Irish eyes crying

BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE The Vagabond Lover: A Father-son Memoir By Garry O’connor Centrehouse Press £20 Oldie price £18.97 inc p&p Garry O’connor has written biographies of Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson, Paul Scofield and Sean O’casey, Peggy Ashcroft and Dame Maggie Teyte, who was his mother’s aunt and rumoured, actually, to be her mother. That oncerenowned soprano was both a majestic eccentric who would cry out when she dried during a performance – ‘Stop, I’ve swallowed my eyelashes’ – and a shrewd observer who took a grim view of O’connor’s father and the prime subject of his latest, most deeply felt biography. Cavan O’connor was, she declared, an ‘unhappy man’; this book shows that, despite and even because of his enormous success as a singer, he was very unhappy indeed.

Though you can still hear on Youtube the lilting Irish tenor he brought to ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’, Cavan is little remembered today. But, between 1920 and 1935, he made thousands of records and stage appearances. With the coming of radio, and then the war, he became as famous as Gracie Fields, getting 14 million listeners for his own Sunday lunchtime show.

He wasn’t always exactly a household name. In the 1930s, the BBC made him their ‘mystery singer’, the Vagabond Lover, under which guise he got mountains of fan mail, mainly from women entranced by his songs of idealised love. Papers ran speculative cartoons of this anonymous figure, surrounded by swooning girls on their knees. The Daily Express had a competition for the person who could most accurately describe him. The winner was not the correspondent who claimed that the trim, handsome Cavan was short, left-handed, with a cast in one eye and a passion for cowboy movies.

Cavan was born in Nottingham in 1899, son of an Irishman who disappeared when he was two, leaving him and his English mother in abject poverty. He scoured scrapheaps for tin waste to sell and, at nine, became a pitboy in a mine, then a barber’s assistant, then an apprentice in a printing shop, and then, pretending he was older than his 15 years, a volunteer soldier. Sent to wartime France, he witnessed horrors galore and, before being wounded and returned to

Blighty, had his teeth pulled out with builders’ pliers – making him, says Garry wryly, a singer who performed through dentures.

Back home and one of the myriad unemployed, he busked, sang in working men’s clubs, and somehow won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied to become an opera singer. But one tutor’s warning – that he risked becoming ‘a vocal prostitute’ – seems to have haunted him and helps to explain why, after years touring Britain, he became so envious, embittered and rancorous.

The downturn in his fortunes in the 1950s, along with a ruinous attack by the taxman, left him permanently raging: at the pop scene, at singers who sounded ‘like castrated hyenas’, at a supposedly ungrateful BBC, but, mostly, at his wife and the three sons he resented for the privileges he had bought them. There were violent, often drunken rows, in one of which Garry knocked him down. And yet Cavan’s much-abused wife, Rita, ‘mothered the perpetuation of his career, bolstered his emotions, propped him up with encouragement’ until he died aged 97, still angry, still disappointed, still practising the sentimental songs the public no longer wanted.

Quite a story, but not the book’s only one. As its subtitle indicates, this is also Garry’s biography of Garry: his childhood; his amours; the Cambridge years he spent performing alongside Ian Mckellen, Derek Jacobi and an aspiring actress and close friend called Margaret Drabble; the theatre criticism he wrote for the Financial Times; the encounters with people as different as Willie Donaldson, Harold Macmillan and Samuel Beckett; the books, primarily the Ashcroft biography, which provoked widespread outrage by revealing her promiscuity.

It’s finely written, enthralling stuff. It also comes with much earnest, anguished analysis, with Garry wondering how his impossible father shaped his own character, but also why that father became so impossible. Even in old age, he writes, Cavan was ‘the little boy abandoned and neglected, crying out for help, who had to put on a brave and aggressive face’. Whatever the truth, Garry admits to loving him and the voice he finds beautiful. ‘It still lifts my spirits,’ ends this frank but forgiving son, ‘and makes me cry.’