Dad's Army

by Graham McCann

  THE CHARACTERS

  The missus looked at me and she said: ‘What are you supposed to be?’ I said: ‘I’m one of the Home Guards.’ She said: ‘Well, what d’you DO in the Home Guard?’ I said: ‘I’ve got to stop Hitler’s army landing.’ She said: ‘What – YOU?’ I said: ‘No! There’s Harry Bates, and Charlie Evans, and … There’s seven or eight of us altogether … We’re in a GROUP!’

  ROBB WILTON1

  Be friends, you English fools, be friends!

  HENRY V2

  CHAPTER VII

  An Officer and a Gentleman

  Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON1

  Impelling power and restraining wisdom are as opposite as any two things, and are rarely found together.

  WALTER BAGEHOT2

  When, as a consequence of the exceptional success of Dad’s Army, David Croft and Jimmy Perry agreed to publish a selection of scripts from past series,3 they decided to include a potted biography of each one of the leading characters. It seemed, in the circumstances, a perfectly natural thing to do: after all, to those who tuned in to watch the world of Walmington-on-Sea on a regular basis, these fictional individuals had been alive for some time.

  Mainwaring and Wilson were very easy to believe in. Whenever Mainwaring put down the telephone, summoned up the sickliest of grins and said, ‘Just chatting to the little woman’, and whenever Wilson responded to Mrs Pike’s audible inquiry, ‘Will you be around later, Arthur, for your usual?’ by wrapping a hand over his eyes and whispering, ‘Oh, Mavis!’, nothing more needed to be said, or shown, because one already knew. Just by watching these two men each week, listening to their stories, following their exchanges, studying their asides, it was possible, without even trying, to compile brief biographies of both of them in one’s mind:

  George Mainwaring: Born in Eastbourne in 1885. His father, Edmund, was either – depending on whose account one chooses to believe – a well-regarded member of the Master Tailors’ Guild who ran a high-class gentleman’s outfitters on the Parade, or the beleaguered proprietor of a modest little side street draper’s shop most easily identified by the assortment of workmen’s trousers that used to hang and flap outside the window. George’s childhood – unlike that of his brash, sporty, effortlessly popular brother Barry – was one long struggle, but he did manage to win a scholarship to his local grammar school, where he took a cold bath every morning, buried his nose in books, and did all that he could to cultivate a clear brain and a sharp eye. After school, he joined the Eastbourne branch of Swallow Bank, slowly and methodically working his way up from office boy to assistant chief clerk. When war broke out in 1914, he volunteered at once – only to be turned down on account of his poor eyesight; four years later, following several more unsuccessful attempts to join up, he was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the Pioneer Corps, and arrived in France just in time to clear up the mess, but just too late to qualify for any medals. Shortly after returning to civilian life, he met and married Elizabeth, a nervous, big-boned, sensitive-nosed, reclusive vegetarian from a relatively well-connected family in Clagthorpe. The couple’s childless but ‘almost blissful’ marriage received a welcome boost in the early 1930s when George was promoted to the position of Manager at the Walmington-on-Sea branch of the bank; he proceeded to immerse himself in his work, while she proceeded to hide herself away inside their modest little home at 23 Lime Crescent. In 1940, just when George seemed to have resigned himself to a life of quiet desperation, fate intervened, and he seized his chance to answer his country’s call with his own special brand of bulldog tenacity.4

  Arthur Wilson: Born in a large, rambling country house in Gloucestershire in 1887. His father was something in the City, his great uncle was something in the House of Lords. His childhood, thanks to an excellent and attentive nanny, was idyllic, and his education, at the medium-sized Meadowbridge public school, was also perfectly pleasant. After failing the exam to enter the Indian Civil Service, he began his working life in the City, where he soon acquired a reputation for romance rather than banking. He served in the Army from 1915 to 1918, securing a commission as a captain, and was in an excellent position to witness at first-hand all of the great wartime British disasters. Shortly after returning to civilian life, he met and married one of Sir Charles Cochran’s Young Ladies; she left him soon after the birth of their only daughter, who would grow up to serve in the WRNS. In the early 1930s, while working at the Weston-super-Mare branch of Swallow Bank, he encountered an attractive young widow, Mrs Mavis Pike; when promotion to chief clerk took Wilson to work under George Mainwaring at Walmington-on-Sea, Mrs Pike, along with her young son, Frank, chose to follow him. In 1940, just when Arthur was waiting patiently for more good fortune to land in his well-tailored lap, Mainwaring intervened, and he resigned himself to at least a year or two of quiet desperation.5

