I left Latymer School to run off and join the circus … sorry, to start my professional career. Just before I walked out of the school gates for the last time I was summoned to the headmaster’s office. From behind his desk he sized me up.
‘I am afraid, Forsyth-Johnson, that there is no way I can possibly give you a good report. The truth is, I don’t know enough about you. You have hardly been with us.’
‘Don’t worry about that, Headmaster. I’m going into a business that judges what you can do, not what you have done.’
‘Indeed? And what business might that be?’
‘Show-business, sir.’
He looked at me in disbelief, then said, ‘Well, good luck then.’ He was not impressed.
These three photographs are publicity stills I had taken to send out to agents and theatres looking for bookings. Right from the start I wanted to make it clear I was an all-round entertainer, not just a dancer. That wasn’t enough for me, or my ambitions.
In the second, I am playing the piano accordion, an instrument I learned in order to extend my repertoire but eventually grew to dislike after I took up the piano. It’s a similar story with the ukulele banjo I’m strumming in the third shot. I really should have been playing the Hawaiian guitar, the first instrument I learned to play and which I much preferred. Perhaps I thought there wasn’t much call for tropical music during the war – with the popularity of George Formby, the ukulele was probably a safer choice if I wanted to find work.
I learned the Hawaiian guitar courtesy of a door-to-door sales pitch. The bandleader Felix Mendelssohn (and His Hawaiian Serenaders) had organized a group of salesmen to go around the houses, with a guitar and an instruction book, offering you the chance to have your own instrument on hire purchase. The deal also entailed weekly lessons. It was a clever idea and I immediately signed up when they came knocking on our door. From there, mastering the better-known ukulele was an easy step.
THE THEATRE ROYAL, BILSTON, in the Midlands, scene of my first ever professional engagement in 1942. What an incredible thrill for a fourteen-year-old boy with grown-up ambitions. At last I was taking my first real steps towards fulfilling my dreams of stardom.
‘Theatre Royal’ sounds fancy, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. In fact, it was a hellhole, which was not uncommon after the war broke out. A lot of theatres that should have been condemned remained open because variety shows were one of the very few forms of entertainment on offer to lift the country’s spirits. The lack of materials available for on-going maintenance did not improve the situation.
I was offered the booking through a frankly useless theatrical agent from Tottenham. Until the show went out on the road I worked in his office, as a gofer, answering the phone when it rang (rarely), and more regularly picking up milk for his ‘egg and milk’ breakfast. ‘It soothes my ulcer, boy,’ he explained.
The show was so awful, I think it may have brought on another.
The Great Marzo topped the bill. How to describe him? I know: ‘a hopeless magician’. That’s what I thought, at least. Then there was me, way down the list, propping up the other acts with my one and only appearance as ‘Boy Bruce, the Mighty Atom’.
Now, my idea for the act wasn’t bad at all – a page-boy carrying luggage from the railway station to the hotel, who stops off to see what’s inside and proceeds to pull out a variety of instruments and a tap mat, all of which spark off a series of song-and-dance numbers. It was just the execution that left a lot to be desired.
Takings were so poor that at the end of the week there was not enough to pay anyone their agreed fee, so the decision was taken to split what little box-office money there was between the acts according to each performer’s billing. As bottom of the heap I received thirteen shillings and fourpence, which was a lot less than a pound. It wasn’t even enough to pay for my digs, let alone the train fare home. I had to phone my parents and ask them to rescue me. That was bad enough, but to make matters worse, the dreadful show’s dreadful producer had already persuaded Mum and Dad to contribute twenty-five pounds for expenses to save us from cancellation before we had even opened. That was a lot of money in those days, money my parents struggled to afford.
Did any of this make me question my chosen career? Not for a second. I was sorry that my parents had lost money, of course I was, and I wished the show had been better. But, deep down, I was thrilled. At last I was in show-business.
THINKING BACK ON THESE childhood memories, one aspect stands out above all others: the encouragement and support I received from my parents.
They truly were amazing. Finding money they really didn’t have to pay for dance lessons; my mother stoking my ambitions, sitting late into many nights making my costumes – satin suits and blouses – endlessly pricking her fingers as she sewed on the sequins, and her sacrifice of two hours each way, accompanying me to dance lessons; my father, with his quiet understanding that his youngest child saw a different path for himself and doing all he could to set me on that route – the tap mat, the spotlights and, most importantly, working to build my confidence. Neither of them lived long enough to see what all their hard work eventually led to. I so wish they had.
I STILL SOMETIMES SHUT MY EYES AND IMAGINE HIS FACE, HIS SMILE
At least my father saw me compère Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Unfortunately he died in December 1961, before I had the chance to fulfil one of my most cherished wishes. With his love of cars, I wanted to buy him a Rolls-Royce but I couldn’t afford to do so before he was gone. I regret that deeply. I still sometimes shut my eyes and imagine his face, his smile, as I hand him the keys. ‘Dad, here is your Rolls-Royce. Why don’t you lift up the bonnet, see if anything needs fixing?’ He would have adored that, and I would have loved to watch him.
My mother didn’t live long enough to see me at the Palladium. She died in 1957, a year before my big break came along. We used to watch the show on television when Tommy Trinder was the compère. She would sit there enjoying every minute of it, then turn to me and say, ‘I’d love to see you up there, boy. I’d really love that.’
I do believe she had a hand in making that wish of hers come true. She had done so much for me while she was alive, and yet I’m convinced she felt she still had one more thing to do. When she arrived in Heaven I have no doubt she sought out a very good agent to book me into the Palladium.
