My Autobiography (7 page)

When I saw the cantata, I thought it dismal but for the beauty of the girl, which left me a little sad. Little did I realize, however, the glorious triumph I was to enjoy two months later when I was brought before each class and made to recite
Miss Priscilla’s Cat
. It was a comedy recitation Mother had seen outside a newspaper shop and thought so funny that she copied it from the window and brought it home. During a recess in class, I recited it to one of the boys. Mr Reid, our school-teacher, looked up from his work and was so amused that when the class assembled he made me recite it to them and they were thrown into gales of laughter. As a result of this my fame spread, and the following day I was brought before every classroom in the school, both boys and girls, and made to recite it.

Although I had performed and deputized for Mother in front of an audience at the age of five, this was actually my first conscious taste of glamour. School became exciting. From having been an obscure and shy little boy I became the centre
of interest of both the teachers and the children. It even improved my studies. But my education was to be interrupted when I left to join a troupe of clog dancers, the Eight Lancashire Lads.

F
ATHER
knew Mr Jackson, who ran the troupe, and convinced Mother that it would be a good start for me to make a career on the stage and at the same time help her economically: I would get board and lodging and mother would get half a crown a week. She was dubious at first until she met Mr Jackson and his family, then she accepted.

Mr Jackson was in his middle fifties. He had been a schoolteacher in Lancashire and had raised a family of three boys and a girl, who were all a part of the Eight Lancashire Lads. He was a devout Roman Catholic and after his first wife died had consulted his children about marrying again. His second wife was a little older than himself, and he would piously tell us how he came to marry her. He had advertised for a wife in one of the newspapers and had received over three hundred letters. After praying for guidance he had opened only one, and that was from Mrs Jackson. She too had been a school-teacher and, as if in answer to his prayer, was also a Catholic.

Mrs Jackson was not blessed with abundant good looks, nor was she a voluptuary in any sense of the word. As I remember her she had a gaunt, skull-like, pale face with manifold wrinkles – due, perhaps, to having presented Mr Jackson with a baby boy rather late in life. Nevertheless, she was a loyal and dutiful wife and, although still nursing her son at the breast, worked hard at helping with the management of the troupe.

When she told her side of the romance, it varied slightly from that of Mr Jackson. They had exchanged letters, but neither one had seen the other until the day of the wedding. And in their first interview alone in the sitting-room while the family waited in another room, Mr Jackson said: ‘You’re all
that I desire,’ and she avowed the same. In concluding the story to us boys, she would primly say: ‘But I didn’t expect to be the immediate mother of eight children.’

The three sons’ ages ranged from twelve to sixteen, and the daughter was nine, with hair cut like a boy in order to pass as one in the troupe.

Each Sunday, everyone attended Catholic church but me. Being the only Protestant, I was lonely, so occasionally I went with them. Had it not been for deference to Mother’s religious scruples, I could easily have been won over to Catholicism, for I liked the mysticism of it and the little home-made altars with plaster Virgin Marys adorned with flowers and lighted candles which the boys put up in a corner of the bedroom, and to which they would genuflect every time they passed.

After practising six weeks I was eligible to dance with the troupe. But now that I was past eight years old I had lost my assurance and confronting the audience for the first time gave me stage fright. I could hardly move my legs. It was weeks before I could solo dance as the rest of them did.

I was not particularly enamoured with being just a clog dancer in a troupe of eight lads. Like the rest of them I was ambitious to do a single act, not only because it meant more money but because I instinctively felt it to be more gratifying than just dancing. I would have liked to be a boy comedian – but that would have required nerve, to stand on the stage alone. Nevertheless, my first impulse to do something other than dance was to be funny. My ideal was a double act, two boys dressed as comedy tramps. I told it to one of the other boys and we decided to become partners. It became our cherished dream. We would call ourselves ‘Bristol and Chaplin, the Millionaire Tramps’, and would wear tramp whiskers and big diamond rings. It embraced every aspect of what we thought would be funny and profitable, but, alas, it never materialized.

