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Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy
Graham McCann
The story of the greatest British sit-com and its enduring appeal.When we laugh at Dad's Army we laugh at ourselves, and nearly fifty years after it was first broadcast, millions of us are still laughing – whenever and wherever it is repeated. With contributions from the people who planned, produced and performed the programme, and material drawn from the BBC archives, acclaimed author Graham McCann has written the definitive story of a very British comedy.This edition does not include any illustrations.



Dad’s Army
The Story of a Very British Comedy
Graham McCann



Copyright (#ulink_1da21b39-c8cd-536f-a206-4d2c964a8eee)
Fourth Estate
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This edition first published in 2002
First published in Great Britain in 2001
Copyright © Graham McCann 2001
The right of Graham McCann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.


Source ISBN: 9781841153094
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN 9780007389421
Version: 2015-12-16
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Dedication (#ulink_4e96653e-9590-5039-8c02-9eb6b6b53f04)
For my mother, and in memory of Dick Geary

Epigraph (#ulink_84173136-4930-52d0-a354-183bfdac99f5)
Love and celebrationare matchless foundationsfor programme-making,given there is skill as well.
HUW WHELDON

Contents
Cover (#u785f62de-2ff8-54d1-8a76-1f687c230db4)
Title Page (#u9fd97f99-c6ac-5f83-b82f-1f72e7f16819)
Copyright (#uec1fef00-5cc4-5666-a62c-9524e0e66251)
Dedication (#ulink_99fee220-ce7e-50d5-aa35-d15027c9781e)
Epigraph (#ulink_a72fd2a2-ee59-567a-8fcd-45f19240a0a1)
PROLOGUE (#uf1f39a7e-de8a-5c36-be40-caa91cc58f7c)
PART ONE: THE SITUATION (#u92cb1f39-b02e-5b7e-ad4c-b2efdad5924a)
I A Peculiar Race (#u3c9c4cad-8f54-5c38-9f5a-864bc57235d8)
II A Cunning Plan (#uba0b73e6-1268-50ee-8cd0-fa3a04c02120)
III You Will Be Watching … (#uf58a1293-0be7-569a-bc39-fdfd7c3e09ee)
PART TWO: THE COMEDY (#u3ff3e0c4-9480-5a2c-9120-7e9d142a5de1)
IV The Pilot (#u3eff7798-2cc6-53d4-9522-677f7a18eb30)
V Series One (#litres_trial_promo)
VI Success (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE: THE CHARACTERS (#litres_trial_promo)
VII An Officer and a Gentleman (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII A Scot, a Spiv and a Stupid Boy (#litres_trial_promo)
IX The Old Fools (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR: THE COMPANY (#litres_trial_promo)
X Thetford (#litres_trial_promo)
XI Shepperton (#litres_trial_promo)
XII Shaftesbury Avenue (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIVE: THE CLASSIC (#litres_trial_promo)
XIII The Nation’s Favourite (#litres_trial_promo)
XIV Never Too Old? (#litres_trial_promo)
XV Revival (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Episode Guide (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_c8ce6038-8653-556f-a48e-0f33e4e910c5)
This is my country
These are my people
This is the world I understand
This is my country
These are my people
And I know ’em like the back of my own hand.
RANDY NEWMAN
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Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.So if it is correct to say that humour was stamped out inNazi Germany, that does not mean that people were notin good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something muchdeeper and more important.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
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Even our jokes have walls and hedges round them.
J. B. PRIESTLEY
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You must remember this: a small church hall, somewhere in England, sometime during the Second World War. To the left, perched high on top of a wobbly wooden stepladder, is a fresh-faced, fragile-looking youth, folded over a tommy-gun, primed and poised to pounce. To the right, seated behind a rickety card table, is a wiry, wily old campaigner, leaning over a Lewis gun, all set to snap and strike. At the centre, shiny toe to shiny toe, stand a short, stout Englishman and a tall, thin German.
The German has just announced that he has added the Englishman’s name to the ominously long list of those who, once the war has been won, will be brought to account for their actions. The Englishman has just replied that, since the Germans are never going to win this war, he can put down whichever names that he wishes. It is at this point that the fresh-faced youth on the ladder elects to interject:
Whistle while you work.
Hitler is a twerp.
He’s half barmy,
So’s his army.
Whistle while you –

‘Your name will also go on the list!’ exclaims the German. ‘What is it?’ ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ orders the Englishman.
‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ What a beautiful comic line, patently apt yet palpably absurd, so funny for being so true. It encapsulates not only the kind of qualities – brightness, decisiveness and bravery – we tend to associate with our best self, but also those – foolishness, fearfulness and frailty – that we tend to associate with our worst. It makes us laugh so much because we laugh most unaffectedly at what we know most about, and what we know most about is ourselves: each of us, at some point or other in our life, has said or done something equally as apt and equally as absurd as ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’
It is really no wonder then that this scene has been hailed by some as the funniest moment in the history of British television,
(#litres_trial_promo) nor that the show in which it featured has come to be recognised as one of this medium’s most treasurable achievements.
(#litres_trial_promo) We do not warm to just any old thing that the small screen serves up to us; for all of the hours, days, months and even years of television that we watch in the course of a lifetime, we actually remember very little, and cherish even less. We tend to recall and respect only those few programmes which try neither to be momentous nor mundane, but which simply try, right here, right now, to engage our minds and our moods.
Dad’s Army was just such a programme. It ran for nine years – from the summer of 1968 to the winter of 1977, stretching out over nine series and eighty episodes – and has continued to be a frequently repeated favourite ever since. Its extraordinary appeal, in terms both of breadth and of depth, has remained remarkably solid over the years. For example, the episode entitled ‘The Deadly Attachment’ (which featured that ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ line) attracted an estimated audience of 12,928,000 when it was first broadcast on BBC1 back in 1973; when, the following year, it received its initial repeat, 10,908,000 people tuned in to see it, as did 9,082,800 for the second repeat in 1978 and 10,600,000 for the third in 1989.
(#litres_trial_promo) Such rare and special constancy has little to do with any clinging need for nostalgia:
(#litres_trial_promo) among the programme’s most devoted admirers are some of those who would prefer to forget the war, as well as some of those who are not able to recall it. Dad’s Army’s lasting appeal has a great deal to do with an unquenchable craving for quality.
Dad’s Army, as a television programme, was something special. It stood out back then, when television’s aim was to entertain a nation, and it stands out even more prominently now, when the intention is merely to indulge a niche. It was – it is – an exceptional piece of programme-making. Every element epitomised the unshakeable commitment to excellence: the gloriously apposite theme song, a flawless recreation of the sound of wartime defiance; the well-chosen setting, animated by the meticulously assembled authenticating detail; the quietly effective style of direction, focusing our attention on the action rather than the art; and, at the very heart of it all, the consistently fine acting and writing which combined to cultivate a set of characterisations that audiences came not only to laugh at but also to live with and love.
The comedy that comes from character, observed J. B. Priestley, is ‘the richest and wisest kind of humour, sweetening and mellowing life for us’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Context can supply the catalyst for the comedy, but only characters can supply the raison d’être. ‘The humour of incident and situation that does not proceed from character, however artfully it may be contrived, is at best,’ argued Priestley, ‘only an elaborate play, making a glitter and commotion on the surface of things. But the humour of character goes down and touches, surely but tenderly, the very roots of our common human nature.’
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Not everyone who has watched Dad’s Army will have known much, if anything, about the last world war, or the history of the Home Guard, or life in early 1940s England, but everyone, surely, will have known someone like the portly, pushy, pompous little provincial bank manager and platoon commander, George Mainwaring (‘Oh, they’ll know by the tone of my voice that I’m in charge …’), or his sleepily urbane and vaguely insouciant chief clerk and sergeant, Arthur Wilson (‘Would you all mind falling into three ranks, please? Just as quickly as you can, in three nice, neat lines. That would be absolutely lovely, thank you so much’). Most, if not all of us, will have known someone very much like the indomitably doughty but somewhat over-excitable local butcher and lance corporal, Jack Jones (‘Get help? Right ho, sir! Don’t panic! Don’t panic!’), or the sly and saturnine Scot, undertaker and part-time private, James Frazer (‘I knew it: we’re doomed. Doomed, I tell ye!’), or the frail, permanently fatigued former gentleman’s outfitter and conscientious dispenser of bicarbonate of soda, Charles Godfrey (‘Do you think I could possibly be excused, sir?’), or the sharp, street-smart spiv Joe Walker (‘’Old on a minute – I said they were difficult to get, I didn’t say impossible!’), or the mollycoddled, maladroit and callow clerk and combatant, Frank Pike (‘Uncle Arthur, if you don’t let me up on that bunk I’ll tell Mum!’), or the vulgar and obstreperous greengrocer and chief air raid warden, Bill Hodges (‘Ruddy ’ooligans!’), or the camply effete Anglican vicar, Timothy Farthing (‘I must say, you’re a much braver man than I am’) and his fawning, flat-capped verger, Maurice Yeatman (‘Ah, well, there’s all sorts of courage, your Reverence – I don’t know how you have the nerve to get up and give those sermons every Sunday’). Dad’s Army, deep down, was not really about the war. It was about England. It was about us.
It was about our amateurism (‘I think we can quite happily say that Jerry’s parachutists will be as dead as mutton from Stead & Simpson’s to Timothy White’s. We’d get a clear run down to the Pier Pavilion if that blasted woman would get out of the telephone box!’), our faith in good form (‘Break the glass? Have you lost your senses? We’re not savages, you know! We’re a well-trained British army of sportsmen!’), our willingness to help out (‘I’d be delighted to oblige in any capacity that doesn’t involve too much running about’), our reluctance to be regimented (‘I’m afraid I’m just not awfully good at strutting and swaggering’), our cosy eccentricities (‘I’m so sorry my sister Dolly couldn’t come tonight – she’s got a touch of rheumatism – but she sent you some of her upside-down cakes’), our irrepressible playfulness (‘We’ll do “Underneath The Spreading Chestnut Tree”! Sergeant Wilson will do the cheerful actions, and we’ll follow’), our loyalty (‘I’d go through fire, and brimstone, and, and, treacle for you, sir!’), our caution (‘Do you really think that’s wise?’), our courage (‘They could put twenty bombs down my trousers and they will not make me crack!’), our deep-rooted distrust of outsiders (‘Damned foreigners! They come over here and then have the cheek to fire at us!’), and, most of all, it was about our chronic consciousness of class.
