CHAPTER NINETEEN

Remember Me

In the immediate aftermath of Beryl’s death George’s brother Ted phoned him. Ted felt that this was a difficult and vulnerable moment for George, and he offered to come to stay with him for a couple of weeks. It was a time, he said, to have someone who loved him with him, to protect him from the likely onslaught from those attracted by his money. George turned him down. Instead he went straight back to performing in Bristol – missing only four shows between Beryl’s death and her funeral. But he was driving himself too hard. He developed a serious cold which threatened to become pneumonia and went home on 5 January. Harry Scott claimed he had had another heart attack and Eliza seems to suggest something similar in an interview of the 1960s.

I was going to see him in pantomime in Bristol in 1960 when Beryl died. He rang me up to tell me he was coming home – he had a seizure in the street you see. People thought he was pulling their leg but he wasn’t. He was coming from the Grand Hotel to the Hippodrome and this seizure took all the use of his arms away.

On 15 January he was admitted to the Victoria Hospital, Blackpool. Fans sent him 200 get well letters and cards a day. Now that he couldn’t bury himself in work his thoughts turned to Beryl. According to Harry Scott, George said to him, ‘If only we had Beryl back. She could have what she wanted and do what she liked. Oh, just to have her back with us again.’ Scott added, ‘For without Beryl at his side he always appeared to be lost.’

Yana maintained that George decided to get rid of Beryldene as soon as possible, discharging himself from hospital on 31 January to organize its sale. The house was full of memories, some difficult and sad, but others, of course, happy and proud. In the attic were 120 pairs of his stage shoes, in the lounge were his ukuleles and his framed personal letter from Field Marshal Montgomery. A signed photo of King George VI stood on the piano.

Patricia Howson, whom George and Beryl had entertained to tea in Wroxham in August 1954, had sent him a get well card and then visited him in hospital. She was by now thirty-six years old. He rang her father from hospital to ask if she had married. When he learned that she hadn’t, he said, ‘Tell her I’m a single lad now.’ He told Fred he was hoping to marry again, saying, ‘I’ll not ask ten years of anyone.’ Pat and her father were phoned by Harry Scott and invited for a drink with George, an offer they accepted for 3 February. Having gained her father’s approval of his proposal, he got into his Bentley S.2 two days later and went to see her, as she was off work that day with flu. According to the newspaper reports of later court proceedings, Pat took some persuading to accept his offer of marriage. On 9 February George took her with him to a doctor’s appointment so that she could hear the doctor’s opinion that if she accepted she would not be marrying an invalid.

Seven weeks after Beryl’s death, and after an eight-day courtship, they announced their engagement on Valentine’s Day, 1961, Pat’s birthday. He clearly foresaw that some would disapprove, saying he ‘hoped his friends would not begrudge him his happiness’. One seems to have done. Scott recalled that George received a phone call from Yana when the news broke and replied, ‘Well, you had your chance. Now you’ve had your chips.’ Perhaps he had actually proposed to her and been turned down. To a reporter he justified his engagement by saying that his doctor had advised him, ‘It is the finest thing you can do to settle down with someone who will take care of you.’ Still on the theme of being looked after, he commented, ‘Put me on a ukulele or at the wheel of a car and I’d get along – but not in a kitchen!’ Harry Scott recounted that George had told him, ‘I have no wish to be hypocritical. There is certainly no disrespect to Beryl, as you know. I don’t want anyone to put any sordid interpretation on what I have just done. I hate loneliness. I am still a sick man and Pat is a wonderful doctor in her own way, and that’s just the sort of doctoring I need.’

