Michael Whitehall: My mother couldn’t accept who we really were

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. It was an aspiration and then it was a demand. The Whitehall family mythology is disputable. It's really a love story. You're the father-son dynamic. I have been so lucky. And it was the real you. I like this. Jack had to hide in the van. Was she loving? She was always upset with me for making a fool of her in public. Can you believe that? He used to love getting into a frock and going off to a football match. My mother would have none of that. No, no, no.

0:45Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio show. I've been particularly looking forward to this one. Michael Whitehall, welcome. Thank you. Bon viveur. producer, talent agent, writer, prep school teacher. I had no idea how much you'd covered in your 20s until I read your memoir, Shark Infested Waters, The Adventures of a Theatrical Agent, which is currently enjoying a reissue. But obviously one of the things I'm most interested in is the fact I was trying to work it out. I think you're the third guest on Full Disclosure who went to the same school that I went to.

1:25Oh, Ampleforth. Yes. so right William de Rimpel Rupert Everett yes and now you yeah so we'll probably talk about that a little bit more than uh yes I mean I should say as you mentioned Rupert that I did leave of my own accord when I left Hampleville I didn't and I gather he didn't no neither of us did but you and William de Rimpel did so it's two all it's two two but we'll begin at the very beginning because you paint a picture of your mum which and given that Patricia Hodge has written one of the introductions to the book there is a touch of the of the Hyacinth bouquets to your mum very absolutely very I mean the arguments that went on within the Whitehall family

2:21before Ampleforth became a reality. Because my mother said to my grandfather, who had all the money, which she had made in the rag trade, so we were a fairly, I think you could call us low middle class, probably. My mother would have none of that. No, no, no. We were going to Ampleforth. She had aspirations. Oh, I mean, yes. It was an aspiration and then it was a demand that that is where my mother, the first time I saw my mother really shattered and shocked was when my grandfather said, I think we should send the boys, the boys being me and my brother Barry, I think we should send the boys to the whip gift in Croydon.

3:13and my mother she said Croydon and back there is no way that Michael and Barry my brother are going to Croydon your dad had gone there after a term at Cranley I think well I'm not sure about that this is an early discovery in the book isn't it the Whitehall family mythology is disputable Yes, the family thing is a bit dodgy. It doesn't totally add up. But what did add up was that my mother had these aspirations for us to be far grander than ever turned out to be. Where did they come from? My mother came from her parents. they moved around a bit but let's say Glasgow ok so the delusions or the ambitions of Granger weren't they weren't, not everybody had them from that back, your mum had a particular oh no, it was just her, she stood out alone she went to the Glasgow School of Arts, that was where she started getting the aspirations she went to a very minor school and then she went because she was a good artist, a good normal artist, not a high end artist and she then got aspirations and said you know the boys and all that I mean I could go through more detail of that period with my grandfather for instance her father who was a cross dresser Yes, but this is established.

5:06This isn't disputed. No, no. This is Arthur. That is all Arthur. Yes. Arthur Kelland. And he used to love getting into a frock and going off to, you know, like a football match. Or the school run, I think. School run. Traumatically. Yes. For your mum. Yeah. You wouldn't want to be picked up by your dad in a frock. No. And that's what happened. So she carried quite a lot. She carried a lot. There was a mixture of sort of guilt. And I don't know, she was never very comfortable, Nora. She was always awkward. Yes. And she was always, particularly with me, because my brother was a very quiet person, very, very upset with me for making a fool of her in public, which is what I got all the time from her.

5:59But that's what she'd been defined by, I suppose, by embarrassment regarding Arthur. And so she thought that the more respectable she could become, perhaps the safer she would feel. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then along came you. And then along came me, making a fool of her own public. My brother, Barry, he didn't make a fool of her own public. He was very quiet and normal. And I was completely out of control. Was she loving? Very, very loving. I was very close to her. My father died when I was quite young, and it was in the days when everybody was smoking, and my father smoked almost all day and all night and finally got emphysema and passed away, sadly, still in his mid-late 50s.

6:59But those were the days when a lot of smoking took place. Everybody was smoking. I used to sit in the back of the car and my father would drive the car with a cigarette in his mouth. My mother would have the odd puff and all the smoke would come into the back of the car where I'd be sitting with Barry. So I'm amazed that we never got emphysema when we were about six or seven. We didn't. What other memories do you have of your dad? Very sweet, very kind, but had the misfortune of having a brother who was my uncle, Cyril, who was a very sharp, clever businessman. And they were in the rag trade. All of them were in the rag trade.

