funny.â56 Stone, sensing a negative, invited his colleague to clarify his position. âI thought,â Carmichael replied with a grimace, âthat he was death-defyingly unfunny.â57 Stone, however, disagreed: âI think youâve got it wrong. Iâm going to book him for one of our shows.â58
Howard was duly installed as the compère of a concert party â The Waggoners â that was touting north-west Germany. For the next three months or so, from the end of 1945 to a short time after the start of 1946, he was in his element. Moving rapidly from place to place, he acquired a clearer sense of what it took to win over any audience, and he adapted his act accordingly. He improved the best of his old routines; dropped the rest; wrote, tried and tested several new jokes, sketches and monologues; and generally grew in confidence as a performer.
Those who watched him were impressed. One such admirer was a 21-year-old soldier and budding comedian named Benny Hill. Serving in Germany at the time with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, Hill was struck immediately by Howardâs edgy originality, and made a point of seeking him out in the canteen shortly after the show had finished.
It was a brief but revealing meeting between two of British comedyâs most significant stars of the future: Hill, the self-assured optimist, and Howard, the insecure pessimist. âYouâve got a jolly good way with you,â gushed Hill, believing Howard (who was seven years his senior) to be a relatively seasoned professional. When it became clear that he was actually lavishing praise on a surprisingly shy and modest amateur, Hill urged him to consider pursuing comedy as a career: âYou ought to take it up,â he insisted. âI think you would do very well.â59
Howard, blushing a little and fidgeting with his curly hair, mumbled a clumsily non-committal response â âI donât know, really, you knowâ â but he was genuinely touched by the encouragement.60 Indeed, having endured so many curt rejections up to this point in his life, he treasured every single one of the kind words that he now received.
Richard Stone, for one, would discover just how true this was some thirty-five years later, when the star Frankie Howerd, upon hearing a specious rumour that Stone had only grudgingly found a place for him in CSE, asked his former boss to meet him as soon as possible for lunch. âIt turned out,â recalled Stone (who had secretly been hoping that the reason for the meeting was to sound him out about acquiring Howerd as a client), âthat in all the years, through his many ups and downs, he had consoled himself with the thought that there was at least one man in show-business who believed in him. He then produced from his pocket a tired piece of Army notepaper which he had cherished. It informed those whom it might concern that Sergeant Howard was a very funny man, and was signed Richard Stone, Major!â61 The insecurity would never go away.
Throughout that short tour during the winter of 1945/46, however, Howard was a relatively happy young man. The fears of wartime were finally over, and the anxieties of peacetime had not yet begun. All that he was required to do â and all that he needed to do â was perform, and he relished every minute. Then, with the arrival of April 1946, the brief but blessed interlude was brought abruptly to a close. Frankie Howard, after spending six years in uniform, was demobbed, and he returned to civilian life.
Finding himself back in Eltham, âwith less than £100, a chalk-striped suit, pork-pie hatâ,62 and that precious one-page reference from Richard Stone tucked safely away inside his jacket pocket, he felt some of the old nerves start to stir. Now aged twenty-nine, he stood for a moment alone, took in all of the familiar sights, and then thought to himself: âWhat now?â63
Theyâre mocking Francis!
My agent. Heâs a very peculiar man, my agent. Heâs got what they call a dual personality. People hate both of them.
It was an extraordinary coincidence. Shortly after Frankie Howard departed from the Army, he met not only the man who would soon prove to be one of the best things to have happened to his early career, but also the man who would end up seeming like one of the worst. These two men were one and the same: Stanley âScruffyâ Dale.
Of all the innumerable managers, promoters and sundry âten-percentersâ who struggled to make a living out of post-war British theatre, none was quite as mysterious, unorthodox and downright odd as Stanley Dale. Invalided out of the RAF after sitting on an incendiary shell that had penetrated his aeroplane (an act of valour for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross1), he had since built a new career for himself in civilian life as a booker for the band leader-turned-impresario Jack Payne.
A whippet-thin man of average height with a sharp-featured face and short, curly hair that swept back over his head in shiny little ripples, Dale was notorious for his unpredictable office hours, his somewhat insalubrious personal habits and, most of all, for his chronically unkempt appearance. âScruffy was scruffy,â confirmed the scriptwriter Alan Simpson. âI mean, nearly every time I saw Scruffy [he] was in bed! He used to conduct all of his office meetings in bed, with a fag hanging out of his mouth â he never seemed to puff it, it always seemed just to burn away until there was nothing there but a sort of grey stick â and he had all of this ash dripping down on to his pyjama jacket.â2
When, however, Dale managed to summon up the effort to rise from his bed and dress (which happened â if it happened at all â only very rarely earlier than noon), he was capable of giving off a certain âloveable roguishâ kind of charm, particularly when telling some of his extraordinary tales (many of them tall, a few of them positively colossal) about the remarkable things he had done, the astonishing sights he had seen and the impressive people he had known over the course of his improbably eventful life. Tony Hancock, for one, fell deeply under his spell for a while during the immediate post-war period, sitting around with him night after night, sharing cigarettes and drinks and listening wide-eyed and open-mouthed to his anecdotes about the countless narrow escapes he claimed to have experienced while serving in the RAF.3
A budding young stand-up comic by the name of Jim Smith was another performer who would find himself drawn into Daleâs orbit. After seeing the teenaged Smith on stage at the start of the 1950s and quickly sensing his potential, Dale put him under contract, continued paying him a regular salary during his two years away on National Service, and, when he returned, gave Smith the âgiftâ of his own surname â so Jim Smith became Jim Dale, and the comedy performer was promptly re-packaged as a pop star.
One