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Class provided the grit that made this pearl. As Dennis Potter put it:
Dad’s Army is made possible by the extended joke which allows the British, or more specifically the English, to turn every possible encounter into a subtle joust about status. There is as much drama swilling about in our casual ‘good mornings’ as in the whole of Il Trovatore, and more armour-plating on a foot of suburban privet than in the latest Nato tanks … [Dad’s Army] is a conspiracy of manners between the loving caricatures in crumpled khaki and the complicit delight of an audience which likes pips as well as chips on its shoulders.
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There, on one side of the desk, sits the middle-class, grammar school-educated George Mainwaring, an overachiever desperate to seize the day, and there, on the other side, sits the upper-class, public school-educated Arthur Wilson, an underachiever content to cast a lazily discerning eye over each approaching day and remark on how perfectly lovely it looks before allowing it to amble idly by. There, between them, sparks and fizzes every kind of subtle slight, scornful sniff and furtive little dig that one class can direct at another without risking the ignition of outright civil war:

George Orwell, who was an active member of the real-life Home Guard, likened England to ‘a family with the wrong members in control’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In wartime Walmington-on-Sea, the wrong members are recruited from Wilson’s side of the family, but Mainwaring continues to harbour the hope that one day the wrong members will arise from his side. There is, in the meantime, an uneasy truce, with both sides trapped in the same small, neat and nosy seaside town, the same tiny tumbledown church hall, the same ageing bodies, the same sobering predicament. ‘Still,’ as Orwell added, ‘it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.’
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Any vision of England is bound to be partial. The vision of England projected by Dad’s Army is England at its kindest, gentlest and most decent. This is the England that George Santayana hailed as ‘the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the England that Emerson respected for its ability to ‘see a little better on a cloudy day’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the England that Arnold Bennett cherished for its ‘powerful simplicity’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the England that Orwell loved for the fact that the most stirring battle-poem in its history ‘is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction’.
(#litres_trial_promo) This is the England in which one can find oneself saying, with the very best of intentions, something as silly as ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ Few partial visions seem quite as familiar as this, and fewer still seem quite as appealing.
Dad’s Army encouraged the nation to laugh at itself, and that, as services go, is one of the most precious that any nation can receive. It does not deserve to be remembered merely as an extremely popular situation-comedy, nor as an admirable piece of light entertainment, nor as an ever-reliable ratings winner. It deserves to be treated with a little more respect, a little more care, than that. It deserves to be remembered as a truly great television programme, a fine example of what Huw Wheldon once described so well as ‘good programmes made for good purposes by good people doing their best and doing it well’.
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THE SITUATION (#ulink_32ebf9a9-4f61-5899-9d59-27205bf32309)
The day war broke out, my missus looked at me and she said: ‘What good are yer?’ I said: ‘How d’you mean, what good am I?’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re too old for the Army, you couldn’t get into the Navy and they wouldn’t have you in the Air Force, so … what good are yer?’ I said: ‘I’ll do something.’ She said: ‘What?’ I said: ‘How do I know? I’ll have to think.’ She said: ‘I don’t see how THAT’s going to help you – you’ve never done it before … So, what good are yer?’ I said: ‘Don’t keep saying what good am I!’
ROBB WILTON
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CHAPTER I A Peculiar Race (#ulink_e5530cd2-00e2-5037-9adb-b54b01d08799)
I think it’s true to say that at the present time this country of ours, because of its courage and its proud defiance, its determination to put an end to this international brigandage and racketeering of the Hitlers and Mussolinis and their riff-raff is the hope of all that is best in the world, which watches us with admiration.
J. B. PRIESTLEY
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DAD’S ARMY
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It all began, in a way, one day back in the summer of 1940. Shortly after nine o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, 14 May, Anthony Eden, Great Britain’s newly-appointed Secretary of State for War, began his broadcast to the nation on the BBC’s Home Service:
I want to speak to you tonight about the form of warfare which the Germans have been employing so extensively against Holland and Belgium – namely the dropping of troops by parachute behind the main defensive lines … [I]n order to leave nothing to chance, and to supplement from sources as yet untapped the means of defence already arranged, we are going to ask you to help us in a manner in which I know will be welcome to thousands of you. Since the war began the government have received countless inquiries from all over the Kingdom from men of all ages who are for one reason or another not at present engaged in military service, and who wish to do something for the defence of their country. Well, now is your opportunity.
We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain, who are British subjects, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five, to come forward now and offer their services in order to make assurance [that an invasion will be repelled] doubly sure. The name of the new Force which is now to be raised will be ‘The Local Defence Volunteers’. This name describes its duties in three words … This is … a spare-time job, so there will be no need for any volunteer to abandon his present occupation … When on duty you will form part of the armed forces … You will not be paid, but you will receive uniform and will be armed … In order to volunteer, what you have to do is to give in your name at your local police station and then, as and when we want you, we will let you know … Here, then, is the opportunity for which so many of you have been waiting. Your loyal help, added to the arrangements which already exist, will make and keep our country safe.
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Now there could be no turning back: eight months into the war, and four days after the commencement of Germany’s offensive in the West, Britain was set to launch the largest, most quixotic and, in a way, least militaristic volunteer army in its history.
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The government, in truth, had never been keen on its formation, believing, to begin with, that such a force would find itself with far too little to do, and then later fearing that it might find itself trying to do far too much. There was one prominent political figure, however, who had supported the idea right from the start: Winston Churchill. On 8 October 1939, Churchill – then newly installed as First Lord of the Admiralty – had written to Sir Samuel Hoare, the Lord Privy Seal, with a proposal:
Why do we not form a Home Guard of half-a-million men over forty (if they like to volunteer) and put all our elder stars at the head and in the structure of these new formations? Let these five hundred thousand men come along and push the young and active out of all their home billets. If uniforms are lacking, a brassard would suffice, and I am assured there are plenty of rifles at any rate.
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Nothing came of the suggestion, however, as the military’s chiefs of staff were of the opinion that any danger of invasion or raids was slight so long as sufficient naval and air forces were guarding the sea approaches to Britain, and, as all of the belligerents settled into the six-month stalemate that came to be known as the ‘Phoney War’,
(#litres_trial_promo) it seemed as if Churchill’s notion of an army of ageing amateurs had been left to die a quiet death. Then, quite suddenly, things changed: on 9 April 1940, the Allies were startled by the first in a series of sudden and strikingly effective enemy thrusts when German units moved in to occupy Denmark and Norway; barely a month later, as the Allies were still struggling to come up with a suitable response to the events in Scandinavia, the main offensive began in earnest when Germany took control of both The Netherlands and Belgium. These developments transformed the public mood; now that it appeared possible that most, if not all, of the Channel coastline might soon be under German occupation, the prospect of England being invaded suddenly seemed startlingly real.
Anxiety swiftly took the place of apathy. There were fears of a fifth column, and fears of airborne landings. Facts may have been scarce but there was an abundance of rumours, and soon newspapers were full of speculation regarding the possibility that enemy agents were already operating inside the nation. The intelligence division of the Ministry of Information, which had been set up to monitor civilian opinion and morale, noted that such talk of espionage and sabotage was causing widespread unease, and ‘the situation in a few places has become slightly hysterical’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The prospect of parachute landings was, if anything, the source of even greater anxiety. The Home Office distributed a distinctly unsettling circular to the public informing them that ‘German parachutists may land disguised as British policemen and Air Raid Wardens’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and The Times ran a sobering editorial warning its readers that these enemy paratroopers ‘might speak English quite well. Some might be sent over in civilian dress to act as spies. The general public must be alert.’
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Something, clearly, had to be done, and, whatever it was, it had to be done quickly. The government had initially been reluctant to contemplate any policy which involved ordinary citizens being allowed to take matters into their own hands instead of relying on the orthodox forces of security and public order – namely, the Army and the police – but it soon found itself placed under mounting pressure from both Parliament and press to do precisely that.
(#litres_trial_promo) When reports started to reach the War Office concerning the appearance up and down the country of ‘bands of civilians … arming themselves with shotguns’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the time had arrived for a serious rethink. Without pausing to determine whether its ultimate goal was to sustain or suppress this burgeoning grass-roots activism, the War Office proceeded to improvise some plans and, as one observer put it, evoked ‘a new army out of nothingness’.
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On Sunday, 12 May, at a hastily arranged meeting, a way forward was agreed. A breathless succession of ad hoc decisions followed throughout the next day until, at 8 p.m., all of the essential details had been assembled and readied for dispatch. It was originally intended that the first news of the novel force would be broadcast on the wireless by the man most responsible for the shape it was set to take – namely, General Sir Walter Kirke, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces – but Anthony Eden, recognising an early opportunity to impose his presence upon the public’s consciousness, decided that he should be the one to address the nation on this subject. As he sat down on that Tuesday evening and faced the microphone, he had two aims in mind: the first was to demonstrate that the government was responsive to popular opinion, and the second was to promote a policy which he hoped would curb any public propensity for spontaneity. He succeeded in doing the former, but the latter would prove far harder to accomplish.
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Before Eden’s broadcast had concluded, police stations up and down the country found themselves deluged with eager volunteers. On the Kent coast, the most threatened area, men were still queuing at midnight. Early the following morning the lines once again began to form, and throughout the rest of the day they grew longer and longer. Over the country as a whole 250,000 men – equal in number to the peacetime Regular Army – registered their names within the first twenty-four hours. One of those responsible for enrolling the applicants in Birmingham recalled his experience:
The weather was sweltering and we were allotted the small decontamination room in the police station yard … Applicants seemed to form a never-ending stream. They started to queue up as soon as they could leave their work and by 11 p.m. there were still scores of them waiting to enrol. Every night we worked until the small hours of the morning, trying to get some sort of shape into the organisation in preparation for the next day’s rush. Within a few days the platoon was three or four hundred strong and it seemed that if every police station [in the city] were experiencing the same influx, all the male population of Birmingham would be enrolled within a week or two.