In the rather jerky news film of their engagement interview it’s possible to begin to see how the relationship worked. For once, at long last, George was in control of the situation. He did most of the talking, though it’s clear that he sometimes found it difficult to express himself. Pat sat quietly and smiled for the most part, but her spirit and humour came through now and then. When George commented that she’d ‘got something on her plate’ in taking him on she laughingly replied, ‘So have you, but you don’t know it!’ George described Pat’s diamond solitaire engagement ring as one which had been in the family. He said it belonged once to his maternal grandmother. He also gave her a ukulele-shaped brooch in diamonds as an engagement present and a Rover saloon as a birthday present. Both of them made a point of telling reporters that they had not seen each other romantically while Beryl was alive. George commented, ‘When I saw her eight days ago it was our first meeting since 1954 when the family had tea with me while we were holidaying on the Norfolk Broads.’ That, of course, was the summer when the Formbys’ whisky drinking had apparently got out of hand. According to a Daily Mail article published the day after his death, he disclosed that he had loved her since then but refused to see her because of his Roman Catholic faith, which of course ruled out divorce. Pat told reporters, ‘We met recently after a gap of seven years and it all happened with shattering suddenness.’ She had tried for a week to keep the engagement secret and, surprisingly in view of Yana’s comment, said they intended to live at Beryldene. ‘“Pat shall choose a new name,” said Formby. “It really doesn’t bother me at all,” said Miss Howson.’ Later, George joked, ‘I’ve been trying to telephone you all morning. I thought you had run off already!’ He told a reporter that the doctor had told him he must not work for nine months at least and remarked that his fiancée didn’t know what an old man she’d got. Despite the fact that he was still very weak and on a regime of pills, George drove Pat, her mother and two friends to the Moorcock Inn, on the fells overlooking the Ribble Valley, for a celebratory lunch.

Marjorie Proops, a famous agony aunt of the time, lent him her support the following day under the headline ‘Good for you, George!’ Her argument was that when a man has been happily married he pays his wife a compliment if he marries again after her death. She quoted George on his engagement day as saying, ‘Beryl knew I’d never survive on my own. I’m such a helpless chap. I honestly believe that what I’m doing is a tribute to Beryl and all the happy years we spent together. And I know she’d approve.’ Perhaps. Ted Formby took a different line. ‘Personally I thought it was disgusting. I don’t think he was in love with Howson at all; she just made a beeline for him. He had just lost Beryl and he was a naïve, vulnerable man out in the world on his own at the age of 56.’ Ella put it more charitably. ‘I think he really was lost when she went. Absolutely lost.’ Eddie Latta also had a view. ‘George… was very happy with Pat. Within five minutes it was Pat this, Pat that. You see George wanted someone to hold his hand.’

Certainly a very different picture of the Formby marriage began to emerge. ‘A close friend’ said it was true that Beryl ‘drank considerably and that they had not lived together as man and wife for fifteen years’. According to this ‘friend’, George ‘regarded her behaviour as being due to illness. He was tremendously patient and understanding under somewhat trying circumstances’. Then George himself, in a confessional interview to the Daily Express’s theatre critic Michael Walsh which may have been cathartic at the time, revealed to the world that:

Drink got the better of her. Nothing we could do would stop her. We locked the stuff in the garage. We hid the key. We even tried not having a drop on the premises. Towards the end she would not eat. We lost all our friends because she could be so rude to them. We used to sit on each side of the fire looking at each other, Beryl in a world of her own. When we used to go on cruises people thought it was for the benefit of my health. But it was really for Beryl’s. After living on your nerves for so long something is bound to go.

What he didn’t admit was that he had been drinking too. Loyally, Harry Scott tried to put the best spin on the situation. ‘Although neither of them at any time could be classed as alcoholics, both George and Beryl were drinking heavily in the last stages of their lives. Beryl, when the end was near, would try to keep pace with George with their favourite drink, whisky. In those days Beryl was not eating anything. The effect of the alcohol she was consuming was rather noticeable at times.’ But in fact they had been drinking heavily for years.

