LITMIR.BIZ

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The big trick where the milk was supposed to stay suspended in its upturned bottle failed to work. As he remembered it, ‘The stage was swimming with milk. I dropped my wand. I did everything wrong. But the audience loved it. The more I panicked and made a mess of everything, the more they laughed. I came off and cried, but five minutes later I could still hear the sound of the laughter in my ears and was thinking maybe there’s a living to be made here. When I joined the forces I began to do some shows in the NAAFI and started to do tricks that all went wrong.’

      Tommy never lost his passion for straight magic and once established as a star relished those moments when he could turn the tables on his audience by sneaking in an example of genuine skill and, to his apparent surprise, a miracle would result. We can never be sure how black and white things appeared to him that day back in the British Power Boat canteen, but the escapade can certainly be pinpointed as the occasion when he first entertained the idea of an act based on incompetence, even if at that stage he could have had little inkling of where he would get to perform it. From that point on his ineptitude was deliberate. His friend and fellow magician, Val Andrews, has commented, ‘From the very start of his performing career Tommy worked extremely hard to ensure that everything he touched would break, fall over, refuse to work, or by arranged accident reveal its secret. Years of hard work and experience went into honing the perfect comic article.’ At other times, as the mood of the interview took him, Tommy would shift the scene of the Hythe catastrophe to a service concert in Egypt or a postwar audition in a London nightclub. However, there can be little doubt that his comic agenda was set that Christmas lunchtime. Derek Humby had been there to witness the fiasco. Nor was he the first comedian to be switched on to his trade in this way. As Eric Sykes has observed: ‘What people fail to realize is that you don’t decide to be a comic; the audience decides that you are a comic.’ Juggler W. C. Fields, fiddler Jack Benny, aspirant thespian Frankie Howerd, frustrated pianist Les Dawson all accidentally discovered a talent for laughter when their original talents failed to make the grade.

      The variety theatres of Southampton provided Tommy with his first appreciation of magic as performed before a proper audience on a large stage. The great illusionists of the day passed through the stage doors of the Hippodrome, the Palace, and the Grand. Horace Goldin, Chris Charlton, The Great Carmo, and Murray the Escapologist were all major names who in the late Thirties visited the town that proudly billed itself as ‘The Gateway to the Empire’. One particular performer attracted Tommy’s attention, as he later confided to ‘Wizard’ Edward Beal, a kindly small-time local entertainer who found time to run a bookshop next door to the business Tommy’s family ran in Southampton in the late Forties. In his book Particular Pleasures, which contains an appreciation of Cooper, J. B. Priestley queried, ‘I wonder if he is old enough to have seen, even as a young boy, the wildly original act of the American, Frank Van Hoven.’ Van Hoven, billed as ‘The American Dippy Mad Magician’ and one of the first of the true burlesque conjuring acts, died in 1929. While Tommy did not see the original, he did see the man who copied his act, namely Artemus. The week of 20 March 1939 saw the Southampton Palace Theatre featuring a bill headed by ‘Artemus and his Gang – Juggling with Water, Eggs, and Ice.’

      Van Hoven’s other billing had been ‘The Man Who Made Ice Famous’, placing due emphasis on his main prop, namely a huge block of ice, the slippery peregrinations of which kept audiences in uproar as it slithered across the boards, causing freezing havoc among the three stooges enlisted to hold it and to keep it in a state of perpetual motion with the table and the goldfish bowl slopping full of water that they were supposed to hang on to at the same time. A borrowed handkerchief also came into it somewhere: only when the block of ice was in fragments, the bowl emptied of its contents, the table smashed to smithereens and the audience reduced to hysteria did Van Hoven get a chance to explain that he had been trying to pass it into the ice. Those who saw both considered Artemus mediocre in comparison with the original, but those who came to him fresh would rave enthusiastically. He did vary the routine, substituting the production of real eggs from a hat in lieu of the handkerchief business. The accidental omelette that materialized as eggs smashed on the wet and icy stage made the surface even more hilariously hazardous. In later years, as we shall discover, Tommy made great play of a burlesque magician sketch in which someone else played the wizard and he played a stooge from the audience. Eggs were the operative prop on this occasion. Tommy was too practical to have to bother about ice and goldfish bowls. But, as he reminisced to Ted Beal about the act, there was no doubt that Artemus had impressed him. Assuming he saw him in March 1939 and not before, the experience postdates the Hythe canteen episode, but must have further heightened his perception of the burlesque conjuror in entertainment terms. Ted also confided in Tommy his special philosophy: ‘The trouble with so many magicians is that they are purveyors of puzzles without the humour’; but by the late Forties, Tommy had already come to that conclusion for himself.

