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kindliness brought upon her the responsibility of delivering babies, laying out the dead, and acting as a Mother Courage figure in the lives of those around her. The arrival of young Thomas would have been one chore among many on a typical day. Ivor says, ‘My mother never went to bed before twelve and was up at four.’ A few days before she had taken pity on Tommy’s parents as they came searching for accommodation. His mother was seven months pregnant. She had just returned from the cinema when her waters broke. In later years he had his own version: ‘I was a surprise to my parents. They found me on the doorstep. They expected a bottle of milk.’

      His birthplace still stands at 19 Llwyn Onn Street, Caerphilly, a tiny terraced house, with two bedrooms upstairs and two living rooms downstairs, the white stucco of the upper storey in stark contrast to the tessellated red and slate brick of the lower level. His parents rented the front room on the lower floor. ‘Llwyn Onn’ translates as ‘Ash Grove’, thus hinting at the semi-rural environment that distinguishes it from the centre of the Welsh cheese capital dominated by the gloomy remains of its thirteenth-century castle. The wide street slopes down to fields that give way to railway sidings, the area retaining the prospect of childhood exploration and adventure that was taken from Tommy when only a few years after his birth his parents moved to Exeter. The tip a few yards away from the house where all around would dump the ashes and embers from their coal fires remains in use to this day, serving almost as a spiritual hearth for this most famous of sons.

      Thomas Samuel Cooper, Tommy’s father, was born on 13 October 1892. A Caerphilly man, he lost his first wife and child at childbirth before the First World War, making the near tragedy of Tommy’s own birth even more poignant. The son of a coalminer, he too found himself drawn down the mines upon leaving school. Invalided out of the First World War with honourable discharge on 1 April 1917, he never went back to the Coegnant Colliery at Caerau that had sustained his early adulthood. One version says that he was gassed at the Somme, another that he was gassed working in the hold of a ship unloading petrol cans. Whatever, he suffered the after-effects to the end of his days. He had been acquainted with Gertrude Catherine Wright before the hostilities, but any attraction between them had been forestalled by her earlier engagement to a clergyman. Born on 1 March 1893, she was the daughter of a farm bailiff from Stoke Canon, a few miles from Exeter. What brought Gertrude to Wales, or Thomas to Devon in the first place, before or after the war, is lost to history. Their wedding at the Register Office, Pontypridd on 16 October 1919 provided him with happy consolation at the end of a traumatic decade.

      An early photograph of the couple suggests that Tommy inherited his looks from his mother. Here are the soulful eyes, the heavy nose, the straight line of mouth that he came to twist up and down from grin to frown with quicksilver flexibility. However, the consensus is that he derived his sense of fun from his father. Cooper always described his dad as ‘a happy-go-lucky fellow. He loved talking to people. He’d talk to a complete stranger. Before you knew where you were he’d be sitting down talking to them. A very nice man.’ In the Welsh tradition, he used to sing informally at concerts, but at heart he was a frustrated clown. Zena Cooper, Tommy’s sister-in-law recalls: ‘He never stopped laughing. A deep throaty laugh. Obviously a family trait! He was a natural and he was hilarious. On the beach you had these deckchairs and he’d put one up the wrong way and suddenly the people sunbathing would start to laugh and he’d make it worse. He loved the audience and would milk the crowd.’ His father had been one of a family of seventeen. Having weathered the depression and the war, he was way ahead of his son in discovering the value of laughter as shield and safety valve in the front line of sanity.