7:49Uncle Cyril was. Jack was. Jack's parents Arthur and the other one they were it was all rag trade and they were all making money out of ladies coats and suits and furriers and all that kind of world which I mean I wasn't I thought it was all very peculiar to be quite honest but that's where the money came from was was them. And your dad did that as well for a bit? My dad did that but he kept getting the sack. Right, so he wasn't as good as Cyril. He wasn't very good at the rag trade, then he worked for a bit for Marks and Spencers and then he got the sack from that and then he worked, he was a partner in the John Lewis partnership, got the sack from that, so he was, he just sort of couldn't really cope.

8:45Which wasn't really what Nora wanted was it? I mean, I'm going to check things with you because not only is the Whitehall family mythology disputed, but also the Internet archives from which we research things like this are not exactly infallible either. But did she sometimes perhaps convey the idea that he was a retired naval officer rather than working in John Lewis? She did. This was when we moved up a rung from living in Streatham and Penge. It's a great word. We then bought a house in, my father bought a house in Beckenham. This is Fox Grove Avenue. Exactly. And the thing about Beckenham is that it was in Kent.

9:31It was in Kent by yards rather than miles. but it helped me a lot later on when I got to Ampleforth because I could say to these very very posh boys at Ampleforth who said to me oh Whitehall where do you live? and I said actually I live in Kent and they said oh I love Kent little did they know that you could get to Penj from our house in about two maybe three minutes so but it was useful but the naval officer thing came because my mother thought she'd gone up a rung by being at 43 Foxgrove Avenue, Beckenham and she wanted to show off a bit to the neighbours and she got very friendly with a very posh man up the road and he said to Nora, rather took her off you know, it came completely out of the blue.

10:35He just said to her, we never see very much of your husband. And Nora said, oh, no, because he has to get up early in the morning, which he had because he drove a van with furs in the back of the van. And Nora didn't want the van to appear in Fox Grove Avenue for the neighbour's benefit. So So he had to get up early in the morning and get in the van and move it off and then go off back to work in the van. So she invented this thing that he was the reason we never see Mr. Whitehall is because he's a retired naval officer, but he still does a lot of work in the Navy. So he goes off, you know, for sometimes weeks on end.

11:29And sometimes Jack had to hide in the van, which wasn't allowed in Foxgrove Avenue, but it was allowed in the other, the other bit of the road, which was called V Avenue. Got it. That was the slightly posher bit. And he would sit in that high-backed van, sometimes for hours on end. So he was indulgent of her eccentricities then? Completely. Which is a loving thing to do, I think. They loved each other to death. There's an awful lot of love in your life, Michael, isn't there? It occurred to me, I've had the pleasure of meeting Hilary, who people will know, of course, from the Whittering Whitehalls, and obviously with your children, most obviously, Jack, because you've made television programmes with him.

12:15But a lot of people who go to school like ours, and I'm similarly blessed to you, struggle with love and struggle with relationships. You've been very blessed in that department. Yes, I have. I mean, I've been very lucky, I mean, hugely lucky with Hillary, of course. And, I mean, we've just had our wedding anniversary, literally, the day before yesterday, which I think is, was it 40 years? Something like that. And I've just had my 86th birthday. Good Lord, yes. Can you believe that? But this love obviously begins with your mum, doesn't it? This idea of you being a very, I think, a very secure child, despite some of the strangeness around you and some of your mum's peculiarities.

13:03It was always very warm, I sense. Yes, it was. So how much of a wrench was it then to go away to school? Did Barry go before or after you? Barry went before me. He was three years older than me. He went first. I followed him it was one of those weird things also when you go to boarding school well not even boarding school that you don't speak to your younger brother brutal actually the younger brother wants to speak to his older brother but the older brother does not speak to the younger brother because it's a bit weird it's a bit weird and I used to say to Barry Well, you don't exist if you're three years below somebody else, do you?

13:54Except to make toast or something like that. And I used to say to Barry, why do you never talk to me at school? You know, I mean, we're a boarding school. We've gone off to a boarding school on a train from King's Cross up to Bjork. And we've got off the thing. And I'm stuck up there for all these weeks and weeks and months sometimes. And Barry walks along the corridor and I'm all sort of, oh, Barry's here. And I'm sort of waving at him and he walks straight past me. And I say, Barry, Barry. And then he says to me at the weekend, Michael, could you not do that stuff? I said, what stuff? Well, that's sort of waving at me.