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Form lagged behind content. The Local Defence Volunteers was launched without any staff, or funds, or premises of its own. An air of edgy amateurism accompanied its inception. No registration forms had been printed, so the police were simply instructed to ask each prospective new recruit four basic questions:
(a) Are you familiar with firearms?
(b) Occupation?
(c) What military experience have you?
(d) Are you prepared to serve away from your home?
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The applicants, noted the novelist Ernest Raymond, received a less than fulsome welcome:
The uniformed policeman behind his desk sighed as he said, ‘We can take your name and address. That’s all.’ A detective-inspector in mufti, whom I knew, explained this absence of fervour. ‘You’re about the hundred-and-fiftieth who’s come in so far, Mr Raymond, and it’s not yet half past nine. Ten per cent of ’em may be some use to Mr Eden but, lor’ luv-a-duck, we’ve had ’em stumping in more or less on crutches. We’ve taken their names but this is going to be Alexander’s rag-time army.’
As I passed out through the sandbags I met three more volunteers about to file in through the crack. I knew them all. One was an elderly gentleman-farmer who’d brought his sporting gun … Another had his hunting dog with him … All explained that they were ‘joining up’ … so I prepared them for the worst, I said, ‘Well, don’t expect any welcome in there. They don’t love us. And get it over quickly. I rather suspected that if I stayed around too long, I’d be arrested for loitering.’
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What momentum the fledgling LDV was able to gather originated from its untended but irrepressible new members. Eden’s initial message had asked merely for men to sign up and then wait (‘we will let you know’), but the first wave of volunteers, desperate to help frustrate the enemy’s knavish tricks, were in no mood to sit idly by. Like actors who had passed an audition for a play that had yet to be written, they gathered together and improvised. No later than a day after the call had come, the new men of the LDV had armed themselves with everything from antique shotguns and sabres to stout sticks and packets of pepper and, without waiting for official instructions, had started going out on patrol.
Membership continued to grow at a remarkably rapid rate: by the end of May the total number of volunteers had risen to between 300,000 and 400,000, and by the end of the following month it would exceed 1,400,000 – around 1,200,000 more than any of the War Office mandarins had anticipated.
(#litres_trial_promo) Order did not need to be restored: it had yet to be created. A rough-and-ready administrative structure was duly scrambled into place,
(#litres_trial_promo) and Sir Edward Grigg (the joint Under-Secretary of State for War and the man to whom Eden had handed responsibility for the day-to-day running of the LDV) spelled out ‘the three main purposes for which the Local Defence Volunteers are wanted’:
First, observation and information. We want the earliest possible information, either from observation posts or from patrols as to landings. The second purpose is to help, in the very earliest stages, in preventing movement by these enemy parties landed from the air, by blocking roads, by denying them access to means of movement, motors and so on, and by seeing that they are hemmed in as completely as possible from the moment they land. Their third purpose is to assist in patrolling and protecting vulnerable spots, of which there is a great number everywhere, particularly in certain parts of the country where the demands for local guard duties are really greater than the present forces can meet.
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Grigg then proceeded to cloud his clarification by adding that, ‘I do not want to suggest that it is the duty of the War Office to issue instructions in detail as to how these Local Defence Volunteers should be used … If we started giving instructions in detail the whole organisation would be at once tied up in voluminous red tape. Their general function is far better left at the discretion of the local commands.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Such cautious guidance, though welcomed as better than nothing, did little, in itself, to lift morale. Deeds were needed, not words. The two tangible things most keenly anticipated by the Volunteers were still not forthcoming: uniforms and weapons.
Eden had stated quite clearly on 14 May that the LDV would ‘receive uniform and will be armed’. The following day, however, the War Office intervened to point out that for the time being only armbands bearing the stencilled initials ‘LDV’ would be available until a sufficient number of khaki denim two-piece overalls and extra field service caps could be manufactured (and no mention at all was made of any imminent issuing of weapons).
(#litres_trial_promo) A few enterprising individuals took matters into their own hands and fashioned their own versions of the LDV uniform: Sir Montague Burton, Leeds’s famous ‘popular’ tailor, promptly turned out 1,500 sets of well-cut battledress made from officers’ quality barathea cloth. The vast majority, however, were left to soldier on in civilian clothes amid fears that, with only a humble armband to identify them, they might end up being shot by invading Germans as francs tireurs.22 Eventually, after weeks of waiting,
(#litres_trial_promo) official uniforms began arriving, but in some places the denims came without the caps while in other places the caps came without the denims. One commanding officer reflected on the sartorial chaos:
The issue of denim clothing forms a memorable epoch in [the history of the LDV]. If a prize had been offered for the designer of garments that would caricature the human form and present it in its sloppiest and most slovenly aspect, the artist who conceived the … denim was in a class apart. Though marked with different size numbers, it was always a toss-up whether a man resembled an expectant mother or an attenuated scarecrow.
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The despised denims would be replaced during the autumn by ordinary Army battledress, yet the distribution of the new outfits proved almost as shambolic as that of the old. Whereas the denims had seemingly been designed for exceptionally well-upholstered figures, the battledress appeared to have been intended for ‘men of lamp-post silhouettes’, and it was not long before local tailors were busy carrying out covert conversions of two ‘thin’ suits into one to fit the somewhat fuller figure.
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The wait for weapons was almost as long and, if anything, even more frustrating. While the War Office dithered, the new recruits, determined to equip themselves with something that resembled a firearm, again proceeded to improvise: an Essex unit, for example, made use of some old fowling-pieces, blunderbusses and cutlasses. One Lancashire battalion raided Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo in order to take possession of some antique Snyder rifles, while another commandeered fifty Martini-Henry carbines from a Lancaster Boys’ Brigade unit (much to the latter’s annoyance), and a third acquired an impressive supply of six-foot spears. In Shropshire, a cache of rusty Crimean War cavalry carbines were returned to active service; and in London, fifty ancient Lee-Enfield rifles (used most recently by chorus boys in a patriotic tableaux) were liberated from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
(#litres_trial_promo) By the end of May the War Office had managed to purchase 75,000 First World War-vintage Ross rifles from Canada and 500,000 well-worn. 300 Springfield and Remington P14 and P17 rifles from the United States, but neither of these orders would arrive before late June or early July, so, in the meantime, recruits were advised to make do with ‘this thing they developed in Finland, called the “Molotov cocktail’”, which, they were assured, would prove most useful in the event of an invasion by enemy tanks.
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The LDV seemed destined during the sterner days of that first summer to remain dogged by such delays and diversions. The rank and file grew resentful, the public sceptical and the press scornful.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was high time, argued the critics, that these amateur soldiers were taken seriously by professional strategists. Finally, in the middle of June, the beleaguered War Office deemed it prudent – in the light of plans for more than one hundred MPs to make a formal protest about its conduct
(#litres_trial_promo) – to appoint Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pown-all as Inspector-General of the LDV (‘a nice thing to take over,’ he grumbled as he contemplated this ‘rare dog’s dinner’).
(#litres_trial_promo) Pownall’s mission – and he had no choice but to accept it – was to turn the LDV into a well-organised, well-trained and effective fighting force. During the next two months, he duly attempted to rationalise the administration, speed up the supply of uniforms and guns, oversee the establishment of more appropriate methods of training and generally see to it that the force fitted as neatly as possible within the overall strategy for the conduct of the war.
If Pownall was prepared to do everything that seemed necessary to make the members of the LDV look like proper soldiers, then it soon became evident that Winston Churchill was equally determined to ensure that they felt like proper soldiers. Ever since he had replaced the broken-spirited Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister on 10 May, Churchill’s energy and attention had, understandably, been diverted into other areas, but by the middle of June he had begun to involve himself more directly in the affairs of the LDV. There was something inevitable about the way in which he proceeded to impose his formidable personality on this fledgling force: it was, for him, a tailor-made enterprise – a proud, worthy, One Nation, volunteer army of ordinary Britons united in their determination to defend their homes and defeat the invader. It was, to a romantic such as Churchill, an irresistible enterprise. He had to make it his.
On 22 June he asked the War Office to prepare for him a concise summary of the current LDV position.
(#litres_trial_promo) After considering its contents for a number of days, he came to the conclusion that one of the main problems with the force was its name. On 26 June he wrote a note to Eden, informing the Secretary of State for War that he did not ‘think much of the name Local Defence Volunteers for your very large new force’ – the word ‘local’, he explained, was ‘uninspiring’ – and he made it clear that he believed that it should be changed.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ever the shrewd populist, Churchill was right: the official title had signally failed to strike the right chord, and from the moment of its inception the force had been saddled with a number of nicknames – ‘Parashots’, ‘Parashooters’, ‘Parapotters’, ‘Fencibles’ – by the press,
(#litres_trial_promo) and a variety of unflattering epithets – ‘the Look, Duck and Vanish Brigade’, ‘the Long Dentured Veterans’, ‘the Last Desperate Venture’ – by the more sardonic sections of the public.
(#litres_trial_promo) Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, argued that a better name would be ‘Town Guard’ or ‘Civic Guard’, but Churchill bridled at the suggestion, exclaiming that such names struck him as sounding ‘too similar to the wild men of the French Revolution’. No, he declared, he had another, a better, name in mind for the LDV: his name, ‘Home Guard’.
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Eden was far from keen, protesting that the term LDV ‘has now passed into current military jargon’, and that a million armbands bearing these initials had already been manufactured. ‘On the whole,’ he concluded, ‘I should prefer to hold by our existing name.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, agreed with Eden, complaining that not only would a name change prove too costly, but also that the adoption of a new name whose initials were HG ‘would suggest association with the Horse Guards or Mr Wells’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Churchill was angered by such insolence: he was, after all, Prime Minister, and an astonishingly popular prime minister at that (the latest polls had revealed that, in spite of various setbacks, a remarkable 88 per cent of respondents continued to express confidence in his leadership),
(#litres_trial_promo) and he had grown accustomed to getting his own way.
