Death
Hancock committed suicide, by overdose, in Sydney, on 24 June 1968. He was found dead in his Bellevue Hill flat with an empty vodka bottle and a scattering of amylo-barbitone tablets.
In one of his suicide notes he wrote: "Things just seemed to go too wrong too many times". His ashes were brought back to the UK in an Air France hold-all by satirist Willie Rushton and in deference to his fame and love of cricket, his ashes travelled back in the first class cabin.
Spike Milligan commented in 1989: "Very difficult man to get on with. He used to drink excessively. You felt sorry for him. He ended up on his own. I thought, he's got rid of everybody else, he's going to get rid of himself and he did."
A memorial plaque marks the location of where Tony's and his mother's ashes were scattered at St Dunstan's Church in Cranford Park (near Heathrow Airport).
Read more about this topic: Tony Hancock
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)