14:41And I said, why? And he said, it's just very uncool for me. So would you mind not doing that? And I said, well, can we talk? Oh, no, definitely not. talk and so i never spoke to him i would never ever speak to barry during term time

15:04how old would you have been when you started at gilling you'd have been um nine nine yes so so barry was ahead of you by three years and so you're sort of nine years old when you turn up there in short trousers yes but you had a sense that you had a capacity for making friends so or were you lonely in those first time i think i was a bit short of friends because most of the the boys who were in my year were quite different from me in terms of they were quite sporty yes And I have always been a complete non-starter in sport of any kind. Right. Completely unable to do things that people would look at me with sorrow and say, but surely that cricket bat, you see how you put it like that when you're defending.

16:06And I say, I don't understand how I do that. And that was the language. It was the language of sport. Yes. You couldn't speak. I just couldn't absolutely hope it. So that would be quite a big deal at that stage. But I did see an opening. Go on. And having seen this opening, I then achieved it. What I saw was, okay, I can't do the sport, but I can do the camaraderie by being there with, in the cricket season, I can be there with the first 11 cricket team when we were away to some other school because I could be scorer. Because the one thing I could do was handwriting. I was obsessed with having italic handwriting, which all the monks, as you all remember, wrote beautiful.

17:02So that I really concentrated on. And it worked. And I still have. I have to say, well, I say it myself, very good italic handwriting. So that got me off to all the cricket matches because I'm a scorer. I was the first 11 cricket team scorer. And that gets you on the minibus, metaphorically and physically. Exactly. It gets you on the minibus. And as a result of that, the teams of rugby players, which I obviously wouldn't know anywhere near the rugby pitch, but they did quite like Whitehall because he was always quite jokey and cheers, everyone. I then became the first 15 orange man. So my job would be, before the away match, the boys playing the rugby would all be getting ready with their kit and everything and the bus would be there ready to take us to Sedbar or one of those sort of very butch Quakes Wakefield Giggleswick Giggleswick and so I would do that, I'd be in charge of the oranges so the lady in the the hags who used to call them, which was very rude, ladies, would come through and give me oranges.

18:36I'd slice them up and have them all ready, and I'd put a cover over them, and then I'd get on the bus with the oranges, and then I would josh with them on the bus. Then we'd get to Giggleswick, and the match would start, and then at halftime, whistle blows. And on I would come with the oranges. And everybody would go, oh, thanks, white soul. And then the man would blow the whistle and say, get that little fucker off there. Off we're carrying on and blow the whistle again. And that's all I had to do, come on at half time with oranges. But I got the trip. Yes. And I got a sort of camaraderie. and I just became this sort of weird character that was always there.

19:30Also a sort of facilitator, both as scorer and as the orange boy. If I was an amateur psychologist, there are possible early signs here of being an agent because you want to be part of it, but you don't need to be prominent or you don't need to be at the forefront. Yes, yes. Well, I hadn't thought of that connection, but you are correct. But you weren't sitting there being all resentful about not being the prop or not being the opening batsman. You were enjoying your role. Yes. And it was authentic. It was the real you. Because I'm not sensing that you were sort of strapping on some sort of survival personality in order to avoid getting beaten up.

20:13You just thought, I think I'd have more fun if I was on that bus. So what can I do to get on it? And you did the thing that was open. and it was the real you. I like this. And I never got bullied. No. I never got bullied. I had friends who got bullied.

20:33My best friend at Ampleforth, I mean, this is moving on from Gilling into Ampleforth, was Piers Paul Reid, the writer of many... Just for people who hate public school at this point, I have to say, well, I, of course, was at school with his son, Albert. Just to confirm all the clichés.

20:58And we became, you know, great friends. And actually, we are still great friends. We see each other quite a lot. But we were the two. I mean, Piers has said to me many a time when we see him, he says, you know, here we are, the weeds. having another dinner together, the weeds, because we were two weeds. I mean, there was Whitehall, the sort of funny weed. Yes. And then there was Piers, the sort of intellectual, because his father, of course, was very... And, of course, his father was very, very different to mine. I mean, there was no Jack Whitehall with his van. Vans full of furs. No, bags full of furs.

