Submitted by
Nicky Smith
Hugh Williams
The Guardian newspaper had a long article at
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,786755,00.html
about Hugo Williams, poet, brother of Upstairs Downstairs star Simon Williams and son of OOOAIM cross-dresser Hugh Williams. It gives an excelent insight into the everyday life of posh theatrical folk -
Williams was born in Windsor in 1942. Laurence Olivier telegrammed his
congratulations to the parents and suggested that the boy be called
Torquemada. The telegram is in the black-and-white scrapbook. Four years
later, the Williamses had another son, Simon, now a well-known actor and
(like the parents) occasional playwright. Next came a girl, Polly, now
married to the actor Nigel Havers. Conscious of a surrounding glitter, while
he scrapes by on poet's wages, Hugo Williams sometimes feels that the roles
have been reversed between him and his younger brother. "I know he thinks
that", says Simon, who beams admiration for Hugo and his works. "But he was
very much the elder brother. He was a sort of god. He'd tell me what music
to listen to, what clothes were in fashion, what to read. I'd always play
Friar Tuck to his Robin Hood." Even now, he says, "Hugo won't come down to
the country to visit me at all. Lunch has to be at his place, not at mine,
even though I have a schedule and he doesn't."
"Williams's childhood is depicted in his writings as sunny, on the whole,
though acted out beneath perpetually looming shadows. The first cloud was
the war, and his father's absence while serving in the army. Williams says,
"He didn't really have to go. He could have stayed at home and done his bit
by making morale-boosting films or something, but he insisted on it. I think
their marriage never fully recovered. They only had a few years of real
happiness together." His mother had a love affair and his father returned
from service to find himself hounded by the Inland Revenue. "That disgusted
him and almost broke him", says Williams, producing a newspaper clipping
about the actor's financial problems from the scrapbook. His father's tax
debt stemmed from money he had made starring in Michael Powell's war-effort
film One of Our Aircraft is Missing. It was only after a long interval that
the revenue claimed more than £1,000, an enormous sum at the end of the
1940s, and Hugh Williams was forced into bankruptcy. "He threatened to leave
the country, so they confiscated his passport", Hugo explains. Simon takes a
typically more cheerful view. "Looking back, I found it rather exciting, all
the moving house at the time of our father's bankruptcy. It must have been
clever of them to disguise the tremendous difficulties they were facing, and
make it seem like fun to us."
"Then there was the shadow cast by school. In 1955, after a miserable time
at a prep school in Hemel Hempstead, Hugo Williams took up a place at Eton.
Wasn't his father broke? "He borrowed the money from Michael Astor. When he
turned up at Eton, the housemaster said, 'Oh, I read about your trouble and
took your son's name off the list.' Dad said: 'Well, you'll just have to put
it back on again.'" Williams has written much about his schooldays in his
fortnightly column in the TLS, "Freelance", which functions as a
clearing-house for whatever is happening in his head. Recently he recalled
passing a shop called Thomas's in Eton, which "used to have a display of
canes arranged criss-cross in the window... I was once sent down to Thomas's
to buy a suitable cane with which to be beaten."
His time at Eton was not unhappy, he says, "though one tends to blame it for
all sorts of mess in one's life at present". His formal education ended,
without much in the way of paper qualifications, when he was 17. Inevitably,
he embarked on life with certain attitudes. An acute and funny early travel
book, All the Time in the World (1966), has the 20-year-old setting off
round the globe carrying "dressing gown, slippers, dinner jacket,
typewriter", looking for a bed in a youth hostel."
Presumably my life could have been very different if the evil Inland Revenue
had never made my parents pay any taxes...
