Why there will never be another Kenneth Williams – by the editor of his notorious diaries

Kenneth Williams at 100 – what a thought. We do know what he might have sounded like today, since among his battery of instant character types, a tottering crone was one of the most convincing. Indeed, as we shall see, that aged voice was his passport to a comedy-based career. I took up with him, as you might say, 35 years ago, when his estate came to my agents looking for someone who’d written comic material, performed it on stage, and television, plus some filming perhaps – and of course who knew Mr Williams and the variety of his works. There were diaries, they said, to be turned into a book. I owe literary agent Caroline Dawnay a great debt for suggesting that I might be the all-rounder they were looking for. Like everyone else, I was fascinated by this unique individual who could swoop from acidulous poshness to corrosive cockney in the space of a sentence, and still make sense. There was, and remains, nobody like him.

It was around 1991, anyway, that I was invited into a bank vault in Enfield to examine the 43 sealed brown-paper packets that contained his diaries. As another metric for the time that’s passed, the bank in question was the now-forgotten Midland, the year before HSBC swallowed it up. Williams had been dead three years by then, and one thing the publication of the diaries couldn’t do – quite the opposite, in fact – was to quell the continued rumblings of controversy over his demise. The open verdict returned by the coroner still seems more tactful than truthful when weighed against Williams’s own written testimony concerning the hoard of “poison” he kept in reserve; and the court of course could not have been expected to know that in a journal as early as 1947, he had characterised himself as a “suicidalist”.

It’s no secret anywhere in the world that people who make us laugh often lead melancholy domestic lives. But in this centennial moment, we would do better to dwell on the joy Williams brought not only to us but to himself. For the most part, he did with his life what he wanted to do, and had a good time in doing so. Some of his tastes were low, but many refined. A file left to me by his neighbour Paul Richardson, the initial custodian of the diaries, shows how much he loved the English poets, from the Elizabethans to the adoptive Eliot. Given any serious piece or writing to work on, he was always up to it. An example from Russian literature:

“At 11.30 this morning I’ve got Dick Williams coming to discuss the Gogol script for his film Diary Of A Madman. He came. I read the pieces. V. good I think, and he brought two LPs with music by Shade (Peter) for the film. It is superb. His music for Love Me was marvellous enough but this is a dream. This sort of music makes me want to give thanks to God, it shows Him in people, it shows the beauty and the redemption. It gave me buoyancy for the rest of the day.”

That film never came together, but the brilliant BBC sound engineer John Whitehall (otherwise famous for getting the best out of comedy shows) arduously reassembled the soundtrack performance, so that it now stands alone, and available on YouTube, as evidence of Williams’s special talent.

Williams was the classic autodidact, as his formal education had been minimal, though a certain hunger for precision expressed itself in his calligraphic skills. His moods might fluctuate alarmingly, but his penmanship, rarely less than elegant, made the reading of the diaries a pleasure.

As a youth, playing with a Combined Services Entertainments group and in summer repertory troupes from Newquay to Margate, he’d shown no particular penchant for comedy. At the time, he took the socio-educational duties of the theatre rather seriously, and it was a serious piece of work that propelled him sideways into laughter-making. Luck had finally landed him with the West End role of the Dauphin in Shaw’s historical drama Saint Joan, starring the Irish diva Siobhan McKenna. Towards the end of the play, long years having passed, the Dauphin reappears in old age, with voice to match. Williams managed the vocal transformation so well that a watching BBC producer, Dennis Main Wilson, auditioned him at once for a new comedy series he was preparing. It was Hancock’s Half Hour. Ken recognised in Tony Hancock a man who was, in different ways, as troubled as he was, and for a while they seemed to have a mutual therapy going. But in the end, Williams became a victim of Hancock’s obsession with pure comedy, purged of catchphrases. They had to go, and the luckless Williams went with them.

Of course, they popped up again (“Ooh, Matron!”) in the Carry On films, a tradition that on the one hand he claimed noisily to despise, but which filled several holes in his life. The income – he budgeted to expect £5,000 clear for each one – was paltry but regular. The sense of family was another attraction, for among the cast he had genuine friends: Bernard Bresslaw, with whom he discussed Jewish law and customs; Kenneth Connor, who in spite of deploying a comparable battery of “voices”, was much more friend than rival; Peter Butterworth, endearing on both sides of the camera; and Bernard Cribbins, relations with whom started out coldly, but whom Williams eventually saluted as a genuine “droll”. Cribbins and Williams easily topped the list of performers on Jackanory, BBC TV’s storytelling programme for children, who can always tell who is on their side.

And then there was Hattie Jacques, as loyal a Londoner as Williams had always been. During the Second World War, she’d been a welder in the Holloway Road, and knew how to look after herself. It’s striking how formidable his favourite women were: Maggie Smith, whom he always adored; Sheila Hancock, one of the very few visitors known to have used the Williams bathroom; and the reliable Joan Sims – to whom he notoriously proposed marriage. She was not the only target for the companionship-only union he had in mind, and like all the honorees she sensibly turned the offer down. Barbara Windsor, another outsize personality, brought him closer to marriage, but in a most peculiar way, by having him accompany her on her honeymoon with Ronnie Knight in Madeira.

But the constant woman in his life, right to the end, was his mother, Louisa, or Louie, or Lou. Her husband, Charlie Williams, had a barber’s shop at 57, Marchmont Street, near King’s Cross. That address still deals in coiffure, now under the name “CV Hair and Beauty”. (The world’s delicate ear is fortunate that the coarse-grained Charlie never got a chance to pass comment on that.) Louie became a widow in 1962 when Charlie swigged from a bottle marked “Gee’s Linctus”, which proved to be full of a highly corrosive solvent, carbon tetrachloride. Citing undue publicity that might harm Louie, Williams did not attend the Coroner’s Court, but was represented by his faithful agent, Peter Eade. A verdict of accidental death was returned, but there were those at the time who privately reckoned that the accident had been facilitated by Kenneth. His diary doesn’t seem greatly shocked by these events, calling the switch of liquids merely “mysterious”. In today’s world, where conspiracy theory is a worldwide hobby, nasty theories still circulate.

One thin little thread links us still with that era. The panel game Just A Minute started in 1967, and still runs today after more than one thousand editions. Kenneth Williams remained a regular panellist to the close of his life. He often claimed to have shocked himself by his tempestuous outbursts on the show, but his diary verdict “I behaved disgracefully” barely disguised his satisfaction in having conquered his inner censor. Perhaps that’s one reason why we miss him. Few performers have spooled out confessional information with such a sense of release, and self-explanation. “You see” ends many of his impromptu monologues. He wants us to understand him, you see.

Meanwhile, if you prefer to commune more intimately with his psyche, I recommend his favourite painting, the National Gallery’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Guercino. As I wrote in the Introduction to the Diaries, “a believably strong Christ was part of its attractions. For Williams, visions of personal redemption, whether religious or emotional, involved his being gathered up and made safe by muscular arms. It seems never to have happened to him in life.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]