Radio Lives - Michael Howard

This is the story of a comedian whose star was in the ascendancy in the 1940s. Like many of his contemporaries he had been offered radio spots after working at the famous Windmill Theatre. In the post-war years he was everywhere:  on radio, television, variety theatre, stage plays and the cinema. He was known as ‘the English Bob Hope’. But from the 1950s his personal life started to unravel with divorces, bankruptcy, a very public affair with a well-known actress, two suicide attempts, numerous court appearances and a stretch in prison. This is the story of Michael Howard.

First of all Michael Howard wasn't actually Michael Howard, he was Ian McKenzie, he would adopt his stage name by deed poll in 1941. He was born in 1916 in Holywell Green, just south of Halifax, as at the time his father was serving as the congregational pastor at the village church. John McKenzie had been born in Aberdeen in 1882 and studied divinity at the city’s university. In 1912 he married Margaret Murray and moved to Holywell Green. The family moved to Wolverhampton in 1917 and again to Nottingham in 1921 when he was appointed as the first Jesse Boot Professor of Sociology and Psychology at the Congregational College. He remained in Nottingham until his retirement in 1951 when he moved back to Scotland and was a Congregational minister in Edinburgh.

As for young Ian he was educated at Nottingham High School and then Yale University, though quite how and why he ended up at Yale remains unclear.  Returning to England he was active in amateur dramatics in Nottingham and went on to study at RADA. He made his first professional stage appearance in 1936 at the Old Vic in the Jacobean play The Witch of Edmonton where he was in the illustrious company of Edith Evans, Marius Goring and Michael Redgrave. He then spent three years in touring companies and in rep at Northampton and Worthing.

McKenzie made his first radio broadcast in May 1935 when he was also working as an Assistant Producer for the Nottingham Pageant. On the BBC Midland Regional Programme he spoke in the Signposts series on To the Dukeries. He was back on air the following month on Children’s Hour reading Mr Binns’s Oak Tree, a story from the Pageant written by Clare Chapman.

His big break into theatre came with the tour of the new play George and Margaret in 1937/38 with a cast that included John Arnatt, who’d been at RADA with Howard, and Eric Messiter, uncle of Ian Messiter, the creator of Just a Minute.  

Betty Kelly became the first Mrs Howard when they married in 1938. She was the sister of actress Judy Kelly who appeared in nearly 50 films including the 1940 version of George and Margaret.

In September 1939 he decided to produce and direct a touring version of the W.A. Darlington play Alf’s Button about a British soldier who comes across a magic button which summons a genie to grant his wishes. This updated version starred Wally Patch, Hal Walters and Mavis Claire. However, the tour was the start of McKenzie’s financial woes, as he later admitted that it opened on the same day that war broke out and he lost £1,300 in six weeks. The fact that a comedy film version Alf’s Button Afloat, starring the Crazy Gang and including Wally Patch in the cast, was still showing in provincial cinemas at the same time can hardly have helped at the box office. 

In late 1939 an invitation to appear in My Dear Children, John Barrymore’s last Broadway production before his death, took McKenzie back to the States. At the end of the play’s run Billboard magazine reported that he was ‘in town eyeing film and radio possibilities’. He ended going over to Hollywood where he tried his hand at script-writing. He wrote for Sam Goldwyn and worked on the script of Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and did dialogue for other films.

On his return to England he was rejected from military service on medical grounds and his career started to take a different turn when comedian Oliver Wakefield – billed as ‘The Voice of Inexperience’ – suggested he forsake drama for comedy. Following this advice he wrote himself an act, changed his name to Michael Howard and managed to get an audition with Vivian Van Damm to appear at London’s Windmill Theatre. Over a couple of years he appeared in about a dozen different editions of Revudeville, the daily shows that would be changed every few weeks with new routines, perhaps a different cast and new ‘tableaux vivant’, as the infamous nude poses were known. The Daily Herald described Howard as "a prim, spectacled young man with lapses into raciness" (11 July 1942). As well as solo turns he performed in sketches and a ‘smart patter and dance act’ with Valerie Tandy. In his solo turns “he chatters away in an inconsequently amusing way to an accompaniment of laughter” (The Stage, 17 September 1942).

