IMPORTANT Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is

313 Pages·2005·0.75 MB·English

IMPORTANT

Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no
transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is
intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it.

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THE NATIONAL LIFE STORY COLLECTION

INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET Title Page
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Ref. No.: C466/99 Playback No.: F8072-F8079;
F8506-F8508
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Collection title: Artists’ Lives
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Interviewee’s surname: Lacey Title:

Interviewee’s forenames: Bruce

Date of birth: 31.03.1927 Sex: Male
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Date(s) of recording: 16.05.2000; 18.07.2000

Location of interview: Interviewee’s home

Name of interviewer: Gillian Whiteley

Type of recorder: Marantz

Total no. of tapes: 11 Type of tape:

Mono or stereo: Speed:

Noise reduction: Original or copy:
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Additional material:
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Copyright/Clearance: Full Clearance
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Interviewer’s comments:
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Bruce Lacey
C466/99/01 F8072A Page 1
[F8072 Side A]

This is Gillian Whiteley interviewing Bruce Lacey on Tuesday the 16th of May 2000.

Well Bruce...

Oh it’s working, OK.

Right, we’re on. It would be good if we could start perhaps then with your family
history.

Yes.

What can you remember about your maternal grandparents and your paternal
grandparents?

Well, I was born in 1927, at Catford in...no, Lewisham Hospital, but I lived in
Catford, which is south-east London. And, my father was a house painter, but he
collected things. They weren’t like your high class antiques, they were like, poor
man’s antiques I suppose. And my mother had been a milliner. And they had met at
the Catford roller-skating fancy dress ball one year, where my mother went as a red
Indian, because she had played a walk-on part in a production of Hiawatha at the
Albert Hall, so she had this costume from there. And my father decided to go as a
circular dinner table, with hoops around him, and he cut a hole in one of his mother’s
best sheets, and he disguised himself in the middle of the table behind a potted plant,
well an imitation one. I imagine[???] he was on roller skates. But he found he
couldn’t dance with anyone, so he was sitting in the corner looking all miserable, and
my mother went over, and she fell in love with his smile, you know.

Mm.

So, there was that influence. And as a child, we lived near, well Lewisham
Hippodrome, which was a great variety theatre, and we used to go to the Lewisham
Hippodrome every Saturday night. And we used to sit up in the gods, and watch all
Bruce Lacey
C466/99/01 F8072A Page 2
these different jugglers, comedians, singers, magicians and things like that. But
whenever there was a conjuror on the bill, my father would pay for us to sit in the
front row. And always the conjuror would say, ‘Can I have a volunteer from the
audience?’ and my father would be up there, you know, participating. And they,
they’d like, pull an egg out of his mouth and smash on the head, and he’d get into a
balloon basket and go up into the flies, and you think, oh my gosh, what’s happening
to my father? And then he’d come running out from behind. And so... And then we
used to have great parties, and all the family would come, and my father would roll up
the carpet, paint the floor, covered it in talc and stuff, and we, my sister and I would
then do little performances and acts. And at the age of nine I joined a tap-dancing
troupe with my sister, so I started tap-dancing. Well my mother’s father, my mother
had come from Plymouth, and her father was a sea captain, master mariner, on
windjammers. And he won...there was an award called the Blue Ribbon, it might
have been a tea-clipper, but he won it from Lisbon to Newfoundland. And the sad
thing is that I don’t know very much about him, but...

This is your maternal grand, your mother’s father.

Maternal, that’s right.

Right.

From Plymouth.

From Plymouth.

