the end, in kinder times he’d been fond of Vere’s gentle presence. Isobel Chidell, Vere’s sister, tells his story, which runs as a kind of forecast of Kenneth’s; though Vere enjoyed a much more aristocratic professional grounding. Vere’s story stands for several others that were played out on the borders of Kenneth’s life: actors, directors and writers who started out with the same bright hopes, and gradually settled (or not) for something well short of stardom.
One family figure in the story who has remained seriously under-illuminated has been Kenneth’s sister, Pat. She, like Ken, was regarded with some wonderment by those who met her socially, chiefly on account of her unforgettable voice, a growling cigarette-fuelled basso that was very nearly male. At the time of the diaries’ publication Pat was still alive, and it would not have been fair to tell her full story, as revealed in one of the early diary volumes. The fact that Charlie Williams was not her real father explained much of the tension between daughter and Dad, and indeed between Pat and Kenneth. For the same reasons of tact, the subject was not raised, either, when Pat’s only sound interview was recorded, in 1995, for my Radio 4 programme I Am Your Actual Quality, in the series Radio Lives.
Even so, the interview, which was conducted by the BBC producer Simon Elmes, proved to be of the greatest possible interest, both as a portrait of the otherwise unknown Pat and as an evocation of the Williams family’s home life. By some mischance the BBC Sound Archive had lost their copy of this unique testimony, but I was relieved to find that my own archive had retained it, and I have since taken the opportunity to restore to the Archive’s shelves one of the more amazing voices to be found there. Pat Williams was already enduring her final illness when she gave her interview, and several others who recorded their impressions at that time have also left us: Isabel Dean, Betty Marsden, Derek Nimmo, Dennis Main Wilson, Barry Took and Eric Merriman. Only fragments of their testimony appeared in the original programme, and I am grateful to the BBC for allowing them to speak now at length, if only on the printed page. A brief outline of their careers and preoccupations is given in the ‘Cast of Characters’ listing.
Kenneth Williams kept his memorabilia neatly filed and classified. Had he put together his own scrapbook of his life, much of it would have looked very like the book you are holding. Taken together with the sound of his voice, which is still so readily and multifariously available, these pages bring him as nearly back to life as we can manage. We hope he would have understood our desire – even need – to do so.
‘I don’t think he had any class aspirations. He was proud to be a Cockney. And he always said that when he died, and if there was a wreath, it had to be “Gates of Heaven Ajar” which, apparently, is a London tradition’
Michael Whittaker
Whenever a comedy entertainer dies an unnatural death there’s an odd feeling in the air. It seems wrong. We all know it happens, and it can even feel understandable when there’s a long decline, a wasting-away of the beloved talent, to warn us that a sudden plunge might come. Such was the case with Kenneth Williams’s old colleague Tony Hancock, whose professional disinte-gration had been in progress for some time when he ended his life in 1968, on the other side of the world. Even if Hancock had left no suicide note there would have been little doubt that his exit was deliberate. Nobody needed to ask why.
Kenneth Williams left us twenty years after Hancock, and in the twenty more years since it happened few conversations about him can have failed to include the question, ‘Do you think he killed himself?’ The coroner at his inquest recorded an open verdict, and that naturally encourages speculation, since the ‘openness’ refers to the technical possibility that the case could be brought back to court and re-examined. That’s not going to happen, but the re-examination still goes on, informally, wherever Ken’s fans are gathered together.
Many factors are involved in the discussion, including the state of Kenneth’s career. He was still earning acceptably, and registered occasional astonishment when, say, an advertisement for dairy products brought him a cheque larger than the one he’d been accustomed to getting for a Carry On film. But in general his working life had begun to consist of spin-offs and guest appearances; the central column of his career was inert, without its theatrical and cinematic inputs, and with little serious drama even on radio. Probably the first sure symptom of a decline was his trip to Australia in 1981, to do two Michael Parkinson shows in the style he’d already refined at home. ‘I don’t seem to have anything else to do,’ he confessed to his diary, where the Australian visit was later characterized as ‘like an insane nightmare. At my age, the truth begins to dawn: look in the mirror and see an old face and the grey hair & know that you’re no longer dreaming of adventure…just desperately trying to provide for the old-age pension.’
Kenneth knew he wasn’t the only one to show his age, but the sight of his own generation at work wasn’t encouraging either (‘Benny Hill looks more and more like a desperate adipose decrepit’). Early 1983 found him ‘thinking that it would be far better to snuff it’, and at that point his physical pains amounted only to a stubborn cough. There came a high point later in the year with the television recording of An Audience with Kenneth Williams, his one-man entertainment in front of an all-star gathering of friends, but it wasn’t long before he was lamenting again the marks of age on his televisual image. His mother’s health scares begin to disrupt life at home. ‘I am now uninterested in work,’ he recorded in November 1984, the first time this particular form of negativity had afflicted him. His book Back Drops was remaindered the following year, and then, on 2 January 1986, ‘I noticed awful pain behind the ribs – seemed the alimentary tract was afire.’
That marked the beginning of the end, and the end came a little over two years later. Broadly speaking, there are two views on the matter, both very sincerely held. Among his friends, the feeling remains widespread that Kenneth simply couldn’t or wouldn’t have committed suicide, because of the family responsibilities he bore. His neighbour Paul Richardson feels that strongly, even though the subject of suicide had arisen between them.
Paul Richardson: ‘He once said to me on Warren Street, “Oh, I’m going to do away with all this. I’m going to commit suicide.” I said, “No, you’re not.” “No,” he said. “It takes guts, doesn’t it?” I don’t believe he did intentionally commit suicide. I do not believe that at all. I think with him taking Gaviscon and all kinds of pills to stop the pulsating pain, he did take an accidental overdose. I firmly believe that, because in no way would he have left behind Louie on her own. And I really think it was an accidental death.’
Derek Nimmo: ‘I remember once I ran his mother home after a recording “he’d gone off” and then I got a really lovely letter from Kenny a few days later because I’d taken his mother home. Something which he didn’t do, of course. And then on another occasion I gave her a silk scarf at Christmas, and I got a great long letter from Kenny saying how touched he was that I’d given it to his mother – I mean he deeply loved his mother, that’s why I always thought the whole suicide business seemed to be so unlikely, I know Freud also agrees with me. When the Coroner was asked whether he could have taken sleeping pills accidentally, “possible but not probable” I think were the words he used. I just can’t imagine that he would have killed himself, knowing his mother was going to be left behind, especially as he hadn’t really provided for her in his will. His mother was the most important person to him in the world, I think.’
Kenneth’s agent, Michael Anderson, feels that a form of professional pride would have got in the way, too.
Michael Anderson: ‘I personally don’t think that