His work at The Windmill didn’t go unnoticed by the BBC and in April 1943 he was back on the radio in an edition of Break for Music, an ENSA lunchtime concert series for war-workers broadcast from a factory canteen, a sort of ENSA equivalent of Workers’ Playtime. Further radio spots followed that year in ENSA Half-Hour, Anzac Hour and Navy Mixture, which he continued to make guest appearances on until 1947. In 1944 and early 1945 he was engaged as Master of Ceremonies on the General Forces Programme show  Twelve Man and a Girl ‘twenty minutes of music in the modern way’, more Break for Music gigs and the first of many appearances on the long-running Music-Hall.         

Howard as Archie, part of the Bren Gun Carrier unit 
led by Dennis Price's character Sgt. Peter Gibbs in
A Canterbury Tale

In the summer of 1943 Howard made a brief return to acting - playing the part of Archie in the Army tank crew - when filming started for Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (the film was premiered the following May). He would go on to appear in another seven films: playing a Nazi spy in I See a Dark Stranger (1946), newspaper reporter Slopey Collins in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), Alf in the second feature A Sister to Assist ‘Er (1948), another newspaper reporter in Front Page Story (1954), an airport official in Out of the Clouds (1955), a sailor in The Baby and the Battleship (1956) and finally as a member of the ship’s crew who meets with a sticky end in The Golden Rendezvous (1977).     

Meanwhile back in the theatre, in December 1943 he made his Palladium debut in George Black’s Look Who’s Here with Howard making an impression as ‘a nonchalant topical chatterer’ who also introduced an impressive line-up of acts that included Old Mother Riley and Kitty McShane, The Cairoli Brothers, Cyril Fletcher, Binnie Hale and the dexterous piano-playing duo Rawicz and Landauer.  

In late 1943 and early 1944 Howard also appeared at various venues for the Bernard Delfont produced variety show Clap Hands and Smile This show starred Charlie Kunz ‘radio’s wizard on the piano’ (his theme song Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie providing the inspiration for the title), Nosmo King, ventriloquist Arthur Worsley and the dance act of Ray & Maxin, this being Eileen ‘Ray’ Johnson and Ernest Maxin. Maxin had also worked at the Windmill and years later would produce Morecambe and Wise’s shows for the BBC. In 1944 Howard also toured with Joe Loss and his Band, appeared in the revue Artistes and Models with dancers Gaston and Andree, the plate spinner and contortionist Eva May Wong and, for some shows, Doris Hare. He ended the year in the magical revue Cavalcade of Mystery starring magician Cecil Lyle, aka The Great Lyle.  

1945 was the year that Michael Howard was finally given his own star vehicle on the radio with the start of an impressive twenty show run of The Michael Howard Show, broadcast on the Home Service from 4 August. The cast included actors Wilfred Babbage and Norman Wooland and singers Pat Rignold and Phyllis Robins. So successful was his show that after just a few weeks it was moved from Saturday lunchtimes to Tuesday evening in the slot previously occupied by The Will Hay Programme. Mind you, it wasn’t universally appreciated as the review in the Daily Mirror concluded it ‘has good points but once more it seems based on the American idea of guying the leading man, plus the introduction of a dumb blonde, plus a film burlesque.’ Describing his act Mark Lewisohn, in the BBC Comedy Guide, said ‘his stage persona was that of a man who had wandered into the wrong place but was determined to carry on as if he had made no mistake, while his stage patter often had the air of a shaggy-dog story’. Also, in November of that year, Howard made a whistle-stop visit to the States to record several programmes for broadcast by various stations.

The success of the radio show led theatrical impresarios George and Alfred Black to organise a stage version of it for a six month provincial tour in 1946. Billed as The Michael Howard Show he was accompanied by impressionist Joyce Golding, The Millionaire Magician, singers and mimics Max and Harry Nesbitt, acrobats Desmond and Marks, the singing and dancing duo of Kim Kendall and Patricia Stainer and comedian Peter Dare. For some reason (perhaps objections from the BBC) mid-tour the title was changed to Black Scandals. 

More radio work followed in 1947 such as Can You Beat It?, a comedy show based on the American series Can You Top This?, in which ‘three comedians try to beat listeners’ stories with the studio audience acting as judges’. Howard was a regular guest comedian for the first series in 1947 and the second between September 1950 and July 1951. Others appearing included Norman Long, Horace Percival, Jon Pertwee, Terry-Thomas, Bob Monkhouse and Charlie Chester. 