  One reason why these two characters were so easy to believe in was the fact that they seemed to believe in each other; it was obvious, from the way that Mainwaring studied Wilson and Wilson studied Mainwaring, that each man was the other’s most devoted critic, biographer and social anthropologist. Mainwaring, for example, would analyse Wilson’s appearance and demeanour, itemising his faults – the overlong hair (‘You’re not a violin player, you know!’), the unfastened collar and cuffs, the ‘dozy’ level of alertness, and the fact that his right hand had sometimes been known to come to rest on his hip (‘It only needs a couple of inches more and you could be taken for one of those nancy boys!’) – and then exclaim: ‘Why must you give yourself airs all the time? Why don’t you behave normally, like me?’ Wilson, in turn, would make a mental note of each one of Mainwaring’s many insecurities, and then, when the time seemed right, he would smile, give a knowing little look, and offer words of comfort (‘Your face doesn’t look nearly so round and moonlike’) or commiseration (‘How awfully embarrassing for you, sir’). Whenever the two of them were together it was the relationship – rather than merely the men – that one watched.

  ‘It is no coincidence,’ wrote one critic at the time, ‘that each role was interpreted by a man who knows what real acting is, and not by some clumsy egomaniac.’6 Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier were, in many ways, as unlikely a couple as George Mainwaring and Arthur Wilson. Lowe’s background was northern working class (born in Hayfield, Derbyshire, in 1915 – the only son of Arthur, a railwayman, and Mary Ford – brought up in Levenshulme, South Manchester, and educated at Alma Park Central grammar school); Le Mesurier’s was southern upper middle class (born in Bedford in 1912 – the only son and youngest child of John Halliley, a well-known family solicitor, and Mary Le Mesurier – brought up in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and educated at Sherborne public school in Dorset). Lowe’s route to success was long, indirect and arduous. There was a spell as a stagehand at Manchester’s Palace of Varieties (where he stood in the wings and studied such gifted comedians as Robb Wilton and Will Hay), and then, while serving in the Middle East as a sergeant-major in the Army, there was an important formative period spent performing in plays and revues for the troops. After the war had ended he made his professional stage debut in Manchester rep, then came years of hard toil in the provinces, the odd small role in British movies, a West End debut in 1950, and finally, from the early 1960s, regular work in television. ‘Oddly enough,’ he once reflected, ‘it was never my ambition to be a star; I simply wanted to be the best character actor going, but stardom obviously came through television. I don’t think I’d have done it without television.’7 John Le Mesurier, on the other hand, ambled his way to fame: after allowing himself ‘to be guided ever so gently into the occupation my parents knew best’, as an articled clerk in an old and respected Bury St Edmunds firm of solicitors called Greene and Greene, he eventually summoned up the courage to inform his family ‘that the law was about to lose an unpromising recruit’.8 He took his mother’s maiden name and began training to be an actor at the Fay Compton Studio of Dram
atic Art in London (Alec Guinness, one of his contemporaries at the school, would say that Le Mesurier – ‘whose brilliant comic timing was evident even then’ – was the ‘most distinguished of my fellow students’).9 A subsequent uneventful spell in repertory was rudely interrupted by the war (Le Mesurier startled his commanding officer by rolling up at Tidworth barracks in a taxi, with a set of golf clubs among his personal baggage and the smell of champagne cocktails on his breath, but he ended his period of active service as a captain in the Royal Armoured Corps on the North-West Frontier of India), and then, upon being demobbed, he drifted into movies and never looked back – or, indeed, forward. ‘It might have been nice to have been a star for a while,’ he once remarked. ‘But I really don’t mind. You know the way you get jobbing gardeners? Well, I’m a jobbing actor. I don’t mind whether I spend a day on a film or two months. As long as they pay me, I couldn’t care less whether my name is billed above or below the title.’10

  The two men differed from each other markedly in terms both of taste and of temperament. Lowe, for example, made the following selections when appearing on Desert Island Discs:

  1. Tosti, ‘Parted’ (Peter Dawson)

  2. ‘Love Is The Sweetest Thing’ (Al Bowlly/Ray Noble and his Orchestra)

