Why being teeny was a HUGE problem when it came to girls!
FOR 5ft 1in comedy giant Ronnie Corbett, his lack of inches were a blessing, and a curse. On Saturday, in the first excerpt from his autobiography, we heard how Corbett — who died last week aged 85 — put his height to brilliant use in his career, including his golden years with Ronnie Barker. Here, the star, who found love with his wife of almost 50 years, the statuesque Anne Hart, tells how as a boy he feared the world would laugh if he was seen with a taller girl . . .
WHEn I was about 14 years old my Aunt nell, who was a worldclass worrier, paid two guineas — a whopping £2.10 in decimal money — to send away for a course for me called How To Become Taller. I suppose she and my mother, Anne, had been fretting for years about my lack of height. I can’t say I ever remember being particularly troubled by it, but then I took after my dad, William Corbett, who was 5ft 6in and rarely worried about a thing.
Aunt nell’s two-guinea investment purchased a few glossy white sheets of paper, with instructions printed in blue, explaining that the secret of increasing one’s stature lay in positive thinking combined with stretching exercises. I had to recite: ‘Every day and in every way I’m getting taller and taller.’ Which I wasn’t.
The exercises made me stretch up the bedroom wall, trying to reach pin-marks, while Mum and Aunt nell urged me on, willing me to grow. But even under the influence of their concentrated thoughtwaves, I remained the same size, and all we got for two guineas were some pinholes in the bedroom wall.
Mum took me to see a specialist, who said there was nothing to worry about — I was just a tinier sort of person. I’ll always be grateful he didn’t recommend any medical treatment because, apart from the dangers, he might have ruined my career.
I never had a hard time at school because of my height, which surprises me now when I remember how cruel we could be as schoolchildren.
The fishmonger’s son was always called Stinky or Fishy, and another lad called Jimmy, who must have been dyslexic, was teased rotten whenever it was his turn to stand up in class and read. We hugged ourselves with glee as he struggled over every word — what awful little beasts we were.
But I never suffered from being small, until I discovered girls. Then I did get self-conscious. I wasn’t just worried that women would reject me — I thought the whole world would laugh. Because, let’s face it, there is something inherently funny about a little man with a taller lady.
The real difficulties started at the school dances. We used to sit round the walls of the school gymnasium while the band played, and I developed a method for gauging a girl’s height before she stood up.
If, while she was still sitting on the floor, her shoulder was as high as the lower parallel bar, I knew there was every chance that, when she stood up, I’d be on eye level with her collarbone. This I wanted to avoid at all costs.
Unfortunately, my method didn’t always work. I discovered I had to make allowances for what I called ‘the slump factor’: it was important, when making mental measurements, to observe whether the young lady was sitting up straight.
Still, I kept going to dances, and I kept asking girls to dance. Maybe those positive thinking lessons did some good after all.
Whether I was small when I was born in the Simpson Memorial Hospital — opposite the fire station in Edinburgh — in 1930, I don’t know. To tell the truth, I don’t remember much about that, though my mother always did: the doctor left a swab inside her.
This was mentioned from time to time as I grew up, as if it was almost my fault . . . which was not really fair, as I was occupied at the time, being held upside down by my ankles and having my bottom slapped.
My first real memory is a rather traumatic one, of nearly drowning at the age of three in a paddling pool in St Andrews near the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. I can still recall the sense of panic and see all that glittery, shiny water with me underneath. When you’re three years old, you don’t have much of a life to flash before your eyes, so it’s lucky my mum was there to haul me out.
It was my dad who saved me on the West Sands, when someone gave me a big boiled sweet, the sort with a strong fruity flavour, and I swallowed it whole. It got stuck in my throat and Dad had to lift me up by my legs like a rabbit and hold me upside-down, slapping my back till I coughed it up.
My dad was a baker, and the sweet, warm aroma of baking bread wafted through the whole of my childhood. Sunday evenings were the best time of the week, because that was when I’d go with him to the bakehouse to help with the ‘spongeing’ or preparing the doughs, which would then be left to stand overnight.
