Ginger Geezer: The Life of Vivian Stanshall

Lucian Randall: dedicated to Gloria and David Randall

Chris Welch dedicates this to Marilyne and Steven

‘He was one of those men in whom nature runs riot; she endows him with not one or two but twenty talents, all of them far beyond the average and then withholds the one ingredient that might have brought them to perfection – a sense of balance and direction’

– Alan Moorehead on Sir Richard Burton, in The White Nile

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1 Teddy Boys Don’t Knit

2 So the Boys Got Together and Formed a Band…

3 The Dopal Show Will Appear in Person as Themselves

4 ‘Is Mrs Penguin at Home?’

5 Do Not Adjust Your Set

6 I’m Singing Just for You…Covered in Sequins

7 Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?

8 A Festival of Vulgarity

9 The Crackpot at the End of the Rainbow

10 I Don’t Know What I Want – but I Want It Now

11 The Fur-tongued Horror of a Kiss

12 Some Geezer, an Ooly Ginger Geezer

13 Boy in Darkness

14 Calypso to Colapso

15 Crank

16 The Land Where the Hoppity Oats

17 The Clocks are Baring Their Teeth

Discography

Notes

Permissions

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

1 Teddy Boys Don’t Knit

Early years

A journalist once asked Vivian Stanshall to feature in a newspaper article she was writing about a species known as the English eccentric. Sir John Betjeman was to be the senior representative and Vivian the younger example. Was he, she enquired, still ‘doing it’?1 Stanshall was astonished by the question. He didn’t do, he was simply being himself. On or off stage, he explored his absurdist vision of the world without pretence. Wherever he was, his outfits were equally flamboyant, his improvised routines often intricate and his physical presence captivated whoever was to hand, band mates, audiences or bewildered passers-by on the street. Anyone, as long as he could make a connection. His was not a persona applied for a performance and removed at the end of the evening along with the gold lamé suit, those disturbing ping-pong-ball eyes or the pink rubber ears.

Whether playing the effete, sequinned showman with the Bonzo Dog Band or later reporting from the shadows of the stagnant countryside at Rawlinson End, Vivian’s sharp observations on the inanities of life were as personal as they were funny and they came in an unending stream, he never switched off. In full flow, as he was on ‘The Intro and the Outro’, a favourite Bonzo Dog Band track, he delivered rapid-fire gags, here a seemingly never-ending roll call of increasingly unlikely musicians. ‘And looking very relaxed, Adolf Hitler on vibes.’ The image of the Fuhrer loosening up had an incongruity which was true of Vivian. He never relaxed; constant activity and new ideas bubbled and burst out of him, driving him, and everyone around him, to distraction. The interviewer who suggested this was a studied image was fortunate to have phoned rather than met him at his home. Vivian often made troublesome visitors feel uncomfortable by pausing mid-conversation to pointedly feed his collection of piranhas with freshly killed mice or to hint that one of his larger snakes was loose on the premises.

The journalist might have done better not to hunt for hidden tricks or mirrors and instead simply looked a little deeper into how one person could be inventive in so many fields. Or asked how that person could simultaneously be the upper-class squire and a ripe Cockney geezer and how it was that the murkier fringes of English normality came to be unflinchingly illuminated by an artist whose own character was formed in a part of traditional England. It was in a Great British seaside resort that Vivian spent most of his childhood.

Southend-on-Sea is a cheeky, presumptuous sort of place. For a start, it is some thirty-five miles to the east of London, rather than south. It is situated on the Thames Estuary; not quite the sea. It does have a famous funfair called the Kursaal and a mile-and-a-quarter pier, the world’s longest. Gaily festooning the seafront are the famous illuminations, signalling Southend’s status as an alternative to the drab, city streets of the capital. It certainly performed this function for many deprived London families in the 1950s. After a slow and tedious journey by steam train, thousands of eager holiday-makers spilled out of the station and headed for the front in search of dodgem cars, slot machines, deckchairs, hot dogs, jellied eels, cockles, tea and a game of bingo. The highlight was a trip on the pier railway or a heart-stopping ride on the water chute at the Kursaal.