And she came to London to work as a milliner near, well, I can’t remember now,
anyway, near Lewisham. Now my father’s family, they were fishermen and sailors
from Yarmouth, and his father had come to London as a compositor, working for a
printing firm. And, he stayed with us for a number of years until he, he died. But
then my mother’s brother had been in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War,
and he was also an amateur photographer. So I was brought up with photograph
albums of all these aeroplanes. And so I had this aeroplane, and also this sea
influence in my life. Well, when the war came, the Second World War came, I joined
Bruce Lacey
C466/99/01 F8072A Page 3
the Air Training Corps, and started to learn gliding, because I wanted to be a pilot.
And, the big dilemma was, did I go, well, into the Navy or into the Air Force? I
didn’t went to go into the Air Force or the Navy, but because of the sea and the air
thing, I then wanted to go into the Fleet Air Arm, take off from an aircraft carrier on
the sea, but in an aeroplane. And I went up for my air crew selection, and like I’m
doing now, I was leaning on the table, all these admirals in front of me, and they were
asking me questions about, ‘What sort of plane would you like to fly?’ And I said,
‘Well I’d really like to fly a twin-engine bomber.’ And they said, ‘Well we haven’t
got twin-engine planes in the Fleet Air Arm.’ And then they asked me a question on
trigonometry, but because when the war came, and all my fellow students all
evacuated, I stayed home, and had odd bits of teaching from odd schools where a few
students were left behind, and then went down to Wales where my father was working
camouflaging explosives factories, I’d missed out on trigonometry. And in the
waiting room a guy said, ‘They may ask you questions on trigonometry, which is it do
with navigation.’ So he said, ‘If they do, there’s a little rhyme you can say, which
tells you what the sign and the co-sign and the tangent.’ And so I suddenly thought of
this rhyme, when they asked me this question, and I started saying it to myself but
also out loud. Got half-way through and forgot, and one of the admirals carried on
with the rest of it. Obviously they knew I knew nothing. So I went out, and when I
came in again they said, ‘Well we don’t think you’re quite officer pilot material.
We’ll offer you a job as a telegraphist air gunner.’ And so I then got a little badge, I
was able to go back to my fellow Air Training Corps people with what was then, you
could put a white flash in your hat to say you were accepted for air crew. And then,
the war was coming to an end, so they said, we’ve stopped all training, which was just
as well, because the Japanese used to go for the telegraphist air gunner first, so I
wouldn’t have lived long. And so I decided to go into the Navy.

Right.

Well, going back to when my father went down to Wales, I did have some private
tuition, and then my father was working in this explosives factory, camouflaging it...

This is... Just take me back. You mentioned he went back to Wales. When was that
then, what sort of time was it?
Bruce Lacey
C466/99/01 F8072A Page 4

This was about, three years after the war started.

Right. OK.

And so, we as a family all moved down and lived in this...

You all moved to Wales?

We all moved to Wales. Except my sister, who stayed behind.

Right. Was she older than you?

Pardon?

Was she older than you?

She’s two years older. But she stayed behind and had one or two illegitimate babies
and things like that, you know. Eventually she came down. But, my education was
all rather mixed up. And so I went to work in the explosives factory for a firm of
engineers as the timekeeper. Now, it made cordite, this factory did, which is made by
getting cotton, soaking it in sulphuric and nitric acid, washing it all out and drying it,
and then you’re faced with this, what they call a propellant. It’s not like dynamite
which just explodes. It goes slowly and it pushes the shell out of the gun. So that was
like a naval propellant factory, although I was a civilian. And, so... What was I going
to say? Oh that’s right. So, this firm were building these huge tanks to hold sulphuric
and nitric acid. And if you walked across the factory one day, when they were
pumping in fresh sulphuric acid, the exhaust gases would come out of the pipe and
you’d see all this coming towards you, this... And you’d run, because if it hit you,
you’d have all like needles in your face. So, when, when all the men left, they left an
engineer doing odd repairs, and I became a fitter’s mate, you know. So I had a little
bit of engineering experience working with him. So when they said, ‘We’ve stopped
training for air crew,’ I decided to go into the Navy. And they gave me at Skegness in
a Butlin’s holiday camp, they gave me various IQ tests, and when I discovered that I
Bruce Lacey
C466/99/01 F8072A Page 5
wasn’t going to wear bell-bottoms, you know, like the traditional sailor, I was in my
little chalet crying my eyes out, and this psychologist came along and she was
comforting me and saying, ‘There’s no need to cry. You’re going to have a peak cap
and a collar and tie and look like an officer,’ you know. So I decided to go for a
trainee electrical mechanic, and in doing so, I learnt all about electrical things and
engineering things, all about making threads and, all sorts of mechanical things. And
I finished up on a battleship in Portsmouth Harbour, which was, had been used in the
D-Day landings, HMS Ramillies. It had been turned into a training ship, they’d taken
all the small guns out and turned them into classrooms. And, I remember once, we
had to sleep three decks below sea level, in our hammocks, in a very tiny space, about
thirty of us, and the air-conditioning had broken down, and the lavatories were all
blocked up, and it was really terrible. And I decided to go up and swing my hammock
between the big fourteen-inch guns you get on battleships. And I wake up in the
morning and all my friends... Because before you started lessons you had to swab the
decks, and they would be swabbing the decks, they didn’t notice me up in the air, you
know. And because I’ve always, I’ve always been a bit of a, I suppose dare-devil or
adventurer, although I didn’t smoke, I decided to smuggle cigarettes out, you were
allowed a ration of free cigarettes. So I went into the ship’s library and saw this very
thick volume called The War Over Japan, and that had finished, so I thought, well
nobody’s going to bother to read that. And I cut a compartment inside, cutting all
holes, stuffed it with cigarettes. And then tied it up with lots of books. And went out
through the gate and said to the security policeman, ‘Is it all right if I smuggle some
cigarettes out tomorrow night?’ So he let me go. And then when I went out with
more books the following night, I was stopped and searched. Because I’d taken them
out the night before you see. I didn’t smoke, I gave them to my father. So... But one
thing before I joined the Navy, I... One of my great things was, playing toy soldiers,
dressing up, make-believe. If I went to see a film with Charles Laughton called The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, I would put cotton wool on my eye and Plasticine, mould
an eye down here, walk about with a hunchback, frightening all my parents. And,
then I went to see a film called Beau Geste.

