the times | Thursday January 13 2022 53
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RSC actor best known for
The Vicar of Dibley
Gary Waldhorn
Page 54When Robin Le Mesurier was a small
boy, his mother, Hattie Jacques, then
starring in the Carry On comedy films,
took him with her to a police charity
function she had agreed to attend. “At
the end of the evening they presented
her with a special pair of handcuffs as a
gift,” Le Mesurier recalled. “The next
morning I got hold of them and locked
myself up. It was a bit of a joke at first
until we realised we couldn’t get them
off. When she carted me down the
street to the nearest police station I
yelled at passersby: ‘I haven’t done any-
thing, missus, please don’t lock me up!’
I thought it was very funny, although
I’m not sure Mum did.”
When they finally got to the police
station no key could be found to undo
the cuffs so he was taken to a locksmith
instead. “It wasn’t a total disaster
because later, when Mum was working
with Eric Sykes in their celebrated
television series, Sykes wrote a whole
episode based on that incident.”
As the son of not one but two
celebrities — his father was John Le
Mesurier the actor best known for
playing Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army
— he considered his childhood to have
been “charmed” but also, as he told
Jacques’s biographer Andy Merriman,
“somewhat chaotic”.
The family home, a four-storey
white-washed Victorian townhouse in
Earls Court, became, he said, “an on-
going party. Mum and Dad constantly
had friends over. Some famous people
‘in the business’, some not so famous,
and it just seemed never ending.”
He recalled being woken up regularly
in the middle of the night by the likes of
Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan and
various jazz musicians jamming loudly
somewhere in the house. “To this day
I’m asked frequently what it was like
growing up in such a bohemian house-
hold, but it didn’t seem out of the
ordinary. To me, Kenneth Williams,
Joan Sims and Harry Secombe were
just friends and colleagues of Mum
and Dad’s.”
The party theme continued into his
adult life. He became a sought-after
rock guitarist, who was on the road with
Rod Stewart at the peak of his popu-
larity, when his group had two private
planes at its disposal and were trashing
hotel rooms and playing jokes on rival
bands and fellow band-members.
One of their earliest scrapes was
when, at Stewart’s behest, the band
went to Glasgow for Hogmanay, and
their hotel rooms were raided. The
police found marijuana and charged
everyone present including Billy Peek.
“Billy had never smoked and is as
straight as the day is long,” Le Mesurier
recalled. “It transpired his enema bag
was mistaken by the officers as some
sort of drug paraphernalia. We spent
the day in the cells and were then
rushed to the Apollo Theatre under
police escort for the show.”
Robin Mark Le Mesurier Halliley
was born in London in 1953 to Hattie
Jacques (née Josephine Jaques) and
John Le Mesurier (né John Halliley),
from whom he said he inherited his
good manners and passion for music.
Robin and his younger brother Jake (né
Kim) grew up in a house which was
often full of lodgers, actors and au pairs,
including one of Jacques’s gay friends
“completely out of place”. He did not
fare much better at Westminster City
Grammar School, where he was bullied
for having a famous mother, and was
once stabbed in the back with a pair of
compasses.
Music became his salvation. He had
been given his first guitar when he was
nine, and as soon as he was old enough,
his father regularly took him to Ronnie
Scott’s as well as on a weekly pilgrimage
to a record emporium. He had already
absorbed a great deal of jazz by the
time he first heard rock’n’roll but was
immediately “hooked”, especially by
blues guitarists. He was soon playing in
a blues-style band with schoolmates.
His initial foray into the music busi-
ness was running a mobile disco. Every
weekend, still in his early teens, he DJ’d
at parties. At an East End wedding, he
almost came a cropper. “My playlist
wasn’t going down well and a bloke
came up to me and asked, ‘Do you know
the Hokey Cokey?’, ‘No,’ I replied some-
what perfunctorily. That didn’t seem to
go down very well. ‘Well, I’ve just come
out the nick for GBH, so you’d better
find something more suitable than the
crap you’re playing.’”
When he was 13, his father remarried.
Joan Le Mesurier (obituary July 15,
2021) had also been married before, andwho operated as an unofficial “mother’s
help”. He remembered it as “a very
gentle household where there was
never a cross word”.