Unfortunately the revelations in the newspaper about the unravelling of his marriage appeared only a few days after his engagement announcement, and he quickly came to regret his frankness. According to Harry Scott, ‘He sat in his pyjamas in an armchair facing the sea stunned and silent. Then he said, “This shouldn’t have been done to me, Harry. This should have been one of the happiest days of my life. Instead I am hurt and upset. I was married to Beryl for 36 years. I owe so much to her and now this report that she became an alcoholic and even tried to turn me against religion is simply baring my private life with her to the whole world.”’ The words sound unnatural, even stilted, but it’s noticeable that George didn’t question the truth of the reports. He merely regretted that they had been made public.

George and Pat booked their wedding, planned for May, at a small Roman Catholic country church, St Francis, Hill Chapel, Goosnargh, seven miles north of Preston. On 22 February, only eight days later, after dining at the Howsons’ home, George was sitting in his car in their drive when he had a heart attack so severe that when he got to hospital he was given the last rites. In the previous few days he had had plenty to concern him apart from the negative press. He was apparently still preoccupied with the selling of Beryldene, even at a loss. Earlier on the same day that he fell ill he had paid a ‘five figure price’, probably £10,000, for White Lodge, a modernised Georgian farmhouse at Little Lea, near Preston, where he planned to live with Pat.

During the next few days George’s mother and sister Louie visited him in St Joseph’s, a hospital run by a Catholic religious order. According to Ted, one of the first things George said to Eliza was, ‘There’s five hundred pounds in that cupboard – you’d better have it.’ His mother retorted that she hadn’t come for his money but to ask him what was going on. ‘What’s all this bloody nonsense about? What the hell are you doing?’ she wanted to know. George was uncomfortable. ‘Don’t go on, Mother, don’t go on.’ Sheepishly, he told her not to worry; that ‘something was said’ and ‘things had got out of hand. Word had got out’ and he didn’t know how to get out of the situation without embarrassment. He assured her that he would not marry Pat: he had just got rather carried away.

Eliza’s memory was a little different, but the main point was the same:

I said, ‘George, you be careful.’ I said, ‘You know, there are always people out hunting, you know.’ I said, ‘You would be able to pick up anybody.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry, Mother,’ he says, ‘I’ve no intentions to get married.’ He said, ‘This one’s got her head screwed on right.’

I said, ‘Well, you have yours screwed on right, never mind her.’

He said, ‘Don’t worry, I shan’t marry.’

Nevertheless the plans for the wedding went forward, just as they had done in the teeth of his mother’s disapproval in 1924. On Monday, 6 March, as George and Pat were sitting hand in hand, and, just minutes after she had shown him the wedding ring she had bought that day, George suffered another heart attack. She saw the sudden change in his condition and called for help. A doctor was called and the matron, a priest and a nun also came in, but, ‘with a dreadful hacking cough’, George died. He had survived Beryl by ten weeks.

***

The hours after the death were extraordinary. According to Eliza, she was not told and had to hear of it in the evening on the radio. She told Kevin Daly in 1962 that she learned later that her son had died at about quarter past four. She arranged to go to the hospital at ten o’clock that night to bring the body home to her house.

Harry went, that was his manservant, he should have sent for me… And by quarter to five that body was out of that hospital, taken to the parlour and being embalmed without my permission… She was having him embalmed and was going to have him buried in Preston without my permission. And without me knowing.

Comment on the wretched period after George’s death has focused on Eliza’s fight for some of the money. But her words were at least as much about the emotional hurt she had suffered. ‘Nobody was allowed to go near him when she met him… She broke my heart.’ The day before George died Pat Howson didn’t visit him. Eliza wanted to know, ‘Why didn’t she say “I’m out playing golf today, would you like to come and sit with your son?”’

