A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Read online

  St Alban’s was, and still is, a huge old church modelled on Rheims Cathedral. At the time of Noël’s birth it had been in Teddington for about half a century and seemed to be almost totally supported, in the choir at least, by members of his father’s family which was large and deeply musical. Noël’s paternal grandfather had been the organist at the Crystal Palace and his Uncle Jim, in the years before he took almost exclusively to the bottle, was the organist at St Alban’s except for the month of August when every year he used to travel to Paris and deputize for Guilmant at the organ of Notre Dame. Noël’s father worked as a salesman for Metzler’s during the week (Sir Henry Wood, founder of the promenade concerts, remembered ‘very enjoyable times in Metzler’s going through the marvellous Mustel organs that they used to sell, and no one ever displayed them with such a wonderful technique as did Arthur Coward’) and every Sunday he was to be found in the St Alban’s church choir together with his brothers Randolph, Walter and Percy and his sisters Hilda, Myrrha, Ida and Nellie. Later in life Aunt Hilda, who had sung most of the solos, moved about half a dozen miles north-west and became known locally as the Twickenham Nightingale.

  Noël’s parents had actually met during choir practice in the church where they both sang loudly and frequently, and a prolonged courtship was carried out under the raised eyebrows of the local vicar, the Reverend F. Leith Boyd, who used to preach hell-fire sermons at the surprised old ladies of his congregation until he mellowed enough to become vicar of St Paul’s in Knightsbridge. At about this time, shortly before their marriage, Noël’s mother and father were also to be seen together in a number of amateur theatricals, though these were apparently restricted to the town hall in Teddington.

  In 1892, soon after their marriage at St Alban’s, the Cowards had a son whom they christened Russell. He lived only until he was six, when he died of spinal meningitis. Mrs Coward remained convinced however throughout her long life that Russell had died because as a baby she had had him inoculated; this conviction made her determined never to allow herself or any of her family to be vaccinated against anything ever again, a determination that remained unshakeable even when her third son, Eric, became a tea-planter in Ceylon and laid himself open to every tropical disease imaginable, one of which eventually killed him.

  A year and a half after Russell’s death, while the Cowards were still living at Waldegrave Road in Teddington, they had a second son; born within ten days of Christmas, he was christened Noël and, much to his subsequent fury, given the middle name of Peirce after an old school-friend of his mother’s who had been called Miss Peirce.

  One of the family’s neighbours in Teddington at that time was R. D. Blackmore, the author of Lorna Doone; asked by Mrs Coward to be one of Noël’s godfathers, he declined on the grounds that Russell had been his godson and that therefore his godparenthood might be unlucky.

  Coward’s early memories seem inextricably bound up with the church in Teddington where his parents met, and where he was christened on February 10th 1900. He is reputed to have behaved impeccably at the font, though there was a nasty ecclesiastical scene about two years later when the young Master had to be forcibly restrained from dancing in one of the aisles.

  At the time of Noël’s birth Sir Henry Irving, then beyond doubt the head of the acting profession, was on tour in America. In his absence, Frank Benson was at the Lyceum doing a Shakespeare season with a company that included Henry Ainley and Harcourt Williams. It was still the high summer of the actor-managers: Beerbohm Tree was at Her Majesty’s, playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Julia Neilson as Oberon; Charles Wyndham had just opened a theatre bearing his own name in the Charing Cross Road, and George Alexander was giving his Rupert of Hentzau at the St James’s. Melodramas were at the beginning of a slow decline, though Drury Lane still had one called The Price of Peace, which offered its spectacle-crazed audiences scenes in Battersea Park, an ice-skating rink, and, amazingly, the terrace at the House of Commons.

  In general revivals were preferred to new plays, by actors and audiences alike; W. S. Gilbert called the English dramatists of his time ‘steady and stolidy’, and the critic J. T. Grein noted that ‘so long as Shakespeare draws the crowd ... we need not bewail the poverty of our contemporary drama’, though in fact both Bernard Shaw and, in Ireland, W. B. Yeats were writing prolifically by 1900.

