By David Konyot.
It’s February 1962 I’m 15½ and I’m in London , since I last saw my mother she has remarried, my stepfather is Ron Beadle, (stage name -Ron Rowlands ) a comedian /writer and as different from my father as it was possible to be , My arrival was a shock to both our systems but he handled it way better than I did.
My first month back was a whirlwind of activity, I got new clothes, a job and enrolled in a dancing school. OK in order, the clothes I arrived in and brought with me were consigned to a fire in the garden, We were living in Shepherd Bush one road back from the green so shopping wasn’t a problem, I was bought a new wardrobe of clothes, the Job was as a page boy in the Mount Royal Hotel in Marble Arch and the Dancing school was the Billings school of dance above the famous Bush pub next to the BBC studios at the end of the Green, it doesn’t sound very impressive but that school had great teachers and produced some very good dancers and artists.
The job of pageboy was completely different to anything I’d done before, dressed in a beige/brown uniform with the obligatory pageboy hat slightly slanted I looked good and was soon making a lot more in tips than my wages of £4-10s pw,Time for a little perspective and a maths lesson, in todays money that’s £80 for a 6 day week of 8 hours a day =£10 a day, thats just a little over what the minimum hourly wage is now in 2020 plus that was before NI and Income tax were deducted . Enough with the maths = I could make good tip money and soon learned who the good tippers were
#1 American tourists , always good especially if you were small like me and made a bit of a struggle with their heavy luggage – no limit to baggage allowance on flights in ’63 .
#2 Japanese tourists, individuals not groups, I quickly learned and practised how deep the bow had to be in order to get a big tip for respect .
The worst were the Brits, French, Dutch and German businessmen, avoided them at every opportunity.
The work was 8 hour shifts, nobody wanted the night shift but I volunteered to do it on a regular basis because it fitted my schedule which on these days would be = Finish my shift and walk home which was a distance of just under 3 miles but saved me a lot in bus fares, be home by 7.00 am, sleep till 12, afternoon in dance school, from 2pm Ballet = 2 hours bar and floor work, Modern dance = I hour, finish off with Tap = 1 -1½ hours then back home for a meal, our house was literally 500 yds from the school, a couple of hours relaxing then back to the hotel, I knew I wanted to be in show business but didn’t know where as long as it wasn’t Circus .
On the personal side life was tense, Ron and I had an unspoken truce, we didn’t really know each other and my lack of interaction with my parents in my young years had made any emotional contact difficult, I know my mother also suffered in those early years but we could never talk about it, although I loved her there was always an unspoken barrier between us that was and still is a cause of regret to me.
When I first thought about a book I was going to call it ‘Conversations I Never Had.
As time went on Ron and I got on much better, we argued about anything and everything for over 50 years but never fell out, I learnt to love and respect him because he made my mother happy every day they were together but it was a long time before I realised how much I had learned from him, even during the arguments there was logic and reason in abundance, well at least from his side.
Another reason for my admiration and love for them both was that they gave me a brother, well actually they had a son , Ronald Walter Alexander Leslie Beadle who has been my rock and my best friend for most of my life and co-incidentally all of his. From a family of entertainers reaching back centuries he became a full Professor of Business ethics with more letters after his name than I can count, a published author, a leading academic in his field and the go-to guy on Macintyrian Philosophy.
I regard him as the black sheep of the family.
He will appear more during this book as he is an important part of my life and we are more than brothers we are friends and in the 50 years + that we have known each other we have never had a disagreement, not even about football. ( he’s a Mackem and If I have to explain what that is it’s not worth the bother ‘cos you know or you don’t and if you know you’ll either stop reading or carry on and if you don’t you won’t care anyway and the last sentence has been a waste of time ).