George’s sister Ethel turned up at Beryldene within hours of the death amid rumours that money was in the house. It was said that George had a stash of £60,000 in ‘the suitcase’ under his bed. If he had, it was never found. According to his brother Ted, this was because Ethel got drunk with Harry Scott and they shared the money between them. But perhaps that wasn’t quite what happened…

The Daily Mirror of 8 March announced ‘Mix up over Formby funeral’. Pat had assumed that she would be organising it and contacted a local firm. This was extremely high-handed given that Eliza was George’s next of kin. She said in 1970 that it had meant a lot to her that George had re-found his Catholic faith with her and the service was planned to be at St Wilfred’s Roman Catholic Church, Preston. But Eliza was a Roman Catholic too, and, understandably, had other ideas. On the Tuesday she personally registered his death in Preston, then had George’s body taken to Liverpool. She rearranged the funeral to be at her own parish church, the undertaker being Bruce Williams (George’s one-time songwriter Eddie Latta). The paper blandly commented ‘Everything has now been sorted out in an amicable way’. It was a deeply ironic remark.

By coincidence, two famous ‘Lancashire lads’ were buried on Friday, 10 March 1961. Sir Thomas Beecham, the popular conductor and impresario, born in St Helens, was laid to rest in Surrey. George’s funeral was at eleven o’clock, a Requiem Mass said at St Charles’ Roman Catholic Church, Aigburth Road, Sefton Park. Some of the crowd were at the church two and a half hours before the service was due to begin. The entire two miles from the chapel of rest was lined with people. Eliza, by now eighty-two and almost blind, leant on Frank’s arm as she approached, carrying her white stick and crying quietly. Some women also burst into tears as the coffin was carried into the church. The crowd surged forward and police had difficulty in keeping a clear way for the mourners. A sergeant had even to warn people to beware of crushing children. Pat, described as ‘pale but composed’, walked into the church behind the family group. She sat on the other side of the aisle from them. The cortège of fourteen cars then drove the seventeen miles to Warrington, to arrive at the cemetery at 12.30 p.m., a hearse filled with flowers leading the way. In a sombre echo of his father, the number of people lining the route of the funeral procession was immense – perhaps as many as 150,000 – and was controlled by mounted police. ‘At Market Gate the lunchtime traffic was almost brought to a standstill by the crowds.’

The pressing crowd at George’s funeral, Liverpool, March 1961

They stood, most of them women, some straining at the crash barriers and pressing up to the hearse, hushed in the cold, dry wind.

The Formby family at George’s funeral

Jimmy Clitheroe, who described George’s death as ‘a huge personal loss’, and Ronnie Hilton represented the world of entertainment. Clitheroe had worked with George on Much Too Shy and was also with him on the bill in summer 1960 at the Queen’s, Blackpool. Among the wreaths from show business friends and colleagues was a cross of lilies, tulips and carnations sent by Gracie Fields and her husband Boris. Beside a crucifix the family’s white and pink carnations and red roses for ‘Our Georgie’ lay on the light-oak coffin with Pat’s flowers – a large cross entirely of deep red roses. Her simple card read: ‘Now and always’. At the side of the grave where her husband had been buried forty years before, Eliza, dressed in black, was supported by Frank and Ted. The family came forward in turn to sprinkle holy water on George’s coffin. Pat, dressed in a grey suit, a white blouse and a black hat, was one of the last, afterwards returning with her parents to their Preston home. Harry Scott carried in his arms Punch, nicknamed Willie Waterbucket, George’s much-loved Lakeland terrier, his companion for sixteen years and now to be in Harry’s care.

The funeral has been depicted as something of a battleground, with George’s mother openly hostile to Pat. She is said to have referred to Pat as ‘George’s floozie’ and on another occasion ‘that fucking floozie’, a slur fiercely, and reasonably, rebutted by George’s brother Ted. It’s highly unlikely that a woman of Eliza’s generation would use that adjective, though Ted’s rendering of her speech suggests that she did swear now and then. Eliza herself said that Pat spoke to her at the graveside ‘to offer her condolence to me. I said, “Why? Why? After he’s dead?”’ Ted remembered it differently. He said that after the funeral Pat approached the car with George’s mother – and Ted – in it and asked to speak to her. Eliza declined, but politely and with dignity. Newspaper reports revealed that less than an hour after the interment the family gathered at a Warrington café to hear the contents of George’s will. It had been drawn up and signed only a fortnight before, on 23 February, the day after his coronary thrombosis at Pat’s house, while George was in hospital. It was his third will in three months. Harry Scott was left £5,000. George left everything else – declared at probate in August as £135,142 5s. 9d. (£2,240,000) – to Pat, to the outrage of his family.