Other BBC shows in the 1940s were Leave It to the Boys (1947-48), where the ‘boys’ were Michael Howard and Scottish singer Monte Rey (real name James Fyfe) who were ‘willing to undertake or overtake anything’. The cast comprised Peter Butterworth, Ann Lancaster, Gwen Lewis, Dick Francis (the actor, not the jockey) and a young Petula Clark, performing scripts by Talbot Rothwell, long before his Carry On writing days. There were comedy spots on Variety Bandbox (1948-52), the northern variety show Fanfare (1949) and as part of the cast for a series starring Elsie and Doris Waters titled Petticoat Lane. The premise was that their characters of Gert and Daisy would tour the market, making their way from stall to stall to ‘meet unexpected people in the most unexpected places’. Also in the show was Max Wall and Benny Hill. 

Peggy Evans and Michael Howard married at the
Congregational Church in Ealing on 4 June 1949

Howard was sometimes likened to ‘the English Bob Hope’ and this was surely enforced by his appearance in the melodrama The Cat and the Canary, a comedy film version of which Hope had the star role, in the 1939 Paramount Pictures release. Howard would play Paul Jones in a short run at London’s Q Theatre in December 1946, a role he’d reprise in 1948-49, 1954 and 1966, with two of the productions directed by Arnold Ridley. It was on the 1948-49 tour of The Cat and the Canary that he met his second wife Peggy Evans, who was playing the role of Annabelle West. Peggy had been trained at the Rank ‘charm school’ and is now best known as Dirk Bogarde’s girlfriend, Diana Lewis, in The Blue Lamp, with Bogarde as the young thug who fatally shoots PC George Dixon. By January 1949, just three months into the show’s run Howard was divorced from Betty Kelly and five months later he married Peggy Evans followed by a honeymoon ‘somewhere in Scotland.’

Many reviews of The Cat and the Canary noted that Howard would usually end each performance with an amusing curtain call with his ‘nonsensical patter’. One newspaper reported that a woman in the stalls of Dartford’s Scala Theatre laughed so ‘heartily’ at Howard’s performance in the show that she lost her false teeth which fell under the seat and that ‘she recovered them the next day.’

Dramatic stage roles continued throughout his career including And So to Bed (1947), The Man at Six (1947) which included a young Patrick Macnee in the cast, two tours of Once Upon a Crime (1948 & 1959) an update by Talbot Rothwell of George M. Cohen’s Seven Keys to Baldpate, J.B. Priestley’s Duet in Floodlight (1949), co-starring with Peggy Evans in Beggar My Neighbour (1951-52) a new play written by Arnold Ridley, Dear Delinquent (1958), Bogey 7 (1963) and Sleeping Partners (1967-68), more on that particular play later.

Michael Howard’s obituary in The Stage referred to his ‘chaotic personal life’ and certainly throughout most the 1950s and into the 60s he was no stranger to the inside of a court house. In December 1949 a case was heard at Nottingham County Court for non-payment of a bill for theatrical photographs with Howard ordered to pay the sum of nearly £27 plus costs. In January 1950 it was the turn of Brentford County Court to judge on the matter of unpaid hotel expenses accumulated in Ramsgate in the summer of 1948. In June 1951 he was declared bankrupt by the Official Receiver with debts totalling £9,570, mostly to the Inland Revenue, (see Note 1). He would later attribute this to his “unjustifiable extravagance” and that he had been unable to get work, saying that his earnings had dropped from £15,000 to £47 a year. In the Spring of 1952 a case was heard by Westminster County Court for arrears of an unpaid maintenance order for his first wife. In June 1953 he was before the beak in Bath, again on the charges of obtaining credit, this time when hiring a car in the town. In July 1959 it was the turn of his second wife to claim for more than £200 unpaid alimony and child maintenance, a suspended committal order of 28 days was made provided the arrears were paid off. He was made bankrupt again in 1961; the liabilities were substantially those of the earlier order. In November  1961 it was the turn of the Bow Street Magistrates to commit him for trial on seven charges of obtaining credit and to refuse bail as he ‘jumped his bail’ and fled the country for three months earlier that summer. (Note 2) The following month he was sentenced to 12 months in prison, spending Christmas in Wormwood Scrubs before serving the remainder of his time at the Spring Hill open prison in Buckinghamshire. It wasn’t until April 1967 that he was finally discharged from bankruptcy proceedings. At the time he said that his earnings for the previous five years totalled £955. Leaving the court he told reporters that “it had been a millstone around my neck. Now I can face the future and start a new life. I have a number of offers open to me”.       

