Kenneth Williams

Kenneth Williams

Birth: 22nd September, 1926
Place of Birth: King’s Cross, London, Britain
Nationality: British
Job Title: Actor, diarist, broadcaster
Partners: None
Died: 15th April, 1988, London, Britain

The social stereotype of the ‘eternal bachelor’ has several different manifestations. The first stereotype is the playboy, the bounder who can’t settle down with a woman because one woman simply isn’t enough. Then there is the career man, considered the best in his field, who simply hasn’t got the time to meet a partner. Last on the list is the latent homosexual, characterised by meticulous tidiness, an unnaturally strong love for his mother and a seemingly constant denial of his sexuality. A true eternal bachelor, this month’s Gay Great is a classic example of the latter.

Kenneth Charles Williams was born in late February 1926 in a modest area of London. His father, Charles Williams, was very Victorian in his ways and worked as a barber, leaving his wife at home to take care of Williams and his older sister all day. Although having little to do with the children on a day to day basis, Williams Senior strived to have a controlling hand over his offspring while their mother, Louisa, endlessly mollycoddled them, especially her gentle son. The dynamics of his parental relationships went a long way to shaping the young Williams’ future. Whilst soaking up absolute love from one parent, a fear and loathing soon developed for the other. Williams Senior was dismayed at his son’s lack of sporting desires and would often present him with gifts of football boots or boxing gloves, all of which were useless to the overtly feminine boy.

Only one competitive game took his fancy - one called ‘Our Game’ created with his sister in which they would mimic friends and family members. Williams loved bending his voice and swapping accents to suit his chosen victim. Even his father was amused on occasions. In school, he excelled at English, history and art while using every health condition possible to be excused from sports.

As he grew, Williams and his mother prepared themselves for a running battle with his father over Williams’ choice of career. However, both were highly surprised when Williams’ father approved of his son’s decision to study at a specialised lithography school. At last, father and son had found the common ground they lacked in every other area of life. However, it was not to last. After less than a year at the school, life was turned upside down with the mass evacuation of children from London during the Blitz. Williams was sent to Bicester in Oxfordshire where he stayed until he was old enough to return of his own accord.

His guardian for the evacuation became an unlikely influence upon the young man. He was posted to live with a middle class veterinary surgeon, a bachelor who lived alone with only his books for company. Williams was delighted to be in the constant company of a man with class and education. Through him, he learnt that background did not necessarily equal class, and that if he wanted to he could also become a gentleman. He returned to London with an accent that would in time become immortal, a combination of Home Counties middle class and Cockney that could easily drift from one side of the Monopoly board to the other in a single sentence!

In 1942, Williams started what could be described as his most enduring relationship when he picked up a pen and wrote his first entry into a small pocket diary. For the next forty years (save a few gaps) he would record his thoughts and feelings every night. As time went on, his journal became less of a nostalgic tool and more like a friend, somebody to tell his innermost feelings to. He knew he was homosexual by the time the diaries had started, and through the years a strange mix of loathing and desire for the touch of other men starts to emerge. From the start, he felt uncomfortable with close human contact and the underground lives of homosexual men. Often in his diary, he would refer to his sexuality simply as ‘the predominate sexual problem’. Attempts to ‘cure himself’ were common, as was their subsequent failure.

Once back in the capital, Williams managed to complete the lithography study he had started before evacuation and began his first job as a mapmaker. At 18, he was automatically drafted into the army. However, a life of avoiding all things physical had left his body limp and skinny. He was initially sent directly to a border regiment, but was soon ordered to attend a Physical Development Centre, a notorious army institution designed to ‘make a man’ out of ‘wimps and poofters’. He eventually returned to his unit and was posted to the survey division in Ruislip. Later, he took postings to India although he was lucky enough never to get close to the action like many young men of the time.

But his heart was not in map making and Williams longed to be posted to the recently established Combined Services Entertainments (CSE) division. He auditioned, but was not successful. Determined to get his foot in the door, he took a job designing posters for the division’s productions at the Victoria Theatre, Singapore. Sure enough, his ‘back door’ form of entry into the theatre company worked, and while on his first designing job he was asked to fill in for an actor struck down by malaria. He put in a heartfelt performance and was instantly recruited to the company as a full time actor. The CSE offered budding thespians like Williams a playground in which to learn and explore the art of stage production. He performed alongside greats such as Laurence Olivier, George Formby and, of course, Vera Lynn. But it was future comic icon Stanley Baxter with whom he felt the greatest affection. Their friendship endured, despite Williams’ ever growing ‘difficult’ streak.