(#litres_trial_promo) On 6 July he sent a curt note to Cooper, informing him in no uncertain terms that ‘I am going to have the name “Home Guard” adopted, and I hope you will, when notified, get the Press to put it across.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The War Office, however, continued to resist, and General Pownall, while acknowledging, grudgingly, that ‘“Home Guard” rolls better off the tongue and makes a better headline’, was similarly obstructive, regarding the proposal as a ‘pure Winstonian’ publicity manoeuvre which would end up costing, by his estimation, around £40,000. He confided to his diary that the Prime Minister ‘could well have left things alone!’
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Churchill chose simply to ignore the objections, making a point of mentioning his preferred new name whenever and wherever he had occasion either to meet or to speak about the LDV. On 14 July, for example, he seized on the opportunity to broadcast the name to the nation, referring in passing to the existence ‘behind the Regular Army’ of ‘more than a million of the LDV, or, as they are much better called, the Home Guard’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Further resistance was futile. Churchill, as one of his colleagues freely conceded, possessed ‘a quite extraordinary capacity … for expressing in Elizabethan English the sentiments of the public’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and there could only be one winner in this, or any other, war of words. On 22 July, Eden, after another awkward meeting with Churchill, wrote despairingly in his diary: ‘We discussed LDV. He was still determined to change the name to Home Guard. I told him that neither officers nor men wanted the change, but he insisted.’
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Churchill had won. On 23 July 1940, the Local Defence Volunteers officially became the Home Guard.
(#litres_trial_promo) From this moment on, the force would bear an unmistakable Churchillian signature. Sturdy, patriotic, loyal and dependable, the Home Guard, just like its spiritual leader, had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, but was determined to achieve victory ‘however long and hard the road may be’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The LDV appealed to the head, the Home Guard to the heart. Writers, drawn in by its rich composition, found it an easy force to eulogise and, in some cases, romanticise. C. Day Lewis, for example, wrote a lyrical account of how he had helped ‘to guard the star-lit village’,
(#litres_trial_promo) while J. B. Priestley, in one of his regular BBC broadcasts, likened the first night that he shared on guard with ‘a parson, a bailiff, a builder, farmers and farm labourers’ to ‘one of those rich chapters of Thomas Hardy’s fiction in which his rustics meet in the gathering darkness of some Wessex hillside’:
I think the countryman knows, without being told, that we hold our lives here, as we hold our farms, upon certain terms. One of those terms is that while wars still continue, while one nation is ready to hurl its armed men at another, you must if necessary stand up and fight for your own. And this decision comes from the natural piety of simple but sane men. Such men, you will notice, are happier now than the men who have lost that natural piety.
Well, as we talked on our post on the hilltop, we watched the dusk deepen in the valleys below, when our women-folk listened to the news as they knitted by the hearth, and we remembered that these were our homes and that now at any time they might be blazing ruins, and that half-crazy German youths, in whose empty eyes the idea of honour and glory seems to include every form of beastliness, might soon be let loose down there.
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There was nothing but society in the Home Guard. For the more retiring or aloof of individuals, moving straight from a pinched and hidebound privacy to a bold and busy community, the first rush of novelty proved acute. The poet John Lehmann set off to his local headquarters cradling ‘a volume of poems or a novel by Conrad’, but it was not long before he found himself listening intently instead ‘to dramatic detail of the more intimate side of village life that had been shrewdly and silently absorbed by the carpenter or builder in the course of their work. Gradually, the quiet, humdrum, respectable façade of the neighbourhood dropped away, and I had glimpses of violent passions … appalling vices … reckless ambitions … and innumerable fantastic evasions of the law.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The age range (especially during that first year, when the official upper limit of sixty-five was not rigidly enforced) was remarkable, with raw adolescents mixing with seasoned veterans. One unit contained an elderly storyteller who claimed to have been nursed by Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, but, as this would have made him at least 104 years old by the time of the current war, the detail seems dubious. The real doyen is generally accepted to have been the sprightly octogenarian Alexander Taylor, an ex-company sergeant major in the Black Watch, who had first seen action in the Sudan during 1884–5, and had gone on to serve in South Africa and Flanders before finally answering Eden’s call, deliberately misremembering his date of birth, picking up a pitchfork and marching proudly off to help guard his local gasworks.
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Old soldiers such as Taylor were simply grateful for the chance, once again, to take part, but there were other veterans who were impatient not only to take part but also to take over. ‘The Home Guard,’ wrote George Orwell (then of the Primrose Hill platoon), ‘is the most anti-Fascist body existing in England at this moment, and at the same time is an astonishing phenomenon, a sort of People’s Army officered by Blimps.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The character of Colonel Blimp – the round-eyed, ruddy-faced, reactionary old windbag with the walrus moustache who regularly lectured the nation (‘Gad, sir … ’) from the confines of David Low’s satirical cartoons
(#litres_trial_promo) – had long been laughed at; now, in the flesh, he had to be lived with. It made sense for the Home Guard to make full use of the most experienced military men in its midst, and it was therefore no surprise that its earliest administrative appointments were weighted towards retired middle-and senior-ranking officers. Not all of the old grandees could serve in higher appointments – an East Sussex company had to accommodate no fewer than six retired generals, while one squad in Kensington-Belgravia consisted of eight former field-rank officers and one token civilian.
(#litres_trial_promo) The War Office privately acknowledged that it was inevitable that problems would be caused by ‘the masses of retired officers who have joined up, who are all registering hard and say they know much better than anyone else how everything should be done’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The urgent need for class to cohabit with class had led to a quelling of old conflicts. The presence of these haughty, hoary ex-officers, however, ensured that they would never be cancelled entirely. In one Devon village unit, for example, a fight broke out between a retired Army captain who, it was alleged, had ‘roped in his pals of like kind’, and a young man who had ‘asked why he hadn’t been invited to join’ and had been informed that he did not measure up to the required social standards.
(#litres_trial_promo) The novelist A. G. Street noted how the most snobbish of old soldiers would turn up for training ‘clad in their old regimentals, pleading that the issue uniform did not fit’, and would make men ‘almost mutinous’ by regularly flaunting the full regalia of a distinguished military past:
[I]n some cases it would seem that winning the war was a trivial thing compared with the really important one of always establishing rank and position. So they disobeyed orders and wore their old uniforms, just to prove to everybody that once they had been colonels. In fact, some of them, if given a choice between a heaven minus all class distinctions and a hell that insisted on them, would definitely prefer the latter.
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The War Office, straining to strike the right diplomatic note, took steps to settle things down. ‘Though this is a deeply united country,’ said Sir Edward Grigg, ‘it is immensely various; and the Home Guard reflects its almost infinite variety of habit and type. The home-bred quality must not be impaired in order to secure the uniformity and organisation which are necessary for armed forces of other sorts. We want the Home Guard to have a military status as unimpeachable as that of any Corps or Regiment … But we do not want it to be trained or strained beyond its powers as a voluntary spare-time Force.’
(#litres_trial_promo) On 6 November 1940, it was announced in the House of Commons that the Home Guard, ‘which has hitherto been largely provisional in character’, was to be given ‘a firmer and more permanent shape’; it was now, like the Regular Army, to have commissioned officers and NCOs, a fixed organisation, systematic training and better uniforms (battledress, trench-capes, soft service caps and steel helmets) and weapons (automatic rifles, machine guns and grenades).
(#litres_trial_promo) On 19 November, Grigg announced that, as ‘there had been criticism’ of some of the early appointments, all existing and future officers would now have to go before an independent selection board, which would ignore each man’s ‘political, business [and] social affiliations’ and consider only his ability ‘to command the confidence of all ranks under the special circumstances and conditions of the locality concerned’. Likening the force to ‘a lusty infant … strong of constitution, powerful of lung and avid, like all healthy infants, for supplies’, he promised to remain attentive to its needs. ‘It is Britain incarnate,’ he declared, ‘an epitome of British character in its gift for comradeship in trouble, its resourcefulness at need, its deep love of its own land, and its surging anger at the thought that any invader should set foot on our soil.’ No one, Grigg insisted, wanted the Home Guard to lose the ‘free and easy, home-spun, moorland, village-green, workshop or pithead character [that was] essential to its strength and happiness’, but it had grown so fast – ‘like a mustard tree’ – that it now required ‘sympathetic attention to its needs and difficulties’ in order for it to become truly ‘efficient in its own way as a voluntary, auxiliary, part-time Force’.
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Now that the Home Guard had won the War Office’s attention it was determined never to lose it. ‘They are a troublesome and querulous party,’ moaned General Pownall to his diary. ‘There is mighty little pleasing them, and the minority is always noisy.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This constant carping was in fact their one reliable weapon. ‘The Home Guard always groused,’ acknowledged one former member. ‘Grousing is a useful vent for what otherwise might become a disruptive pressure of opinion. And in the Home Guard it was almost always directed to a justifiable purpose – the attainment of higher efficiency. “Give us more and better arms, equipment, instruction, practice, drill, field exercises, range-firing, anything and everything which will make us better soldiers”: that formed the burden of most Home Guard grousing.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Whenever prominent volunteers did not trust the War Office to act upon some particular request, they would simply go straight to the top and appeal directly to the ever-sympathetic Churchill. Pownall was well aware of which way the wind was blowing: ‘The H.G. are voters first and soldiers afterwards,’ he observed. ‘What they think they need, if they say so loudly enough, they will get.’
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Pownall had never been happy in his onerous role as the Home Guard’s Inspector-General. In October, Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Eastwood
(#litres_trial_promo) – a younger man championed by Churchill – took over the Home Guard and the changes continued to come. In November, Eastwood was ‘upgraded’ to the new position of Director-General and handed a more powerful directorate within the War Office.
(#litres_trial_promo) The first half of 1941 saw a marked tightening-up of Home Guard organisation, as well as far more active involvement by regulars in administration and training. The first anniversary of the force was marked in May with a morale-boosting message of congratulation from King George VI, who also invited volunteers from various London units to stand on sentry duty at Buckingham Palace.