Meanwhile another radio star vehicle followed in 1949 with Here’s Howard. A pilot episode was broadcast in the Star Parade series in May 1949 and was given the green light for a full series of thirty shows starting in September that year. The pilot, produced by Leslie Bridgemont and written by Laurie Wyman of The Navy Lark fame, featured Richard Dimbleby, Jean Kent, Lionel Stevens, Norman Shelly and, in her first broadcast, Pat Coombs. Coombs. Shelley and Stevens would be joined by Doris Nichols for the Home Service series. It was Wyman’s first major radio script-writing assignment, though for the Star Parade pilot it was reported that he’d been ‘recalled to the Army to finish his service’ and that he’d be ‘listening in barracks’. Reviewing the first show Ken Findon in Reveille wrote that ‘it was particularly memorable for its brilliant script’ and that ‘his first effort displayed with and originality comparable to Take It From Here’” A second shorter series of Here’s Howard, this time on the Light Programme, followed in July 1950.

Unfortunately none of Michael Howard’s own shows were retained by BBC Sound Archives. However, his act has survived in two variety shows that did get kept. The hour long Variety Parade was recorded on 2 May 1945 just ahead of broadcast for the VE celebrations the following week. The main acts were Tommy Handley and Arthur Askey. Also committed to disc was The Big Show, a 90-minute extravaganza that was a joint BBC and NBC production broadcast on the Light on 16 September 1951. Stars from the States and the UK performed at the Palladium, stars such as Tallulah Bankhead (who presented the regular show on the NBC radio network from 1950 to 1952), Fred Allen, George Sanders, Beatrice Lillie, Vera Lynn, Jack Buchanan (a last minute replacement for Wilfred Pickles), Robb Wilton and, of course, Michael Howard. It also meant that, for the first and only time, Howard made the cover of the Radio Times.    

Television had first beckoned Michael Howard in 1948 when he introduced a couple of episodes of the variety show New to You but it wasn’t until 1951 that he got his first (and only) series which borrowed the title, if not the format, from his last radio outing, Here’s Howard. The programme was commissioned to fill the slot vacated by Terry-Thomas who’d gone off to America without accepting the offer of a return series. It would be a fortnightly show, the norm for many programmes at that time. The Radio Times billing rather cryptically told us that it would star Michael Howard with ‘some friends who prefer to remain anonymous’. A press preview offered a little more insight and that each show would start with Howard ‘alone in the studio. Then, when he gets chatting, the scene will dissolve into his meeting place with some well-know personality. To preserve the element of surprise we shall not know in advance whom we are to see; but ... they will be chosen widely and not necessarily from the entertainment world.’ At the end of the first show announcer Sylvia Peters told viewers that Michael Howard had been performing with a cracked rib. Earlier that day he’d tripped against a table in his West End flat and sustained the injury so for the live broadcast he’d been strapped up and a nurse was on standby on the set. 

The choreographer for Here’s Howard was Irving Davies. Producing was ex-Variety Bandbox producer Bryan Sears for what his first television assignment. Head of light entertainment Ronnie Waldman explained what would become a perennial problem for TV executives in that “Here’s Howard will be the final test of whether a show which makes good on sound can be adapted to make good TV”. However, his conclusion didn’t auger well for the series when he said “so far, radio shows have not proved much of a success on vision”. He was right, the series ran for eight shows and never returned.  At least one TV reviewer saw the series as ‘disappointing’ with Howard ‘as an example of the intimate type of comedian (who) ought to conquer the limitations of the television screen, but his scripts do not blaze with fun and humour.’ (Birmingham Mail 16.5.61) At the start of each show Howard would tell his gags lolling against a No Smoking sign. The only other clues as to who and what was on the series I can find are appearances from actor Reginald Purdell, that well-known personality Gilbert Harding, a Parisian dance sequence and a spoof on Sanders of the River.     