  Noël Coward spent the first five years of his life in Teddington, during which time electric trams appeared in the High Street, the village grew enormously, and his own family there diminished considerably: most of the uncles and aunts followed Hilda’s example and moved away, some rather further than Twickenham. Uncle Percy actually moved as far as Australia, having married a professional pianist whom he abandoned on arrival there. In 1905 what was left of the Coward family in Teddington – Noël himself, his parents and a devoted maid called Emma who was inclined to hum the works of Gilbert and Sullivan through her teeth – found they could no longer afford to live there; reluctantly, having rejected the idea of emigrating to join Uncle Percy in Australia because they couldn’t raise the fares, they moved a few miles away to a small villa half-way down Lenham Road in Sutton; but many years later Noël recaptured at least some of his memories of Teddington in a nostalgic poem called ‘Personal Reminiscence’:

  I cannot remember

  I cannot remember

  The house where I was born

  But I know it was in Waldegrave Road

  Teddington, Middlesex

  Not far from the border of Surrey

  An unpretentious abode

  Which, I believe,

  Economy forced us to leave

  In rather a hurry.

  But I can remember my grandmother’s Indian shawl

  Which, although exotic to behold,

  Felt cold.

  Then there was a framed photograph in the hall

  Of my father wearing a Norfolk jacket,

  Holding a bicycle and a tennis racquet

  And leaning against a wall

  Looking tenacious and distinctly grim

  As though he feared they’d be whisked away from him.

  I can also remember with repulsive clarity

  Appearing at a concert in aid of charity

  At which I sang, not the ‘Green Hill Far Away’, that you know

  But the one by Gounod.

  I remember a paper-weight, made of quartz

  And a sombre Gustave Doré engraving

  Illustrating the ‘Book of Revelations’

  Which, I am told, upset my vibrations.

  I remember too a most peculiar craving

  For ‘Liquorice All-Sorts’.

  Then there was a song, ‘Oh that we two were Maying’

  And my uncle, who later took to the bottle, playing

  And playing very well

  An organ called the ‘Mustel’.

  In the Autumn quietness of suburban roads

  And seeing the Winter river flooding

  And swirling over the tow-path by the lock.

  I remember my cousin Doris in a party frock

  With ‘broderie anglaise’ at the neck and sleeves

  And being allowed to stir the Christmas pudding

  On long ago, enchanted Christmas Eves.

  By the time the family moved across the Surrey border to Sutton, where their villa had a coloured glass front door and little else to recommend it, Noël’s father (who had begun his career as a ‘corresponding clerk’ and been so described on Noël’s baptism register) had stopped selling pianos for Metzler’s and was now working for Payne’s, a newer but less successful piano firm, as a travelling salesman. On one occasion his travels took him as far as Naples, which to some extent made up for an otherwise monotonous round of calls. Soon after the family had settled themselves in Surrey, Noël’s brother Eric was born; Noël remembers him at that early age as bright red and singularly unattractive. Other outstanding moments of his early life in Sutton include a nasty encounter with Miss Willin
gton, the headmistress of the local school, whom Noël bit, and an even nastier one with a neighbouring bull-terrier, who bit Noël. His first term at a day school did, however, lead to Coward’s appearance at an end of term concert at the Public Hall in Sutton on July 23rd 1907, when he gave the assembled parents a rendering of ‘Coo’ from Lionel Monckton’s musical A Country Girl. He came fifteenth on the bill, and followed it with a sickly number about birds and trees and smiling fields called ‘Time Flies’.

  The school concert was a qualified success, and a few months later Coward was to be found giving his all in public once again, this time by the sea at Bognor where during the family’s summer holiday he won first prize and a rather nasty box of chocolates for singing ‘Come along with me to the Zoo, Dear’ in a competition organized on the beach by Uncle George’s Concert Party, even though this particular Uncle was no relation.