The bakehouse was a paradise filled with sweet treasures. There was a loft full of glace cherries, sultanas, muscatels, walnuts and tubs of butter and demerara sugar. I was allowed to scoff all the cherries I wanted, and to snaffle a wee bit of marzipan or frangipane as well.
There were always three or four bakery cats, and Dad would take me to see the kittens in the corner of the loft, curled up in an old sultana basket with some jute sacking.
There was nothing he couldn’t turn his hand to — cherry cakes, millefeuille pastry, rough puff pastry, chocolate and Madeira cakes: I can picture him now preparing individual sponges to be baked in small metal cups, as he scooped just the right amount of mixture from the bowl and flicked it into each cup from six inches away. I used to marvel at the elegance and economy of his movements.
Dad’s career ended sadly, though. He rose to be the head baker of all Lothian schools, overseeing school dinners for thousands of children — and then the council reorganised the service and my father was made redundant. He was offered a job as a caretaker. It was slave labour for a man of his skills.
In the end, he became so disillusioned he destroyed his recipe books. There were 28 of them, a record of all he had learned in his career, written up in his own neat hand — and he ripped them up and burned them.
To show this much emotion, he must have felt terribly bitter. He was a reticent man who tended to repress his feelings. We never really talked, for instance, about his experiences in World War I, when he had lied about his age to enlist and fought on the Somme as a boy of sixteen-and-a-half.
But he loved to talk about nothing. He was what we called in Edinburgh a ‘bletherer’, a man who saw the funny side of the ordinary troubles in life and who believed street corners were made for him to stand on, passing the time of day. I must have
I tried to avoid chatting up the tall ones
I got the bug playing drag at 16 in panto
inherited my gift of the gab from him. I remember Dad’s father too, a retired coalman who lived in a tenement in the tough Tynecastle district of Edinburgh, with gas-lit stairs and no bathroom.
I won’t forget the smell of tomcats on the cold gritty stairs, or ‘entries’ as we called them, and the sight of women pushing their week’s washing in a pram to the ‘steamie’, or laundry.
My grandfather was called Walter, and mostly he seemed to sit by the fire being plied with sandwiches and tea, or paring slivers with a penknife off a solid block of tobacco, the colour of molasses, which he smoked in a pipe with a metal cap on the bowl.
He didn’t say much, but then his mouth was always busy with tea, pipe or sandwiches.
Nobody ever said anything but there was, I suspect, a feeling in the family that Mum’s side was a bit more genteel. Her father, James, was a London policeman, who had retired due to ill health, and her mother, Margaret, was a cook-housekeeper in a grand house in Belgravia.
Margaret loved the theatre and all the glamour of the West End, and she would regularly go and queue for the cheap seats at the box office. I must have got my love of greasepaint from her.
Mum was a petite, dark woman with a pretty face and a love of poetry. Before her marriage, she worked in the head office of John Menzies the bookseller, on the switchboard and later in accounts. As I said, a little bit more genteel. She went to Boroughmuir School with the actor Alastair Sim, whose father was a kilt-maker on the Lothian Road: Mum used to point it out every time we passed his shop.
Mum’s sister, Nell, had no children, and treated me and my brother and sister almost as her own. She had been married once, for a year, but we didn’t speak about that.
Aunt Nell was a deeply affectionate soul with pet-names for us all: I was her ‘little Rodie-Podie’. She was starstruck, too — one evening she rushed home very excited because at Jenners, the outfitters shop where she worked, the great songwriter Ivor Novello had come in to buy some cashmere.
I enjoyed, as I hope you have gathered, a happy childhood . . . unencumbered by academic excellence, perhaps, but full of fun.
We weren’t well-off, yet we always managed a summer holiday. Our luggage would be packed into trunks and roped up ten days beforehand. On the day of departure, we took a taxi to the station — the only taxi we took all year.