Mm.

Do you know the story of Beau Geste?
Bruce Lacey
C466/99/01 F8072A Page 6

Vaguely, mm.

Oh it’s a tragic, tragic story.

What was the film, when was that then, 1930s are we talking about?

In the Thirties, that’s right. But I was attracted towards films that had heroes in, you
know. And part of the story in Beau Geste, he’s got this troop of Foreign
Legionnaires, all are trapped in this fort, being besieged by the Arabs, the Touaregs.
And when the relief column arrive, they see all the soldiers with their guns at the, on
the parapet, and when they get inside the find they’re all dead, because as they’ve
died, their friends have propped them up with a gun and they’re running around firing.
So I went out and bought those Foreign Legionnaire soldiers, and I would re-enact the
whole story of Beau Geste. And there was another heroic film called Gunga Din, and
there was another one even more tragic, and noble, which was called The Four
Feathers, about these three friends that volunteer to fight in the, not the Boer War,
when they were fighting in the, with all the, the Arabs in Egypt, they volunteered to
go, but one was a pacifist and he was given a feather. And they went out. And he
went out in disguise as a native, and he, when they were, his friends were caught at
different times, he helped to save their lives. So I’m nearly crying because it was
such a tragic story.

Mm.

And one guy, Ralph Harrison, he gets lost from his troop, and he loses his hat, and in
the sun, he goes blind, and his friends save him of course and they all get back
together. And then, at one point they find out that it was their friend that saved him.
So anyway, so I had this image of myself also of being like sort of a hero, you know.
And in my bedroom in the Air Training Corps, I actually built an aeroplane cockpit,
and I used to pretend I was bombing Germany every night. They were mainly out of
tea-chests, and there were no tape recorders, so I had to go, [makes engine sound] like
an aeroplane. And I’d be the pilot. And I made an intercom, so I could speak into a
microphone, hear my voice amplified in the earpiece, and then on a long roll of paper,
Bruce Lacey
C466/99/01 F8072A Page 7
a foot wide, driven by gramophone motors, one roll to the other, through a hole in the
cockpit floor, he saw me take off from Biggin Hill, fly across England, then the
English Channel would go by, and then France, all the trees and the houses, looking
down on them. And then you’d fly towards Berlin. And then, I would then lay down
on the floor and be the bomb aimer, and then, talking to myself, talking back to the
pilot, they do, they say, ‘Steady steady, left, left, right, right,’ and then say, ‘Bombs
away.’ Then I calculated the height and how many seconds it would reach for the
bombs to reach the ground, and with a secret button that only I knew I was pressing
with my toe, I pressed, little torch bulbs would flash under the paper and I’d go,
[makes relevant sound] like bombs exploding. So I had all this fantasy in my
bedroom. Which was like a simulator, or you could call it an art installation, or
performance art, or what, you know. Anyway, so, in the Navy, studying hard, burning
the candle at both ends, going back to London at weekends, living three decks below
sea level, I was home one weekend, I’d been training for a year, mathematics,
electronics, everything, and I was home, and I collapsed. I was taken to hospital, X-
rayed. They wheeled me out to a hospital balcony, didn’t tell me what was wrong.
The nurses were crying. I thought, what on earth is wrong? My mother and father
were crying. And in the end my sister, she said, ‘You’ve been diagnosed with
tuberculosis.’ Now tuberculosis at that time, in, say, 1945, or ’46, was known as the
white plague or the white death; there was no cure. The only cure was bed rest or, or
surgery, you know. So I was then... I was more disappointed, not with having