(#litres_trial_promo) In November, it was announced that conscription would be introduced in order to keep the Home Guard up to strength. Under the National Service (No. 2) Act, all male civilians aged between eighteen and fifty-one could, from January 1942, be ordered to join the Home Guard, and, once enrolled, would be liable to prosecution in a civil court if they failed to attend up to forty-eight hours of training or guard duties each month. Once recruited, they could not leave before reaching the age of sixty-five (although existing volunteers had the right to resign before the new law took effect on 17 February 1942).
(#litres_trial_promo) This influx of ‘directed men’
(#litres_trial_promo) – the opprobrious term ‘conscript’ was avoided – changed the character of the organisation still further, erasing the last traces of the old LDV, moving beyond the original Corinthian esprit de corps and accelerating the transformation of an awkward political after-thought into an integral and well-regarded part of active Home Defence.
Some problems, however, proved more obdurate than others. One of these, as far as the men at the War Office were concerned, was women. Back in June 1940, the government – concerned, it was suggested, that other key voluntary organisations, such as the Women’s Voluntary Service, might in future be deprived of personnel due to increased ‘competition for a dwindling source of supply’
(#litres_trial_promo) – had ruled that ‘women cannot be enrolled in the L.D.V.’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The decision did nothing to deter the more determined of campaigners, such as the redoubtable Labour MP Edith Summerskill, who proceeded to form her own lobby group, Women’s Home Defence, and argued her case so persuasively and passionately that some of Whitehall’s frailest males branded her an ‘Amazonian’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In spite of the fact that Churchill agreed with Summerskill, and in spite of the fact that thousands of women had been contributing to the force from the very beginning as clerks, typists, telephonists, cooks and messengers, the War Office would hold out until April 1943, when, having exhausted all excuses, it finally agreed to relent and permit women to serve, in a limited capacity, as ‘Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries’.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘It was generally felt,’ recalled one Home Guard officer, ‘that these conditions should have been more generous and that women should have been treated with more consideration. To mention one grievance, they were not issued with uniforms and this, according to rumour, was for some political reason. They were without steel helmets and service respirators, although at “Action Stations” they worked alongside with, and [were] exposed to the same risks as, the men.’
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Weapons, or rather the scarcity of them, represented another persistent problem. Ever since the massive loss of weapons and equipment at Dunkirk, the production of standard military munitions had been fully taken up by the urgent needs of the regulars and nothing could be spared for the part-time force. Spirits did rise in 1941 when the Thompson (or ‘tommy’) sub-machine gun, a formidable weapon familiar to every film-goer from endless gangster movies, was issued, but soon fell again when it was promptly withdrawn and redistributed to the Commandos. Aside from a limited supply of outdated rifles, the Home Guard had to make do with bayonets, a variety of hazardous home-made grenades – such as the Woolworth or Thermos bomb (described by one disenchanted veteran as ‘just a lump of gelignite in a biscuit tin’)
(#litres_trial_promo) and the Sticky bomb (a glass flask filled with nitroglycerine and squeezed inside an adhesive-coated sock – ‘when throwing it, it was wise not to brush it against your clothes, for there it was liable to stick firmly, and blow up the thrower instead of the enemy objective’).
(#litres_trial_promo) Then there was the Sten gun, a cheaply-made but relatively effective weapon which was only made available at a gun-to-man ratio of one to four. It was summed up by one distinctly underwhelmed recuit as ‘a spout, a handle, and a tin box’.
(#litres_trial_promo) There were also such strange and cumbersome contraptions as the Northover projector, which cost under £10 to produce, fired grenades with the aid of a toy pistol cap and a black powder charge, and was likened by one volunteer to ‘a large drainpipe mounted on twin legs’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The most despised of all these weapons was, without any doubt, the pike. Although cheeky youths were known to cry out ‘Gadzooks!’ whenever pike-bearing Home Guards marched by, the 1940s version – consisting of a long metal gas-pipe with a spare bayonet spot-welded in one end – bore scant resemblance to its ancient forebears. Journalists dismissed them immediately as ‘worse than useless’ and ‘demoralising’,
(#litres_trial_promo) politicians criticised them as ‘an insult’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and incredulous quartermasters put them swiftly into storage. The frustration never faded: too many men, for too long a time, found themselves still unfamiliar with firearms.
A third abiding problem was red tape. In spite of the countless War Office assurances to the contrary, the Home Guard grew increasingly bureaucratic. ‘[T]oo much instructional paper – printed, cyclostyled, or typewritten – was produced and circulated,’ recalled one volunteer. ‘There seemed to be a paragraph and subparagraph to cover every tiniest event which could possibly happen, not only to every man, but to every buckle and bootlace. In consequence, the administration of Home Guard units tended to follow the placid, careful, and elaborate course of civil service routine, and many a man felt encouraged to take shelter behind an appropriate regulation rather than think and act for himself.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The more that the living reality of war seemed obscured by its paper description, the more enraged the most recalcitrant souls, such as George Orwell, became. ‘After two years,’ he wrote, ‘no real training has been done, no specialised tactics worked out, no battle positions fixed upon, no fortifications built – all this owing to endless changes of plan and complete vagueness as to what we are supposed to be aiming at … Nothing ever happens except continuous dithering, resulting in progressive disillusionment all round. The best one can hope is that it is much the same on the other side.’
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In spite of its myriad imperfections, however, the Home Guard went on to make a genuine difference. Ever since the start of the Blitz in September 1940, it had come to be valued not just, nor perhaps even primarily, as an anti-invasion force but also, and increasingly, as a vital contributor to civil defence – locating and extinguishing incendiary bombs, clearing rubble, guarding damaged banks, pubs and shops, directing traffic, assisting in rescue work, first aid and fire-fighting, and generally making itself useful in crisis situations. Tales of incompetence – often comic, occasionally tragic – would, inevitably, be told and retold (such as the time a bemused platoon from the 1st Berkshire Battalion mistook a distant cow’s swishing tail for some kind of inscrutable ‘dot-dash movement of a flag’, or the occasion when a Liverpool unit’s bid to train on a patch of waste land was thwarted by a gang of small boys who protested that ‘we was playing ‘ere first’),
(#litres_trial_promo) but the stories of compassion and courage were legion.
(#litres_trial_promo) One Buckinghamshire platoon, it was reported, ‘accommodated, fed and slept in their guardroom approximately 250 mothers and children turned out of their homes through time bombs. Half a dozen tired men of the night guard received and fed the refugees out of their rations, and then with umbrella and bowler hat went to town to do a “day’s work”.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Communities were comforted, spirits were lifted, and lives were saved.
For all its invaluable versatility, however, the self-image of the Home Guard remained resolutely that of a fighting force, so as the fears of invasion started to fade, the feelings of redundancy started to form, and it became increasingly necessary for the government to find ways of reassuring the Home Guard that it still meant something, and still mattered. In May 1942, for example, its second anniversary was marked by a host of measures intended to bolster its self-esteem: a day of parades and field-craft demonstrations – ‘Home Guard Sunday’ – was held. Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Paget, the Commander of the British Home Forces, paid public tribute both to the progress that the Home Guard had made, and to the ‘spirit of service and self-sacrifice’ shown by its members;
(#litres_trial_promo) the Prime Minister reminded the force that it continued to be ‘engaged in work of national importance during all hours of the day’, and remained ‘an invaluable addition to our armed forces and an essential part of the effective defence of the island’;
(#litres_trial_promo) and King George VI announced that, as a sign of his ‘appreciation of the services given by the Home Guard with such devotion and perseverence’, he had agreed to become its Colonel-in-Chief.
(#litres_trial_promo) Early the following year, Churchill – fearing that a forthcoming satirical film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, would encourage people to regard the Home Guard as little more than a comical anachronism
(#litres_trial_promo) – urged the War Office to find further ways to make the force ‘feel that the nation realises all it owes to these devoted men’, adding that they needed ‘to be nursed and encouraged at this stage in their life’.
(#litres_trial_promo) That May, following Churchill’s prompting, the third anniversary celebrations were greater and grander than ever: there was another ‘Home Guard Sunday’ – Churchill had wanted a ‘Home Guard Week’
(#litres_trial_promo) – with ceremonial parades throughout the country and a march of 5,000 Home Guards through central London. The King, who took the salute, praised the force for attaining such a ‘high standard of proficiency’, and assured it that, as the Army directed its attention elsewhere, ‘the importance of your role will … inevitably continue to increase’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Churchill was in Washington during the time of these celebrations, but he still managed to make the most memorable contribution with a lengthy radio broadcast designed specifically to restore a sense of pride and self-importance within the force: ‘People who note and mark our growing mastery of the air, not only over our islands but penetrating into ever-widening zones on the Continent, ask whether the danger of invasion has not passed away,’ he observed. ‘Let me assure you of this: That until Hitler and Hitlerism are beaten into unconditional surrender the danger of invasion will never pass away.’ Noting that any prospect of invasion hinged on the strength of the forces deployed to meet it, he reaffirmed his faith in the Home Guard:
[I]f the Nazi villains drop down upon us from the skies, any night … you will make it clear to them that they have not alighted in the poultry run, or in the rabbit-farm, or even in the sheep-fold, but that they have come down in the lion’s den at the Zoo! Here is the reality of your work; here is that sense of imminent emergency which cheers and inspires the long routine of drills and musters after the hard day’s work is done.
The Allies, he added, were now moving overseas, leaving the Home Guard with greater responsibility than ever: ‘It is this reason which, above all others, prompted me to make you and all Britain realise afresh … the magnitude and lively importance of your duties and of the part you have to play in the supreme cause now gathering momentum as it rolls forward to its goal.’
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The celebrations and speeches seemed to work, but not for long, and before any more bouquets could be brandished the realities of the strategic situation had started to sink in. During the first half of 1943, it had still been possible to contemplate the possibility of some sudden reversal in Allied fortunes; by the end of the year it had become clear that the Germans, now without their Axis partner Italy, were well on their way to defeat. The Home Guard, as a consequence, gradually lost its sense of purpose. All except the keenest Home Guards came to resent the obligation to surrender their evening hours in order to train for a non-existent battle, and absenteeism grew increasingly common.
