Johnson Clark

Johnson Clark and Hodge, mid-routine. Photo: Ripley and District Heritage Trust

A high tide took Johnson Clark's whole act out to sea before he'd even broken it in. He was a teenager working the sand at Skegness with a brand new set of ventriloquist dolls, five of them, bought outright and ready to make him a living. Then the tide came in further than anybody planned, and every doll went with it.^[1] Most people would call that the end of a story. For Johnson Clark it turned out to be the start of one. Friends in the Pierrot troupe passed the hat and bought him a replacement, a single boy puppet with a mop of hair and a mouth built for trouble. That puppet stayed with Clark for the rest of his career, through the West End, through America, through a Royal Variety Performance bill in 1931.^[1] They called him Hodge. Pull up a chair. This is how a Derbyshire farmer's son built one of British music hall's longest running double acts, one prop shotgun and one very patient tide at a time.

Twopence at Blackpool, and a tide at Skegness

Johnson Clark was born in 1886 in Ripley, Derbyshire, quite possibly at Peasehill Farm, which his father Richard seems to have rented.^[1] The family later moved to Belper, and at fourteen Clark took a job at Cox and Malin's in Derby.^[1] The whole career started on a family holiday. In Blackpool, Clark bought a book off a beach performer for twopence. The title told you everything: How to Become a Ventriloquist.^[1] He taught himself from that pamphlet, and by about eighteen he'd talked his way into Fred Clements' Pierrot troupe at Skegness, working the sand and a pitch next to Hildred's Hotel.^[1] That's where the tide took his five dolls, and where the troupe bought him Hodge in return. He gave the new figure a farmhand's rough voice to match a farmhand's rough manners and never traded him in.^[1][3] He made his first London appearance in 1904, in Waltham Green, under the stage name Vernando. He dropped it soon after and went back to his own name, borrowing his mother's maiden name, Johnson, as a forename in place of whatever he'd been christened.^[1] Ventriloquists rename themselves all the time. Clark did it once, early, and never looked back.

The Sportsman Ventriloquist

On stage Clark billed himself as The Sportsman Ventriloquist and built the whole act around one relationship: a Squire who owns everything, and a farmhand who keeps getting the better of him anyway.^[2][5] Clark played the Squire in tweeds and boots with a shotgun under his arm. Hodge sat on a tree stump like he'd been caught napping on the job, sometimes played as a plain yokel and sometimes, later in the act's life, as a gypsy boy loitering where he shouldn't.^[3][5] The backdrop was a painted English countryside complete with a real roadside stile and, remarkably, an actual telephone box built right into the set for one reason only: to justify Clark doing his phone voice.^[5] That's a lot of carpentry to build around a single vocal trick, and it tells you exactly how far Clark thought a bit through before he ever brought it on stage.

The dialogue survives, which almost nothing from this era of music hall does. Here's a piece of it, Squire and Hodge working over a stolen rabbit:

SQUIRE: Have you been poaching, my lad?
HODGE: No sir.
SQUIRE: How did you get that rabbit?
HODGE: By the scruff of the neck.
SQUIRE: Out of one of my fields?
HODGE: No sir... well, it wasn't there.
SQUIRE: Rabbit chased your dog indeed! You'll be telling me next the rabbit caught your dog and killed it.
HODGE: No sir, that would be a lie. When our dog saw the rabbit there was an argument, and our dog won.
SQUIRE: So you took the rabbit?
HODGE: And the poor little dog had none!^[5]

Read that again. A tenant's boy talks circles around a landowner holding a shotgun, and wins clean, every single time. That's the whole engine of the act: a rustic voice against upper class tones, and the rustic voice comes out ahead.^[5]

On the road, and glad to get home

Clark toured America in 1909 and 1910, then went back around 1912 booked through the William Morris circuit.^[1][4] He never took to it. Charles Hook's Ventriloquial Parade quotes him plainly: he didn't care for the long jumps between towns or the idle weeks with no bookings between dates, and said outright he'd be glad to get back to England.^[4] Plenty of performers chase the road their whole careers. Clark tried it, decided the English music halls suited him better, and went home. In 1931 he landed the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium, the top booking of his working life and proof he never needed America to matter.^[1]

Grandpa Giles, a brother, and one more trick up his sleeve

Hodge wasn't the only figure in Clark's trunk. By the time of his 1956 obituary he was working alongside a second character, Grandpa Giles.^[3] Ventriloquism ran in the family too: Clark's brother Henry took the stage name Hal Bryan and built his own career in variety and as a pantomime dame.^[1] And Clark could do more than argue with a poacher. A fellow ventriloquist named Colin Spencer watched Clark work the Garrick Theatre in Southport in the late 1940s. Writing in 2006, decades after the fact, he said he still had a recording of Hodge finishing a sad song and the whole bit landing in tears. Spencer used that recording, alongside one of another act named Coram, to settle an argument about who had really been first to bring pathos into a ventriloquist act.^[5] Clark could work a crowd two very different ways with the same wooden partner.

The last booking

Johnson Clark died on December 21, 1956, at seventy years old, taken ill while performing at the Opera House in Workington.^[1][3] He was cremated in Carlisle, the city where he'd been booked to open a pantomime later that same season.^[1] The Oracle's obituary that spring called him a well known ventriloquist of the British music halls who had also played America several times, and it did not forget to mention the honor that mattered most in the trade: a Royal Command Performance in London.^[3] A poached rabbit, a shotgun that never once fired, and a farmhand who talked his way out of trouble every night for fifty years. That was the whole act, and it worked because Clark never let go of Hodge, not even after the sea tried to take him first.

Five dolls lost to the tide and the sea sent back a bill of goods, one Hodge, mouth built for trouble, and Clark never once asked for a refund on the other four.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy

The circle