The Radio Times (3 August 1951) previews
the new series of Dear Me

The next radio outing was in the hands of a master of comedy scripting, Ted Kavanagh, writer of ITMA. For Dear Me, which aired on the Light Programme over eight episodes in the summer of 1951, the premise was that Michael Howard is supposedly working on his autobiography. In a touch of nepotism cast as his secretary was his wife Peggy Evans. Tony Hancock was in the unaired pilot recording but he wasn’t to star in the series as he sounded too much like Howard, and anyway, by the time the series started he was otherwise engaged on Happy-Go-Lucky and the second series of Educating Archie. Appearing in Dear Me were Miriam Karlin, Clarence Wright and Horace Percival, both ITMA alumni, John Sharp, Reginald Purdell and David Jacobs. The reviews for Dear Me were mixed: ‘Mr Howard’s comedy is too mechanically efficient for an idea which depends on warmth for success’ (Daily Express, 9.8.51) ‘The opening effort lacked pace, but there were moments of good fun. Verdict: If Howard can soften his microphone manner – avoid the cynical and supercilious – Dear Me will endear itself to the listener.’ (Daily Mirror, 13.8.51) ‘It has all the tricks and topicalities. The burlesque of Twenty Questions was a superb piece of absurdity. I hope it will keep it with a different question every week.’ (Evening Despatch, 13.8.51)    

And so, after a decade in the limelight Michael Howard hit the lean years. It’s likely that Michael Howard’s name was tainted by bankruptcy case – which had fallen between the end of Here’s Howard and the start of Dear Me – and other court appearances. Between 1952 and the autumn of 1956 there were few regular radio or TV engagements. For BBC radio he was on Variety Fanfare a few times in 1952 and there was also Workers’ Playtime (three appearances between 1953 and 1960) plus nineteen turns on Midday Music Hall (1956-61), with Bill Worsley (first husband of Beryl Reid) being the only producer to stay loyal to Howard.  

Stage work kept Howard moderately busy in the early 50s. In 1951 there was a tour of All the Fun of the Air with Jimmy Wheeler, Charmain Innes and Dick Henderson (father of Dickie Henderson) and later variety dates with singer Steve Conway with Howard billed as 'Radio's Favourite Comedian No. 864-5-6-87'.  The following year he worked with impressionist Peter Cavanagh, 'the Voice of them all' in Count Your Blessings and in 1953 the farce The Perfect Woman with Peggy Evans, Irene Handl and Sonnie Hale. In 1954 yet another revival of The Cat and the Canary, again co-starring Peggy and then it was up to Scotland to compere the Rikki Fulton written revue On the Tiles. That same year life was almost imitating art as not only was he a reporter in the film Front Page Story but also started to write a weekly column for Edinburgh's Evening Dispatch newspaper.

1955 proved to be something of a performing desert for Howard with no stage, radio or television engagements.  It wasn't until a chance meeting with another ex-Windmill Theatre comic in September 1956 that Howard made his television comeback in the second series of ITV's Alfred Marks Time. Clifford Davis, TV critic for the Daily Mirror wrote: ‘Remember him? The diffident, spectacled comedian husband of actress Peggy Evans. His dry, whimsical way with a story took him to the London Palladium ... but financial troubles ended in bankruptcy...and Howard quit show business as a performer. A chance meeting in Bond Street with comedian Alfred Marks resulted in Michael being booked for the opening edition of tonight’s series. He has two character parts in sketches – as a surgeon with Eunice Gayson as his nurse, and as the dwarf artist Toulouse Lautrec. As Lautrec Howard will have to walk on his knees. ‘That’s show business,’ he quips. ‘I’ve had to get down on my knees to get back.’  

Howard’s film knowledge was put to use in the Light Programme series The Peers Parade. Broadcast in the summer of 1957 it starred singer Donald Peers, who had been absent from British shores for over two years in Australia, with each hour long show promising ‘personalities from the entertainment world’ and a regular cast of Dick Emery, Miriam Karlin, Ann Lancaster, organist Harold Smart and Cliff Adams with the Show Band Singers. One feature was Picture Puzzles, a four round contest of movie knowledge and Howard was engaged as the ‘referee’ on most editions. It was, in the words of one critic ‘the return of another star from the wilderness.’  