London kids thought of ‘Sarfend’ as a sort of paradise, a Never Never Land where time stood still and everyone lived on a diet of sweets, candy and hot doughnuts. It was difficult to imagine anyone actually living and working in such a pleasurable environment.

The small but busy town grew into an urban sprawl during the post-war years. In the process it merged with its older neighbours like Leigh-on-Sea. In this cluttered coastal conurbation Vivian Stanshall grew up in the 1950s with his mother, father and younger brother. Leigh-on-Sea isn’t quite the romantic artist’s birthplace that Dublin, Paris or New York are, though actor Steven Berkoff was attracted to the area, featuring the mighty Kursaal amusement park in his early autobiographical play, East, as a place of escape and excitement. For a youngster who lived in the town all year round, it was the soulless ‘Concreton’ alluded to in Vivian’s later tales of Sir Henry Rawlinson. If nothing else, the years there inculcated in Vivian a love of seafood, English seaside resorts and Cockney slang, habits and tastes.

Leigh-on-Sea was actually the remnants of an old fishing and smuggling village, which was well established when upstart Southend was still a hamlet. It was a place where you could still find cockle boats and sheds, sailors’ inns and clapboard cottages, and where you might spot a lively red-haired child with a penchant for painting and drawing. He grew into a noisy tearaway teenager with a fondness for practical jokes. Throughout his childhood, Vivian later claimed, he was ‘hopelessly, innocently burdened with the ineluctable conviction that I was destined to be an artist and I really couldn’t help that’.2 His early interest in art came from his mother’s side of the family. His great-great-grandfather was what was then called a black-and-white artist. Much as the inescapable portrait painters crowd popular attractions like London’s Leicester Square today, he would wander the streets drawing quick sketches or portraits. Eileen Stanshall, Vivian’s mother, was dragged into art shops and plagued by her young son’s requests for art materials and paintings.

Mrs Stanshall was born Eileen Monica Prudence Wadeson in Kilburn, London, on 5 February 1911, and lived at 65 Salisbury Road in nearby Willesden Green. Her father was John Thomas Wadeson: ‘In my father’s family every boy child was called John Thomas or Thomas John, which was a tradition which went back many years. There were no fancy names in those days!’ she says. He was a fireman who served in the Royal Navy during World War One, following which he drove an ambulance during the great influenza epidemic that ravaged Europe in 1919. ‘Everybody was down with the ‘flu and dying of it,’ recalls Eileen. ‘They asked for volunteers to man the ambulances. I was about eight years old, and at school, and you’d see the ambulances passing all day long.’

The family were accommodated in a fireman’s house which seemed a place of comfort and security amid the crisis. Eileen recalls children and adults falling victim to the killer epidemic in every street in the neighbourhood, though her family was unscathed. She was the fourth child of Mary Beatrice (neé Douch), who had left a convent to be a nurse, just about the only work a girl could get in those days: ‘My mother and all the children were Catholics and Dad wasn’t. But if there were any dances on, he’d go with her to the church hall.’

Eileen went to school in Willesden Green and later went to work for the Address-O-Graph company, which made customized metal address plates for small businesses. She quickly grew tired of the endless clanking noise of the machinery. Aged eighteen she went for a job at a Catholic church furnishers called Burns, Oates and Washbourne, in the City, where she did office work. She remained single until her late twenties, when she went on a trip to a holiday camp at Caistor, near Great Yarmouth. Such holidays were very popular with young people as an alternative to staying in a staid old hotel; indeed, after World War One, the camps were built especially for teenage holiday-makers. The young man whose heart Eileen caught was born Vivian George Stanshall in 1911. By the time his future wife met him, he had a different name.

‘His mother liked “Vivian”,’ explains Eileen. ‘She had been reading a novel and the hero’s name was Vivian, so that’s what she called her baby. When he got older he thought it sounded sissy, so he wouldn’t tell anybody his real name.’ Vivian changed his name by deed poll to Victor and was known as Vic.