tuberculosis, that I couldn’t finish my course and get my, what they call leading
seaman’s badge, which I’d already bought in gold embroidery, you know, ready to put
on. And so, I was then sent off to various hospitals, mainly naval hospitals at first,
and I discovered that I only had it very slightly. I had what they call infiltrations.
Now if you imagine infiltrations on the lungs as being spots, the worst thing you
could have was cavities, which are like boils, and some people have them as big as a
saucer. Now the only cure for that was through either, paralyse one half of the
diaphragm, which would stop the lung from working, which would rest it; or the other
one was to give... That’s what they called a phrenic crush. The other one was
artificial pneumothorax, where they injected air between the lung and the cavity wall
to squeeze that lung up. But the worst one, I think it was called a pneumothorax,
where they laid you on the operating table, made a slice down your back through all
your ribs, and then, took out an inch of ribs, joined you up together, so you would be
Bruce Lacey
C466/99/01 F8072A Page 8
permanently lopsided for the rest of your life. So I’m laying, knowing I haven’t got it
very badly, but people, there’s a guy in a plaster cast because he’s got it in the spine,
to keep him still; there’s a guy next to me that’s coughing his lungs out. I’m building
up pillows to keep all the germs away. There’s another guy comes in with tubercular
meningitis. I start developing all his symptoms, I’ve got headaches. Another guy’s
got it in his stomach, screaming out with pain. And I’ve got this stomach ache that
lasts for months, all the specialists say, you know, ‘We think you’re a hypochondriac,’
you know. And, I’m still doing...I mean, all in the Navy I was doing performances,
and then in hospital I’m doing things like, I used to make things called epidiascopes,
where you can put photographs in. And I get a shoe box and my parents bring me in a
lens and a bowl. And I’m projecting all the mates, all the sailors, all their photographs
of their girlfriends up on the wall. And one guy, he gets his willy out and he sticks his
willy into this projector, so there’s this about eight foot, glistening, in full colour,
willy on the wall. And the nurse comes in, all horrified, you know, ‘Stop stop stop
stop’ all this. And there’s one guy in the corner, he’s laughing, and he’s laughing, he
starts coughing. He starts haemorrhaging. And he’s taken out and in the morning
he’s dead of course, and there’s just a hospital bed, all the blankets rolled up, you
know. And it’s a real sock in the stomach, you know. Well, while I was in the Air
Training Corps, I’d gone from working in the explosive factory, and then, we were
living in Wales, and they started a thing called the Police Messenger Corps, in which
young schoolboys, they thought the Germans might parachute into South Wales, cut
all the telephone wires, and so schoolboys, on a Sunday this was, schoolboys sat in
the police station on a Sunday, and if the Germans landed, we would carry messages
on our pushbikes, through the German lines, to other police stations. And I
camouflaged my bicycle. But also I had this fantasy, I was very caught up, I had this
romantic idea about the Germans, and we didn’t know all about Auschwitz and things
like that, and so I tried to pretend I was a German spy. And I forged a German
identification document, and I used to walk along and drop it, and people used to pick
it up and say, ‘You dropped this,’ and no one actually looked at it, you know. I
realised years later, the thing I’d copied in a book was an identification card with a big
red ‘J’ on it. And I found out later that that was the Jewish identification card. So
anyway, so, some of our mates that were over sixteen, they had motorbikes, so I
thought, well when we went back to London again, I thought, I want to be a
motorcycle policeman. So my mother and I went up to Scotland Yard, she said, ‘My