After that flurry of activity it was mainly stage acting work that followed but Michael Howard’s name did occasionally pop up in the Radio Times on programmes such as Does the Team Think? (1958 and 1960), Startime (1964-65), A Night at the Music Hall (1966) with Howard billed as 'the Eminent Raconteur' and the showbiz quiz Sounds Familiar (1967) where he was joined on the panel by his then girlfriend Dawn Addams. In November 1965 there was an attempt to rehabilitate Michael Howard's name in an edition of Comedy Parade called Mike to Mike, written by Howard and produced by Bill Worsley. An introductory article in the Radio Times explained more:

Tonight’s star, that dry wit Michael Howard, can certainly claim that Mike to Mike is custom-made to fit, for he wrote it himself. He plays a radio comedian in search of a fashionable gimmick, an image for his new show. It’s a quest that leads him through some crafty verbal gymnastics into a series of bizarre situations, including a visit to the Turkish baths and a magistrates’ court, and encounters with Doctor Who, a psychiatrist, and a nightclub owner called Bubbles. Where all this gets Howard – with the connivance of Graham Stark, Sheila Buxton and Clovissa Newcombe – is to be disclosed at first hand and heart-to-heart in Mike to Mike.  

One assumes that his various appearances in front on magistrates informed some of this script. There was no follow-up series. His final radio appearances were on Radio 2's Variety Club in July 1979 and January 1980.

Signing the contract for Bogey 7
(The Stage, 2 May 1963)

Back on the stage there was the comedy thriller Time Murderer Please (1957) with his old Alf's Button pal Wally Patch and a long tour with Carol Austin in Jack Popplewell's comedy Dear Delinquent (1958). His friend Talbot Rothwell, who was also godfather to Michael's daughter Harriett, provided a couple of play scripts, the previously mentioned Once Upon a Crime (1959) and Bogey 7 (1963). This play tells of a journalist who makes a bet that he can write a thriller in 24 hours. Howard told the press: “Getting the role in Bogey 7 has been the greatest thrill of my life. Since I came out of jail last August all my show business friends have been wonderful to me.”

The Cat and the Canary continued to play an important role in Howard’s life, and it was a 1966 revival that thrust him into the public eye again when he fell head over heels in love with his leading lady Dawn Addams who, like Peggy Evans nearly two decades earlier, was playing the role of Annabelle West. The only problem was that both were married, Howard to his third wife June Davis (Note 3), and Addams to an Italian Prince named Don Vittorio Emanuele Massimo, although they had separated in 1958. Dawn even changed her surname to Howard saying “I did it because I love Michael Howard and because we are both unable to marry at the moment”.

Dawn Addams as Magda Vamoff in a 1963 
episode of The Saint

British-born actress Dawn Addams had signed a seven-year contract with MGM and starred in a number of Hollywood films during the 1950s. But by the 1960s she was mainly working in television, you'll spot her in old episodes of The Saint and other ITC programmes when they crop up on ITV4. Her last role was as Mrs Landers in 26 episodes of the BBC North Sea ferry-based soap Triangle.    

Meanwhile, in March 1966,  Dawn was in the news when it was reported that she was involved in a custody battle with her estranged husband over their son Stefano and that she had also adopted a baby boy. Later that year it was reported that the baby, called Sean, was in fact not adopted and was Dawn’s and that identity of the father had not been disclosed when the birth was registered. Tragically Sean died in November of that year from bronchial pneumonia aged just eight months old. Hours later she was back on stage at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre for the next performance of The Cat and the Canary.  

Howard and Addams worked together again at the Bristol Hippodrome in, appropriately enough, Sleeping Partners (Note 4) by which time Howard was now divorced from June, living with Dawn in Putney and mainly working as a theatrical impresario. In late 1967 Howard sold his story, presumably to top-up dwindling funds, to The People who serialised it over three Sundays. (Note 5). They worked together again in a 1970 Richmond Theatre production of The Little Hut but by the end of the year they had announced their separation.     

In 1973, now aged 57, there was yet another actress in his life, this time Gretta Gouriet, some 33 years his junior. Howard proposed to her but as Gouriet told the Daily Express “I need a few more days to think about it. The chances are about 50-50”. In the event the chances were zero.

His Inner London Crown Court appearance reported
in the Liverpool Daily Post 22 October 1974

The following year he was embroiled in more legal problems when he was given an 18-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, after admitting writing out cheques worth £1,188 knowing that his bank would not honour them. Howard told the court that he’d reached “absolute bottom” after two (sic) divorces and two suicide attempts.    

