Highgate and Skegness, 1936–38
‘Right. Are you ready?’
It is an autumn night in 1937. In the sitting room at Number 34, Highgate Lane, an expectant crowd has gathered: Winnie, Juggler Jane, Danny, Millie and their new baby daughter Pamela, the children, Roy, Tommy, Brian and Barbara. In the passage Harry is calling to them as he waits to make his entrance.
‘I said “Are you ready?”’
‘Yes!’ they all shout, they are ready. Get on with it!
The door opens, and Harry walks in wearing a curly ginger wig, a long satin skirt like Jane’s, a shawl, and a hat with ribbons tying under the chin. Below the hem of the skirt his audience see the frills of a pair of bloomers. He is carrying a bottle of whisky and his gait is deliberate and slow.
Winnie sighs in mock embarrassment. Millie, Roy and Tommy laugh, and Jane, sucking at a clay pipe, looks nonplussed. The clothes are not old-fashioned to her, though she is puzzled as to why her grandson is wearing them.
‘Mother Riley!’ says Millie, and Harry smiles.
‘Aye,’ he says, ‘but watch this.’
He walks across the room, pauses, and licks his lips, then he brushes back the ginger curls of his wig, puts his right hand under his long black skirt and produces from somewhere near his thighs a full half-pint of bitter, which he drinks off in one.
His audience is speechless. Roy breaks the horrified silence. ‘How did you do that, Dad?’
‘Do it again, Uncle Harry!’ says Tommy.
‘You’re not really going to do that in front of people,’ says Winnie. ‘Are you?’
Harry repeats the trick, and then explains that it is part of a new act based on Arthur Lucan’s Old Mother Riley character. In the last few years Harry has become popular as a drummer, comic and singer, well known in the valley for his ad-libbed version of ‘All of Me’, but he has been trying to think of ways to increase his bookings and his fees. Seeing his first Old Mother Riley film has given him an idea: a ribald South Yorkshire take on Lucan’s act, but with the beer gimmick. If that works, he will add his version of the Sand Dance, which has become popular on the back of a craze for Egyptiana following the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and for which he has bought fezzes, fake moustaches, long white nightshirts and sandals. To the two copy acts he adds a third one of his own. For this nameless character, Harry tapes pitmen’s metal Dudleys to his body, and wears women’s stockings with dripping tins pushed inside them. Over this he wears a floral-print dress and finishes off the look with the application of foundation, lipstick, eye make-up and rouge, and sometimes the ginger wig. The effect is more frightening than anything else, but when he takes his drumsticks and plays the Dudleys and dripping tins as if his whole body is a drum, the audiences will go wild.
Roy and Tommy want to see it all now. Winnie says he’s barmy and she won’t be able to show her face again in Highgate, but privately she thinks his ideas are good, and a part of her likes the idea of a husband who is popular and acclaimed.
Harry will never tell anyone how he carries the half-pint under his skirt, but the trick and the Mother Riley take-off appeal to promoters. With Millie often performing with him, he is booked for bigger clubs around Doncaster and Barnsley and moves up the bill, adding the Sand Dance and the Dudley drumming as he goes. Winnie welcomes the extra money because pit wages are low and the chances of being made unemployed high; that autumn the Jarrow Marchers pass through Barnsley, and King Edward VIII goes to mining villages in South Wales and says that something must be done to get the people work. For Millie the fees make up for the loss of earnings after Danny retires from professional boxing and shifts to training lads in the Bolton-upon-Dearne gymnasium. It is she who will be doing the travelling now, says Harry, and she had better get ready because this act is going places.
*
‘Skegness?’ says Winnie one Sunday morning in June 1938, as a hungover, late-rising Harry eats a breakfast of bacon and eggs, the radio humming fuzzily in the background.
‘There’s nowt wrong with Skegness,’ says Harry. ‘You like it.’
Skegness is busy and booming, with a Butlin’s holiday camp just opened and new gardens, baths and a boating lake on its foreshore pulling in East Midlands families with money to spend.