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The Home Guard’s long, slow, inexorable decline dragged on into 1944. The fourth anniversary of its formation was duly marked in May with the usual array of strenuously celebratory events; on this occasion, however, the applause failed to distract the men from their misgivings. After D-Day, in June, it was evident to all that what the future held in store was not battle honours but redundancy. On 6 September, it was announced that Home Guard operational duties were being suspended and all parades would from now on be voluntary.
(#litres_trial_promo) At the end of the following month came confirmation of the inevitable: the Home Guard was to stand down on 14 November. Although few volunteers were entirely surprised by the decision to disband, many were taken aback by the speed at which it was set to be executed. ‘We learned that, like the grin on Alice’s Chesire Cat’, wrote one embittered volunteer, ‘we were to fade out, leaving no trace of our existence.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It seemed for a time that the men would be ordered to give back their uniforms, but Churchill, anticipating the probable public reaction to such a patently mean-spirited act, intervened to cancel the plan, insisting that ‘there can be no question of the Home Guard returning their boots or uniforms’.
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The end, when it came, was met with dignity. On Sunday, 3 December 1944, more than 7,000 Home Guards, drawn from units all over Britain, marched in the rain through the West End of London, and concluded with a parade in Hyde Park before their Colonel-in-Chief, King George VI. ‘History,’ he told them, ‘will say that your share in the greatest of all our struggles for freedom was a vitally important one.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That evening, shortly after nine o’clock, the Home Guard, which had begun with one radio broadcast, ended with another – this one delivered by the King:
Over four years ago, in May 1940, our country was in mortal danger. The most powerful army the world had ever seen had forced its way to within a few miles of our coast. From day to day we were threatened with invasion.
For most of you – and, I must add, for your wives too – your service in the Home Guard has not been easy. Some of you have stood for many hours on the gun sites, in desolate fields, or wind-swept beaches. Many of you, after a long and hard day’s work, scarcely had time for food before you changed into uniform for the evening parade. Some of you had to bicycle for long distances to the drill or the rifle range …
But you have gained something for yourselves. You have discovered in yourselves new capabilities. You have found how men from all kinds of homes and many different occupations can work together in a great cause, and how happy they can be with each other. I am very proud of what the Home Guard has done and I give my heartfelt thanks to you all … I know that your country will not forget that service.
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‘The Home Guard,’ sighed General Pownall back in the early days of its existence, ‘are indeed a peculiar race.’
(#litres_trial_promo) If, by ‘peculiar’, he not only meant ‘odd’ but also ‘special’, he had a point, because in spite of the lingering imprecision of its status and the nagging inadequacy of its instruction, this unlikely alliance of the wide and rheumy eyed won real respect for its readiness to stand, and wait, and serve. ‘When bad men combine,’ wrote Burke, ‘the good must associate,’
(#litres_trial_promo) and the men of the Home Guard did so without hesitation or fuss. At their peak they numbered 1,793,000;
(#litres_trial_promo) their gallantry earned them 2 George Crosses, 13 George Medals, 11 MBEs, 1 OBE, 6 British Empire medals and 58 commendations; 1,206 volunteers were either killed on duty or died from wounds, and 557 more sustained serious injuries; they cost little, but contributed much.
(#litres_trial_promo) The glory passed them by, but not the gratitude.

CHAPTER II A Cunning Plan (#ulink_71d5fba0-c10f-5fc9-aa1a-72fe0ed5c530)
Comedy on television is a lot like comedy in Burlesque. It’s not how funny are you; it’s how many weeks can you be funny?
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PHIL SILVERS

War is hell. So is TV.
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LARRY GELBART

It all began, in another way, one day back in the summer of 1967. Shortly before 11.30 in the morning, at the end of May, Jimmy Perry, a 42-year-old actor, was strolling through St James’s Park when, in the distance, he heard the sound of the band playing for the Changing of the Guards. As he drew nearer, he could make out the rows of marching men, smart and sharp in their striking scarlet tunics and their towering bearskin hats. He stopped and watched. The longer he looked, however, the more vivid, in his mind’s eye, seemed a scene from twenty-six years before, when, as a youth, he had stood in much the same place at much the same time and surveyed the rows of oddly shaped, drably dressed men marching rather less neatly but rather more proudly outside Buckingham Palace on behalf of Britain’s Home Guard. It made for quite a contrast. It gave him an idea.
Jimmy Perry had been searching for an idea, the right idea, for some time. His career, so far, had been pleasantly varied. There had been concert parties and Gang Shows during wartime, followed by RADA, Butlins, repertory companies, and nine absorbing years (in partnership with his wife, Gilda) as actor-manager of the Palace Theatre, Watford. His current activity, as a member of Joan Littlewood’s left-wing Theatre Workshop in the east London surburb of Stratford, was providing him with plenty of challenges (such as portraying Bobby Kennedy in Barbara Garson’s US political satire MacBird, and then moving straight on to a role in Vanbrugh’s Restoration comedy The Provok’d Wife), but, nonetheless, he still felt unfulfilled. ‘I was doing all right,’ he recalled, ‘I was earning a living, but, you know, I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. So let’s say I was looking at that point to really establish myself.’
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Although the stage remained, in many ways, his natural habitat – he cherished its traditions and relished its immediacy – he recognised that television, with its massive audience and prodigious output, now represented his best chance to advance. Finding a foothold in the medium was, however, far from easy: in spite of the fact that Perry had already made several small-screen appearances over the course of the previous two years, he was no nearer than ever to making his mark. ‘I needed to get noticed,’ he recalled. ‘I’d been in situation-comedies and bits and pieces, but I was still waiting for the role that would let me show people what I could do. Then one day I thought to myself: “I must have a decent part. I know what – I’ll write my own sit-com, and I’ll write a really good part in it for me!”’
(#litres_trial_promo) Writing, at that stage, was regarded purely as a means, not an end. ‘I had no ambition to be a writer. None at all. Writing is hard – acting is blooming easy! I just wanted to establish myself as a performer, an actor, and the only way I thought I could do that was by pushing myself from the writing side.’
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It needed a sharp idea, however, to spark the strategy into life. ‘Nothing came to begin with,’ Perry admitted. ‘I’d written bits of stuff before, but not really much, and I didn’t know what I was going to write about. I just knew I wanted to write a sit-com with a nice part for myself! So I looked, I thought, I looked, I thought.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Then came that summer stroll through St James’s Park, and the sight of the soldiers, and the memory of the Home Guard. Perry had been in the Home Guard himself, in the 19th Hertfordshire Battalion, at the age of fifteen. ‘My mother was always fearful of me being out at night and catching cold, but I loved it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Suddenly, all of the old incidents and images came tumbling back into consciousness: the late arrival of the ill-fitting uniform, the odd weapons (wire cheese-cutters, sharpened bicycle chains), the commanding officer who concluded each parade by waving his revolver in the air and shouting, ‘Kill Germans!’, the elderly lance corporal who continually reminisced about fighting for General Kitchener against the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzies’, the long, rambling lectures on how to tackle tanks with burning blankets, the Blimps, the booze-ups, the banter and the bravery. ‘To be alive at that time,’ he reflected, ‘was to experience the British people at their best and at perhaps the greatest moment in their history.’
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Then the idea struck him: ‘The Home Guard! What an idea for a situation-comedy!’
(#litres_trial_promo) As he made his way back to his flat in Morpeth Terrace, he started to assess the idea in his mind:
I broke it down. I thought to myself: well, it was important that I wrote about something I’d experienced and understood; and service things are always funny, always popular; and there was that thing about reluctant heroes, you know, people who were civilians in the daytime and part-time soldiers at night; and there was that whole background to it, and the attitude of the British people at that time; and no one had done the Home Guard before, no one had tackled the subject; and I was to be in it. That’s how it started.
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Later that day, during his regular train journey from Victoria to Stratford East, he took out his notebook and scribbled down some ideas. Research began in earnest the following morning:
I thought I’d better brush up on my facts, so I went to the Westminster public library and looked through all of the shelves: nothing, not a single book on the subject. Then I asked a young librarian if she could help me: ‘The Home Guard?’ she said. ‘Never heard of it.’ Astonishing. So I moved on to the Imperial War Museum, and they did have some Home Guard training pamphlets, a couple of memoirs, that sort of thing. But apart from that there was nothing – no reference to it anywhere. The public had forgotten about the Home Guard, and I thought it was time they were reminded of it.
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Devising a basic storyline did not pose the novice scriptwriter too great a problem. ‘Don’t forget I’d run Watford Rep with my wife for nine years, and we did over six hundred plays. I regarded that as my apprenticeship. If you do a fresh play every week, year after year, boy oh boy, do you know how to move actors about. That’s how I learnt my craft. Probably few other writers have had that opportunity, and I like to think that it helped me considerably.’
(#litres_trial_promo) His own wartime memories had enabled him to sketch out the situation, but the focus for the comedy was suggested by a 1937 English movie:
I’d been asking myself: ‘Now, what am I going to do with this? What sort of comedy set-up?’ And that Sunday afternoon, showing on television, was Oh! Mr Porter, with Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt – the pompous man, the old man and the boy. And the movie’s great strength was the wonderful balance of these three characters. So I thought, ‘That’s it: pompous man, old man, young boy!’
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It took him just three days, from start to finish, to write the script. It was called The Fighting Tigers. He put it in the drawer of his desk and went back to work: ‘I just didn’t know who to show it to.’
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Early in July, during a break in the Theatre Workshop’s run, came a stroke of good fortune. Perry’s agent, Ann Callender, called with news of a small but eye-catching role in an episode of a popular prime-time BBC TV situation-comedy. As the situation-comedy was Beggar My Neighbour,15 whose producer-director happened to be David Croft, whose wife happened to be Ann Callender, Perry realised that he had not only found a good part, but also a great contact. David Croft was one of several top producers at the BBC, along with Duncan Wood (Hancock’s Half-Hour, Steptoe and Son), James Gilbert (It’s a Square World, The Frost Report), Dennis Main Wilson (The Rag Trade, Till Death Us Do Part) and John Ammonds (Here’s Harry, The Val Doonican Show, later The Morecambe & Wise Show).
