Biography Of Peter Cook Read online

  Most of Peter’s friends look back on their last year or so at Radley with extreme nostalgic admiration. Noel Slocock, for instance: ‘We were very disciplined early on by both the Dons and the more senior boys, but I think when we “broke through” and began to fulfil ourselves, Peter with his drama and all the rest of it, and the Dons became friends, it became a golden time, which was actually very difficult to recapture in later life as we took up more serious responsibilities.’ Peter’s own later reflections on life at Radley tended to be rather more schizophrenic, alternating between similar cosy trawls through memorable moments and an aggrieved sardonic resentment that he had ever been sent there.

  One of the memories he preferred to dredge up was the sixth-formers’ termly dance against a local girls’ school – against, not with. ‘We never won,’ he said. It was the boys’ first and only chance to explore and get to grips with heterosexual sex, and Peter was very much in the Radley vanguard. He purchased a violently snazzy tie and a bottle of Old Spice, and despite the predatory advances of acne about his features, he had enough elegance, urbanity and wit to score heavily with the opposite sex. On one occasion he almost managed to achieve sexual congress in the school organ loft. After each dance the boys would compile a chart of the ‘Top Ten Tarts’ among their number, selected for their success in getting off with the girls. Peter was repeatedly voted No. 2, to his intense disappointment. ‘I was bubbling under for three terms. I’ll never forget the boy who was No. 1: T. S. Blower. Terence Blower. It is indelibly planted upon my memory.’16

  Otherwise, the only woman in the boys’ orbit was the matron. Peter recalled that ‘On one occasion, weak with laughter after a particularly hilarious episode of The Goons, I told her that I felt “strangely feeble”. The good lady carried me to the bathroom, took off my pyjamas and gave me a bath. During the course of this she soaped my back with her bare hands. This innocent action caused me severe pleasure and embarrassment which I disguised with a large sponge. Later I exaggerated the incident to my friends, and intimated that rather more had gone on: thus an impeccable atron’s name became sullied by the school’s rumour-mills.’17

  Peter’s final triumph was saved for his last few weeks at the school. Along with its flourishing drama department and theatre, Radley possessed an entirely separate marionette theatre, created and run by Chris Ellis, the good-natured, enthusiastic and resourceful art master. Every year a traditional but substantial opera or light opera would be mounted with the assistance of the school orchestra, such as The Magic Flute, The Beggar’s Opera or The Pirates of Penzance. In 1956, Ellis decided it was time for the boys to create their own original musical. He already knew Michael Bawtree to be a talented musician and arranger from previous productions, and a natural choice to compose the score; but he had no idea who should write the book. In the cloistered world of the art department, he had not yet come across the celebrated Peter Cook. So he asked the members of the Marionette Society to decide for themselves. The vote was unanimous, and Peter was approached to fulfil Ellis’s unusual commission. The result was The Black and While Blues, the story of Mr Slump, an evangelical jazz musician who takes his band to Africa to convert the natives away from cannibalism. Peter not only wrote the script, but produced the play, carved many of the puppets’ faces and took the lead role himself. About the only thing he couldn’t do was sing very well – his voice was frustratingly unequal to the simplest musical task – so whenever Mr Slump burst into song, the head of the choir George Clare had to take over.

  Peter spent much of his final term rushing round – ‘like a maniac’, according to one puppeteer, Ian Napier – organising auditions, holding rehearsals, persuading model-makers and puppeteers to join up, designing posters and selling tickets. He charmed the much-maligned matron and one of the master’s wives into running up the costumes on their sewing machines. He persuaded a real girl – Diana Llewellyn Jones, daughter of one of the Social Tutors – to play the role of the Slump band’s torch singer, Bertha Kittens. Creative abilities aside, Peter was revealing himself to be an organisational genius. ‘He manipulated people in such a way that they were pleased to do it,’ explains another of the puppeteers, Christopher Leigh. ‘He had such a quick, dry sense of humour that the whole workshop was always in fits of laughter, whether things were going right or going wrong. He could always bring that smile to your face which made for such splendid working conditions, even though the workshop was extremely cramped as you might imagine. And after every show there was always an (illicit) party, which he was very much the ringleader of. He produced a great esprit de corps.’