  In 1908 the Cowards moved again; this time to Number 70, Prince of Wales Mansions, overlooking Battersea Park, where they stayed until the Spring of 1913. In these years the family’s money troubles got considerably worse and they lived with what Ruth Gordon has called ‘the dark brown taste of poverty’ in their mouths. Noël’s father’s income from the piano firm was very small indeed, so once installed in Battersea his mother decided to follow the example of Aunt Ida who had by now set up a boarding house near Victoria Station in Ebury Street. Thus the Battersea household was soon joined by two paying guests, a Mr Baker and a Mr Denston, who dressed for dinner and were fond of musical soirées afterwards. ‘The circumstances of my early life,’ wrote Noël later, ‘were liable to degenerate into refined gentility unless carefully watched.’

  But in spite of the genteel poverty surrounding it, Noël’s childhood was cast in the classic theatrical mould; the precocious son of a doting mother, by the time he was eight he was already in proud possession of a toy theatre and looking forward to annual visits to the real theatres that were no longer so very far from his home. He used to save his pocket money and go once a week to see Gertie Millar in The Quaker Girl at the Adelphi; she possessed a magic that Noël was never to forget. For hours he would wait outside the stage door in the hope of seeing her, and once she even gave him some flowers from a bouquet which he kept for years reverently pressed in a bound volume of Chums.

  In public, he was the kind of child who would suddenly burst into unexplained howls of fury, leaving passers-by with the distinct impression that his doting mother was ill-treating him. But left to himself, he was not too precocious to make a few friends around the neighbourhood, some of whom initiated him in the basic doorbell game. In Noël’s case, however, it was played with a difference; instead of ringing the bell and then running away, he would ring it and then stand there, smiling seraphically but saying nothing, while a distraught housewife tried to find out what he wanted.

  One of the joys of living at the top of a large number of flats was that the people who lived below used to leave prams on the landings outside their front doors. These could then be tied by Noël to their doorknockers, so that when the unfortunate lady of the house opened her front door from the inside, her pram came at her. Living in the next door flat to Noël at this time was an infant James Cameron who remembers that his family’s enthusiasm for the ‘gifted boy’ across the landing waned somewhat after Noël tried to tip a pram with Cameron in it down the landing stairs.

  In the meantime, Uncle Walter had gone on to become organist at the Chapel Royal in St James’s; and soon after his brother’s family moved to Battersea it was decided that his nephew should go to the Chapel Royal School then run in Clapham by Mr Claud Selfe who had a passion for making his boys swing Indian clubs and pursue other manly sports. The idea was that Noël should try for a place in the choir when he was old enough, but this did not entirely appeal to Coward himself who didn’t much like the look of the other choirboys; even at the age of nine he was alert enough to realize that he might find more exciting things to do with his early life than spend it singing sacred music. But he joined the school, and when the day came for his first audition, he did his best; dressed in an Eton suit he gave a comprehensive if overacted version of Gounod’s ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’. Dr Alcock, the choirmaster, was not impressed. He told Mrs Coward that her boy was far too young, that though she insisted Noël’s voice had once moved the ex-Queen of Portugal to tears it really wasn’t quite good enough for the Chapel Royal, and that he hadn’t got a vacancy in any case. Mrs Coward, with the superb loyalty and dauntless pride of all theatrical mothers in time of crisis, rapidly overcame her disappointment and decided that Noël’s failure had in fact been a blessing in disguise. Dr Alcock, she said, was obviously silly and didn’t know a good voice when he heard one; moreover, she added that in her opinion, the whole choir looked exceedingly common, including Uncle Walter.

  During the first decade of this century, the years when Coward was growing up in suburban London, the theatre was going through a quiet revolution. No longer were the actors in charge; Irving’s influence was on the decline (he died a few hours after a performance of Becket at Bradford, on October 13th 1905) and instead these were the years of the writers – of such men as Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, John Galsworthy, Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones and, in Ireland, J. M. Synge. The theatre of ideas, which had begun with translations of Ibsen in the 1890’s, was carried forward by the playwrights of the 1900’s, though on the other side of the footlights Beerbohm Tree, George Alexander, Charles Wyndham and Seymour Hicks preserved the status quo of what J. C. Trewin has called the ‘Theatre Theatrical’ of the time. Tree had by now succeeded to the mantle of Irving in spite of the fact that his Hamlet was described by W. S. Gilbert as ‘funny, without being vulgar’.

