Dawson and Dickens

She would never know the anguish of that smut-faced child, as kiddie after kiddie was chosen by the adults living in the evacuation area, leaving him alone on the pavement with a shabby holdall… Eventually a policeman and a grim-faced official almost bullied a couple into taking him…

It may be another piece of Freud apocrypha that no one ever lost money on a different kind of smut. Still, even on the strength of mime and mimicry, Les Dawson’s art was far more than double entendres and fossil gags, although the “policeman’s boots type of joke” (Orwell, The Art of Donald McGill) turns up in his autobiography A Clown Too Many in the form of a tanked-up Les getting sick on a policeman’s trousers.

Yes, the book is sometimes a bit flowery and now and then the descriptions are padded with mother-in-law material. It’s a life that’s dog rough in places. But it’s never dull. It’s also epigrammatic, surreal, macabre, hilarious and moving.

For Raymond Chandler there was no complete man without at least a touch of vulgarity and Orwell thought the smutty postcards of his essay gave necessary expression to the “Sancho Panza” or “worm’s eye” view of life, which he saw as a mood that had been suppressed in English literature early in the nineteenth century.

His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures.

Though each of these itself is paradise, when taken in a moderate amount of moderation, this remains a rather tame understanding on Orwell’s part. Of turning a spiritual and professional corner onstage one night in the Sixties in Blackpool, Dawson writes

I glared at the unfeeling audience, and I went on glaring at them with something akin to hatred. After what seemed an aeon, somebody chuckled, and then somebody else. I made as if to see who was at the back of me… “Who the hell’s come on?” The laughter began to grow … “Dawson’s the name, I’m about as famous as Lord Godiva.” … “Do you think I care?” … It was my night… I was one of them. Fed up, sick of society, I belonged to them… I don’t recall driving home at all, but I do remember stopping once on the moorland road… urinating into a bush and shouting, “I bloody did it.”

Les Dawson was born into grime, an only child in the Manchester of the early Thirties. As for the seemingly effortless reproduction of comical Yorkshire speech on the page, the Mancunian Les must have enjoyed that, when giving ink to his stories about their nightclubs. On his mother’s side the family was entirely Irish and, whenever his grandmother had “me tipple” of drink taken, she would end up singing, They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.

In early adulthood he had a string of perversely inspiring Dickensian day jobs. One story sees him trudging through snow to a smelly hovel in order to fix a rusty washing machine but then finding a lost Christmas pay packet that’s stuck in a knackered vacuum cleaner. These jobs he combines with years of night slogging on the northern club circuit, with the attendant awful digs thrown in for any man who cannot get home.

Yes, yes, there I am on the bill at just about the height where dogs find it easy to urinate…

The swirling fag fug…

… the nights when club audiences had booed me off; I remembered the time bottles were thrown at me; the times when I’d stood… with sweat dripping down my suit as I battled to be heard…

Several other thespians were sitting glooming over their fate in what passed for a living room, and when the landlady introduced me, they merely grunted and turned back into statues.

The curious fact that Orwell never stresses the comedy in his long essay on Dickens, nor all that is allied in the macabre and grotesque, is typified when he mentions Krook’s spontaneous combustion in Bleak House. This is made without any reference to the obvious conclusion that the relevant chapter is played for laughs.

“‘Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place tonight,’ Mr Weevle rejoins. ‘I suppose it’s the chops at the Sol’s Arms.’ (…) Mr Snagsby sniffs and tastes again, and then spits and wipes his mouth; ‘I don’t think… they were quite fresh, when they were shown the gridiron.’”

Les himself ends several portraits with a coda about how a person died, usually unnaturally. He makes much mention too of his own “cowardice” yet, like many an unwillingly tough man, he imposes himself only after extreme provocation. Comedy meets desperation, as in when the grown Les is forced into gallantly tackling a pair of burglars on behalf of a female neighbour.

… we grappled in silence with only fear as the referee.

Having subdued one, he uses a foot to trap the other, who is hiding in a closet. The most significant fight has, however, come at the age of eleven but, like the account of the school fight in Camus’ The First Man, it leaves him more than anything disgusted by this awful world.

Again and again the fists rained upon my face and chest, and I did not retaliate… I tried to back away, only to be pushed by the crowd into the path of my adversary. Then I hit Dunn with one punch and it was over… Nobody said a word to me, the crowd about-turned and left the scene. Dunn staggered to his feet and shook my hand; he, too, remained silent, and at last alone, I sat and cried.

Some people have presumed a lot of the book’s material (e.g. the Paris job, tinkling on a piano downstairs in a brothel) had to be at the very least embellished but one should note the style and tone never vary between incident and reflection. His extraordinary German experiences alone, thirty years apart, would make a fine play or film. His first stint there, as an army conscript in 1950, makes life in Germany then seem almost as dodgy as it was in wartime. For his second, in West Berlin, the only notable addition was the presence of TV cameras.

The audience was in an uproar; they… thought it was part of the act; little did they know it was a fight to a flour and water death. (…) Kenny Ball staggered on in a cloud of alcohol and wailed into a jazz number…

Les fared better at the other end of the Axis while in Hong Kong. In response to the appearance of his character Cosmo Smallpiece, a crowd of silent Japanese tourists exploded, then rose to their feet en masse to copy his gestures and facial expressions.

As for triumph and disaster, the hard-drinking Les had his own characteristic take on both of Kipling’s impostors.

… if disaster was inevitable, why not meet it with a tum full of the blender’s art?

Triumph in its turn meant all those years on TV when somehow he could hardly put a foot wrong, while attracting audiences of nine or ten million.

The following week I hired a penguin from a zoo, and all it did was waddle on to the stage and stand next to me. I ignored it completely and the audience fell about.

PS

Though generous with his time, his encouragement and his share of the limelight, Les gives an honest Dickensian nod to his meanness with money (outside his family) when recounting a list of his crimes and bungles as an apprentice electrician.

That he did cheat his workmates of two pence per person by buying meat pies cheaper from another shop.