Ted was very bitter about Pat’s inheritance because he felt that George should have provided for his mother. The day after George’s funeral the Daily Mirror quoted him as saying:

It is a terrible shock to know mother has been left out of the will. I got the impression that she would have been looked after and I can’t think how my brother could have done this thing… The family will contest the will and I shall begin legal proceedings. What we want to know is whether the drugs given to George in hospital as part of his heart treatment could have affected him. We don’t want to start a squabble – George’s memory is good enough for us. But I am a working man with three children. Then there are my sisters, Ella, Ethel, Louie and Mary, and my brother Frank.

Ella maintained that George was mean. ‘George was very tight-fisted and we did wonder why he didn’t ever help us.’ From the perspective of the family, the ‘gold-digger’ that Beryl had always feared would ensnare George had appeared as soon as she was unable to protect him. In Pat’s defence, no one could have been less like the stereotype.

Predictably, there was an avalanche of comment following George’s death, largely centring on the sensational last few weeks. Stan Evans took the view that George was perhaps hoping for children with Pat, but, ‘The switch was too quick. He was grabbing at straws.’ The Times obituary described his stage persona. He was ‘a good-natured, foolish (but not witless) chap’ and ‘a music hall professional of genius’. The Daily Mail guessed that George’s fortune might amount to £250,000, including the almost £20,000 left by Beryl to him. Reporters managed to get a statement from Ethel, now Mrs Corless and the wife of a publican in Liverpool. ‘We certainly don’t want any squabble over money matters so soon after George’s death, but if there has been a change in the will to our disadvantage we shall certainly contest it seriously.’ She revealed that she had seen George at his home about a month before and he had told her that his mother and sisters would receive bequests in his will. ‘Four days before he died I saw him again and he made no mention of any alteration to the will.’ It was said later in court that George had discussed with Ethel the possibility of his going into business with her and her husband on his retirement. It would be reasonable to think, however, that Mr and Mrs Howson might have asked, on the engagement of their daughter, what provision George was planning to make for her, given the state of his health.

As George’s will was in dispute, an auction of George’s and Beryl’s home and effects was inevitable. Pat began to arrange it, and the sale lasted three days, from Tuesday to Thursday, 20 to 22 June 1961. At the last minute £30,000-worth of furs and jewellery were withdrawn from sale ‘by the joint agreement between Formby’s fiancée Miss Pat Howson, his mother, Mrs. Eliza Booth, and his three sisters’. Pat maintained that they were gifts to her, but a later report said that they would remain in the custody of John Crowther, the executor, until ‘the final details of ownership’ were decided.

Thousands of people queued and police were drafted in to control the crowd. Entrance was strictly by catalogue. Gerry Nicholas found the whole business extremely depressing. ‘It was almost like the Marie Céleste… everything had a look of abandonment about it. The curious were there in their hundreds… and everything, but everything, was exposed, right down to his socks and his underwear.’ Eliza had asked if Ted could have George’s clothes and shoes as they would fit him perfectly, but her request was turned down. In a marquee set up in the garden, at noon on the first day, the smoke-green Bentley, with only 2,200 miles on the clock, was sold. Peter Suckling was despatched by his employers, a garage in Mayfair, to Lancashire to ‘not come back without the registration number GF 1’. He secured the plate for £250.

George and Beryl had kept an extremely comfortable household, laden with china, glass, silver and plate, linens and blankets. It was furnished with expensive Chinese carpets, silk and brocade curtains and heavy carved furniture in oak, walnut and mahogany. Among many items utterly typical of a middle-class home in the mid-twentieth century were some exceptional lots: the embroidered mandarin’s robe worn in South American George, for example, went for £17 10s. Then there were the ‘framed personal letter from Tactical Headquarters, Eighth Army, to the deceased, by direction of General Montgomery’; as well as ‘a pair of tall cut tumblers etched “G.R. 1918”, and a star cut wine glass etched “G.R.”’