‘I do like it,’ she says, ‘but I don’t disappear off to it on a Saturday night, though.’
‘More’s t’ pity.’
‘Shut up, Harry. Who’s booked you?’
He tells her the name of the pub. ‘Twenty-five bob.’
Winnie catches herself. Twenty-five shillings is a lot, even after it’s been shared out with Millie.
‘How are you going to get there?’
Feeling optimistic that the Skegness booking will be a success, Harry has already purchased a secondhand tandem from a couple in Goldthorpe. Millie, though doubtful at first, has decided she is game.
‘Our Millie’s as daft as you are,’ Winnie says when Harry confesses.
‘It’s ambition,’ he replies. ‘Tha’s got to start somewhere.’
After lunch on the Saturday, Harry and Millie pack their costumes and props into bags, tie them to the tandem’s frame, and set off at a wobbling pace along the road that leads to Doncaster and then to the open flat country and the sea. It is a fine, warm day and they reach the town in five hours, stopping off at a pub on the way for a pint of bitter and a half of stout. The act goes down well and they are offered a repeat booking. As they cycle home through the warm, dark countryside, they sing their songs and make plans, and the next morning Harry tells Winnie that he was right: Skegness will be only the beginning of the venture.
Harry talks to some acts he knows and pitches them to promoters as a music-hall troupe called the Mother Riley Roadshow, with him as compère and Millie as vocalist. After a few weeks of rehearsing and plugging they get a foot-of-the-bill booking at a theatre in Rotherham, and Harry paints posters, drills the acts, and grows anxious and irritable with Winnie until the afternoon comes when he can get on the tandem and set off towards the bright lights of the city to the south.
Later that night, when Roy, Tommy and Juggler Jane have all been long asleep, and Winnie is reading a romance in the sitting room, she hears muffled sounds outside: laughter, singing and a fumbled scratching of keys on the door. In a burst of air and banter, Harry, Millie and Danny tumble in with a gang of comics and musicians, all of a-snigger and a-roar with booze. ‘T’ performance has gone down wonderful, my love,’ says Harry, ‘and t’ manager wants us back. Bring my champagne and cigars!’
He turns on the radio and sends one of the gang up to the beer-off near the crossroads at the top of the lane to have an enamel bucket filled with ale. Annie laughs, Harry turns up the radio. Winnie goes to the kitchen to slice bread and slather on dripping and bacon. Coats off, cigs lit. A musician called Ronnie takes his guitar from his case and plays tunes as singers take it in turns to stand before the range, which makes a sort of backdrop hung with wreaths of cigarette smoke. Their mate comes back from the beer-off with the bucket slopping full of beer.
‘We thought tha’d drunk thi’ sen lad!’ calls Harry. ‘Get some glasses, Win.’
Performers and hangers-on dip their glasses into the bucket and sing harmonies, one after the other – novelty songs, ballads, old-style music hall and modern dance numbers. Winnie sits quietly, with the gypsy girl watching her, until Harry tells her to get some more sandwiches made. In the kitchen, as she cuts the loaf, she hears him cajoling Millie back to sing ‘Play a Simple Melody’, in which two singers argue over the merits of old-style music versus modern rag. In the middle, they break off into a mock argument:
Millie: ‘This is a lovely old song, and not rubbish. This kind of song will outlive all your raggy nonsense.’
Harry: ‘You’re fifty years behind the times: we want something with a kick in it! I’ll sing you a chorus that’ll make ’em sway!’
The party goes on until two o’clock in the morning. Down the road there are other gatherings. In the backings, carousing, screams and blazing rows that some of them listen to and laugh at outside the back door. Winnie wonders about bed; should she go, saving her energy but annoying Harry by deserting him at what is the high point of his week, or should she stay up, when he doesn’t really seem to notice her anyway, and make herself tired? In the end it doesn’t matter because he isn’t looking out for her. She just slips out as they take it in turns to sing in front of the range, and walks up the dark stairs, hearing behind her laughter and Harry and Danny singing ‘Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries’.