21:46A very grand family. That was Sir Herbert Reid. Yes, of course. And all that. Well, I mean, class kicked in, didn't it? And again, you don't seem to have inherited any of your mother's discomfort. Because an earlier friend, I think your best friend at Gilling, was a chap called Rothwell. That's right. And there's a nice story about when you turned up at his house and you were the first down for breakfast. and the gulf between what you were used to in Kent and what happened when you went to stay with the Rothwells is pretty stark. Well, Rothwell was one of my best friends, and he was a very sweet boy, but much posher than me.

22:29And his parents lived in a manor house, Moorbath Manor in Devon, and he asked me to come in the holidays and spend a few days with him, with his parents and I saw, that'd be lovely. Oh, my mother, of course, then went into complete panic, you know. Oh, my God, what do we, oh, you must find out, I mean, will they be dressing for dinner? Because it's her dream and her nightmare at the same time, isn't it? Yes, of course. And I said, I don't know, mother. But, I mean, they live in a manor house, don't they? and I said well yes they do and she said oh god I don't think I've got anything you can wear we better go into town and get some and I you know there's so much panic about this period anyway I'm finally off to Rothwald's Moorbath Manor train and then into the manor and have the first I get there on a Saturday have the Saturday no I get there on the Friday night and then on the Saturday morning we get up and we're going to out and about but the first thing to do is to have breakfast so I come down to the dining room of the manor Major Rothwell I was a bit disappointed that he was a major I thought I would have thought more Colonel maybe but he was only a major and I got down into the dining room ahead of everyone else and I thought, well, there's no food here.

24:09I'll just have a cup of tea. So I had a cup of tea and a piece of toast or something. And I would have thought, I thought a house like this, they'd come and there'd be a cook or something. A woman would come in with, you know, eggs and bacons and mushrooms and omelets and all that, but there was no sign of any of that. So I finished my toast and marmalade and tea, at which point the doors flung open, and in came Major Rothwell. He'd be, morning, old boy, how are you doing? And I said, oh, I'm doing fine, yes, thank you very much. No, really lovely to be here, and you have a lovely house. And he said, well, we've been here, you know, my grandfather, the poor and great-grandfather.

24:56so um not eating anything and i said toast and marmalade and i said yes i'm absolutely fine oh because it's all over here and he walked over to this side table where these silver dishes were which i thought were sort of ornaments and he lifted them up and one had egg in it and the other bacon and he started putting all this food in his plate and they say you sure you won't change your mind, old boy? And of course, I was committed. I'd had the toast and marmalade. I couldn't go back there. So off he went and I felt stupid and I thought I must remember that. And hungry. Stupid and hungry. And I mean, lots of other things happened in that weekend, but I mean, this isn't a movie of the week.

25:47No, of course. Well, it could be. It could be almost. So, yes. So, So then the return visit occurred and Rothwell came to stay with us in Beckenham. And again, I mean, Nora was even more of a state, you know, because you would have thought that Rothwell was going to be coming with, you know. A retinue. A retinue. So people, anyway, so Rothwell arrives and dissolved to a similar situation in the morning. Rothwell comes down for breakfast and it's all gone fine so far. Laura's been sort of fussing around and hoping I didn't say the wrong thing. And Jack, I think, had been sort of banned from the house almost because he might be common and say the wrong thing.

26:41Anyway, Jack comes down and looks across and sees this table with these silver dishes. And he looks at Nora and says, Nora, why have you put bacon in your jewelry box? And she said, what do you mean? Well, that's the book. That thing is what you normally put all your jewelry and your necklaces and everything in. Oh, Jack, don't be ridiculous. well it's got bacon in it what about in here and she's got fried eggs in there and saying Rothfell will you have a fried egg or I could give you a poached one if you would prefer anyway that was classic Nora but you didn't inherit any of this I mean you must have what was your accent like when you arrived at Gilling would you know I can't remember because it couldn't have been very posh I wouldn't have thought so But I think it was probably a bit more out and about.

27:43Yes. Like that, other than it certainly wasn't like all the Corbyn Sturtons and all those very hooray. So you're conscious of class, obviously, but you're not chippy, I don't think. I think, is this correct that you kind of realised that you would need, if you couldn't speak the language of sport, you could speak the language of urbanity and charm and that would be helpful to you and therefore you kind of from Nora's point of view you moved up a few rungs just in terms of your conduct and your manner yes oh yes definitely definitely conduct and manner I would have picked it up off just sort of being in this place with all these posh...

