In his younger years, Billy Cotton was also an amateur footballer for Brentford (and later, for the then Athenian league club Wimbledon), an accomplished racing driver and the owner of a Gipsy Moth, which he piloted himself.

He enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers by falsifying his age and saw service in the First World War in Malta and Egypt before landing at Gallipoli in the middle of an artillery barrage.

After the end of the war, in the early 1920s, he worked at several jobs, including as a bus driver, before setting up his own orchestra, the London Savannah Band, in 1924.

[2] Famous musicians who played in Billy Cotton's band during the 1920s and 1930s included Arthur Rosebery, Syd Lipton and Nat Gonella.

They had two sons, Ted and Bill Cotton, who later became the BBC's managing director of television;[2] despite this, he had an affair with one of his band's singers (Doreen Stephans) and moved into a flat with her in the early 1950s.