Vic chanced upon Eileen at one of the many dances at the camp and was immediately smitten. ‘I had bright ginger hair and I was always dancing,’ says Eileen. ‘I passed him as I went into the dance hall and he was by the doorway. I didn’t even look at him. When I sat down he came over for a dance. I wondered why he wanted me, because my friend Rose was a beautiful girl. But he never left me alone that whole evening. We had one dance after another. From then on until the day he died he never took his eyes off me.’ Vic was good-looking, six-foot-two and, although he wasn’t a Catholic like Eileen, he had a commanding manner that immediately impressed his sweetheart. He was very sporty and fit, with a twenty-inch neck and huge biceps. His passion was playing football and he had faultless manners. ‘He had a very nice voice. His mother made sure that all her family spoke nicely, because the old man didn’t. I could quite see her point of view. But Vic could mix with anybody and he was very well liked. Some men will put it on, but I noticed he always spoke in exactly the same way as the men he was dealing with.’

The relationship blossomed and Vic took his girlfriend to meet the family. His father, Thomas Henry Stanshall, was a music dealer who sold sheet music and 78s in a Walthamstow shop. The Stanshall name goes back to the Crusades, and has a number of meanings: a stone hall, a wall of stones or, going back to Saxon times, St Ann’s Hall. The Stanshalls are now a rare breed. Vic himself never looked into the history of the name, but his two sons – Vivian and Mark – took up the challenge and were bombarded with letters from Americans writing to say their name was Sandhill. They all wanted to know if they could be any relation and Vivian told his brother, ‘You answer those in case they want to breed with us.’

Vic had two sisters and was spoiled as the youngest and the only boy in the family, growing up to be the traditional sort of man who expected his tea ready for him when he got home from work. His mother was ‘a tall thin woman’, remembers Eileen, ‘who looked as though she needed a good meal.’ Vic’s dad made a less favourable impression on the girl: ‘Vic’s father was in the army and he was very strict. There was no love in that family, somehow.’ Vic emulated his father in being unemotional: he was happiest out with the lads and messing about with cars. ‘There are pictures of him with a souped-up Austin 7,’ says Mark Stanshall, ‘and he had a rather nice three-wheeler Morgan with pipes coming out of the side.’

Eileen and Vic were married, after a five-year courtship, at the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Kilburn on 19 June 1937. Vic was twenty-seven and his bride a year younger. The groom’s family were then living in Walthamstow, on the north-east outskirts of London. The newlyweds set up their home nearby; by this time Vic was a financial secretary, working his way up to become an office manager.

On the outbreak of war in September 1939, Vic Stanshall joined the RAF. He was too old to be a flyer and went into administration, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant. ‘He was having a lovely war because he was teaching the guys self-defence and playing football,’ says Mark Stanshall. ‘When they found he had some sort of brain, they put him into ciphers and he worked on decoding. God knows what he actually did. He wasn’t at Bletchley Park, but it was something similar.’ The family moved from London to avoid the Blitz and their first child was born in Shillingford, Oxford, on 21 March 1943.

The birth was a difficult one. Eileen was in labour for seventy-two hours and, as she told her son years later, ‘You nearly killed me, now that’s enough of that! [The nurse] brought me three babies, two with tiny little heads and you with a great big whopping head and ginger hair. I said, “Ooh, no, I’ll have one of those little ones.” She said, “I’m afraid you’re stuck with it.”’3

They named the boy Victor Anthony Stanshall, Victor being the ‘manly’ name his father had wanted himself. Eileen always used the boy’s second name, Anthony. When the child himself learned to speak, he found it difficult to say ‘Anthony’, which came out as ‘Narnie’. The pet name stuck, at least until Anthony was old enough to reject both his parents’ choices in favour of his father’s original name, Vivian. His older friends called him ‘Vic’ throughout his life, as did his first wife and his own son. His second wife, and the daughter he had with her, both called him Vivian. The one name by which he disliked being addressed was ‘Viv’, and he corrected people if they tried it. But to fans of the Bonzo Dog Band, he was always Vivian. It was not an act of rebellion to take his father’s rejected name, says Mark Stanshall, ‘it was affectation. He didn’t have another Vivian in mind. It just sounded good.’

