Obituary: Bert Lister

Bert Lister's colourful life assures him of a small place in theatrical history. As dresser, valet, stage manager and chauffeur, he performed his services with no degree of servility whatsoever. Noel Coward nicknamed him "Nanny", an appellation Lister once took literally, answering a summons by the Master in full nurse's uniform.

Lister grew up in the Midlands, and maintained that his bookmaker father was the black sheep of an otherwise respectable family - his son rather thought to continue in that vein. His mother, an amateur opera singer, died when she was 36 years old. At the time Lister senior was nowhere to be found - he was in fact at the Northern Derby in Newcastle - and it was three days before he learnt of his wife's death. "That night he went to bed crying, and when he woke the next morning his hair had turned snow-white," his son recalled. "It was in all the papers."

The family lived for a while at Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight, in a house which had to be quickly abandoned in 1914 - Bert remembered that the breakfast things were left on the table - when it was requisitioned to hold German prisoners of war. They moved to London, and aged 12 Bert was already on stage, joining Percy Lewis's revue, performing a whistling act, "In a Monastery Gardens".

Bert Lister married young, a millionairess called Margaret Cox, but the match did not last long. "I was one of those proud cocky bleeders, and I just pinched her car and drove away and left her."

He met his second wife, Doris Mann, when he was playing a bookmaker - an appropriate role - in Derby Days. She was one of Cochran's Young Ladies, "very attractive - but a bit stupid". By this time Lister had been taken under Alice Delysia's wing, where his somewhat explosive manner, and easy way with Anglo-Saxon oaths, got him into trouble when he forgot his lines in A Pair of Trousers (1930) at the Criterion Theatre. "I played the butler in it - I had to bring in a tray and say, `Madam, please ask one of the lower servants if you want the steps moving', and I forgot it. I was trying to find the words, and muttered, `Oh fuck it', and two ladies in the stalls heard me and I got the sack! But Delysia brought me back in disguise, as a Chinaman . . ."

During the Second World War Lister served in the Royal Marines, and was for a period batman to Evelyn Waugh. He once met the novelist in London by chance, and he invited him to White's. "Someone came in and said, `I'm sorry, Other Ranks aren't allowed in here'," Lister recalled. "Waugh said, `Oh piss off.' The fellow went scarlet! Then someone else came in and said the same thing, and Waugh said, `I told him to go, I don't want to have to tell you to go, just go!' "

Before the war Lister had become friendly with John Gielgud, and together they shared a flat in St Martin's Lane. It was through John Perry, another friend of Gielgud's, later to become Binkie Beaumont's boyfriend, that Lister was recommended to Noel Coward as "secretary-cum-dogsbody". He worked with Coward during the run of Present Laughter at the Haymarket in 1943, and the following year toured South Africa with him, acting as manager, on occasions sounding like an East End trainer to his under-performing boxer: "On the opening night at Cape Town, he went on and made a real cock-up of it. A lot of people had paid a lot of money - it was packed: General Smuts was in. When he came off - and he really had behaved disgracefully, his performance was terrible . . . I clouted him across the chops. I said . . . `You're not fit to lick their boots!' . . . He went back and did his two best comedy songs, and it was a riot." Coward himself paid tribute to Lister in his autobiography Future Indefinite (1954): "He could charm a bird off a tree, provided the bird was familiar with racetrack jargon, rhyming slang and the more trenchant four-letter words of our native tongue."

In 1945 Lister met Gail Kendall, who was appearing in Coward's revue Sigh No More. She was to become his third wife, after a period of living together before Lister's divorce came through, an immorality which had the improbable effect of shocking Noel Coward. In the immediate post-war years, Lister spent time in Paris, where he stage-managed an appearance by Maurice Chevalier whom, he recalled, was spat at because of his collaborationist reputation. He also met Edith Piaf: "I was very fond of her. Always pissed at night . . . a strange girl - a bit sexy," Lister remembered. By this time his relationship with Coward was beginning to break up. "We had terrible rows - he only wanted me to star Graham Payn in the show! I wouldn't have anything to do with it. I had to move out of the Ritz into another hotel because we wouldn't speak." Lister left Coward after seven years of service and, despite a flurry of telegrams from him, refused to return.

Lister subsequently started up a chauffeuring business. "My best driver was the Queen's former driver, Fred . . . He didn't even know where Piccadilly Circus was! All he did was drive - he followed the two cyclists in front of him. So I had to buy him a map."

His last job was with the film producer Norman Jewison during his most successful period (producing Fiddler on the Roof, Rollerball, Jesus Christ Superstar), and seven years later he retired, to his flat in Victoria. His daughter by Gail Kendall, Perry Lister, became part of Sarah Brightman's "Hot Gossip" dance troupe, and went on to marry the rock star Billy Idol.

It was odd to visit Lister and Kendall in their tiny flat, where photographs of Lister with Noel Coward sat happily on the sideboard alongside snaps of the peroxide punk rocker Billy Idol and their pink-haired daughter. Weakened by a lengthy illness in his last years, Lister nevertheless gave graphic and blasphemous accounts of his past adventures, a mixture of a theatrical Don Juan and a minor character in a Cockney play by his onetime master, Noel Coward.

Philip Hoare

Herbert Lister, stage manager, dresser, chauffeur: born 1908; married three times (two sons, one daughter); died London 30 October 1995.