In later years Howard returned to his first love of acting with occasional stage roles in fringe theatre productions and even a return to television. In March 1979 he appeared at the Bush Theatre in a production of Independence by the Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura. Concerning the aftermath of colonial oppression in the West Indies, Howard was cast as an ex-governor. In May 1979 he played German politician Wilhelm Liebknecht in the political drama Landscape in Exile by David Zane Mairowitz produced by the Foco Novo theatre company at the Half Moon in Whitechapel. 

Michael Howard with George Waring in LWT's
Mixed Blessings (1980)

In 1980 he appeared in an episode of the LWT sitcom Mixed Blessings. For the BBC he popped up in a 1981 episode of the medical drama Angels and the 1983 Alex Shearer comedy series The Climber. His final tv role was in 1986 as the inebriated Mr Davenport in an episode of the Roy Clarke comedy series The Clairvoyant where he starred alongside Roy Kinnear, Sandra Dickinson and Hugh Lloyd. (Note 6).

In 1988 it was announced that Michael Howard had died on 18 February at the Mount Vernon Hospital in Middlesex. He was aged 71. His funeral service was held a week later at the Breakspear Crematorium. An obituary in The Times described him as having a ‘dry, fatalistic humour’ that made him a leading radio comedian of the 1940s and 1950s. The Daily Telegraph added how in more recent years ‘he was best known for his numerous appearances in law courts, usually for financial reasons but occasionally for matrimonial or alcoholic ones’.  (Note 7) The Stage described him as ‘almost a precursor of what has come to be called alternative comedy, for his style of humour was considerably removed from that of the gagsters and sketch performers of the forties and fifties and he never fitted well into the variety scene which was the main outlet for comedians in those days’. Back in his native Halifax the Evening Courier said that he had been largely forgotten in the area and ‘by the nation at large too, because he was a controversial star who discovered how tough life can be in the glare of publicity’.        

Michael Howard 1916-1988

Note 1: the whole tax investigation is supposed to have started when Tommy Handley died in 1949 with an estate valued at £63,000. Tax inspectors started to look at the financial affairs of other entertainers, and that included Michael Howard. According to Howard he was told “they’re looking for a scapegoat, and it looks like you’re it”. It is said that whilst he was earning up to £150 a week in the eight years between 1943 and 1951 he’d only paid £50 in tax. Others investigated or who were made bankrupt included comedian Hal Monty, actress Hermione Baddeley, Arthur ‘Old Mother Riley’ Lucan, Valentine ‘The Man in Black’ Dyall, and actor Robert Newton.   

Note 2: Apparently Interpol were searching for Howard who had fled first to Belgium then on to Luxembourg and finally France. Holed up in an hotel in Paris, and using a false name, he answered an advert asking for English speaking actors to dub foreign films.    

Note 3: Howard had married June Davis, described in press reports as a ‘32 year old widow’ in June 1963 but they had divorced by November 1967 on the grounds of adultery. This was the case with his previous marriages: he was divorced from Betty in January 1949 when the divorce petition cited adultery ‘in a Morecambe hotel’ with Peggy Evans. His divorce from Peggy came in January 1961, this time the co-respondent was Sally Cooper, daughter of Dame Gladys Cooper. The marriages produced three children: daughter Harriet (born 1939) with Betty and son Ian (born May 1950) and daughter Annabelle with Peggy.    

Note 4: Legal proceedings reared their head yet again, this time over copyright infringement for Sleeping Partners. A High Court writ was issued against both Howard and Addams over their provincial tour of the play by the widow of Sir Edward Seymour Hicks who had adapted it from Sacha Guitry’s play Faison un Rêve. An out of court settlement was reached.   

Note 5: Dawn would also tell her story to The People in January 1970. She also revealed that the father of young Sean was an Italian businessman called Vieri Calamai who she had been introduced to in Rome and that “we spent rather more time in each other’s company than perhaps we should have done.” 

Note 6: Three of these tv appearances are on YouTube. He's a far from politically correct hotel guest in series 3 episode 2 of Mixed Blessings. He plays office worker Mr Pilbeam, yet another character that's fond of the bottle, in episode 4 of The Climber. Finally he appears in episode 3 of The Clairvoyant.

Note 7: Both the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Courier report that he wrote an autobiography in 1973 called Dusk to Dawn but I can find no reference to it elsewhere.