  In these years, for the first time, the theatre in this country acquired a sort of social respectability as well as a social conscience. In 1895 Queen Victoria had given Irving the first theatrical knighthood ever, but it was her son Edward VII who finally set a seal of official (or at least royal) approval on the stage; between his accession in 1902 and his death in 1910 he went to a hundred and forty London productions, and organized almost thirty command performances at Sandringham or Windsor Castle. During his brief reign London saw six new plays by Pinero, ten by Henry Arthur Jones and almost twenty by Bernard Shaw, who in 1900 had sworn ‘never again will I cross the threshold of a theatre – that subject is exhausted and so am I’.

  When Noël Coward was one, Sarah Bernhardt was fifty-six and playing in L’Aiglon at Her Majesty’s; when he was three, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin was founded and Granville Barker published his plans for a National Theatre; when he was four, the Vedrenne-Barker seasons started at the Royal Court, Synge wrote Riders to the Sea, Beerbohm Tree founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Barrie wrote Peter Pan; when he was five, London’s first permanent cinema was opened, Henry Irving died, Shaw wrote Man and Superman, Ellen Terry’s son, Gordon Craig, published his Art of the Theatre and Pinero wrote His House in Order; when he was six, the modern theatre’s first attack on social injustice was made by Galsworthy in The Silver Box, Henrik Ibsen died, and Gerald du Maurier played ‘Raffles’; when he was seven, The Merry Widow opened at Daly’s, Miss Horniman opened the first repertory theatre in Manchester and W. S. Gilbert was knighted; when he was eight, there were four plays by Somerset Maugham running in the West End, a record that Coward himself was to equal with three plays and a revue in 1925.

  Soon after his defeat at the Chapel Royal choir audition, Coward got his first taste of life in the country. His mother, bored with Battersea and depressed by the kind of genteel poverty in which the family were living, decided to let the flat for six months; the lodgers went to lodge elsewhere and Noël and Eric were sent to stay with their grandmother and aunts Vida and Borby in Southsea while their parents looked around Hampshire for a cottage. Coward’s memories here are of the grey warships that lay at anchor off Spithead, the dawning of his lifelong devotion to the navy, and of a sort of desolation that e
ven at the age of nine he seems to have sensed around Southsea. In the meantime Mrs Coward found a cottage at Meon, near Tichfield in Hampshire, and it was there that the family spent the next six months while an operatic lady called Mrs Davis rented the flat at Battersea.

  Bay Tree Cottage in Meon was very small indeed, possessed of a thatched roof and an outside lavatory at the end of the garden which a local goat had to be discouraged from using. While the Cowards were coping with country life for the first time, the German Emperor paid a State Visit to Britain, in celebration of which all the battleships in the nearby Solent were lit up and Noël’s family had a moonlight picnic with fireworks on the cliffs. The rest of their stay in Hampshire was uneventful, except for one occasion when Noël and his mother were nearly caught by their landlord while stealing his plums, and another when Noël wrote a brief drama which unwisely he decided to have acted by three little girls, sisters, who were holidaying nearby. They failed to share his enthusiasm for the piece, and during the performance (staged in a bell tent with evergreens for scenery) were prone to drying up and then giggling inanely. Afterwards the indignant playwright hit one of them over the head with a wooden spade and the whole thing deteriorated into a row between the parents concerned. One of the three girls, Joan Spurgin, never forgot the drama; Noël made her and her two sisters Joyce and Nancy, forego their combined pocket money – all of sixpence – with which he then bicycled two miles into Tichfield to buy ribbon for their various disguises. When they weren’t actually rehearsing (and before the row which put an abrupt end to their friendship), the girls took Noël on endless picnics at which he taught them to make and, indeed, to consume nasturtium leaf sandwiches followed by stinging nettle tea. Joan remembers ‘a friendly and likeable boy who always wanted things done his way, but whose charm made one want to please him’.