On 14 October 1962, Kenneth's father, Charlie Williams, was taken to hospital after drinking carbon tetrachloride that had been stored in a cough-mixture bottle. Kenneth, who had never got on well with his father, refused to visit him. The following day, Charlie died and, an hour after being given the news, Kenneth went on stage in the West End. The coroner's court recorded a verdict of accidental death due to corrosive poisoning by carbon tetrachloride. Kenneth believed his father had committed suicide, as the circumstances leading to the poisoning seemed unlikely to have happened by bad luck. Williams was later denied a visa to the United States, when it emerged that Scotland Yard kept a file on him relating to his father's death – the suspicion being that he had poisoned his father.