As a boarder at Nairobi School, then known as Prince of Wales, he sang in the choir and during the Mau Mau uprising patrolled the grounds at night armed with a rifle. But it was Army life that proved transformative. “Before I did National Service in the Kenya Regiment I was stupid, selfish and angry,” Whittaker recalled. “The Army made a man out of me.”
Encouraged by his parents he studied medicine at the University of Cape Town, but finding he lacked the stomach for the doctoring life trained as a teacher. Moving to Britain in 1959, he read zoology, biochemistry and marine biology at Bangor University, where he also composed songs for the rag week show, one of which, The Charge of the Light Brigade, became his first single.
His second, Steel Man, fared better, inching into the charts in 1962 while Whittaker was sitting his finals, which he passed with the second-highest marks of his year. A summer season in Northern Ireland and his own series on Ulster Television launched him on a showbusiness career, to his parents’ dismay. At first he struggled to make a living, appearing mostly in clubs, but he soon began receiving cabaret bookings.
In 1967 he joined a British team for the annual music festival at Knokke in Belgium, singing If I Were a Rich Man from Fiddler on the Roof, and his own composition Mexican Whistler, which reached No 1 in three European countries when it was released as a single, finally setting Whittaker on the road to success.
Source link
