Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (4 page)

But there was also a private, reserved side to David’s nature even then. ‘Dad gave me the impression,’ said Gadney, ‘that David, formidably good-looking, charming and mature for his years, was a self-contained, even solitary, figure whom it was hard to know.’ Peter Sherwood agreed: ‘There was always something faintly reserved behind all that charm,’ he told Morley. ‘You felt that if you could really strip it off … a quite different David might emerge.’ Back at Stowe for the summer term of 1924, David ‘didn’t have a special friend but he was an extremely pleasant fellow’, Steynor told me, ‘an extrovert and very charming even then, a little mischievous and up to minor pranks but not nasty or vicious.’ Sherwood did recall one Niven prank that was less than kind: ‘I remember him once when we were teenagers rushing out of Waterloo Station
into the back of a cab and saying to the driver, “King’s Cross, and drive like hell!” and then slipping out again through the other door so that the cab would arrive totally empty at the other station.’ Still, maybe taxi drivers are considered fair game by comic actors and comedians. At the end of a taxi ride in London the great Tommy Cooper liked to tuck a little something into the cabby’s top pocket and rumble ‘have a drink on me’, at which the cabby would remark ‘ta very much, guv’, poke his fingers into his top pocket and retrieve a teabag.

Niv’s jokes and pranks ‘were always much the same’, Sherwood told Morley. ‘They were repetitive but somehow he always made them work and got the laughs, and I suppose that was where it all started. He also used to do a lot of impersonations, men who’d eaten mothballs thinking they were peppermint lumps, gracious ladies having to be polite about ghastly Christmas gifts, that kind of thing. His face would become contorted with grotesque smiles and he’d keep the routine going for five or ten minutes.’

Before long David was polishing these vignettes and turning them into short sketches that he would perform on stage during the Chandos House shows that he helped to organise at the end of each term. ‘I started doing concerts at school to be liked,’ he told Michael Parkinson in 1981. Already he was a keen actor with a natural gift for comedy, and he was to base many of his sketches on the Aldwych farces that were popular in London at the time. In the autumn of 1924 Major Haworth founded an Officer Training Corps, Niven and Sherwood both joined, and soon the regular camp concerts gave them yet another outlet for their thespian talents. In the summer of 1925 they spent ten days at an Officer Training Corps camp on Salisbury Plain along with several hundred boys from other schools and David performed a sketch in front of them all in the camp concert that was held in a huge circus tent. He based his act on a monologue about a dim politician canvassing in an election that
the comedian Milton Hayes had recorded. In David’s adaptation the figure of fun was a slow-witted inspecting officer, Major General Sir Useless Eunuch, and to play the part he wore a uniform, a shaggy grey moustache and a monocle. ‘I experienced, for the first time, that delicious terror that has never left me,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, ‘– stage fright … with rubbery knees, dry lips and sweating palms.’ He need not have worried. He was a huge success right from the start, when he shambled onto the stage, peered at the red-jacketed officers sitting in the front three rows and barked, ‘Sergeant-Major, why is it that these members of the band have no instruments?’ For ten minutes he bumbled on – ‘what we must do with this camp, Sergeant-Major, is find out where we stand, then get behind ourselves and push ourselves forward’ – and was given a standing ovation at the end of it. ‘Milton Hayes and I were a riotous success that night,’ he said, ‘and the harpoon of craving success as a performer was planted deep inside me.’

‘David’s impressions became an annual event at the camps,’ said Sherwood, ‘and were so popular that the audience used to chant “We want Niven!” whenever any other poor schoolboy got up to do a turn.’ Another of his favourite acts was to pretend to be drunk. ‘None of us really thought he would go on the stage but he had a wonderful, boisterous sense of humour,’ said Steynor. Frith Banbury, who would become a stage actor and director, felt then that David might develop into a comic song-and-dance man rather than a straight actor. ‘Acting in plays seemed to inhibit him,’ he told me, ‘whereas doing turns was always what suited him best. He was always arsing about, being the funniest boy in the class.’

By Christmas 1924 Stowe had 342 boys, a figure that increased to 420 by the end of 1925. A huge playing field was built, a science block with physics and chemistry laboratories, more dormitories and classrooms, a sanatorium, gymnasium, squash and tennis courts, a golf course, and on 17 July 1924 Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Arthur of Connaught,
unveiled a tablet to mark the gift to the school of the beautiful Grand Avenue of elms and beeches that ran for nearly two miles from the lodge gates to the Corinthian Arch and had been bought by Old Etonians as a generous gesture of welcome from an ancient school to a new one. Even Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt was moved to buy tennis racquets for the team that won the house tennis tournament.

In January 1925 David went off to Savognin in Switzerland on a skiing trip with a group of Stoics. Once across the Channel he and a boy called Griffin managed to get lost in Boulogne, but they rejoined the rest of the party in Basle the following day ‘cheerful but exhausted’, according to a report in the March 1925 issue of the school magazine,
The Stoic
. Perhaps it is best not to ask why two teenage boys on the loose in a French town should have become so exhausted. In Switzerland they enjoyed glorious weather, and although David did not shine at skiing he came into his own at evening sing-songs during which, according to
The Stoic
, ‘Woods, as an irate sergeant, and Niven, as a slightly muddled recruit, were a source of great amusement’.