It was not until September 1948 that the Stanshalls had another child, Mark. Perhaps because of the five-year age gap, the boys ‘didn’t mix and they were never really friendly’, in Eileen’s words. Mark Stanshall agrees. ‘There was always that jealousy thing. He was the first born and he and Ma had a fairly idyllic life during the war when they were living down in Shillingford.’ They lived in a bungalow in the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside.

‘The first two years of my childhood were wonderful,’ Vivian recalled. ‘Just me and Mum and me and my voices, evacuated from the East End.’4 He remembered how the local cows would wander into the kitchen and his mum, broom in hand, would shoo them out. At the bottom of the long garden were the upper reaches of the River Thames. Paddleboats sailed past, filled with soldiers on leave, taking their girlfriends on bitter-sweet farewell cruises. Young people called to each other across the river.

The London Blitz was past its peak, but the country still faced danger from the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s V1 and V2 revenge weapons. Shillingford did not escape the bombs, because it was between two air-force bases which were under fire, particularly at night. Young Anthony’s Oxfordshire adventure ceased when the war ended. It was a mixed blessing to have Dad back. Anthony later said that he could remember almost nothing from the age of three until he went to art school, perhaps an attempt to block out parental criticism. Ominously, his father came back with ideas. He decided he was officer class. This attitude manifested itself in his belief that it was important to speak ‘correctly’ in order to get on in life, a trait Eileen had first noticed in Vic’s mother. In turn, Anthony’s dad instilled the same into his family.

‘He was fearfully middle-middle-class,’ says Mark Stanshall. ‘We all spoke with this awfully posh accent.’ Commendable, perhaps, but totally out of place when the family moved away from the tranquillity of Oxford and back to the urban sprawl of London’s Walthamstow. For the rest of his life, Anthony would remember the incongruity of learning received pronunciation. ‘I didn’t even know any upper- or middle-class kids, but I was saddled with a posh accent that was totally unjustified by my background. I didn’t really know which side I was on.’5 If he was reticent in applying himself, he had the voice ‘thrashed’ into him by his father.6 Vivian began to split his persona between the tough talker of the streets and the polite conversationalist at home.

For all that, Walthamstow was not too bad. They had a corner house at 173 Grove Road. ‘We used to grow sunflowers out in the back garden and keep tortoises,’ says Mark Stanshall. In 1953, the family settled in Westcliffe, between Southend and Leigh-on-Sea. For a time they had a flat above a shoe shop in Westcliffe’s broad shopping street, at that time the smartest area of the town. They moved into a house in Beech Avenue seven years later. Anthony became more streetwise in Southend, still veering at will between the tough talk of the local lads and the Home Service, BBC tones his father required. Immediately after the war, Vic’s ambition was to become a chartered accountant. Eileen recalls that he worked near Fleet Street for a finance company involved in the South African diamond trade. As with so much else, he was never forthcoming to his family about his work.

‘No one knew what he did exactly but it was something to do with unit trusts,’ says Mark. He was not as grand a figure in the City as he made out, never inviting Eileen up to London to meet his partners. Ex-officer Stanshall (now balding, like all the male Stanshalls) was always smartly dressed when he went to work. He took plastic Paca-Macs for added protection, which Mark remembers ‘we always thought were ridiculous’.

Anthony was both impressed and intimidated by the spectacle. ‘He polished his shoes so shiny that when you looked down you could see all the way up to his suspenders – or up skirts, if you fancied it. And then he covered his shoes with protective rubber galoshes and with bowler hat rammed tight and brolly grasped, he would every morning roller-skate from Walthamstow to the City.’7 A wonderful image, this Stanshallian flight of fancy has roots in reality, as his mother confirms: ‘A lot of people did roller-skate during the bus strikes. He might have tried it once or twice. I remember there used to be loads of strikes even when I worked in London and I used to thumb a lift to the office. It was quite fun. Everybody was doing it.’ Mr Stanshall, however was unaware of any humorous aspect to the ritual of work. Like many of his generation, he was not adept at handling emotions of any kind. Anthony was ‘downright terrified’ of his father and would continue to be so, even after the man’s death almost forty years later. The boy keenly felt the lack of any conspicuous display of affection. Eileen is quite sure that his father loved him. ‘A lot of men are like that. They love the babies,’ she said, ‘but when they get to be boys and they see the wives giving all their time to them, they get a bit jealous. There’s no denying; they just do. And then they lose interest in the children.’8 Mark was more accepting of his father. ‘I didn’t have a conversation with him myself,’ he says, ‘but I suppose he was good because he always put the food on the table for us.’ He shared one of his father’s few interests, football. With father a season ticket holder at Arsenal, six-year-old Mark would be taken along to see the side play.

