A life filled to the brim - a tribute to George Melly

Jul 6 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

With his peerless wit and daring suits he was the blues-singing Liverpudlian who raised his glass to life time and again. David Charters pays tribute to George Melly, who died yesterday

A PROCESSION of nannies in starched uniforms pushed their charges over curled and golden leaves, making patterns on the paths in the frost of a morning from another age.

And from beneath the hood of his generously sprung pram, the little boy peeped at the shining glass panes of the Palm House, in Sefton Park, Liverpool, thinking that it must have been the Sleeping Beauty’s Palace.

Such was the precocious imagination of George Melly, who, from the cushion of upper middle-class privilege, rose to sing the blues of black musicians, with a passion rarely heard on these shores.

For, via the rumbling barrel of his chest, the mighty Mississippi had rolled into the Mersey.

It was absurd in a way, but Melly was never a chap to shrink from the absurd, posing as he did in spats and hats and jackets and suits of as many colours as you would find in a confectioner’s window.

At a time when it was fashionable to concentrate on the working-class heroes who had been moulded in Liverpool, Melly stood proudly aside, not in the least ashamed that money and Stowe Public School had helped turn him into one of the most rumbustiously brilliant Britons of the 20th century.

In a conversation, which as usual had been eased by a goodly intake of drink, quite sufficient to have sunk a crew of Russian sailors, but only a warm-up for our man, he told of a TV appearance, with the singer Dominic Behan, brother of the playwright Brendan.

It was suggested that Dominic enjoyed longer periods of sobriety than had the late Brendan, who bruised concrete in New York, London and his native Dublin.

“I must have met him in one of his drunken periods,” replied Melly, the grand, full-lipped smile spreading under calf-brown eyes, one of which was winking, as he savoured the moment.

This was a storyteller plucking humorous images from a deep memory and delivered in a voice, which suggested a rich trifle.

“It was at the BBC in a programme called Late Night Line-Up, known to us as Late Night Booze-Up because the hospitality was always open,” he continued. “God, he was drunk! He insisted on two things. The first one was that he thought that some perfectly harmless lackey was upper-class and he kept trying to kick him, missing each time.

“The other was that he was convinced that I, as a Liverpudlian, had been running around the city with my bottom hanging out of my breeks. I couldn’t persuade him that I was middle-class and had my bottom well within my breeks.”

Melly was brought up first in Ivanhoe Road and then Sandringham Drive, both on the fringes of Sefton Park, where he fell in love with the Palm House, seeing in it the crystallisation of his bedtime fairy stories.

His father, Francis Heywood Melly, was a woolbroker and his mother, Edith Maud, an actress.

Although they weren’t hugely rich, shipping money in the background enabled them to employ a gardener, cook, parlour-maid and a succession of nurse/nannies, among whom were Bella, Hilda, May and Norma.

From school, Melly joined the Royal Navy, where he was an able seaman between 1944-47, gathering some of the material for his memoir, Rum, Bum and Concertina.

Sex, of course, featured much in his life and he had straddled both sides of the sofa, though in later life his heterosexual nature was in far greater evidence.