Audiences liked the Eight Lancashire Lads because, as Mr Jackson said, we were so unlike theatrical children. It was his boast that we never wore grease-paint and that our rosy cheeks were natural. If some of us looked a little pale before going on, he would tell us to pinch our cheeks. But in London, after working two or three music halls a night, we would occasionally forget
and look a little weary and bored as we stood on the stage, until we caught sight of Mr Jackson in the wings, grinning emphatically and pointing to his face, which had an electrifying effect of making us suddenly break into sparkling grins.

When touring the provinces we went to a school for the week in each town, which did little to further my education.

At Christmas time we were engaged to play cats and dogs in a Cinderella pantomime at the London Hippodrome. In those days, it was a new theatre, a combination of vaudeville and circus, elaborately decorated and quite sensational. The floor of the ring sank and flooded with water and elaborate ballets were contrived. Row after row of pretty girls in shining armour would march in and disappear completely under water. As the last line submerged, Marceline, the great French clown, dressed in sloppy evening dress and opera hat, would enter with a fishing rod, sit on a camp stool, open a large jewel-case, bait his hook with a diamond necklace, then cast it into the water. After a while he would ‘chum’ with smaller jewellery, throwing in a few bracelets, eventually emptying in the whole jewel-case. Suddenly he would get a bite and throw himself into paroxysms of comic gyrations struggling with the rod, and eventually pulling out of the water a small trained poodle dog, who copied everything Marceline did: if he sat down, the dog sat down; if he stood on his head, the dog did likewise.

Marceline’s comedy was droll and charming and London went wild over him. In the kitchen scene I was given a little comedy bit to do with Marceline. I was a cat, and Marceline would back away from a dog and fall over my back while I drank milk. He always complained that I did not arch my back enough to break his fall. I wore a cat-mask which had a look of surprise, and during the first matinée for children I went up to the rear end of a dog and began to sniff. When the audience laughed, I turned and looked surprised at them, pulling a string which winked a staring eye. After several sniffs and winks the house-manager came bounding back stage, waving frantically in the wings. But I carried on. After smelling the dog, I smelt the proscenium, then I lifted my leg. The audience roared – possibly because the gesture was uncatlike. Eventually the manager caught my eye and I capered off to great applause. ‘Never do that again!’ he said,
breathlessly. ‘You’ll have the Lord Chamberlain close down the theatre!’

Cinderella
was a great success, and although Marceline had little to do with plot or story, he was the star attraction. Years later Marceline went to the New York Hippodrome, where he was also a sensation. But when the Hippodrome abolished the circus ring, Marceline was soon forgotten.

In 1918, or thereabouts, Ringling Brothers’ three-ring circus came to Los Angeles, and Marceline was with them. I expected that he would be featured, but I was shocked to find him just one of many clowns that ran around the enormous ring – a great artist lost in the vulgar extravagance of a three-ring circus.

I went to his dressing-room afterwards and made myself known, reminding him that I had played Cat at the London Hippodrome with him. But he reacted apathetically. Even under his clown make-up he looked sullen and seemed in a melancholy torpor.

A year later in New York he committed suicide. A small paragraph in the papers stated that an occupant living in the same house had heard a shot and had found Marceline lying on the floor with a pistol in his hand and a record still turning, playing
Moonlight and Roses
.

Many famous English comedians committed suicide. T. E. Dunville, an excellent funny man, overheard someone say as he entered a saloon bar: ‘That fellow’s through.’ The same day he shot himself by the River Thames.

Mark Sheridan, one of England’s foremost comedians, shot himself in a public park in Glasgow because he had not gone over well with the Glasgow audience.

Frank Coyne, with whom we played on the same bill, was a gay, bouncy type of comedian, famous for his breezy song:

You won’t catch me on the gee-gee’s back again,

It’s not the kind of horse that I can ride on.

The only horse I know that I can ride

Is the one the missus dries the clothes on!