(#litres_trial_promo) He had cut his teeth on a wide range of shows, including one technically inventive series of The Benny Hill Show (1961) and thirteen editions of This Is Your Life (1962) at its most Reithian, before carving out a niche for himself, starting with Hugh and I (1962–8), as the creator of well-crafted, character-driven situation-comedies. He was fortunate to be at the BBC during the era of Hugh Carleton Greene, a cultured and courageous Director-General who reminded his programme-makers that they were there to serve the public rather than the politicians or the press, and the BBC, in turn, was fortunate to be able to call on programme-makers of the calibre of Croft in order to fulfil this obligation. ‘It was a wonderful atmosphere in which to work,’ Croft recalled. ‘There were some very brilliant people there in those days and they were all devoted to the BBC. When commercial television started they could all have gone and earned much more money elsewhere, but they’d stayed with the BBC because they knew you could do good work there. It’s always important, you know, in the end, to get good programmes.’
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Croft had worked with Jimmy Perry, briefly, once before. At the suggestion of his wife, he had gone down to Watford to see her client appear on stage, and had subsequently cast him in a minor role in one episode of Hugh and I at the end of January 1966. Neither man, it seems, emerged from the encounter sensing that the seeds of a lasting friendship had been sown. Croft had been happy enough with Perry’s efforts – the lines had been learnt, the marks had been hit – but he was immersed in the production of fourteen half-hour episodes of a high-profile show, and there was no time to dwell on such transient contributions. Perry, on the other hand, had been somewhat intimidated by Croft’s briskly efficient style of direction: ‘I didn’t know if he was having an off day, or I was giving a bad performance, but I do remember thinking to myself: “He looks a bit grim. I’d better watch my step here, better mind my Ps and Qs – I think he could turn nasty.”’
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The second occasion when Croft met Perry, some eighteen months later, proved a far more memorable affair. Croft had recently started work on the second series of Beggar My Neighbour (starring Reg Varney, Pat Coombs, Desmond Walter-Ellis and June Whitfield). ‘We had an episode coming up,’ Croft remembered, ‘in which I wanted someone to play the rather noisy, uncouth brother of Reg Varney’s character, Harry Butt. So my wife took me to the theatre again to see Jimmy, and I could tell he was obviously very good for the part. He was a good actor, was Jimmy. And so I cast him in it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Perry packed two scripts in his briefcase – one of Beggar My Neighbour, the other of The Fighting Tigers – and set off for his first day of rehearsal feeling, as he put it, ‘a bit apprehensive’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Eager to impress, anxious to please, he did what he was told, tried his best to do it well, and waited, patiently, nervously, for the right moment to make his move. It never came. Back in his flat, Perry rang his agent for advice. Croft recalled: ‘He said to my wife, “I’ve got this idea about the Home Guard – do you think I dare show it to David?” She said, “Yes, go ahead.”’
(#litres_trial_promo) Eventually, he did. ‘It was a hot summer’s day, a Friday, and we’d been rehearsing at this boys’ club. I’d been waiting, waiting, waiting. Finally, outside, I saw David was on his own, fiddling with this wonderful white sports car that he had, so I thought to myself, “Now!” So I went over to him and told him about my script. And he agreed to read it over the weekend.’
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The following Monday, the cast and crew congregated at Television Centre to record the next episode. Perry arrived a little earlier than necessary, hoping that, one way or another, Croft would put him out of his misery as promptly as possible, but the anxious actor soon realised that his busy producer-director was not going to have a spare moment for some time, and there was no option but to wait, and watch, and hope. Finally, after several long, agonising hours, Croft came over to Perry and delivered his verdict: ‘What a terrific idea!’
(#litres_trial_promo)The Fighting Tigers had a future.
Croft’s judgement carried some weight within the BBC’s Light Entertainment department. Although he had not been directly responsible for the scripts of either Hugh and I or Beggar My Neighbour, he had, in the past, collaborated on several musicals (including the Cicely Courtneidge vehicle Starmaker); contributed to various pantomimes and West End shows; spent eighteen months as a script editor at Associated-Rediffusion and two years as an extraordinarily industrious young producer, director and writer of around two hundred and fifty shows at Tyne Tees Television before moving to the BBC at the start of the 1960s. Consequently, his opinions – and ambitions – were taken very seriously indeed. ‘I had it in my contract that I could still write for the Palladium,’ he recalled. ‘And that was very unusual for the BBC in those days – to allow you to work for somebody else. I was always very busy. I think the BBC were rather pleased that somebody who actually had some sort of involvement in showbusiness would work for them.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Another thing that ensured that Croft, as a producer-director, was accorded an encouraging degree of autonomy was the fact that, once he had settled on a project, he could be relied on to pursue it in an exceptionally professional manner. Bill Cotton Jnr, Head of Variety at the time, remarked:
There were no frills with David. He always got in on time every morning. He always left at 5.30. And he’d always done his work. You’d see in other offices people tearing their hair out at seven or eight o’clock at night: ‘Oh, God! We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that!’ Dennis Main Wilson, for example, he’d always be working late. David never worked late. He’d planned it, he knew how to produce it, he knew how to direct it, he knew who to talk to, he’d delegated a whole lot of work and then he went home and wrote it up. He was remarkable. I’m not denigrating Dennis Main Wilson, who had got tremendous creative abilities, but he was all over the bloody shop! David was remarkably well organised and efficient. And, of course, he was terribly talented.
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When, therefore, David Croft decided that his next project should be a situation-comedy about the Home Guard – even though it was 1967, twenty-two years after the end of the Second World War, eleven years after Suez, seven years after the end of conscription, three years after America began bombing Vietnam, and right in the middle of a long, hazy summer of love, peace and pot – no one, said Cotton, felt any strong inclination to object:
There’s no percentage in interfering. You trusted people like David, like Jimmy Gilbert, like Johnny Ammonds, to get on with it. And anyway, with most decisions in Entertainment in those days at the BBC, there were always two ways of doing it, so if you agreed one way early enough, and then it became obvious that it wasn’t working, there was still time to change it to the other way. So when someone like David came up with an idea you’d just let him go with it. I do admit that, when he first came into my office and told me that he was planning to do a situation-comedy about the Home Guard, I laughed and said, ‘You’re out of your mind!’ And I wasn’t the only one. But I knew he was going to make a really professional job of it, and, anyway, it wasn’t my decision.
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The man whose decision it was, in the first instance, was the BBC’s Head of Comedy, Michael Mills. Known affectionately to his friends as ‘dark, satanic Mills’
(#litres_trial_promo) (an epithet inspired by his Mephistophelean beard and deep-set eyes), this worldly, wordy, witty man had been involved in programme-making since 1947, when he became the Corporation’s – and therefore British television’s – first recognised producer in the field of light entertainment (‘a case,’ he liked to joke, ‘of the blind leading the short-sighted’).
(#litres_trial_promo) Mills was widely regarded as being one of the most bold and authoritative arbiters of comic potential in the business. His tastes were catholic – he adored the work of P. G. Wodehouse, and adapted several of his stories for the small screen, but he also relished broader styles, such as bawdy farce. His instincts were sound – he would be the one, prompted by the plays of Plautus, to come up with the idea of Up Pompeii! for Frankie Howerd. ‘Michael was great,’ remembered Bill Cotton. ‘Very, very, well-read, a good judge of a script and a good judge of actors, too. He was a brilliant producer, with enormous taste and flair, and he knew how to put a show together, but he could also be quite impetuous and take some pretty big risks. If he had faith in something he would just push on with it regardless.’
(#litres_trial_promo) David Croft agreed:
Michael was a marvellous Head of Comedy. Very enthusiastic. Everything was possible once you’d decided that you could do something. He didn’t ever really discuss budget. He was quite flamboyant like that. I remember, for example, taking over a production of The Mikado from him – it was called Titti-Pu – and finding that he’d already ordered elephants, lions, tigers – the lot. I spent the first few days cancelling all the things we couldn’t afford! So he was wonderfully ambitious, and he had a very broad picture of what you should be doing and what he could do for you, and he did it. He was, I suppose, a genius, and he could do everything in a television studio: if, for example, he wasn’t happy about the way a cameraman was shooting something, he’d go down there, take the camera from him and do the shot himself – ‘From there, understand? That’s what I want you to do, so do it!’ Of course, the result was that the crews were inclined to hate him! But he knew exactly what he was doing. No doubt about it. And as soon as I’d read Jimmy’s script I didn’t hesitate before taking it to Michael.
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Mills duly read the script and agreed immediately with Croft: this was an idea that, if it was handled in the right way, had the potential to run and run.
There was one more obstacle that needed to be overcome, however, before the official programme-making process could really begin. Tom Sloan, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment and the mercurial Mills’ immediate superior, needed to rubber-stamp the decision. In stark contrast to Mills, Sloan was a man who preferred to err on the side of caution, and there was always a chance that he would react warily – or worse – to the prospect of a comedy set in wartime. The son of a Scottish Free Church minister, he was certainly no great admirer of the new strains of humour that seemed intent on mocking all of the old traditional values, and had once insisted upon removing a sketch from a Peter Sellers show on the grounds that ‘to refer to someone who was obviously Dorothy Macmillan as “a great steaming nit” was not in good taste’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The brilliant but increasingly embittered programme-maker and executive Donald Baverstock dismissed Sloan as someone who ‘didn’t have an idea in his head’,
(#litres_trial_promo) but, as Paul Fox, the newly-appointed Controller of BBC1 in 1967, recalled, the truth was considerably more complex:
Tom had ideas. Good, solid ideas. He did have old-fashioned BBC standards; I think that is absolutely true. But he wasn’t a reactionary. I mean, yes, he spoke out against That Was The Week That Was, and that was mainly for territorial reasons – it was made by the Talks Department rather than his own Light Entertainment – but he defended Till Death Us Do Part solidly and sincerely through thick and thin. And he was an exceptionally good organiser, a good commander of a difficult group of people in Light Entertainment who needed a little bit of binding together. He wasn’t the inspiration behind the success of Light Entertainment at that time; but he was the man who made sure that all of that success became possible, because he allowed Bill [Cotton] and Duncan [Wood] and Michael [Mills] their heads and let them get on with it.