  Interference from the masters was kept to a minimum, although a poster showing an illustration of Bertha Kittens had to be withdrawn after a complaint from the Sub-Warden that she was showing too much leg. Chris Ellis, too, remained a little unsure of precisely what he had set in train: ‘To cover possible weaknesses, I suggested that the book should be couched in rhyming couplets – and that is how it was reluctantly written.’18 In fact this proviso almost certainly hampered rather than helped the scriptwriter. The production proved to be witty only in the Salad Days sense, ‘educated’ English humour in the tradition of Slade and Reynolds or Flanders and Swann, sung for the most part by small boys sounding exactly like Celia Johnson. Take for instance this female plea for a handsome suitor:

  If I could find one

  A handsome and kind one

  To give me a life I’d enjoy,

  Oh I’d be engaged to the boy.

  And then we’d go dancing together

  In cloudy and sunshiney weather

  But dash! I’d forgotten

  That all men are rotten.

  Or this, from a number about the man-eating beasts of the African bush:

  Oh Lord deliver us

  From animals carnivorous

  Oh Lord protect us

  Let them not select us!

  As befitted the son of an enlightened and humane Colonial Officer brought up in the conservative atmosphere of Radley College, the show’s attitude to the African native was extremely well-intentioned, if rather patronising by today’s standards:

  We’ve cocked a snook at the colour bar

  Hurrah for the female darkie!

  Black and white will always mix

  Who cares if the kids are khaki!

  Thirty years before Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s Ebony and Ivory came Peter’s equally earnest Black and White:

  We’re just like two piano keys

  One is black and the other is white

  Both in perfect harmony

  And we keep in tune day and night

  Peter later professed himself on a number of occasions to be seriously embarrassed by this ‘diabolical’ piece of work, which was not at all fair to his youthful self. ‘It had a hideously naive premise and really was quite appalling,’19 he informed Roger Wilmut in 1980. By 1986 he had mellowed in his approach, when he told John Hind that ‘It was rather jolly, and pretty good for fourteen or fifteen. I still have people who come up to me and say it’s better than anything I’ve done since.’20 A guarded reappraisal, given that he had actually been eighteen when he had written it. What is not in doubt, though, is the enormous scale of its success in March 1956. After the first performance, tickets actually changed hands on the black market at several times their face value. The staff were delighted that such an innocuous tale had been so professionally produced, but what they had of course entirely missed was the layer of caricature within the performance that was causing all the excitement. The old Etonian African chief encountered by Slump, a character also played by Peter (who recited rather than sang his part in a kind of strangled Rex Harrison voice), was quite clearly based on the celebrated foibles of Ivor Gilliat. The Warden, too, was satirised at every turn, partly via the Eton connection. One of his catchphrases, an emphatic ‘Not a scrap!’, was echoed in the chorus line of the Slump Band’s marching song, ‘Not a jot, not a tittle, NOT A SCRAP!’ sung very loud by all
concerned. Mild stuff, perhaps, but not at Radley in 1956.

  So successful was The Black and White Blues that when the third and final show finished, the cast trooped off to the Isis Recording Studios in Oxford to make a 78rpm record of various songs from the show, of which some five hundred copies were successfully offloaded on to boys and staff. Sadly, Michael Waite, a junior who played one of the female parts, was halfway through recording his solo number when his voice suddenly broke. ‘I was of that age, unfortunately. The tapes rolled again, and yes, it happened again. After the third attempt Peter and Michael were so frustrated that they left it on the record.’ Where it can still be heard today, under a ton of scratches.