I’m getting ahead of myself, it’s still the early ’60’s and life was a round of Work, Dance lessons and Football, Stamford Bridge on a Saturday when Chelsea were at home or if they were away at another London team I would go there, Football was different then, it was and has always been tribal, you had your club but if they were away and you couldn’t get to Birmingham or Liverpool you could go to another London ground to see a game of football, Now you are expected to hate every other club except yours, other fans are the enemy, a lot of the joy has gone, when I was touring I would go to whatever ground was near me if there was a game on, I enjoyed football , the game, the banter, the sometime really funny abuse thrown at officials, all gone to be replaced by millionare superstars who fall over and writhe in agony at the slightest contact, temperamental prima donnas, who never saw players like George Best , Denis Law, or my own king Peter Osgood, another time, another place.
Anyway back to the story
Apart from football matches I spent my time and money on the lessons, I bought a guitar of course, everyone did in the ’60’s, then a clarinet and a harmonica and somewhere down the road found a little talent for music, I spent hours listening to the radio or reading and apart from a couple of mates at the Bridge and the other students in the Dance school I made very few friends, socially I was still very awkward.
A couple of things that happened around that time, I went to class one day to find the road leading to the Bush Pub packed with teenage girls, I pushed my way through to go upstairs to our changing room, and found that the other students were all there but the hall had been rented out to a film company for the day, they were rehearsing scenes for a film called ‘HELP’ starring the Beatles who were in the rehearsal room going over lines.
We all knew who the Beatles were but in an age without social media and the hype that surrounds Pop stars and Celebrities they weren’t that important except to their devoted fans, mostly teenage pre pubescent girls, all of whom seemed to be surrounding the pub screaming out “John”, “Paul”. “George” we did hear a few “Ringo’s” but not many, anyway all we were concerned about was our Dance time was being taken over by a bunch of scousers and couldn’t wait until they buggered off so we could get on with our lessons. There is a footnote to this episode which shows how times changed and also my naivety, January ’64 the Beatles were appearing at the Finsbury Park Astoria, it used to be the Empire and my parents had worked there in their variety days so off I went to see the show, once again a huge crowd of fans around the theatre, I went to the Box office to buy a ticket only to be informed that there were none left but if I hung around there may be cancellations, a couple of minutes later the cashier called me over and said there was a single ticket available in the front row, I duly paid and when the doors opened went and found my seat and apart from the screaming girls it was normal procedure just like going to the cinema.
The show featured Cilla Black, the Fourmost, another liverpool group, and I think the compere was Bobby Willis, later Cilla Black’s Husband, The first half was OK the audience was a bit noisy but of course it was full of girls and me, I was the quiet one, After the interval the sound ramped up a bit because ‘they’ were coming on, Curtains opened, onstage was a set of stairs leading up to a Helicopter, obviously a stage prop but very well done, the doors opened and out came the Beatles walking down the stairs to start their set, The auditorium erupted into the loudest noise I had ever heard, over 1000 girls screaming the names of their favourite’s, a cacophony of mayhem and audible torture, now my seat was on the front row about 6 in from the end aisle, within about a minute of the ‘Boys’ appearing half of the girls at my end of the row had fainted and had been carried out by the ushers, So here I am alone in the front row of the Astoria Finsbury park listening to one of the greatest groups in History, except I couldn’t hear a bloody word for the screaming, other than that it was a nice day out. I often think If I’d kept my ticket what would it have been worth all these years later, Hey Ho, that’s life.