Off stage he was pleasant and always smiling. But one afternoon, after planning to take a drive with his wife in their pony and trap, he forgot something and told her to wait while he went upstairs. After twenty minutes she went up to see what was causing
the delay, and found him in the bathroom on the floor in a pool of blood, a razor in his hand – he had cut his throat, almost decapitating himself.

Of the many artists I saw as a child, those who impressed me the most were not always the successful ones but those with unique personalities off stage. Zarmo, the comedy tramp juggler, was a disciplinarian who practised his juggling for hours every morning as soon as the theatre opened. We could see him back stage balancing a billiard cue on his chin and throwing a billiard ball up and catching it on the tip of the cue, then throwing up another and catching that on top of the first ball – which he often missed. For four years, he told Mr Jackson, he had been practising that trick and at the end of the week he intended to try it out for the first time with the audience. That night we all stood in the wings and watched him. He did it perfectly, and the first time! – throwing the ball up and catching it on the tip of the billiard cue, then throwing a second and catching that on top of the first. But the audience only applauded mildly. Mr Jackson often told the story of that night. Said he to Zarmo: ‘You make the trick look too easy, you don’t sell it. You should miss it several times, then do it.’ Zarmo laughed. ‘I am not expert enough to miss it yet.’ Zarmo was also interested in phrenology and would read our characters. He told me that whatever knowledge I acquired, I would retain and put to good use.

And there were the Griffiths Brothers, funny and impressive, who confused my psychology, comedy trapeze clowns who, as they both swung from the trapeze, would ferociously kick each other in the face with large padded shoes.

‘Ouch!’ said the receiver. ‘I dare you to do it again!’

‘Do yer?’… Bang!

And the receiver would look surprised and groggy and say: ‘He did it again!’

I thought such crazy violence shocking. But off stage they were devoted brothers, quiet and serious.

Dan Leno, I suppose, was the greatest English comedian since the legendary Grimaldi. Although I never saw Leno in his prime, to me he was more of a character actor than a comedian. His whimsical character delineations of London’s lower classes were human and endearing, so Mother told me.

The famous Marie Lloyd was reputed to be frivolous, yet when we played with her at the old Tivoli in the Strand never was there a more serious and conscientious artist. I would watch her wide-eyed, this anxious, plump little lady pacing nervously up and down behind the scenes, irritable and apprehensive until the moment came for her to go on. Then she was immediately gay and relaxed.

And Bransby Williams, the Dickens delineator, enthralled me with imitations of Uriah Heep, Bill Sykes and the old man of
The Old Curiosity Shop
. The legerdemain of this handsome, dignified young man making up before a rowdy Glasgow audience and transforming himself into these fascinating characters, opened up another aspect of the theatre. He also ignited my curiosity about literature; I wanted to know what was this immured mystery that lay hidden in books – these sepia Dickens characters that moved in such a strange Cruikshankian world. Although I could hardly read, I eventually bought
Oliver Twist
.

So enthralled was I with Dickens characters that I would imitate Bransby Williams imitating them. It was inevitable that such budding talent could not be concealed for long. Thus it was that one day Mr Jackson saw me entertaining the other boys with an imitation of the old man of
The Old Curiosity Shop
. Then and there I was proclaimed a genius, and Mr Jackson was determined to let the world know it.

The momentous event happened at the theatre in Middles brough. After our clog dance Mr Jackson walked on stage with the earnestness of one about to announce the coming of a young Messiah, stating that he had discovered a child genius among his boys, who would give an imitation of Bransby Williams as the old man of
The Old Curiosity Shop
who cannot recognize the death of his little Nell.

The audience were not too receptive, having endured a very boring evening’s entertainment already. However, I came on wearing my usual dancing costume of a white linen blouse, a lace collar, plush knickerbocker pants and red dancing shoes, and made up to look like an old man of ninety. Somewhere, somehow, we had come into possession of an old wig – Mr Jackson might have bought it – but it did not fit me. Although I had a large head, the wig was larger; it was a bald-headed wig fringed with
long, grey, stringy hair, so that when I appeared on the stage bent as an old man, the effect was like a crawling beetle, and the audience endorsed the fact with their titters.