  There is no doubt that The Black and White Blues, along with his other stage triumphs, had ignited a spark within Peter, a tiny little flame of rebellion against his smooth passage towards the Foreign Office. He later confessed to The Times that he had secretly ‘wanted to be an entertainer since puberty.’ In his final report, Thompson spoke of a boy with ‘an unruffled temperament who has had considerable influence, especially in his own cultural field. He has qualities – not least a certain elusiveness – which should render him a most useful member of the Foreign Service.’ Peter himself, in the space marked ‘Plans for the future’ on his Leaving Boys Report Form, wrote ‘BBC, Films, TV, Sherry.’ It was intended as a joke, but like many a joke it concealed the truth.

  The Radley generation of 1956 then broke up and went their separate ways, mostly into the army on National Service. From the autumn onwards, Jonathan Harlow would serve in the Mediterranean with the Royal Artillery, Noel Slocock with the Coldstream Guards. Avoiding this chore was Peter’s next task, something he accomplished with customary urbanity and style. Drawing on the long-vanished childhood asthma that remained on his medical record, he claimed to have an allergy to feathers, which of course in those days filled every army pillow. It was explained to him with great regret that he would not be able to serve his country. Coolly, he urged the panel of officers interviewing him to change their minds. ‘I begged, and said “Well, you know, if there’s a real crisis, you will take me on?” They said yes. And the bloke behind me said, “What was that you had?” and I said “Allergy to feathers.” So when he was asked various questions about his medical history, he said “Well I’ve got this allergy to feathers,” and the officer said “How does it affect you?” and he said “I get this terrible pain in my back.” And of course he went in A1, and was probably shot to pieces in Cyprus.’21

  Peter was still not due up at Cambridge until October 1957, so it was arranged for him to spend the academic year of 1956–57 studying in France and Germany, as part of his relentless drive towards a place at the Foreign Office; but with six months of the old academic year still to go, it was subsequently decided that a few additional months in Paris at the College Franco-Brittanique of the Cité Universitaire, starting immediately, wouldn’t do him any harm. It certainly didn’t; but he experienced more of a cultural and sexual awakening in those short months than any great linguistic leap. ‘In the main I hung about trying to get to know women. That seemed to be the usual procedure. I was less aware of the beauty of the European landscape than the new-found qualities of womanhood,’ he remembered.22 Soon he had secured for himself his first ever proper girlfriend, a French girl; although frighteningly short of cash, he took her to the races at Longchamps and won a little more. Which was useful, as they had been forced to walk three miles from the nearest Metro station to get there because Peter couldn’t afford the cab fare. At Whitsun, they hitch-hiked to the South of France, ‘spending no more than our normal daily allowance in Paris,’ as Peter dutifully assured his financially stretched parents.

  Peter absorbed culture by the yard and reported the results back to Lyme Regis. To begin with, his reactions seem rather bemused. The Threepenny Opera was ‘interesting but rather sordid’. Abel Gance’s Napoleon – later to influence a parody silent film in Not Only . . . But Also – was ‘a wonderful old film . . . really very funny.’ He saw Manuela del Rio dance and Edith Piaf sing at the Olympia Music Hall, and became more enthusiastic. Piaf was ‘marvellous, so good that I have been forced to buy one of her records’. He also hugely enjoyed Les Enfants du Paradis. Significantly for comic theorists hunting for influences, on 8 June 1956 Peter was delighted by ‘a most strange play called “Les Chaises” by Ionesco, all about an old couple who are expecting hundreds of important guests who turn out to be imaginary. They hold ridiculous conversations with these non-existent people and eventually jump out of the window.’

  Inspired by this surfeit of culture and by life in a Parisian garret, Peter took up oil painting. His first effort sold at a good price, but rather like the Punch articles, its successors failed to arouse any interest whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling seems to have sed this period of Peter’s youth. Interviewed by Ludovic Kennedy about life in Paris he reminisced:

  Sir Arthur:

  It was a bit like London in the 60s actually, only in black and white and without any subtitles. I was very poor, had a pathetically weedy little moustache and I was absolutely homeless. But I was young and I desperately wanted to paint.

  Kennedy:

  You knocked at the first door you came to.

  Sir Arthur:

  Yes, and I painted it. There was no answer, but the door swung open and there in the centre of the room was this most peculiar melting bed draped over an ironing board. I’d stumbled into the garret of Salvador Dali.

