Terry Major-Ball

Terry Major-Ball: born Worcester Park, Surrey 2 July 1932; married 1960 Shirley Wilson (one son, one daughter); died Chard, Somerset 13 March 2007.

A coldly dispassionate view of Terry Major-Ball would be that his life provides superb social history. A better, or at any rate more understanding one, would recognise a decent, over-conscientious, long-struggling and wholly honest man who paid all his dues and lived an innocent, honourable life from which he managed to take a fair measure of happiness.

The brother of the former prime minister was born 11 years ahead of him in 1932, to Abraham Thomas Ball, lately retired from the music-hall stage, whose stage name had long been "Tom Major". The double-barrelled name had nothing to do with affectation, everything to do with sardonic circumstance.

Tom, only initially and as an offshoot of early swimming and gymnastics, any sort of trapeze artist, had worked the music halls of the British Isles as comedian and song-and-dance man, chiefly with his first wife, Katie Grant. Katie began a whole cycle of confusion by calling herself "Drum" for the stage effect of "Drum and Ball". "Major" was later brought in by Tom to achieve the yet more resonant "Drum and Major".

Terry and his sister Pat, emerged from registry offices as "Major-Ball", John, on the insistence of his mother, Gwen, as simple "Major". Gwen, deeply loved and valued by both boys, was a second wife - Katie having been killed in the Twenties in a stage accident.

In later life, Terry would become the family historian, tracing the Ball family back to the Black Country and his great-great-grandfather Joseph Ball, a locksmith born in Willenhall in 1785. The family had prospered in the next two generations of John, then Abraham Ball: locksmithing, butchers' shops and a thriving Walsall public house. Terry and his brother, John, were in turn the children of Joseph's great-grandson Abraham Thomas (Tom), children of an old parent, in a second marriage.

Tom Ball, born in 1877, travelled the United States and South America as an entertainer and, mutating into "Tom Major", would work the music halls of, he claimed, "every theatre in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland". He was incidentally, a stage contemporary of Charlie Parsons, a.k.a. Jimmy Linton, comedian grandfather of the departing prime minister.

Terry's life would be largely determined when his father left the stage around 1930, the depth of the Great Depression, settling soon after to designing manufacturing and marketing tiles, plaques, garden furnishings and other clay or cement mouldings, only later expanding to do terrible PR for his younger son by branching into garden figures including gnomes.

For a long time it thrived, the family lived pleasantly in Worcester Park, Surrey, and business did not finally finish until 1962 when Terry was 30. But, long before then, Tom, an old Bohemian with very little insurance - 66 when his younger son was born in 1943 - would be struggling on in a business falling slowly into decline. A plan for sale which fell through created commitments. Tom insisted ruinously upon honouring debts instead of ducking into bankruptcy, which high-mindedness brought about effective ruin with family and works removed to rented rooms in 144 Cold Harbour Lane Brixton and a rented workshop nearby.

The work was heavy and, after National Service and a short bossed-about time as a Woolworth's trainee where, in 1958, he met a girl called Shirley, Terry would do ever more of it under ever-deteriorating financial circumstances, without capital or renewed equipment, to the very end.

Mixing sand with cement in a three-to-one combination, riddling it to remove gravel, watering, hand-testing for texture, tamping the mix down into the mould, finishing with ground-stone powder (and spitting out its dust) to give the ornament colour before using mineral black or the manganese dioxide (which burns the skin), to "antique" the figure for an aged look.

This is an account of a day's work not likely to occur in many obituaries. But, with father Tom in his late seventies and his mother slowly dying, Terry it was who, with a good deal of help from his younger brother after 1959, devotedly did it. Terry's autobiography, Major Major: memories of an older brother, published in 1994, describes a hard time soldiered through.

Always clumsy and unlucky, he suffered every kind of physical misfortune, slicing part of a finger off trimming a figure with a machete and, in a number of falls, permanently injuring his back. But all this time, with his father in his eighties, his mother seriously ill and his brother at school until he was 16, Terry effectively kept the family. He did so by working absurdly hard, often enough working a 16-hour day to meet an order, moulding and shaping sand and cement into the early morning.

His strength, throughout a hard-pressed, little-rewarded life, was a miraculous immunity from the least hint of self-pity. On the contrary, the comic side of things usually came along to cheer him up. When the brothers were working together, an obliging lorry added to their business misfortunes by backing into their yard gates. The two of them shored them up with props, but had to come and go over the wall. The police took note of this and, when John had gone to fetch mid- morning buns, Terry had to explain to a disappointed officer that the scruffy character effecting an entry was indeed honestly employed there. Then there was the horse which seemed to be laughing as they broke into their own premises, only for a policeman to materialise astride it and require the same anti-climatic explanation.

In 1960 the Shirley of Woolworth's, Shirley Wilson, married him and stayed married to him. The honeymoon was a week in a loaned chalet on the muddy flats of Sheppey and he returned to work for another two years on the intractable moulds. After the works, following a friendly take-over by David's Rural Industries, finally closed with the larger company, Terry worked for a number of firms. He had a horrible job working 10 hours a night, making plastic bottle caps with a manual press: "The pay was poor and they docked an hour if you were more than three minutes late . . . To work fast, you had to roll up your sleeves. This meant you burnt your arms."

Advised by a doctor that this was work to get out of if you valued health or sanity, he got a job with the South Eastern Electricity Board, installing meters (and reluctantly joined the ETU). He was happy there and tolerably so at another job with Phillips Services. However, badly knocked about by accidents and especially the strained back, he would, at 60, be made redundant.

Throughout much of this time he watched, without a hint of envy or self-service, the rise of his brother, John, through election at Huntingdon, junior office at the Department of Health and Social Security, the Chief Secretaryship, briefly the Foreign Office, then the Treasury, to be Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997.

England being as snobbish as some of it is, and its diary journalists as trivial as most of them are, Terry Major-Ball, with his ungainly, stumbling frame, big glasses and innocent truthfulness, became an object of malign fascination. Paul Johnson, with customary grace, called him "the Prime Minister's amazing brother", while Charles Moore spoke of the brothers as the children "of a failed trapeze artist". Characteristically, Terry, having walked serenely through pages of mocking comment on himself, took mortal affront at such scorn for his father.

Complaints on this matter led him to James Hughes-Onslow, who would ghost the autobiography and prove a friend. Slowly, even the dimmest of the epigoni got the message: they would never get injurious stories about John out of Terry. He had been confided in over the early Eighties affair with Edwina Currie, but although that lady's tannoy later informed the agencies, his mouth stayed shut. He enjoyed, too, a few press jaunts, as why should he not - jaunts not having been notably frequent in that life.

In his later years, with the grinding work behind him, Terry took the family back to Surrey, not Worcester Park but Wallington. Life improved generally, he and Shirley delighting their children and grandchildren. The family triumphant became his hobby, and he spent a great deal of time on Midlands genealogy and in the Newspaper Library at Colindale researching his father's early career.

Terry Major-Ball was something of a pure soul, a man without malice, calculation or pretence. He lived the life or many millions of powerless, put-upon people, worked hard and long in often miserable jobs, but came through. By circumstance, he was wired up to the Big World and exposed to all the malignancies of the celebrity circuit. But at the end even smart diary journalists confessed to respecting him.

Edward Pearce