George said more than once that he made the money and Beryl spent it. The list of her jewellery shows that when she did she spent lavishly. ‘An exquisite diamond bracelet’ of 284 stones, and a ‘fabulously beautiful set of diamond and ruby jewellery comprising bracelet, spray brooch and pair of earrings’ were but two of nineteen lots described in capital letters in the catalogue. Beryl’s platinum wedding ring was there, as well as a ‘platinum eternity ring with eighteen matched diamonds each of approx. a quarter carat’. One of the most sensational items was a ‘superb heart-shaped single stone diamond ring, the stone in excess of 5cts, set in platinum and with ruby-set shoulders’. A list of ten fur coats and jackets; mink, ocelot, Persian lamb and Russian ermine completed Beryl’s personal estate.

For a man ‘allowed to spend only five bob a day’ George had also managed to acquire a lot of material goods. His cigar cupboard contained five caskets of cigars, many from Havana and Jamaica. His clothing, ‘Much of which is new and unworn’, comprised over 150 shirts, 16 pairs of pyjamas, 84 pairs of new socks, 227 ties and 19 pairs of trousers. Among over forty-five pairs of shoes were eight in brown suede. Lot 788 was ‘8 various ladies’ feather-trimmed hats and a gents. trilby hat’. Nineteen ukuleles were listed, among them the named instruments which George had played on the recordings of his most famous songs. There were two so-called Golden Banjoleles, the one which George had used on ‘The Window Cleaner’ record reaching the highest price – £145. To the applause of the crowd as she gave her name, Joy Formby, the wife of George’s brother Frank bought the second, the ‘Chinese Laundry Blues’ banjolele, for £110. Her comment to reporters was that she bought it ‘for Frank for sentimental reasons… He will use the banjolele in his act. He’s always wanted to sing George’s old songs, especially ‘Leaning on a Lamp Post’. George’s sister Ethel Corless paid £380 for a maple wood bedroom suite and a Jacobean-style dining suite designed and made especially for George. She had, she said, to borrow some of the money from friends, but she said wanted to keep some of George’s possessions in the family. Despite the bitterness over the will sentimental ties were still important. At noon on the second day the house itself was auctioned. In the event, the sale of Beryldene was an anticlimax. It made only £9,000, much less than the guide price of £11,500 that George had wanted. The sale total was £22,379, with Lady Beryl II going to a private buyer.

Beryl’s ruby and diamond brooch. Photographs often show her wearing it

In May 1961 Pat seems to have made an offer of £5,000 to Eliza, the amount she would have received from the will of 18 January. When the three months stipulated for the family’s consideration of the offer elapsed, the offer was withdrawn. The ensuing legal battle between Pat and the Formby women over George’s will lasted for over four years. His family argued that he had not been of testamentary capacity when the last will was made and didn’t know of or approve its contents. Ted wanted to throw in undue influence on Pat’s part for good measure. They counter-claimed for a will of January 1961 in which Harry Scott and George’s mother received £5,000 each. In that will £1,000 had been left to the nurse who looked after Beryl and the residue was to go equally to three of George’s sisters, who thus had lost by far the most in the redrafting of the will. Ella, living in America, was not part of the legal action.