  Kennedy:

  Fascinating.

  Sir Arthur:

  Yes, what looked like a melting mattress over an ironing board was in fact his landlady Madame Chevignon. Dali himself had had to leave in a hurry, due to an accident with a burning giraffe.23

  Eventually, depression induced by constantly having to scrimp for cash began to outweigh the cultural benefits of Parisian life: ‘I have become pretty fed up with my 75 franc restaurant. Invariably one starts with radishes, then a scrap of nondescript meat followed by an apple or a banana. Meals at the Cité Universitaire are much better value at 180 francs.’ Except that Peter didn’t have 180 francs, and the college was in the grip of a German Measles epidemic. The inability to afford transport was particularly trying: ‘The other day we almost walked the length of Paris along the side of the Seine, which was quite exhausting. One lives and learns; I have now discovered that you are to tip the woman who shows you to your seat in the cinema, and as far as I can see the only people you are not expected to tip are the ticket collectors in the Metro.’ Uncle Roy and Aunt Joan came to the rescue, catching the boat-train over and taking him out to lunch at ‘Chez George’s’. His parents kindly sent him The Radleian to cheer him up, and Michael Bawtree wrote with the encouraging news that he had played The Black and White Blues record to Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. What they thought of it, he did not say. Before his return home, Peter saved up enough cash for a last treat, and he and his girlfriend visited the French Derby at Chantilly. ‘It should be a lovely night,’ he wrote in anticipation. ‘Dior clothes etc. After the recent debacles in England I only hope an English horse runs away with the race.’

  On 16 June, Peter said goodbye to his girlfriend for ever and flew home. His parents never knew about her: his letters home had always studiously avoided revealing who the other half of the ubiquitous ‘we’ was. He had to return, because it was almost time for the Henley Regatta. The ties of Radley were still strong – after all it had been his home for five years – and no Radley boy would dare to miss the Henley Regatta. In fact, so nostalgic was he feeling that he spent his spare time during the summer writing Thompson’s Social play for the following term’s drama festival. Entitled He Who Laughs, it was a one-act farce about a Martian spacecraft landing in suburbia, after which the entirely staid and responsible Martians become shocked by the goings-on behind the surburban net curtains. Peter never saw it performed.

  Early that summer Noel Slocock’s father lent his son a H
illman Huskey car, and he, Peter, Michael Bawtree, Jonathan Harlow and Peter Raby packed a couple of tents and set out to discover England. There was no set pattern to the trip. They simply zig-zagged across the country as the fancy took them, covering three thousand miles in ten days of idyllic summer weather that seemed to go on for ever. They started at Studley Priory in Oxfordshire, where Michael Bawtree’s parents ran the hotel, then drove through the Cotswolds to the Forest of Dean, camped by the River Wye, then drove up to Wenlock Edge in order to stand atop it and read the Housman poem of the same name. They tracked back down to the New Forest, continued on to Devon to see Noel Slocock’s grandmother, back up to Jonathan Harlow’s home on the Northumberland moors, and finished the trip chewing bread and butter on Dancing Ledge at Swanage in Dorset. In the evenings, they cooked the simplest of food on open camp fires, deep in the forests. By night they sat beneath the stars in their sensible grey pullovers, drinking Benedictine, one or two of them puffing on pipes, ruminating about serious subjects, like men of the world – or at least, as they fondly imagined men of the world to ruminate. It was perhaps Peter’s happiest time: utter contentment radiates from each and every face in Noel Slocock’s photo album.

  During the day, Peter would keep his friends amused with the usual stream of jokes. According to Michael Bawtree, ‘I’m not sure that he had ever camped before, and it was quite a sight to behold this gangling, almost dandified and certainly highly urban figure crouching awkwardly beside a camp fire. He was not the best tent-putter-upper, cook or bottlewasher, but he was surely the funniest camper ever seen under canvas.’24 Late in the evenings, however, when the pipes and the Benedictine came out, the flow of jokes dried up, and Peter talked seriously, as he only ever did when he felt very, very safe or very, very cowed.