      Meanwhile he was getting nowhere fast at the Power Boat Company. He was totally unsuitable for the task – ‘I can’t even knock a nail in straight!’ – but they couldn’t give him the sack because the premium had been paid: ‘The course I was on was one you had to pay for, so I got off with a warning and being sent home.’ Afraid to tell his parents, he spent his time cycling to nearby towns and villages looking for odd jobs. It is hard to think that the situation could have continued for seven years, but world events intervened. As war clouds darkened and Chamberlain’s umbrella looked insufficient protection against the storm, a combination of patriotism and self-esteem found Cooper volunteering for the services. There is no way the Company could stand in his way and besides his height made him a natural for the Guards. His mother had the shock of her life when one day he arrived on the doorstep of ‘Devonia’ in uniform. That the Company could in fact tolerate his antics no longer was bypassed in the elation of the moment. And as Peter North says, ‘He wouldn’t have lasted there during the war. You had to tow the line. The work was classified as a restricted occupation and there was no mucking about then.’ In the circumstances, it is amazing that he did manage to accept the discipline of the army as he did.

      When war was declared, Southampton became one of the major targets of the Blitz. His parents made frequent visits back to Devon and Caerphilly to stay out of harm’s way with family and friends. When peace arrived they appear to have lost their appetite for the semi-rural community. They moved from ‘Devonia’ around the beginning of 1948, ploughing all their resources into a shop at 124 Shirley Road, a major thoroughfare out of the centre of Southampton to the North West in the Romsey direction. Today the premises accommodate ‘Johnny’s Fish and Chips’ emporium. The nearby Rotrax café and cycle store are no more, while the tattoo parlour a few doors down has survived all trends. It has been said that Tommy set his parents up in the shop, but this is not the case, since they were up and running with at first a fresh fish business long before he achieved lasting success. The fish business did not prosper. Zena Cooper recalls how on a Saturday her father-in-law would sell the fish left over at the end of the week for next to nothing. In the end the neighbourhood got wise and bought nothing earlier in the week. Gertrude had to put her foot down and any fish not sold at full price by the end of Saturday she buried in their little postage stamp of a garden. Obviously a lady of amazing industry, she once again kept the family buoyant financially by harking back to her dressmaking skills. Within a short time she converted the shop into a haberdashery to act as a front for them, with alterations and repairs a profitable sideline.

      In these final years of their lives the surviving memories of those who knew them give us further insight into the characters and eccentricities of his parents. Members of Gertrude’s family recall that to deter shoplifters she used to tie all the stock together with some of her son’s invisible thread, so that if someone sneaked something away when she wasn’t looking, all the rest would come with it. Mrs Spacagna, who had a hairdressing business in the vicinity, remembers her as a very private person, but a brisk business woman, always distinctive on her own shopping round from the long black cloak she wore. I have a memory too. As a child brought up in Southampton’s Shirley district in the Fifties, no sooner had I heard that the mother of my television hero had a shop less than a mile from where I lived than nothing could hold me back from making the pilgrimage to seek her out for myself. I could not summon the courage to enter, but remember peering through the window past the displays of knitting needles, zip fasteners, ribbon, braid, and buttons galore to spy sitting behind

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