28:37Yes. Well, actually, they weren't all posh, of course. Well, this is the thing you don't realise at the time. The group I also got very close to were the Yorkshire ones. Right, OK. More local. My other best friend. Their parents lived in Pontefract. Yes. But they owned a mill just outside Pontefract. There were a couple of millo... When you were there, the same. There were always quite a lot of rich Yorkshire. Yes. It wasn't just all Hamilton, Dyer Rimpels and Corby's Sturton. There were one or two hard castles. And there were probably quite a few Whitehalls and O 'Briens, but we didn't really have a tribe of our own.

29:18Because I love what you say about exhibition weekend, which is a sort of prize giving. And that would be, again, your mother's worst nightmare and best dream come true to be in that world and yet to be constantly conscious of saying the wrong thing or slipping up in that world.

29:41I think it explains why you have found it so easy throughout your life to sort of move effortlessly through social milieu, comfortable with anybody, really, which you'd have to be, wouldn't you, as an agent? I mean, you've got toffs on your books, but you've also got horny-handed sons of the soil. Yes, I would say yes, I think that is the case. It's a gift. What were you good at? I mean, were you good in class? What lessons were you good at? English and history was what I did. And I was very interested in history. Problem was that I was more interested in kind of modern history. And they didn't tend to teach that very much.

30:23Lots of Charlemagne, not so much. No, I mean, it was all, I mean, one of my great friends is a man called Neil Stacey, who was an actor of some quality. But he was very bright and he got a PhD in medieval history and all that sort of stuff and was going to be a don at Magdalen and then decided that he wanted to be an actor. so he turned down the job of the Don and decided to be an actor and remained consistently out of work from that day to this but he remains my best friend but he doesn't do very much in the way of acting and there's history of English you gloss over in Shark Infested Waters the fact that you were the editor of the school newspaper or the editor, is that correct?

31:22Yes, I was. Well, you thought you'd make more of that. I do. When I write my memoir, I'll make a much bigger fuss about the fact that I edited a magazine during that period of my life. So that spoke to your English enthusiasms and probably your ability to flit about the place. It wasn't the official school. Ah, okay. So it wasn't the Ampleforth News. It wasn't the Ampleforth Journal. No, okay. Which was all very boring. That was the grown-up one. You know, yes, with endless pictures of monks and their histories and all that sort of stuff. Mine was more private eye. Okay. I mean, not anything like as good as private eye.

32:00Sure, but mischievous. And it was called The Scholar. And it was sort of a little bit under the counter, kind of. Not with news, but slightly. Yeah, I get it. I mean, irreverent. Yes, exactly that. And that, when you left Ampleforth, that was your first professional path, was journalism. It was. So you decided not to go to university. I think you very self-effacingly say because Hull was the only one that accepted you. It was. Hull was the only one. How did Nora take this? Nora presumably had ambitions. She didn't think I should go to Hull anyway. She said, oh, no, darling. The university or just Hull?

32:41No, she felt Hull wasn't right. she was ideally Oxford she wasn't even that sure about Cambridge have you ever been to Cambridge darling? And I said no I haven't she said it's not very nice So no university at all? So there was no university at all because I couldn't go to Hull. So I then had to get a job and I got a job on the Universe newspaper which was a Catholic weekly newspaper and I got that purely based on the fact that I'd been to Amplefall. I was going to say that would be quite a calling card wouldn't it? Yes there was nothing else and the other thing that I got on the universe is that I my main job on the universe was as their film critic because you know they thought the magazine ought to have a proper film critic.

33:45And they thought my qualifications look very right to get that job. So I became the film critic of the universe. And this was a new thing because the universe hadn't had one before. And the editor of the universe was a very strange man who I think had been, He hadn't been a monk, but he'd been something sort of religious and then turned away from religion and now edited the universe, which nobody bought. I mean, the sales were terrible. Anyway, so I'm now the film critic of the universe. and I meet the film editor of the universe who's very similar to the editor of the universe. So I've got two almost identical people telling me what to do and what I was to do was review in as much detail as possible any film that had anything to do with the Catholic Church and I said right and is that serious and he said what do you mean of course it's serious yes you're reviewing films that you know maybe religious film you know or anything that is to do with because our magazine is read by a lot of people you know religious people so tricky that will be your yes Yes.