Le Mesurier wrote in his 2017 auto-
biography, A Charmed Rock’n’Roll Life:
“My character and outlook were
shaped by their kindness, generosity
and tolerant natures. I have been greatlyinfluenced by their politeness — Dad
always maintained that the two most
important words in the English
language were ‘please’ and ‘thank you’,
and I agree.”
Aged eight, he was shocked to read in
a paper that his parents were planning
to get divorced. Even after they had
separated and his mother had moved
her new boyfriend, John Schofield,
into the family home, he was happier
there than at school. In what amounted
to a ménage à trois, his father remained
at the house, simply moving into the
top floor.
He attended Sussex House prep
school in London but felt, he said,‘Mum and Dad constantly
had friends to the house.
It was an ongoing party’
Obituaries
Robin Le Mesurier
Rock guitarist for Rod Stewart who, as the son of Hattie Jacques and John Le Mesurier, was born into a life both ‘chaotic and bohemian’
ROBERT TAYLOR/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKLe Mesurier with Hattie Jacques in 1974, and on tour with Rod Stewart in Los Angeles in 1981had a son of
similar age to
Jake. “I got on
with Joan right
from the start.
She was the ab-
solute opposite
of the wicked
stepmother... Joan also got on fantasti-
cally well with my mum, which made
things so much easier.”
However, family life became
unsettled once more when Schofield
cheated on Hattie Jacques and, in
another rather strange ménage à trois,
Joan Le Mesurier had an affair with
Tony Hancock, John Le Mesurier’s best
friend and drinking partner. John
remained friends with both of them
and, when Hancock killed himself in
1968, he and Joan resumed their
marriage on more conventional terms.
After leaving school the following
year, Robin Le Mesurier DJ’d until his
band Reign became busy with gigs at
clubs and student unions, supporting
the likes of Genesis and the Kinks.
For a year, he was a member of the
Wombles, Mike Batt’s band of furry
creatures inspired by Elisabeth Beres-
ford’s books for children. However, a
drugs raid on the house in Earls Court
cut short his personal Wombling spree,as Beresford insisted that he be dropped
from the band.
He was working as guitar tech for
Rod Stewart when the singer’s first solo
tour arrived at Olympia in London for
four nights in 1976. “Mum came to the
show and sat next to Elton John. Elton
was freaking out because he was sitting
next to Hattie Jacques and Mum was
freaking out that she was sitting next to
Elton John.”
The following year his band Air
Supply was booked as the support for
Stewart’s US tour. Stewart and his col-
leagues regularly popped by during Air
Supply’s soundcheck. “I had no idea
what that meant at the time or how
much that would change my life. I do
remember that his band knew exactly
the timing of when I was about to play
an extended solo and would all stand on
the side of the stage, whooping and hol-
lering and waving. As soon as I finished
the solo, they would leave, which inevi-
tably pissed off the rest of Air Supply.”
Stewart considered Le Mesurier “a
cut above, a beautiful, soulful lead” and
when he asked him to become a per-
manent member of his band in 1981, the
year after his mother had died, he ac-
cepted and settled in Los Angeles. The
two became close and lasting friends,
not least because they shared a passion
for model railways and would spent
hours laying
tracks together.
He also re-
mained close to
his elderly father
and worked
with him on a
recording of The
Velveteen Rabbit,
which was re-
leased before his
father died in 1983.
His first mar-
riage, to Robin
Robinson, a “Play-
boy Bunny”, ended
in divorce. He is
survived by his
second wife, Jules,
an interior designer.
For many years
from 1994 he
worked with the
French rock star
Johnny Hallyday on
his English-
language album and became his tour
musical director. Le Mesurier also pur-
sued his own projects, including the Farm
Dogs band, which he formed with Elton
John’s lyricist Bernie Taupin in the mid-
1990s, and his 1997 album, Picture Palace.
Like his father, Robin Le Mesurier
was no flincher from the glass and, in
2011, he appeared in Rehab, a reality TV
show which followed various celebri-
ties through addiction treatment at a
luxury clinic.
In 2017 he wrote: “My life so far has
been like a rollercoaster but, saying
that, a really fantastic rollercoaster, one
you’d like to ride over and over again.
I’ve been so lucky so far, and many
times being in the right place at the
right time helps. Also, a little nepotism
doesn’t go amiss, either.”Robin Le Mesurier, musician, was born
on March 22, 1953. He died of cancer on
December 22, 2021, aged 68l otonfantasti-trm h a w r V wle
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