  3. ‘At Last’ (Glenn Miller and his Orchestra)

  4. Litolff, Concerto Symphonique No. 4 in D minor (scherzo) (Clifford Curzon piano/LPO/Boult)

  5. Berlin, ‘It’s A Lovely Day Today’ (from Call Me Madam) (Shani Wallis/Jeff Warren)

  6. Bach, Concerto in C minor (Paul Badura – Skoda and Jorg Demus pianos/Vienna State Opera Orchestra/Redel)

  7. Debussy, ‘La Mer’ (NPO/Boulez)

  8. ‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?’ (theme from Dad’s Army) (Bud Flanagan)

  FAVOURITE RECORDING: Debussy, ‘La Mer’.

  BOOK: A book on tropical plants.

  LUXURY: Claret.

  Le Mesurier chose these:

  1. ‘Take The “A” Train’ (Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra)

  2. ‘Spring Is Here’ (from Spring Is Here) (Bill Evans Trio)

  3. ‘Setting Fire To The Policeman’ (Peter Sellers)

  4. ‘Come Rain Or Come Shine’ (from St Louis Woman) (Judy Garland)

  5. ‘Easy Living’ (Rob Burns clarinet/Alan Clare Trio)

  6. ‘What’s New?’ (Annie Ross)

  7. ‘After You, Who?’ (from The Gay Divorce) (Fred Astaire)

  8. Bach, Double Concerto in D minor (BWV 1043) (David and Igor Oistrakh violins/RPO/Goossens)

  FAVOURITE RECORDING: Bach, Double Concerto in D minor.

  BOOK: Samuel Pepys’ Diary.

  LUXURY: A small distillery.11

  Lowe was a dapper little man of inflexible habits and fixed routines, whereas Le Mesurier was something of a suede-shoed libertine who liked nothing more than to ring up a friend and inquire in a hopeful murmur, ‘Playtime?’12 Lowe lived in Little Venice with his actress wife Joan Cooper, and the two of them spent most of their leisure time either restoring or relaxing on board their Victorian steam yacht Amazon (which rarely left the security of the jetty). Le Mesurier was twice divorced. His first marriage, to June Melville, had collapsed soon after the war, partly as a result of her alcoholism,13 while his second, to Hattie Jacques, ended when she left him for another man.14 He shared a home in Ramsgate with his third wife, the vivacious Joan Malin,15 but, whenever he stayed in London at his flat in Baron’s Court, he would while away the evenings – and the early hours of the mornings – at The Coach and Horses in Romilly Street (Jeffrey Bernard was a favourite drinking companion) or at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Frith Street (‘Listening to artists like Bill Evans, Oscar Petersen or Alan Clare always made life seem that little bit brighter’).16

  Lowe was relatively easy to ruffle. He dreaded, when ‘off-duty’, hearing someone shout out at him, ‘How’s Mr Swindley, then?’ or ‘’Ow yer goin’ on, captain? All right?’ (in response he would stiffen up and say, ‘My name is Arthur Lowe’).17 On one occasion, when assorted members of the cast had joined him and Joan on board Amazon for an informal lunch party, he startled his guests by suddenly shouting, ‘Weigh anchor!’, moving the boat out a mere 100 yards on the river, and then promptly dropping the anchor straight back down again, simply because he had spotted a ‘snotty-nosed kid’ staring over at them from the bank – ‘We don’t want to have our lunch with that sort of thing going on,’ he explained.18 Little ruffled Le Mesurier, however, apart from his wife Joan’s torrid year-long affair with his close friend Tony Hancock (to which he responded by behaving, in his words, ‘tolerably well’).19 He appeared to relish all that was odd or unexpected in life, wandering into out of the way bars in the hope of encountering some woozy little eccentric, travelling miles for the chance to hear an expletive-speaking parrot and reacting with calm good manners when an attractive female fan demanded one evening that he take her straight out into a ditch and make love to her (‘Well, my dear, I’d like to oblige you,’ he told her, ‘but it’s rather late and dark, and I really can’t see myself clambering about at this time of night looking for a ditch. Perhaps we ought to do it by daylight’).20

