CHAPTER 1

       St Francis

       Poor soul.

      If we were to begin where Frankie Howerd would have wanted us to begin, we would be five years out of date. According to all of his own public accounts,¹ Frankie Howerd (whose proper surname, incidentally, was spelt ‘Howard’) was born on 6 March 1922. In truth, he was not: being painfully aware of the age-based prejudices of his own precarious profession, he arranged, in the first of many self-inflicted imprecisions, to have his real infancy erased.

      The authentic beginning had actually arrived back on 6 March 1917, when Francis Alick Howard – the first child of the 30-year-old Francis Alfred William Howard and his 29-year-old wife, Edith Florence Morrison – was born in the City Hospital in York. An early photograph recorded the sight of a broad-browed, blown-cheeked and somewhat reproachful-looking baby, with a downy dome of fair hair, a pair of large protruding ears, and a mouth already puckered up into the now-familiar outraged pout (‘I was,’ the famous adult would always insist, ‘quite beautiful’²).

      The Howards’ first family home was situated at 53 Hartford Street, a small but rather smart red-bricked terraced house not far from the city centre in the Fulford district of York. Both parents, right from the start, went out to earn a wage. Francis Snr was a private in the 1st Royal Dragoons; following in the footsteps of his father (a former sergeant at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst), he served as a staff clerk.³ Edith, meanwhile, laboured long and hard as a ‘cream chocolate maker’ at the local Rowntree confectionery factory.

      Before their child had the chance to acquire any real awareness of his loose northern roots – the solitary memory to survive to later life, apparently, would be of him tumbling down some stairs and bumping his head⁴ – the family was obliged to move down south. In the summer of 1919, when the baby Francis had reached the age of two-and-a-half, his father was transferred to the Royal Artillery, promoted to sergeant and posted to the Woolwich Barracks at Greenwich in south-east London.

      The need for the switch had been accepted with some enthusiasm by the newly-elevated Sergeant Howard, who recognised that he was not only taking a modest but none the less welcome step up the professional ladder, but was also, as someone Plumstead born and bred, on his way back to a place that struck him as so much more like ‘home’. The acceptance of such a rude upheaval almost certainly came rather harder, however, to his wife, Edith, whose entire life, up until this point, had been lived in close proximity to her mother, father and seven siblings within the confines of the comforting walls of York.

      The Howards’ new family home was located at 19a Arbroath Road in Eltham (which in those days was a relatively quiet and rural area situated on the borders of London and Kent). Once the Howards had actually settled in, however, it soon began to feel like a home without a family. The problem was that Frank Snr had to spend his weekdays based six miles away at the Royal Artillery barracks, while Edith was left on her own in an unfamiliar environment to bring up their infant son. Although the ostensible head of the household would duly return, with his wage packet, each weekend to be with his wife, the stark contrast in their newly separate styles of life – his brightened by the clarity of its routine and the quality of its camaraderie, hers dulled by a creeping sense of loneliness and a palpable loss of purpose – would in time breed tensions deep enough to shake the base of the bond between them.

      For a while, however, the couple worked hard to find ways to remain committed. Frank Snr not only behaved responsibly in his role as the family’s sole breadwinner, but also invested a fair amount of effort into trying to make what little time he shared with his wife and son seem reasonably worthwhile. Edith, for her part, bit her tongue on all of the bad days, savoured each one of the few that were good, and buried herself in the business of being both a homemaker and a mother.

      It was not just young Francis on whom she would dote. A second son, called Sidney, was born in April 1920, closely followed, in October 1921, by the birth of a baby daughter named Edith Bettina but known to everyone as Betty. Edith adored them all, and, making a virtue out of a necessity, she soon came to relish her role as the family’s singular parental figure.

      As a mother, she gave her children a generous measure of encouragement and affection. A short, slender woman with dark, vaguely ‘gypsyish’ good looks, discreet but deeply sincere religious beliefs and a quietly cheerful disposition, she made sure that her family had fun, sharing with them her great love of music, humour and the art of make-believe. When she could afford to she would take the children out, and when the money was tight she would stay with them inside, but, wherever they were, she always ensured that they would laugh, play and consider themselves to have been richly and warmly entertained.

      Assuming those duties that had been neglected by their absent father, she also instilled a fairly strong sense of discipline in each of her children, and tried to teach them a simple but solid code of conduct. Echoing many of the lessons she had learned from her own father, David (a stern and very strict Scottish Presbyterian), she would always stress the importance of industry, frugality and self-reliance, and insisted on treating others with a proper sense of fairness and respect.

      Of all her three children, it was Frank (as he preferred to be addressed) who appeared the one most eager to please her, as well as the one who was most closely attuned to her own personality and point of view. He loved to sit and listen to her singing snatches from all of her favourite musical comedies (‘my first impression of show-business’), felt thrilled when she showed so much enthusiasm for any performance that emerged from out of his ‘idiot world of fantasy’, and was delighted to find that he shared her ‘way-out sense of humour’.⁵ In short, he adored her.

      Even after he had started attending school – the local Gordon Elementary⁶ – and begun to acquire a broader range of friends, potential role models and adult authority figures, this special allegiance stayed as firm and true as ever. He would remain, totally and openly, Edith’s son.

      He had never been, in any meaningfully emotional sense of the term, ‘Frank’s son’. Whereas young Sidney and (to a lesser extent) Betty would greet each fleeting visit from their strangely unfamiliar father with