Their case was weak. On 14 May 1963 Eliza settled for the £5,000 payout that Pat maintained she had always offered her, and on that day the action was declared to be over. The sisters, with much more at stake, wanted to carry on their fight. But by the end of the day and after an adjournment for an hour’s discussion they too had conceded, accepting payments of £2,000 each. Some of the issues raised in court showed what the family thought of Pat and how their counsel sought to depict her. Her solicitor, John Crowther, was asked about gifts of jewels and furs received by her from George to the value of £6,540, (£108,000) these in addition to a payment to her of £1,000 and the gift of a Rover. The jewels and furs had been Beryl’s, while the money was to cover Pat’s living expenses before the wedding, as she had given up her teaching job at George’s request. Crowther, who had drawn up Beryl’s will as well as George’s, denied all knowledge that George had been given a shot of morphine that morning and another, to alleviate a paroxysm of pain, just an hour before he signed the third will. He did not know that a doctor had instructed that George should have no visitors or telephone calls that day. He was unsurprised by the change in the provisions of the will because a month earlier George had left the residuary bequests to his sisters ‘with reluctance’, describing his family as ‘a set of scroungers’ to explain why he had left them nothing in his final will.

Crowther had asked George if he wished to make provision for his mother, but was told that he had already bought her a block of flats. This remark was used by the family to suggest that George was confused and incapable of making a will, as in fact it was his father who had bought the flats for his mother, and she had drawn income of £4 a week from them over the last forty years. Crowther had also wanted to establish whether George wished it be a condition under the will that Pat should receive the bequest only if they were married. ‘His reply was most emphatic. If he were to die tomorrow, he said, he wanted Pat to have everything – she had brought him more happiness than he had ever known before.’ Reference was made to letters found in George’s possession from members of his family asking for financial help. ‘I am not suggesting for one moment that these letters show that the description of scroungers is applicable to members of his family. What they [do] show is that some members sought help from him and that he had a certain resentment that greater demands were made upon him than ought to have been.’

The solicitor said that when he went to see George that February evening he was watching Sea Hunt on television. He saw no sign of special circumstances which would call for a doctor’s attendance – ‘he was only interested in Mr Formby’s mental capacity’. He said, ‘There is no doubt in my mind he knew what he was doing. His attitude on all the occasions I saw him was consistent – bright, cheerful and alert.’ On 15 May the Daily Mirror was stating that Pat would be ‘richer by £60,000’ after all the costs of the court case and death duties on George’s estate were paid. It was also said that the marriage was to have taken place in ‘a few days’ – in March, not May. Tantalizingly, the Daily Express reported: ‘Certain articles, Mr Crowther agreed, were removed by Miss Howson from Formby’s house Beryldene the morning after Formby’s death. He added: I was more concerned with a suitcase taken from the house containing money.’ Ah, the suitcase. But what did Pat remove from Beryldene on 7 March? Eliza told Rex Blaker in 1967 that her husband had ‘started to write his own life and it was among Pat Howson’s stuff’. Was that one of the things she took away?

By 1965 Pat was feeling very low. She described her brief time with George as ‘a lifetime in a few weeks’, but her troubles dragged on. George’s family had decided to appeal against the decision of May 1963. Twenty thousand pounds had been spent on legal charges and she approached her MP for help. She spoke of desperate unhappiness and the ‘intolerable mental strain’ she was under. She had not been able to work for two years after George’s death and had then returned to part-time teaching, so, she said, she needed the money. This prostration doesn’t ring true. Why did she feel such incapacitating grief for a man she had known well for only a few weeks? Part of the delay was actually her responsibility. As she had changed solicitors ‘a number of times’ this had contributed significantly. At last, in September 1965, the family’s appeal having been rejected, the case was over.

Five years after George’s death his mother was said to be ‘flat broke’. Mrs Booth variously said that most of her money went in legal fees or that she spent it to buy the semi-detached house in Stechford, Birmingham, where she and Louisa were living. Louie, aged nearly sixty, was working as a shop assistant in Birmingham for £7 14s. 6d. (£99) a week. They had also hoped to make money from two racehorses but, having spent over £2,000 on training and stabling, they ‘never won a penny’. Eliza reflected that she had raised large sums of money for charity in the past but she now was facing hard times. The hard truth was that, as Ted said, ‘She always thought she was a very good businesswoman, but of course that wasn’t true.’ Pat showed them no sympathy. ‘George never had any time for them.’