Back in the Isle of Wight, Etta splashed out yet again and bought a twenty-five-year-old, 14ft sailing dinghy,
Merlin
, for David and Grizel to mess about in, and he and his friend Brian Franks founded the Bembridge Sailing Dinghy Club for children with Brian as captain, David as secretary and Ralph Gore, who was later to become Sir Ralph and a famous helmsman, as treasurer. They started with twenty-three members, held races, printed their own stationery and programmes, bought their own burgees and made a profit of £6 14s 0d in the first year.

At Stowe the next term David helped to start a Chandos House magazine,
The Chandosian
, and played the drum, cymbals and trombone in the eight-strong school jazz band, a picture of which was published in
The Stoic
in 1925 and shows David toying with a drumstick and dressed like the other boys in the same dapper suit-and-tie style that the
Beatles would wear in the Sixties. David joined a drama group, the Bruce Players, that Sherwood had started in March and they began to put on occasional one-act plays and sketches that David had written. He also developed a mischievous talent for drawing and during lessons would make witty little thumbnail sketches or cartoons which would then be passed surreptitiously around the room to the amusement of the rest of the class. For weeks David thought that none of the teachers had noticed his little hobby but at the end of term, when one master was discussing with the class what exams they ought to take, he said, ‘Niven, I think you should take drawing.’ The class roared with laughter and for once the laugh was on him.

Another prank that might well have been David’s concerned a statue of Lord Cobham which stood in the school grounds at the top of a tall column with a spiral staircase that was protected by barbed wire because it was strictly out of bounds. One morning Roxburgh told the school assembly that several signatures had been found on the statue and he promised serious trouble for the next person to write his signature up there. The next day he announced that there was now indeed another signature at the top: it read ‘J. F. Roxburgh’. According to another Stowe contemporary, Terence Prittie, on one occasion when David really did go too far and Roxburgh decided that he had to beat him he was unable to go ahead because as he prepared to address Niv’s buttocks with his cane he saw his face grinning at him upside-down between his legs.

Despite David’s taste for mischief he started to work quite seriously, for Major Haworth had persuaded him to aim for Sandhurst and the army, for which he would have to pass several specified subjects in the School Certificate exams in 1926, when he was sixteen. He was still hopelessly weak at maths and had to have special coaching, but his best subject was English and ‘our English master, Mr Arnold, was always praising David’s essays and stories’, Steynor said. Niv certainly
seemed to have had a keen and lively eye and a light touch with words, judging by an amusing little story that he wrote when he was fifteen for
The Stoic
describing a shambolic school expedition during a second trip to Switzerland at the start of 1926. Entitled ‘A Tailing Party at the Swiss Camp’, it read in full:

In fact, unknown to his English teacher or the editor of
The Stoic
, Niv had shamelessly copied the story from one by A. A. Milne,
A Tailing Party
, that had been printed in
Punch
magazine a few years earlier and was later published in book form in two of Milne’s collections of articles,
Once a Week
and
Those Were the Days
. David had simply changed the names and a few words. It was not to be the last time that he passed off someone else’s work as his own. Even now that he was
swotting for his School Certificate exams, David was as mischievous as ever. Hugh Heckstall-Smith, who was trying to teach David physics as well as maths, reported that if he turned his back in class he always suspected that David was up to something nefarious in the back row. When he was working out an equation on the blackboard he felt much more comfortable if he kept David in sight and he would call him up to the front of the class and ask him to point at the equations he was working on. At fifteen David was very big for his age, and if he was asked in the physics laboratory to fetch a test tube, David and his much smaller friend Stewart-Wallace would turn the whole thing into a major farcical performance in which David marched smartly to the end of the lab and back with the diminutive Stewart-Wallace marching in step right on his heels. David was equally mischievous in his chemistry lessons and another contemporary, John Doubleday, told Peter Haining, the author of
The Last Gentleman: A Tribute to David Niven
, that during one chemistry lesson ‘Niven had surreptitiously emptied a glass of sulphuric acid and refilled it with a similarly-coloured solution. Then, at a suitable moment, he had stood up, unstoppered the bottle, and before the science master’s horrified gaze had poured the contents into his mouth, clutched his throat and gasped, “This is the end!” ’

Even so, by the time David was sixteen he was so mature, charming and well spoken that Roxburgh chose him to show prospective parents around the school, even if it meant missing lessons for a whole morning. In July 1926 Roxburgh also decided to make him one of the four prefects – or monitors as they were known – in a new house, Grafton, that was to open the next term with Bernard Gadney as the head house prefect. ‘It will do him a world of good to have something to “run” and the feeling that something really depends upon him,’ Roxburgh wrote to Etta, and Niv recalled in
The Moon’s a Balloon:
‘My prospects in the new house were very exciting, my fat had disappeared, I had many friends at school and at
Bembridge, I had Nessie in the background and I was at last beginning to get to know and to love my mother.’ But three days later he was caught cheating during his School Certificate Latin exam. He was perfectly competent at Latin but wanted to get the exam over quickly so that he could leave early, and persuaded his clever friend Archie Montgomery-Campbell, who was at the next desk, to translate the verse section and drop a crumpled copy onto the floor between their desks so that David could retrieve it and copy it. ‘I am thankful for the sake of the School that I found out what had happened before the papers were sent to the Examiners,’ wrote Roxburgh to Etta. ‘I wish David would think a little more before he does these impulsive things, which are so entirely below his proper level, and which cannot help lowering him in the estimation of us all.’