      His talent for comedy was also shared by his brother, Tommy’s uncle, Jimmy Cooper. A photograph survives depicting a pudgy-faced individual in a stylized clown make-up crouching alongside a top-hatted straight man. He sports two outsize black circumflex accents in lieu of eyebrows, marks repeated in mirror image beneath his eyes. Unlike his brother, he obviously adopted a more than incidental approach to the business of laughter. He wears a cap one size too small and fondles an accordion, one of a string of talents that extended to magic as well as comedy. Tommy’s cousin Betty Jones, daughter of Aunt Lizzie, his dad’s sister, remembers his flair for tricks with eggs, a skill not to be dismissed at a time when they were scarce and precious. He achieved laughter and mystery together by supposedly swallowing a borrowed watch on a chain. There was nowhere else it could have gone. Bend down and you could hear it ticking in his tummy. Another cousin, Bernard Diggins recalls that he was originally employed down the mines, but became branded as a Communist and was subsequently banned for causing trouble in the pits. He would go the rounds of the legion halls and miners’ clubs and have everywhere in an uproar as he enacted a sketch depicting a sentry on duty wanting to spend a penny. Both Betty and Bernard recall that this was considered too risqué for the children to watch and they would be shooed from the room. ‘Ooh gosh! He’d go behind the box. He must go. The things he used to do!’ exclaims Betty. ‘But like Tommy, he was natural, see.’

      Many people are surprised when they learn of Tommy’s Welsh heritage, although town and country have in recent years become increasingly alert to the potential commercial value of the fact. Wales does not profess a great comic tradition. Contemporary with Cooper have been the redoubtably chirpy Stan Stennett (his billing ‘Certified Insanely Funny’ might have been coined for Tommy himself); the pantomime kingpin of the valleys, Wyn Calvin; and funniest of them all, Fifties radio star, Gladys Morgan with her ear-splitting laugh that could cause a leek to wilt at a distance of ten miles. Most recognizably Welsh, Harry Secombe came nearest to Tommy in fame and recognition but was puzzlingly overlooked in a recent poll of the top 100 Welsh heroes that rated Cooper at thirty-four and Aneurin Bevan in poll position. It must say something about laughter and the Welsh that Cooper is the only intentionally funny man to figure in a list that honours actors, writers, sportsmen, politicians and kings, but in which even more recent comedy recruits like Max Boyce, Rob Brydon and Paul Whitehouse fail to make the running. Even one of Tommy’s personal heroes, Bob Hope was absent. Cooper would have been impressed that Hope was Welsh on his mother’s side. Iris Townes hailed from Barry and used to sing in the local music halls before her marriage to Hope’s father.

      Tommy had no show business link on his mother’s side. Gertrude was perceived as the strong-minded individual who held the family together, the business sense she had acquired from her own family paying dividends throughout the marriage. It is hard to make out what employment her husband took up after the war, although his profession is still given as ‘collier’ on their marriage certificate and as ‘coalminer hewer’ on Tommy’s formal registration of birth. Essentially the family income would appear to embrace his service pension – a substantial one according to his daughter-in-law – and what she might accrue from her own training as a dressmaker and needlewoman, skills she kept into her eighties, progressing from door-to-door transactions in Caerphilly to, much later, her own shop in Southampton. From her he undoubtedly acquired his determination and sense of ambition. In contrast, Jack Wright, Tommy’s cousin on his mother’s side, also recalls a lady ‘who would dither a lot. When she went into the kitchen, she always seemed to panic. “Oh dear! Oh dear!” A real ditherer.’ In other words her presence was not completely absent from Tommy’s act.

      Tommy was three when the family moved to Exeter. His doctors had condemned the damp, dank polluted air of the coal mining community and Gertrude took her husband and son to find refuge among her own people. They settled in an even tinier house in a similar terrace in a much narrower street, at 3 Fords Road, at the back of Haven Banks in the district of St Thomas, a modest distance across canal and river from the city centre. Cottage industry became the order of the day as ice-cream was added to sewing to supplement the family finances. The summer months would see the minuscule kitchen turned into an unlikely hive of confection and refrigeration. Tommy would either help or hinder his parents as they sold the delicious Devon dairy product through the front sash window of the small abode. There were times subsequently when it must have all come back to him: ‘I said “I’d like a cornet, please.” She said, “Hundreds and thousands?” I said “No. One will do me very nicely”.’ In time they acquired a van and peddled the delicacy around the fairgrounds, at race meetings, and on forays into the small resort towns, like Dawlish Warren. The Coopers became quickly accepted by the fairground folk, who took a shine to this curly headed cherub. They thought nothing of leaving him in the caravan

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