was a mistake. I wasn’t asked to go to the Coroner’s inquest. I would have said that if anybody had asked me. He had a job to do. I think it was a mistake.’
Kenneth’s mother and sister held to the same belief, quoting not a professional engagement on the timetable but a domestic one. Ken and Lou had an appointment together at the chiropodist’s the following morning.
Pat Williams: ‘He wouldn’t have done it to Mum. He would have known she would be ready at 10.30 the next morning for the chiropodist, that she would come in and find him there. He’d never talked about suicide, he’d never thought about doing anything like that. Nothing will convince me he took his own life.’
In contrast, outside the family he had talked a good deal about the subject, starting as early as his Combined Services entertainment days in post-war Singapore, where he recalled discussing suicide with Stanley Baxter. In a 1947 diary entry he identifies himself as ‘a suicidalist’, and the best part of a year later he is ‘seriously thinking about taking my own life’. This can of course be read as the rhetorical desperation of a young man without a defined path through life, but the feelings never quite go away. The summer of 1963 finds him ‘thinking all the while of death in some shape or another’. By 1972 he finds he has started ‘envisaging suicide and letters to friends and coroners’ – this, interestingly, in the middle of a bout of severe neck pain. Nothing disoriented Kenneth so much as physical suffering.
There is much more evidence of suicidal feeling in the diaries, but it all looks rather notional when laid alongside the harder evidence which Kenneth actually displayed to a couple of his friends. He evidently regarded the revelation as a kind of test.
Michael Whittaker: ‘Years before his suicide he showed me some pills, they were in his kitchen. He said, “Do you know what these are?” Well of course I didn’t, so I asked him what they were for. “For exiting this life,” he said. “You mean they’re suicide pills?” “Yes,” and he’d been collecting them for sixteen years or more. I didn’t quite know what to say so I said, “Surely if they’ve been collected for that long, then you can’t count on them, and would you like to be half dead? Take them and then find yourself half-alive and half-dead?” He said, “No, I’ve got enough to kill sixteen people. Thanks for nothing.” He was annoyed.’
It would seem that Kenneth had drawn attention to his store of pills as a gesture of intimidation, much as he kept his diaries on display, threatening visitors with inclusion within the blue-black binding of the current volume. But on this occasion his friend had failed to respond with the appropriate signs of fear and dismay, so the dramatic gesture misfired. The incident of the pills ended there, but not without leaving a profound impression on Michael Whittaker.
‘I asked him what they were for. “For exiting this life,” he said. “You mean they’re suicide pills?”’
Michael Whittaker: ‘I got such a shock. They were all different colours. I’d seen them there before but I didn’t know what they were. Then for him to say he’d been collecting them specifically to end his life, I was at a loss for words.
I didn’t know what the proper response was. It was a weak response but he didn’t like it. Knowing his strong character, nothing I would have said would have stopped him. He did just what he liked to do.’
Gyles Brandreth had collaborated with Kenneth on the editing of his tactful autobiography, Just Williams. During that process, too, the subject of suicide had arisen – necessarily, since Kenneth’s own father, Charlie, had died a somewhat mysterious death in 1962. The Hammersmith Coroner’s Court had returned a verdict of ‘Death by Misadventure, due to corrosive poisoning by carbon tetrachloride’. The causes were restated on the death certificate as ‘Bronchial Pneumonia, and Carbon Tetrachloride poisoning, self-administered, by accident’, according to Kenneth’s diary note. He himself did not attend the inquest, on the grounds that his presence would attract a degree of publicity upsetting to his mother. He continued to perform nightly in the theatre throughout this period, with no signs of distress. Nor are there any expressions of regret in the diaries. Indeed, rumours of uncertain origin circulated at the time to the effect that the police were examining the possibility that Kenneth was somehow connected with his father’s death, at least to the extent of putting Charlie ‘in harm’s way’ by exchanging bottles, substituting carbon tetrachloride for some more palatable drink the old man expected. But if any theories of that kind were tested, nothing came of them.
‘…in a sense he was almost licensed to commit suicide because of the way his father had gone’
Gyles Brandreth: ‘It was when we were doing the autobiography that he told me that his father had committed suicide and I said to him that he must put that in the book. He said, “I can’t put that in the book while Louie’s alive because she doesn’t believe it and won’t believe it. But it is the case.” It is because he knew his father had committed suicide that when Kenneth took his own life I was not totally surprised. It is a well-established phenomenon that people who commit suicide sometimes come from families where suicide is part of the heritage. That almost, as it were, your forebears and family have given you permission: this is one of the ways this family does. So in a sense he was almost licensed to commit suicide because of the way his father had gone.’
But why in mid-April 1988? There was indeed work to be done, none of it the most congenial he’d ever been offered, but healthy enough. Kenneth had never been rich, but poverty had not threatened for many years. Certainly the multiple pains were a factor; back pain and ulcerations in the digestive system. The diary records his sufferings exhaustively. Peter Cadley, a new friend from Michael Whittaker’s circle, was unlucky enough to catch the rising tide of complaint.
Peter Cadley: ‘The health was always an issue. He talked about it constantly. He talked about health constantly and he talked about sex constantly. The two seemed to combine, but there was also a very puritan streak to him. If we were out for dinner and perhaps drank too much he’d go home and sometimes use an enema to purge himself of the decadence of the evening. There were definite times where you could see he was in a great deal of pain with his ulcers, and either he’d talk about it or be very stoic about it and not mention it at all. There was a lot of medication being taken, a lot of pills, a lot of kaolin and morphine. It was a constant battle at the end to keep the pain at bay. And I was always surprised, I have to admit, that nobody could seem to do anything about it. You would think with the advances in medical science that having an ulcer isn’t completely incurable. Before he died there were plans to go into hospital and have something done, which frightened him quite a lot. I could see there was a great deal of fear in having to go into hospital to have major surgery.’
‘He ended his life not quite running down a hospital corridor but wheeled down one, pursued by demons’
Gyles Brandreth: ‘I didn’t think about it too much because he was a self-dramatizing person. It’s funny to think of the man who had so much fun in hospitals, being pursued down corridors by Hattie Jacques, actually having an irrational fear of them. He ended his life not quite running down a hospital corridor but wheeled down one, pursued by demons. He was very frightened of the idea of going into hospital, frightened of the idea of more operations, and I think he thought, “Where is my life going?”’
Michael Anderson: ‘I did think there was something very wrong with his health. He was fairly explicit to me with descriptions of his terrible pains in his gut. It did worry me. I think Kenneth thought he had cancer. We didn’t talk about it specifically but I sensed that he wasn’t going to grow old gracefully; he wanted to fight it off.’