The second story is a strange one, once again the dance room had been rented out but we were welcome to sit in as they needed an audience, it was hired out to ‘Opportunity Knocks’ for auditions, we sat through the usual parade of singers, impressionists and a couple of dancing acts, who we cheered wildly as kindred spirits, there was then a break while the next hopeful brought his ‘props ‘ in , now remember the room is on the first floor above the Pub up a flight of fairly steep stairs accessed from the Goldhawk Road, first he came into the room with an easel and a bucket full of brushes, he then went down the stairs and returned with a couple of paint pots, down and up again about three times with more paint cans and finally a white canvas in a frame which he put on the easel. It was obvious what he was going to do, one of the biggest stars around at the time was Rolf Harris whose gimmick on his TV show was to do a big painting using house paints constantly enquiring “can you see what it is yet”? but not revealing the subject till the last couple of brushstrokes, so obviously this was the intention of this budding Op-Knocker, he studiously set everything up then performed what I thought was a master stroke he got out a folder and gave the pianist some sheets of music to accompany his ‘act’, Off went the piano, off went the painter waving his brushes with different colours of paint wildly landing on the canvas in a whirlwind of action all the while we were trying to decipher ‘what it was yet’ eventually he threw down his brush looked at the result and in a loud voice said, “Well that’s fucked” turned round went out of the door down the stairs and was gone. There was an awkward silence for quite a while as we waited for the punchline and then the slow realisation dawned that there wasn’t one, then the laughter started, we rolled around the floor with out sides aching and for weeks afterwards at the end of the Dance lessons one of us would say. ‘Well thats fucked ” and the laughter would start all over again.
Jack Billings owned the school with his wife Una, he and Stepdad Ron were friends which is how I got into the school, he was American and had appeared in a couple of Musical films in the States but admitted that he couldn’t compare with Astaire and Kelly so he’d come to England to try his luck, he’d done well on the variety circuit and opened the school, he was our Tap-Dance teacher but he was so much more, his classes were lessons in life, his approach to a tap class were much about improv and music appreciation, once you’d learned the basic ‘Time-Step’ and entered his world the limits were what you set for yourself, He would bring different music in to each lesson usually on an LP and tell us to just listen, after it finished he would pick on one of us and say “OK give us a routine” whoever was picked would have the lesson time to teach us a dance to the music, as we got better the music got more challenging, A couple I remember for me were ‘Big Noise from Winnetka ‘ and ‘Skyliner’, both standard swing numbers and fairly easy until he came in one day and played ‘Unsquare Dance ‘ by Dave Brubeck which is a 7/4 time signature, I got the short straw or as it happened a great compliment, his explanation was that audiences got into a comfort zone, if they saw a couple in evening dress on a dance floor they expected a waltz or a foxtrot but if they got something else they took more notice so a 7/4 time tap dance is what I did, the rest of the class got the same challenges and in shows that I have put on since I have used that same principle that I learned from Jack all those years ago, give them the unexpected and they’ll remember, I did it with lasting consequences in producing the first Circus Harlequin in 1994 but more of that later, we’re getting ahead of ourselves ( or am I laying easter eggs)?
Somewhere during this period I passed my driving test (first time) couldn’t afford a car but I could dream.
1965, after 3 years of dancing school I teamed up with one of the girl students and we became ‘The Dancing Dunnes’ ‘Twenty Tiny Toes Tapping Their Way To The Top ‘, we didn’t use that bill matter, thats from Julian & Sandy in Round The Horne.
Through Jack Billings we got our first contract, Palladium Theatre.
Edinburgh, 6 week run so we packed our straw hats, Canes and Tap shoes and set off for Scotland.
The first two days of rehearsal were fine, I was asked to help in a couple of comedy sketches, we rehearsed our music job done ! 3rd day we were rehearsing different sketches and musical numbers and wondered what was happening , upon asking the producer, a wonderful guy and well known entertainer in Scotland called Hector Nicol, we were informed that the six week contract entailed a change of programme every week, same artists , 6 different shows !!!!!!!. Panic does not adequately describe what we felt at that moment, Hector realised what had happened and gave me the phone number of a firm in Sauchiehall street Glasgow who specialised in costume hire so we appeared as ‘The Dancing Dunnes” in wk 1, Straw hats and Canes, wk 2 Top Hats and Evening Dress, wk 3 Indian Headdresses and Tomahawks, wk 4 Welsh outfits, wk 5 Sailors Uniforms, wk 6 believe it or not Kilts and Tam o’shanters, different costumes , different music , same dance routine.
This was it, not a tent or caravan in sight but
I WAS IN SHOW BUSINESS .
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