Revealed: the secret .. father of Sir Lenny Henry
The much-loved comic caused a sensation when he said he wasn’t brought up by his real dad. Now the MoS has found the truth about him – amid a saga spanning six decades...
THE smile he flashed for family snaps is unmistakable, and so was the twinkle-eyed charm he had, the larger-than-life personality and booming laugh. Yet when Albert Green died 11 years ago, he took to his grave a secret about one of the country’s best-known entertainers.
Today that grave is unloved. A few artificial flowers, faded by years of sun and rain, lie forlornly amid the weeds sprouting through the gravel of a cemetery in the West Midlands.
Indeed, the decaying headstone would barely merit a second glance – but for the fact that it marks the last resting place of the real-life father of comedian and actor Sir Lenny Henry.
He intrigued his millions of fans when, just a few weeks ago, he disclosed that the man who brought him up as his own son, Winston Henry, was not his biological father. The news caused a minor sensation. And he spoke about the discovery when he dramatised his early life in Danny And The Human Zoo, a ‘fantasy memoir’, for the BBC. He said: ‘I wanted to write about the way we grew up and my family and what it was like.’
Yet the comedian and actor remained silent about the true identity of his biological father – and it has remained a mystery, until now.
The Mail on Sunday has established that Lenny, 57, was the product of a passionate and illicit love affair between Albert, known to his friends as Bertie, and Lenny’s Jamaican-born mother Winnie – a married mother of four at the time.
Their forbidden love, which lasted several years, eventually foundered, and decades later Bertie would die alone, in near poverty.
The story begins in Lenny’s native Dudley in 1957. Winnie, then 32, had arrived there alone, leaving behind her husband, two sons and two daughters in the Caribbean with the plan that she would send for her family once she was settled.
She found work as a cook in a hospital and moved into shared lodgings at 103 Wellington Road, Dudley, a rambling and dilapidated house that was later knocked down to make space for a leisure centre.
It was there that she was introduced to 30-year-old Albert Augustus Green, who had come to industrial Dudley from Jamaica a few years earlier. Thrown together by loneliness and homesickness, they began an affair.
Another tenant at the shared house was a then 19-year-old fellow Jamaican, Vince Holness.
‘Winnie used to throw the best parties,’ Mr Holness recalled. ‘We’d have a dance because we had nowhere else to go and could eat as much as we wanted.
‘Winnie liked a drink and she’d go to the bookies for a bet, though later she became a Christian and gave both up. Winnie and Bertie were both good friends of mine. Lenny’s mother was over 6ft, a big woman. We used to call her Big Winnie. She was a nice lady.
‘And Bertie was a gentleman. He was a right handsome man and well dressed. After a while, Winnie moved out and that’s when she had Lenny.’
Lenny, christened Lenworth George Henry, was born on August 29, 1958, at Dudley’s Burton Road hospital. But among the close-knit Jamaican community, the identity of the baby’s father was an open secret from the outset. ‘We stayed friends and we all knew that Bertie was Lenny’s real father,’ said Mr Holness. ‘Winnie’s husband, Winston, didn’t come here until a few years later and I should imagine Winston knew Lenny wasn’t his.’
Indeed, as a sign of how serious the relationship had become, Winnie soon moved in with Bertie at another shared house at 63 Vicar Street, Dudley. Their next-door neighbour at the time was Jamaican Henry Ramsey. ‘Winnie lived there with Bertie and his brother Harry and it was said at the time that one of them was Lenny’s father,’ said Mr Ramsey.
For a time, the lovers and their baby son lived as a family. But Winnie’s Jamaican life was about to catch up with her. In the early 1960s, Winston arrived with the couple’s four children, Hylton, Beverly, Seymour and Kay, and Winnie moved out and into a flat in the town with them, and the young Lenny. Coincidentally, Winston – who decided to forgive his wife and bring up the boy as his own – found a job in the same factory, Bean Industries in nearby Tipton, where Bertie worked as a spin grinder making parts for British Leyland.
Reunited as man and wife, Winston and Winnie went on to have two more children, Paul and Sharon, and they all moved into a family home at 15 Douglas Road, Dudley.
But local gossip about Lenny’s parentage was rife, not least because he bore abso- lutely no resemblance to Winston. While Lenny would eventually grow to a loping 6ft 2in, Winston was small and wiry and, in Lenny’s words, ‘like a walnut with legs’.
In Danny And The Human Zoo, broadcast at the end of August, Lenny starred as Samson Fearon, a character based almost entirely on Winston Henry.
The character of Danny, based on the young Lenny, discovers his illegitimacy when a family friend blurts out the truth. Later, he catches his mother dancing with a man called Calvin Gayle, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Danny.
In reality, Lenny grew up knowing that Winston was not his natural father. And speaking to journalists to promote the programme, the star revealed he had met his real father ‘several times’.