When Williams returned to map making after the war, Baxter felt it impossible to stand by and watch. He bullied him into placing adverts in The Stage and writing to theatre companies. Eventually, he got a reply from a small troupe based in Newquay. Although feeling the company was a little ‘below his talents’, he nevertheless joined them in order to get his all important Equity card. Repertory theatre soon became his home as he moved from company to company playing in some notable plays (although not always in notable roles!)

In 1951, Pat Smith, a casting director for leading screen director Herbert Wilcox, approached him after a performance and offered him his first screen role with a small uncredited part in the 1952 film Trent’s Last Case. From these small roots, further roles developed both on screen and stage. But it was when he took a small role in Hancock’s Half Hour that he accidentally found his niche. Briefed simply as the ‘archetypal annoying, know-it-all neighbour’, He simply drew upon his childhood games and adopted a voice that accurately portrayed all things snide! Soon, his supporting role became an essential element of the show as he took on many and varying characters.

When the programme transferred to television and picked up a far wider audience, things started to get tense on set. Tony Hancock, the star of the show, felt threatened by the popularity of Williams who often had the largest laughs. He also felt comedy should rely on realism, something the madcap Williams certainly did not agree with. Gradually, Williams began to get fewer and fewer lines. Things eventually came to a head and he left, cutting all ties with Hancock and the show. But he didn’t leave empty handed. With him went a huge audience appreciation and a handful of catchphrases, most notably the nasal sounding quip ‘stop messing about’!

His fame as a vocal based comedian was galvanised with a starring role in Ken Horne’s self-titled show – Beyond Our Ken. However, a much larger leap forward came when he once again donned an army uniform for the first in a new series of films by legendary producer Peter Rodgers. Heavily influenced by music hall productions and seaside postcard humour, Carry On Sergeant saw the first of a series that would come to define the British sense of humour. Tapping into the burgeoning sexual revolution underway across the post-war world, Williams allowed his hidden demon to rise to the surface, creating a character who was clearly gay in every way, but nevertheless chased women enthusiastically.

His foray into homosexual characters expanded when he played one half of an overtly gay duo, Julian and Sandy, on the radio show Round the Horne. Although clumsily derogatory, it was the first time a popular show had explored an openly gay character. In addition to his portrayal of homosexual characters on radio and film, Williams’ personality in interviews and appearances as himself in game shows told of his sexuality in every way, apart from an open admission.

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But he was still as far from gay pride as he could be. His diaries tell of a man disgusted with the promiscuous behaviour of his fellow homosexuals as well as ‘the act’ in general. Only one gay man was acceptable to him, his good friend Joe Orton, a notable playwright who lived with long term partner Kenneth Halliwell. They represented to Williams the ideal of a gay relationship, one that followed the conservative norms of a ‘partnership’ such as monogamy and longevity. It was exactly what he wanted for himself; a love that was ‘proper’ in every way. His dreams were shattered in 1967 when, out of the blue, Halliwell beat his lover Orton to death before taking his own life. Williams made little fuss over the tragedy both in life and in his diaries, but those close to him realised it had shaken him to the core.

Although his Carry On career was now earning him a regular wage, he slipped more and more into the life of a man trapped by his own loneliness. He developed a fear of letting anybody get too close. Friends would often be put off by his rude comments; lovers would be forced to leave the flat when things started to go further than kissing. In a time of sexual revolution, he conversely felt compelled to drive away any feelings of desire that would lead him into the arms of another man.

His working legacy as the backbone of the hugely popular Carry On films continued into the seventies and early eighties. Voice over work such as Willo the Wisp and stage productions such as Loot also occupied his time. Gradually though, his career and life began to be blighted by his health. For the whole of his life, he had suffered with many conditions, both real and imaginary, and had gained a reputation as a bit of a hypochondriac. In 1988, he developed a painful ulcer. Although he gave up smoking and adopted a healthier way of life, the pain was still crippling and relentless. On the night of 14th February 1988, he returned home from having his regular tea with his mother who lived next door. His last diary entry, written soon after he got in, began to explain the pain he felt, but was cut short with the sentence ‘oh, what’s the bloody point!’ Several hours later, his mother found him dead in his bed. He had taken a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs. Whether by design or by accident, Britain had lost one of its greatest comic heroes.

Kenneth Williams was a man who never felt comfortable in his own skin. He was a Cockney, who aspired to be middle class. He desired recognition as a serious actor, yet ended up a typecast, jobbing comedian. He was s passionate believer in conservative family values, yet he found himself thrust into the sexually liberated stereotype of a gay man. The publication of his diaries in 1994 showed the world a man lost in his own desires, wanting to love yet scared of loving, wishing to be a serious actor yet persisting with his comedy career. Though fans hate to admit it, suicide seems more than plausible. As dissatisfaction played such a huge part in his life, it is not unimaginable that it also played a great role in his death too.