  There were times during the making of Dad’s Army when Lowe seemed to regard Le Mesurier’s adventures with the same strange mixture of censoriousness and envy that Mainwaring reserved for those of Wilson. On one occasion, for example, Le Mesurier arranged for Bill Pertwee to give him a lift down to Thetford (he had grown bored with his own car and had abandoned it, on a whim, beneath the Hammersmith flyover). Setting off from London on a Friday, Le Mesurier persuaded Pertwee to take a detour to Newmarket in order to visit the National Stud and converse with an interesting assortment of trainers and jockeys; then he proposed another detour, this time to Bury St Edmunds, where he and Pertwee toured the local pubs and eventually spent what was left of the night in one of the town’s hotels; the two men finally completed their journey – which would normally have taken no more than four hours – when they drove in to Thetford on Sunday evening. Lowe, noticing their arrival at the hotel, came over and asked what kind of trip they had experienced. ‘Fine,’ smiled Le Mesurier, ‘it took two days.’ Lowe merely looked at his colleague, muttered ‘Extraordinary’, and walked away.21 Things were no different during make-up sessions, in which Lowe would sometimes find himself temporarily unattended while one woman was busy giving Le Mesurier a manicure, another was brushing his hair and a third was fetching him a sandwich. ‘John could get those women to do anything for him,’ Ian Lavender recalled. ‘I mean, I actually saw him persuade – no, “persuade” is the wrong word – I saw him charm a make-up girl into taking the watch off his wrist, winding it up and then putting it back on again! “Oh,” he’d say, “it’s far too much trouble, could you possibly do it for me, my dear?” And she’d do it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to do!’22 There was, for Lowe, only one meaningful way in which to react to such a scene: an arch of an eyebrow, a quick puff of the cheeks, and another mumbled ‘Extraordinary.’

  In spite of all their differences, the two men genuinely liked, admired and trusted each other, and, when they acted together, they shared a rare and special rapport. ‘So well attuned were we,’ Le Mesurier once observed, ‘that often an exchanged glance between us was enough to make a point in the script. One critic was kind enough to say that we did not really need dialogue – it was quite evident what we were thinking simply by studying our expressions.’23 It was true: Lowe – a sublime bridler – could sum up a dozen lines of text simply by sitting up and inhaling sharply as if he had just been scorched by a piping hot potato, as could Le Mesurier merely by sliding the tip of his tongue along his thin-lipped, lopsided smile. No word, when it was used, was wasted: Lowe, for example, managed, by varying his intonation, to make ‘Wilson’ sound not only like a name but also, whenever the situation called for it, a question, a cry for help or a threat, whereas Le Mesurier never uttered a single ‘yes, sir?’ without having first m
arinated it in sarcasm. There were no false notes. Each actor drew not only on his own disposition but also on his own wit to bring his character smartly into life.

  Lowe described Mainwaring as, above all else, ‘a very brave little chap’: ‘When he says “He who holds Walmington-on-Sea holds England”, he means it. It’s bloody ludicrous, but he means it … and all the other Captain Mainwarings in the Home Guard meant it too. That’s part of the appeal of the series. There’s truth in it all the way through.’24 Mainwaring, Lowe felt, had something in common with two other characters he had portrayed – Leonard Swindley from Coronation Street and Mr Micawber from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield: ‘They are all of them a mess. Swindley was. Mainwaring is a good little bank manager, but, as an army officer, he’s a mess. And have you ever seen anything like the utter hopelessness of Micawber?’25 The other fictional character with whom he had most in common, however, was the hapless hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody (1892), the harassed middle-class City clerk Charles Pooter.

  Both Pooter and Mainwaring are loyal, if somewhat taken for granted, servants of staid but respectable employers; both crave respect but generally fail to attract it (Pooter has to put up with Pitt – ‘a monkey of seventeen’ – who takes great delight in calling out ‘Hornpipe’ whenever he catches sight of his superior’s rather broad-bottomed bespoke trousers,26 Mainwaring must endure Hodges’ regular rude and raucous gibes); both are blessed with friends who often seem worse than their enemies (Pooter has Cummings, who can easily take umbrage, and Gowing, who is ‘sometimes very tedious with his remarks, and not always cautious’,27 Mainwaring has Wilson); and both, on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis, find their personal dignity subject to the most appalling vicissitudes. It was, for example, Pooter – but it could just as easily have been Mainwaring, or, indeed, ‘Mainwearing’ – who made matters worse for himself by notifying his local paper of his omission from its brief record of the guests at a recent ball: