Biography Of Peter Cook Read online

  St Bede’s School is a cluster of rambling, spacious, mock half-timbered buildings purpose-built in 1895, which stands on a breezy headland near the white cliffs at Beachy Head. Today it is a bustling, friendly and sumptuously well-equipped school for some four hundred boys and girls, most of them from Eastbourne itself. In 1945 it was a freezing, regimented institution, all parquet flooring and rough carbolic soap, where ninety boys were carefully watched for dangerous signs of self-expression. As a small, lonely, asthmatic child, Peter was easy prey for bullies, and suffered badly at the hands of an unpleasant older boy called Ramsbotham. He learned quickly that the techniques used to keep Granny Mayo entertained could be profitably employed to prevent Ramsbotham hitting him. Using a combination of ‘wit and sarcasm’, as he described it, he was able to deflect his tormentor’s attentions on to others.

  His teachers would have preferred to see Peter stand up and fight rather than joke his way out of a corner – his first school report dismissed him as ‘cynical’ – but the authorities were soon won over by his academic brilliance. His brave enthusiasm on the football field, where he graced the inside left position with one or two tricks learned from Torquay United’s Don Mills, also stood him in good stead. In time he gained a decent measure of popularity and a reputation as the school wit. On one occasion the annual nativity play ground to a halt, when the next boy due on stage was found collapsed helpless with laughter in the wings after Peter had whispered something in his ear.

  Despite having arrived at a modus vivendi, Peter was desperately unhappy at St Bede’s, not that he would ever have admitted as much to his parents. Having his appendix removed in 1948 didn’t help matters. According to his sister Sarah, ‘Peter had the toughest deal as far as being left behind was concerned. When I was sent away to school later, I whinged like anything about it all, I hated it. But Peter never moaned – I never once heard him complain. It’s taken me a long time to realise how difficult it was for my parents too – as a child you only see it from a child’s point of view. Nobody was being cruel intentionally: that was just the way things were.’ His mother wrote to him once a week – Margaret wrote to each of her children once a week for as long as she lived – but it was no substitute for her actual presence. Peter confided the trbut of his childhood loneliness only to his wives, in later years. As long as his parents lived, he would breezily tell any inquisitive journalist that as a boy he had ‘really loved visiting all those different places.’7 In fact, he lived for the school holidays in Gibraltar entirely because it meant seeing his family again.

  As Sarah grew up, she became Peter’s constant holiday companion, on a series of expeditions to investigate Gibraltar’s creepy-crawlies. They caught little fish at Rosea Bay using home-made rods and bait, and fed them to the cat. They rescued terrapins from a dried-up river bed in Spain, and made a pond for them among the figs and geraniums of their rambling garden. Peter installed a fearsome-looking pet praying mantis in a shoe box, which terrified the life out of his sister. Anything that crept, or crawled, or buzzed, Peter would try and keep it in a cardboard box. In May 1947 he was apprehended by Spanish customs, trying to smuggle a tortoise across the border in a teapot.

  It was the custom for Bob Church to send Alec an annual subscription to the Reader’s Digest as a present, and Peter was absolutely fascinated to read an article therein about killer bees. This became something of an obsession, and he would lead Sarah on hunts lasting many hours for an elusive flower named the ‘Bee Orchid’. In return, Peter would patiently sit through endless dolly’s tea parties and beach picnics organised by his little sister. ‘Despite the age gap, I never felt bossed, teased, patronised or merely tolerated by him – not then, not ever,’ says Sarah. Peter was undoubtedly content. Compared to life at St Bede’s, Gibraltar was an absolute idyll. On one occasion Errol Flynn’s yacht dropped anchor in the bay, and Peter swam out with his autograph book clamped between his teeth. Flynn’s wife went down below, and returned with the scrawled inscription ‘Hiya Pete’. ‘He had signed. I swam away happily. There has never been a thrill quite like that since.’8

  At last, Peter got the chance to befriend his father. They played golf and tennis, and went fishing together. On occasion the family would even have a little flutter on the races. In 1951, Alec Cook dreamed that the Derby would be won by a horse called Nickel Penny. He then found out that there was a horse running at 40–1 called Nickel Coin, so – ever cautious – he only placed a small bet on it. A friend of his placed a much larger bet, and won a fortune when it scraped home in first place. Alec also introduced the concept of a national lottery to Gibraltar, and placed his family on strict orders not to purchase a ticket. He was terrified that his wife might actually win something in his own draw. Margaret nicknamed her husband ‘the sea green incorruptible’ because of his constant scrupulous integrity. This clear moral sense, with its absolute respect for the truth, was passed down to his son wholesale, along with Alec’s melancholy core and his sharp sense of humour.

  Humour was enjoyed in the Cook household very much on a shared basis. The whole family loved to play around with words, and Peter’s predilection for taking a subject and running with it very much came from his father. Favourite family jokes were usually based on word play, often spoonerisms, such as the school report accusing a pupil of tasting the whole worm. Humorous books were an important influence: Wodehouse, Beachcomber, 1066 and All That, and the savagely accurate Geoffrey Willans–Ronald Searle crtion, Nigel Molesworth. Most popular of all were the delightfully bleak Ruthless Rhymes and More Ruthless Rhymes by Harry Grahame, illustrated by Ridgewell, short verses redolent of Edward Lear’s more macabre moments. Peter’s favourite, of course, was the one entitled ‘Prebendary Gorm’:

  When Mrs Gorm (Aunt Heloise)

  Was stung to death by savage bees,

  Her husband (Prebendary Gorm)

  Put on his veil, and took the swarm

  He’s publishing a book, next May,

  On ‘How to make Bee Keeping Pay’.

  This was accompanied by an illustration of Mrs Gorm, her entire head hidden beneath a cloud of furious killer bees, a few of whom are stinging the dog for good measure, while her husband stands behind her grinning heartily in bee-proof gear. Some of the Ruthless Rhymes were quite advanced:

  Weep not for little Leonie

  Abducted by a French Marquis,

  Though loss of honour was a wrench

  Just think how it’s improved her French.

  Generally speaking, though, the family’s humour was dry, witty and very English, and always stopped short of being crude. When Peter drew a picture in Sarah’s autograph book of their little sister Elizabeth (who was born in 1952) sitting on her potty, Sarah rubbed it out with much embarrassment before anyone could see it. Few of the family’s comic favourites were brash or American or both, although Peter personally enjoyed the Goons, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello, whom his parents didn’t much care for. An exception to this was Frank Crumit, whose comic songs Abdul Abulbul Amir, The Gay Caballero and The Song of the Prune were frequently played. Alec’s expansive collection of 78rpm records also took in Stanley Holloway, whose lugubrious monologues usually concerned plain-speaking little Lancastrians failing to bat their eyelids in the presence of kings, lions and other impressive authority figures. Looking back on his career in the mid-1980s, Peter admitted that ‘Only in my forties have I realised that a lot of my sense of humour comes from my parents – that’s quite humbling, in a way.’9

  The atmosphere in the Cook household was correspondingly polite and relaxed. Alec and Margaret were getle and loving parents. They had no need for any formal imposition of discipline: the perfect manners they had instilled in their children kept order for them. ‘There were certain things I knew not to do with them present’10 was how Peter later summed up their disciplinary policy. A key part of the Cook family’s code of manners was the stress put on not being boring – never outstaying one’s we
lcome, for instance – while being prepared to suffer it from others. This had a profound effect on Peter, who was careful never to bore anyone throughout his life, and yet whose ability to converse politely when cornered by pub bores was justly famous. The importance of not burdening others with one’s own trivial problems was perhaps best expressed by the family nanny, who was trapped with Sarah on a blazing passenger vessel – happily both later escaped unhurt – and yet managed to get a cable off to Margaret Cook. It read: ‘SHIP ON FIRE. DO NOT WORRY.’ Peter, of course, was beset with problems in his later life, but would never have dreamed of disturbing his family with them.

  All of which is not to say that the family stood on ceremony. After all, Alec Cook, a man sufficiently important to have his signature printed on Gibraltar’s pound notes, happily skipped down the street to school holding his daughter’s hand every morning. When a ship carrying ammunition exploded in the harbour, he told Sarah that everyone at the Secretariat had hidden under the table playing bears. The Cooks’ was a happy house, full of laughter and music – Margaret played violin in the Gibraltar Symphony Orchestra – often with a party in full swing. But always there was the underlying sadness, on both sides, of Peter’s returns to school. Peter’s career plan remained largely unspoken but generally understood: that he would follow his father and his father before him into overseas service on behalf of his country. To achieve that end, sacrifices needed to be made. Peter’s smile would evaporate and turn to tears at the airport. Eleanor Hudson, an old school friend of Margaret’s, would meet Peter on his arrival in Britain and arrange his transfer to school: she remembers him as a quiet, solemn charge, contemplative of his fate.

  Peter had in fact triumphed at St Bede’s, as far as the authorities there were concerned. His final term’s report, in the summer of 1951, concluded that ‘Originality of thought and a command of words give him a maturity of style beyond his years. In speech or essay he is never dull and his work should always be interesting.’ His Headmaster added: ‘A very excellent term. I think he should have a very promising future at Radley.’ For Radley, one of England’s great public schools, was where Peter was bound, an even larger and more intimidating institution, promising greater challenges to be faced and bigger bullies to be faced down.

  Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, in interview many years later, defended his decision to bring up his own son Roger in the traditional English manner:

  ‘We had him educated privately.’

  ‘But not by governesses.’

  ‘No, by goats. Not by governesses, goats.’

  ‘Despite your own childhood expeiences with goats.’

  ‘Well it was either that, or King’s School Canterbury. And I’m not entirely heartless you know.’11

  CHAPTER 2

  I’m Much Bigger Than You Are, Sir

  Radley and Abroad, 1951–57

  For a public school, St Peter’s College, Radley is a relatively youthful institution. It was founded in 1847, around a large red-brick Georgian box of a mansion, set in 700 acres of parkland near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Other buildings appeared over the years, dotted about the park like mushrooms, including the school theatre, which – rather bizarrely – was a prefabricated, corrugated-iron cathedral originally intended for Newfoundland. As befitting an establishment born in a flush of educational modernism, the school’s linguistic emphasis was upon French, rather than Latin, as the language of international diplomacy. Radley had strong links with overseas service, which was why Peter had been sent there. In the words of one contemporary, Robin Gunn, ‘It was a very insular society, geared to producing characters self-sufficient enough to govern the natives in distant, lonely, steamy parts of the globe.’

  Although barely a century old when Peter arrived there, Radley had equipped itself enthusiastically with the idiosyncratic traditions and vocabulary fundamental to any great public school’s daily life. Masters were called Dons. The Headmaster was known as the Warden. School boarding houses were called Socials. Every boy wore a gown and carried a ring binder called a Block. The school played rugby in winter – Peter’s beloved football was regarded with condescension – while in summer the ‘wet-bobs’ rowed and the ‘dry-bobs’ played cricket. First years had to have all their jacket buttons done up, which could then be loosened at the rate of one a year.

  The Prefects – one per Social – were cocks of the walk. They alone were allowed to carry their gowns, to stroll past the clock tower (others had to jog past it in single file), and to go to the lavatory with the cubicle door shut. They had their own common room, ‘Pup’s study’, which the senior Prefect had the unique privilege of being allowed to enter via the window, up an external flight of stone steps. The Prefects had complete authority to beat the younger boys in their charge, who in turn had to fag for them. Masters didn’t do much beating, although as a contemporary of Peter’s, Nick Salaman, recalls: ‘There was one master who gave beating talks. “How would you feel if I beat you? Tell me how uncomfortable that would feel” and so on. I don’t think he actually ever beat anyone. He just liked to talk about it, that was his pleasure.’

  New arrivals at Radley in the autumn of 1951 had to undergo a variety of initiation ceremonies. The contents of the Radley ‘Grey Book’ (so named because it wasn’t grey) had to be learned off by heart, including the names of all the masters, the initials of every boy in the Social and all the school rituals. Then a penny was balanced upon the new boy’s forehead and a rolled-up copy of Country Life was stuffed into the waistband of his trousers. He was then ordered to tilt his head back at such an angle that the penny would drop into the funnel formed by the magazine; or at least that was what he was told would happen. In reality a gallon jug of iced water was poured down the funnel while he was staring at the ceiling. Failure to pass these tests – undue flinching, in other words – or any other minor transgressions such as farting in chapel, were punished by ‘Lacing’, in which the victim was forced to complete several circuits of the ping pong table while being whacked with hockey sticks. The rigours of the African bush, the thinking presumably went, would one day be as nothing by comparison.