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Who were the men behind the myths? George junior’s personality is as elusive as his father’s was obvious. Formby senior took on the world with relish and unshakeable self-confidence. He was not intimidated by his hard beginnings or the illness that would kill him. He brazened out the consequences of his secret crime all his life, changing his family name and adopting a stage name to bury his tracks, creating his own life story to protect himself and his family. The myths around his son were quite different. Behind the onstage matey manner and broad grin was a shy man, who didn’t mind or even positively welcomed, for most of the time, the elaborate shield constructed and maintained by Beryl between himself and the rest of the world. Not only his brother Ted thought that he was introverted and taciturn – unable to express himself confidently or fluently. Gerry Nicholas described him as an ‘almost monosyllabic man, easily frightened by questions’. It has been said that as a child at the stables he was solitary, even lonely, and he may never have overcome the experience of being cast out from the family to face the world on his own at the age of seven. His inner loneliness of the soul was always there, but Beryl ensured that he would never have to be on his own again. Until her death, of course… His bereavement may have involved complicated feelings, but it could not possibly have been over when his deep need for companionship – and nursing – drove him to contemplate a hasty second marriage with all the stresses of will-changing, house-buying and wedding preparations which would have tested a much stronger man.

It would be easy to characterise George as the clichéd ‘man of simple tastes’. In fact some of his tastes were expensive and luxurious, if conventional. His material possessions were the visible reminders of his success and served to buttress his fragile ego. It has been said that his audiences thought they knew him, but his friends were certain that they didn’t. Too many people in his own lifetime and since have confused his gormless stage persona with the man himself. He may not have been the world’s greatest actor, but he did his job almost too well. Those who lived and worked closely with him knew at least that that was not the truth. He was quite capable of sticking up for himself. His sister Ella, writing to Stan Evans in 1990, had clear memories of her elder brother as a young man. ‘When I think of George I realise he was an artist. He was not a bit funny off stage, he was not meek, and he had to be top dog. Sunday nights we would all play cards for halfpennies. He’d get mad if he lost.’ During the war he didn’t shirk controversy, publicly criticising his fellow artistes more than once as well as the ‘top brass’ for hogging the best seats at his shows. Eddie Latta thought him ‘a hard-headed Lancashire lad’; quite capable of using his friends to his advantage if it suited him, and ready to buy businesses and property for profit. Harry Scott, who saw more of him than most, was convinced that George was every bit as ambitious for himself as Beryl was for him. ‘There has never been a shrewder professional in his own line than Formby,’ he maintained.

George was well able to take command of a situation and of his wife. Scott recalled him saying, angrily, ‘I’m the comic in this business. My job is to make the brass by going out there on the stage. Beryl’s job is looking after the contracts and the engagements. Your business, Harry, is to look after my clothes and get the music, the ukes, and the banjos out before I go on the stage.’ He kept his end up in rows with Beryl and was quite prepared to tell her what to do. Once, a star-struck fan at the stage door heard him say, coldly, ‘Take the dog and get into the car.’ Beryl went without a word. But the golden leashes, which had kept him free to do his job and indulge himself with his expensive ‘toys’, were eventually drawn too tightly even for him. By the time of Beryl’s death, her illness and its consequences had worn him out and depressed him. Conversations by the fire had degenerated into silent drinking sessions, both downing more whisky than was good for them.

What was George’s appeal? Those who knew him believed that it was his unchanging nature in the face of success and wealth. His film persona gave encouragement to the plain, shy and/or accident-prone underdogs among his audiences. His popularity in the Thirties reminded them during the war of the ‘British’ values of honesty and bravery. Max Bygraves described him as ‘a really lovely guy’ who ‘did as much for morale in this country during the war as any of the great leaders. He was born a man of the people and stayed that way all his life. The people themselves loved him for it’. Bob Monkhouse’s view was that ‘he was cheeky but totally inoffensive, with a permanent air of innocence about him’. Gerry Nicholas said of him, ‘He was optimism personified.’