But when I was eight, the war began, and shortly after that I was evacuated: my mother took us to the Borders, where we lived for six weeks on a farm, in the gamekeeper’s cottage. She hated it and within six weeks we were back in Edinburgh, carrying our gasmasks in cardboard boxes and with identification labels still flapping on our coats.
The war made a performer of me. The neighbours put on a concert in aid of the Spitfire Fund, raising money to build warplanes, and I sang a song as Christopher Robin from the Winnie the Pooh tales, wrapped in a dressing-gown with a candle in my hand while standing on the roof of the air raid shelter. I like to think I helped undermine German morale.
The performance that changed my life, though, came when I was 16, in the St Catherine- in- the- Grange church youth club production of Babes In The Wood. I played the wicked aunt, and loved it. Suddenly, instead of being the boy who went to dances but hung back and made calculations, I was thrust centre-stage . . . and it felt like home.
I put everything into that role. Never had the wicked aunt been so villainous and so droll. This must have been noticeable in rehearsals, because the minister, a kindly man named Tom Maxwell, came round to our house and told my parents ‘Little Ron is being remarkable’.
The feeling was stronger than simply being stage- struck. I can honestly say it was a vocation. So it was that, not long after the end of the war, aged 17, I left school with seven Higher Leaving Certificates, passed the Civil Service clerical officer’s exam, and joined the Ministry of Agriculture.
This was not, I knew, the most direct route into the theatre. But I knew that me in regular employment would stop my mother worrying, and anyway I thought it wouldn’t be for long: National Service would be my escape route.
In the event, I very nearly didn’t get into the Armed Services. It was nothing to do with my height — the RAF doctor looked me up and down and diagnosed a ‘deviated septum’ which was a fancy way of saying ‘blocked nose’.
I was horrified. If he didn’t let me in, everyone would think it was because I was too short. So I pleaded and, to my huge relief, I found myself being sent to RAF Padgate near Warrington, to be issued with boots and uniform. It was the first time I’d been away from home on my own.
Then we were sent to Weeton in Lancashire, to study squarebashing or parade ground drill. Perhaps because he thought I was too small to frighten the children,
our flight sergeant used to have me do babysitting when he and his wife went out for the night. I didn’t mind: they’d leave me sausages, an egg and three slices of bread and butter, and I sat in their kitchen writing letters home.
It was good training for World War Three as well — if the Russians ever attacked, I’d be part of the Royal Corps of Babysitters, singing lullabies at them. I applied for a commission and passed out as a pilot officer, posted to Bircham Newton in Norfolk. I never actually flew, except for a couple of occasions when a fellow officer took me up for a jaunt in a Tiger Moth biplane.
Still, I liked being an officer: we were near the Royal Estate and often dined in the mess on pheasants from Sandringham shoots.
My enthusiasm for the stage had not waned, though. Every leave was spent in a spree of theatre visits — I vividly remember seeing Danny Kaye at the London Palladium in 1949, and having the brass neck to phone his hotel later, asking to be put through to his room.
I only wanted to say what a marvellous show it had been, but I found myself talking to a charming man with an American accent, possibly Danny’s manager, and asking about one of his comic songs. This fellow told me the history of the number, and I reeled away afterwards with all my ambitions fortified.
With a group of fellow officers, I was a regular cinemagoer too. One of them was Edward Hardwicke, who came from a grand theatre family and who went on to star, as Dr Watson, in The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes on ITV. Edward had a car, an Austin Ruby Seven called Charlie, and we’d pile into it on cinema nights.
All these experiences helped me refine what I wanted from a showbiz career. I wasn’t a leading man like Clark Gable, or an all-rounder like Danny Kaye. And I was beginning to see that theatre was subject to fads and fashions, which could make stardom highly unpredictable.
But there was one kind of acting that bestowed complete independence, the freedom to have the audience all to yourself. You simply stood up and talked to people. I was going to be a comedian.
adapted from High Hopes: My autobiography by Ronnie Corbett (ebury, £7.99). © Ronnie Corbett 2000. to pre-order a copy, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. p&p is free on orders over £12.