  The Radley day began at 6.45 a.m. with a compulsory and thorough icy shower, as checked off by a Prefect reclining in an adjacent hot tub. There were lessons before breakfast, then bed-making and chapel. Every morning at eleven there were compulsory star-jumps in front of the mansion, followed by more lessons, compulsory games in the afternoon (or military training once a week), prep in the evenings, then bed. Boys dashed headlong, gowns flying, from one place to another. There simply was no time for socialising. Only on Saturday evenings and on Sundays did the conveyor belt slow up; unless you were fagging for your Senior, of course, in which case much of the weekend was spent shoe-cleaning, toast-making and warming outside lavatory seats.

  Peter’s Social, named like all of them after the master in charge, was Thompson’s. J.V.P. Thompson, nicknamed ‘Rutch’ for reasons that nobody can remember, was an odd, slightly deaf man with a booming voice and a bristling moustache, who had a habit of taking his spectacles off and winding them round and round in his ears in order to extract the wax. He was unmarried, so his Social had to go without the softening presence of a Master’s wife and family. Junior boys in Thompson’s lived for the first four terms in a huge, cold, barn-like structure, separated by six-foot partitions into a series of cubicles and corridors, ‘like holes in an oddly carved up rabbit warren’ according to Peter Raby, another of Peter’s contemporaries. Only in January of their third year were boys given the use of a study in an adjacent octagonal building.

  It goes without saying that Peter’s first year or so at Radley was utterly, miserably unhappy. He intensely disliked the authority the school exercised over him and those who applied it. A slight, asthmatic figure, always dressed in the same shabby, ill-fitting gown or blue sports jacket on Sundays – his parents’ salary did not run to an extensive wardrobe – he was easy meat for bullies, of whom there were many. Dr Sid Gottlieb, l
ater Peter’s great friend, occasional physician and confidant, recalls that ‘Peter hated Radley in those days. My God, it was a really terrible, cruel time.’ Peter’s first wife Wendy remembers that ‘He did share with me how sometimes he would bang his head on the wall in despair in the night because he couldn’t breathe and I think he felt so abandoned. He really had a very lonely time.’ None of his school fellows, of course, were privy to his inner agonies. His best friend at the time, Jonathan Harlow, wrote later that ‘Peter seemed to be less affected than most of us either by the miseries or the exaltations of adolescence. Perhaps he merely talked less about himself – even when we knew each other very well, he never mentioned his home or his parents. But if he did not seem particularly unhappy, he was not yet master of that permanent good humour which was to mark him later.’1 The word ‘master’ was an apt choice – Peter was indeed gradually refining the use of good humour as a self-defence. ‘I hated the first two years,’ he explained, ‘because of being bullied. And I was as cowardly as the next man. I didn’t enjoy getting beaten up, and I disliked being away from home – that part was horrid. But it started a sort of defence mechanism in me, trying to make people laugh so that they wouldn’t hit me. I could make fun of other people and therefore make the person who was about to bully me laugh instead.’2 How many times, over the years, has the British comedy industry had cause to be grateful to generations of public school bullies.

  Peter’s particular bête noire at Radley was the Senior Prefect, Ted Dexter, later to become England’s cricket Captain, whose majestic timing with a cricket ball was matched by his majestic timing with a cane. According to Peter’s schoolfriend Michael Bawtree, ‘Prefects were dazzling and terrifying. They could punish and harass at whim. But Dexter was even more astral than the rest, as a cricketing, rackets-playing, rugby-playing hero. He was also extremely lordly, elegant, rich, well-dressed and assured, with something of a “sneer of cold command”. Can you imagine anyone more likely to get young Peter’s goat?’ Even in later life, according to Sid Gottlieb, Peter was still ‘really angry’ at the treatment he had received at the hands of Dexter. ‘He referred to him as the equivalent of an SS brute, always lashing out.’ Peter himself, his tongue pushed slightly into his cheek for public consumption, concluded that ‘That’s where I got my sense of injustice about the world, Ted Dexter. I was always envious of him, because he used to drive an Alfa Romeo. And he beat me for drinking cider at the Henley Regatta. Now OK, you weren’t allowed to drink cider at the Henley Regatta, so perhaps I deserved to be beaten. What I thought was a little unfair was that I had just seen him coming out of the pub with a bottle of scotch.’3