It was only years afterwards that Anthony began to understand his father a little better: ‘He’s quite remarkable in his respect for authority, which was good for me because I think that is lacking now. He is upright and righteous and has an inflexibility of behaviour which borders on the old Catholic Church…[and] a set of values with which, for the most part, I completely disagree, but it is something I can measure myself against and I think that it is a sad thing that most children don’t have that sort of rigidity.’9 Decency, though, meant little without affection, and the boy felt that everything he did was a disappointment to his father. Vic wanted his son to be a footballer, but Anthony showed no interest in the game. He relished other sporting challenges. Every year there was a seven-mile swim from the pier at Southend to the cockle sheds of Leigh-on-Sea. Sixty hopefuls set out to brave the waters and Anthony was among the dozen or so swimmers who finished. Two-thirds were knocked out by a severe underwater current. He was also rather fond of throwing the javelin, and would go on to have a lifelong interest in sharp, pointy weaponry, often to the alarm of his friends and colleagues.

Anthony’s relationship with his mother was uncomplicated. Eileen adored him, providing support whenever he faced a crisis in his life: ‘Mark was much more independent,’ says Eileen, ‘but Anthony had to have his mother on the end of the phone.’ As a child, Anthony was, he admitted himself, ‘freakishly precocious’, speaking from the age of five months. In a sweet shop Eileen explained to the owner that her son always took a long time to choose what to have. ‘I doesn’t,’ Anthony piped up. The man looked at mother and child and said, ‘How old did you say he was?’ By the age of ten months, Anthony later claimed, he was able to hold a conversation. Such was his energy, baby Anthony was strapped into his pram, and such was his loathing of doing nothing that the very smell and feel of the leatherette pram would stay with him for the rest of his life. He hated restraint: ‘We had a dining room and a lounge at Walthamstow and he’d get out of his playpen and walk into the hall, round to the kitchen then back in again,’ adds Eileen. ‘He just wanted me to see he could do it.’

On holiday in Hastings as a toddler, he caught the attention of a seafront clairvoyant, who told his mother that the child would either be an actor or an admiral. Eileen asked the psychic how on earth she could tell. ‘I got the vibes,’ she was informed. ‘Anthony would later joke that the response was, ‘Your pram is sinking and he’s saluting as it goes down.’10 Wherever these mystical portents came from, they identified part of his career with a fair degree of accuracy. As for the nautical part, he joined the Merchant Navy and later both owned a houseboat and settled on a converted ship.

Like most children, Anthony was first and foremost a rascal, and Eileen regularly fended off irate neighbours complaining that the boy was running wild in their gardens. ‘He was always up to something and always thinking about something,’ laughs Eileen. There was much opportunity for messing around on the seafront. ‘I used to kick sandcastles over when I was a kid. Horrible boy,’ he later said. ‘On the other hand, I suppose that’s the closest most people are going to come to sculpture in their lives. Apart from their haircuts.’11

Anthony was also creative, with a passion for music. Anthony just had music in him,’ says his mother. ‘He was always playing something and my father was like that. I had two brothers who were musical and just like Anthony they could pick up an instrument and get a tune out of it. My brother Tom could play the violin. My mother used to encourage music in the family and my father played an instrument as well.’ Mischief and music coincided in young Anthony. The front room at Beech Avenue, a spacious, semi-detached house, was separated from the street by a forecourt and a hedge. The boy sat in the front room with the biggest trombone he could find. He lay in wait for passers-by and walloped them with the trombone’s slide.