‘It is based on the truth, actually, but I didn’t want to write it in a way that was pedantic or whatever,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t the right time to talk about this before. I wanted something that was truthful at the core of this and I’m not alone in this. We talked about this in the rehearsal room and there were a lot of black people talking about the person who raised me and the person who was my birth father, so it wasn’t like it was a big deal or anything.
‘I’m glad I’ve written about it – it was about time.’
But Lenny, who has developed a reputation as a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor, continued by
‘They had passionate and illicit affair’
‘The dad I talk about is the man who raised me’ ‘He’d talk in the pub... he was proud of his son’
saying: ‘I talk about my dad and my mum a lot in every interview I’ve ever done, and the person I talk about is the person who raised me.
‘For obvious reasons my father was quite closed but he brought us up and he raised us and he put food on the table and clothes on our backs and was proud of us. In lots of ways, a lot of those old dads really didn’t talk very much so there was not much emotion there… it was very cathartic writing about him.’
Indeed, it is Winston who is named (using his middle name, Jervis) on Lenny’s birth certificate, a sign perhaps that his mother Winnie was indeed forgiven. He died in 1977, of renal failure and dementia, when Lenny, who had won TV talent show New Faces two years earlier, was just 19.
Speaking about him, Lenny – who was knighted in this year’s Queen’s birthday honours – has said: ‘On his deathbed he wanted to cram a lot in. He’d talk about Jamaica, and his life there and when he first came to England.
‘I would just sit there and nod and then he was gone. I didn’t cry. There was respect for him but the emotional connection wasn’t there.
‘Seymour, my second-oldest brother, cried at my dad’s funeral like a howling wolf and I thought, “Where’s that for me?”’
He was devastated, however, when his formidable mother died in 1998 after suffering years of heart problems and diabetes which resulted in doctors having to amputate both her legs.
He blamed her death for a midlife crisis that saw him check into The Priory clinic after his marriage to fellow comedian Dawn French came under pressure when he was accused of spending the night with an Australian blonde while on tour.
So, what happened to Bertie Green, pictured here with his brothers at a family wedding in the 1990s?
Although there is no record of him ever marrying in England, he is said to have fathered at least three more children.
Members of his family told The Mail on Sunday that Bertie had three daughters from another relationship. A family source said: ‘Two of the girls now live in America and another is in Britain.’
Another friend said: ‘Bertie was really close to the girls and every Sunday, regular as clockwork, he would ring up the two girls in America to catch up with them.
‘When he died, all three of his daughters came to the funeral and their mother also came to show her respects, which says a lot about how well-regarded he was.’
The friend added: ‘Bertie always loved women. You could say he was a womaniser, but he kept on good terms with quite of a few of the women he knew. He was a genuine and likeable bloke. It’s a sign of how respected he was that a lot of people came to his funeral.’
For a time, he shared a house with his younger brother Cleveland in the Coseley district of Dudley before moving into a shabby, rented ground-floor flat in a three-storey block in a rundown part of town.
He became a regular in the scruffier pubs near his home and could often be found playing dominos at his local, The Earl of Dudley Arms, known by regulars as ‘the Tatters’.
His end seems to have been a sad one, although those who knew him said he took pride in Lenny’s extraordinary achievement.
His neighbour and friend Stafford Shaw said: ‘Because of drinking, Bertie let himself go. I don’t know if he was an alcoholic, but he loved his drink. He would drink anything.
‘He was the sort of person who, if he was drinking pints and you offered him a whisky, he would still have it.
‘Bertie would talk about being Lenny’s dad when he was in the pub. I know he and Lenny talked because when Lenny’s brother Hylton’s wife died some years ago, Lenny came to the funeral. Bertie was also there and Lenny called Bertie “Dad”. Bertie was happy about that. He had a laugh about it. I think the two of them used to get on all right.’
But Bertie’s drinking was about to catch up with him. Mr Shaw said: ‘He was always drunk. The last time I saw him, he fell down in the road. I think that’s what killed him. He hit his head on the pavement and he wouldn’t go to the doctors.
‘After he knocked his head, I saw him at the bus stop and he said he meant to go to the hospital, but he died before the appointment.
‘His neighbour, who lived above him, was a close friend of Bertie, and didn’t hear him moving around in his flat as usual one morning, so he went to see if he was all right and they found him dead.’
Bertie died alone at the age of 77, three days after Christmas 2004. The official cause of death was recorded as lung cancer. He had told friends the condition was caused by exposure to asbestos.
After he was buried in Dudley Cemetery, his friends held a wake at his favourite local bar, where traditional Jamaican goat curry was served in his honour.
Another neighbour, Graham Round, attended the funeral, as did Bertie’s old friend from their flatsharing days, Vince Holness. Neither recalls Lenny being present.
Mr Round, who lived in the same block of flats as Bertie, said: ‘He was a really nice man and we were close. I cried my heart out when I saw him in his coffin. He didn’t talk much about Lenny, but he told me he was his father.
‘And he would occasionally tell people about it if he’d had a drink. I think he was proud of his son.’