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Barry Took, whom Sloan recruited as a comedy adviser, agreed:
Tom was a decent man. He had a very stiff, military view of the world, but he meant well. He just didn’t like messiness. He didn’t like people who got things wrong, or things that went wrong. And in comedy, of course, people fail most of the time, and many things fail all of the time, so poor old Tom was always a bit anxious, a bit edgy, about it all. But I admired and respected him because his only real concern was to make sure that what ended up on the screen was something to be proud of.
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What is beyond doubt is the fact that Sloan was driven by the passionate conviction that the BBC’s Reithian fundamentals should be reordered from ‘information, education and entertainment’ to ‘entertainment, information and education’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was, in his own sober-suited way, a committed populist. When he took over as Head of Light Entertainment in 1963, the department’s output, he said, was still regarded by the management as ‘something that had to be done rather than something that should be done’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Later on in the decade, after the department had played a pivotal role in the Corporation’s successful campaign to win back mass audiences from its commercial competitor (winning every prestigious prize available in the process), the attitude of the powers that be had ‘improved’, he said, to the point where it reminded him of the Pope’s view of the nuns who sold religious relics in St Peter’s Square: ‘They may not be quite of the true faith, but they do bring a great deal of happiness to millions of people.’
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The most promising thing about Sloan, as far as Mills and Croft were concerned, was the fact that he was a great believer in the value of well-made, audience-pleasing situation-comedies. Satire, in his view, was a ‘pretentious label’ that on countless occasions in the past had been used to legitimise material that was ‘quite often unfunny’ and sometimes ‘needlessly shocking [or] just plain silly’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Many of the new youth-oriented comedy shows that were emerging struck him as reminiscent of ‘one large cocktail party – or should one say nowadays, one large wine and cheese party – where everybody is sounding off and no one hears the wit for the noise’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and the continuing success of the Variety format, he acknowledged, relied on the availability of peripatetic talent, which was increasingly expensive. The more coherent genre of situation-comedy, he believed, formed the spine of his department’s body of work, the one, true, sure thing that drew viewers to the screen on a regular basis and settled them down comfortably within a routine. This was a subject about which he held, and expressed, strong opinions:
In situation comedy, our aim is to involve you in something you recognise, for thirty minutes, and make you laugh and feel happy. It sounds easy but it is not. There are three key factors in any success: the writers, the performers, and the producer.
The writers … are craftsmen who speak from experience and who try and be funny with it. They are the key and without them the door cannot be unlocked …
[The performer] is really your guest, and if you don’t happen to like him, you ask him to leave by the simple act of switching him off. It is a cruel fact that on television an artist can have mastered every technique of his craft, but if his face or even his voice doesn’t fit, he will never be a star on the box …
The third and equal element in this complicated business is the producer. It is not enough to have a funny script and acceptable artists to perform it, it has to be presented in television terms in an acceptable way. We must assume that the producer is technically competent. He knows what his cameras can do and he knows how to use them. But the good producer brings something else, he brings flair. What is flair? I wish I could define it … Flair is production that brings the qualities of the script and the abilities of the artist face to face with the limitations of the medium, and then adds that magic ingredient, x, which makes the whole a memorable experience for those who watch. It is style, it is pace, it is polish, it is technique: it is all these things controlled in harmony, without a discord, and when you see it, you know it. And when any one element is missing, you know that too.
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Sloan’s ideal situation-comedy was the one that seemed most true to life: ‘We must be able to identify ourselves with the characters or the situation. We must be able to cry, “He’s behaving just like Uncle Fred” or “Do you remember when exactly that happened to us?”’
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The Fighting Tigers looked, on paper, as if it would fit fairly neatly within Sloan’s chosen framework, and neither David Croft nor Michael Mills anticipated a negative response (‘Tom’s great advantage,’ said Croft, ‘was that he knew what he didn’t know, and therefore he hired people to do the things that he didn’t know about and then he let them get on with it’),
(#litres_trial_promo) but Sloan, as an executive, did have one or two reasons to be fearful. Mary Whitehouse’s private army of middle-class, middle-brow, middle-Englanders – the self-appointed National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association – had declared war on Hugh Carleton Greene for having the temerity to, in his words, ‘open the windows and let the fresh air in’,
(#litres_trial_promo) or, in hers, contribute to ‘the moral collapse in this country’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, in response to Whitehouse, had just switched Charles Hill straight from the chairmanship of the commercial ITA to that of the BBC in order, as Richard Crossman remarked, ‘to discipline it and bring it to book, and above all to deal with Hugh Greene’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The knives were out for the BBC. It was, in short, the wrong time, politically, to risk causing – or being accused of causing – unnecessary offence. There had, Sloan appreciated, been situation-comedies before with military themes: the BBC had imported The Phil Silvers Show (featuring the scheming US Army sergeant Ernest G. Bilko and his motor-pool platoon of gambling addicts)
(#litres_trial_promo) in April 1957, and ITV had started screening The Army Game (featuring a group of work-shy Army conscripts in Hut 29 at the Surplus Ordinance Depot at Nether Hopping in deepest Staffordshire)
(#litres_trial_promo) two months later, and both programmes had proved hugely popular. Neither of these shows, however, had actually been set during wartime. One current show that was – ITV’s Hogan’s Heroes, a spectacularly tasteless US-made series set inside a German prisoner-of-war camp – had either been shunned or condemned by the majority of British critics, and some ITV regions had simply chosen not to show it.
(#litres_trial_promo)The Fighting Tigers, therefore, was – at least as far as home-grown situation-comedies were concerned – something different, something new, and Sloan had to be satisfied in his own mind that its humour would not inadvertently aggravate painful memories or reopen relatively recently-healed wounds.
As soon as he received a copy of the script he proceeded to read, and reread, it with uncommon care, second-guessing the most likely objections: ‘Were we,’ he asked himself, ‘making mock of Britain’s Finest Hour?’ Once he had finished, he felt absolutely sure of his conclusion: no. ‘Of course it was funny,’ he reflected, ‘but it was true. [Such characters] did exist in those marvellous days, pepper was issued to throw in the face of invading German parachutists, sugar was recommended for dropping in the petrol tanks of German tanks, and the possibility of defeat did not enter our minds!’
(#litres_trial_promo) Sloan was satisfied. The Fighting Tigers would go ahead with his full support.
The pre-production discussions began in earnest. Michael Mills gave Croft his typically incisive critique of Perry’s original script: it was, he agreed, a fine first attempt, full of vivid, accurate period details and promising comic characters, but, of course, it still needed a considerable amount of work. The title, he said, would have to go: instead of The Fighting Tigers, he suggested, it should be called Dad’s Army. He liked the south-east coastal town setting, but disliked the choice of ‘Brightsea-on-Sea’ as its name, so David Croft came up with ‘Walmington-on-Sea’ as an alternative. Some of the characters’ names, too, Mills argued, did not sound quite right: ‘Mainwaring’ suited the pompous man, as did ‘Godfrey’ the old man and ‘Pike’ the young boy. He did not care at all, however, for ‘Private Jim Duck’, instead he suggested ‘Frazer’; for ‘Joe Fish’ he proposed ‘Joe Walker’ and for ‘Jim Jones’ he preferred ‘Jack Jones’. Mills also felt that the platoon would benefit from being made somewhat more variegated in terms of background: one character, for example, might be made an ex-colonel or perhaps a retired admiral, another the ex-officer’s old gardener, and maybe young Pike would be more interesting if he became the local rapscallion. A little more regional diversity would not go amiss, while one was at it, with a Scot, perhaps, tossed in to the mix. There was one more recommendation that Mills wanted to make: Perry, as an inexperienced television scriptwriter, was in need of a well-qualified collaborator, and the obvious in-house choice, reasoned Mills, was David Croft.
(#litres_trial_promo) Perry happily acceded to the proposal, and the two men set to work on a second script.
Croft visited Perry in his flat in Westminster, Perry visited Croft in his house in Notting Hill; ideas were exchanged, possible plots roughed out, a few comic lines devised, and then each man withdrew to work on the script alone. The collaboration seemed to work, their methods seemed to mesh: Croft was cool, calm and clear-headed, Perry was warm, lively and enthusiastic; Croft could sit back and visualise entire scenes, Perry could leap up and perform particular routines; Croft was a master of ensemble comedy, Perry a connoisseur of comic turns; Croft had a sharp eye for the telling detail, Perry had a keen ear for the serviceable phrase; neither man was too proud to learn from the other, both men were determined to succeed. They had, they soon realised, much more in common than at first they had thought. Both men had fallen in love with the world of entertainment at a very early age (Croft’s parents, Reginald Sharland and Ann Croft, had been stars of the British theatre during the 1920s and 1930s, and the baby David had slept in a prop basket backstage; Perry, thanks to his mother, had visited most of the cinemas, theatres and music-halls in and around London before his childhood was complete). Both had attended a distinguished public school (Croft Rugby, Perry St Paul’s), and both had departed prematurely (Croft because the money ran out, Perry because he ‘was tired of being thrashed’).
(#litres_trial_promo) Both had seen the Home Guard in action at first-hand (Croft as an air-raid warden, Perry as an enthusiastic volunteer) and had gone on to join the Royal Artillery (Croft served in North Africa, India and Singapore, becoming a major at twenty-three, and was on the verge of being made a lieutenant-colonel when he ended the war on General Montgomery’s staff in the War Office; Perry served in the Far East, where he rose to the rank of sergeant and became the life and soul of the concert party). Both had been singers (Croft a tenor, Perry a baritone) and actors (Croft starting out as the butcher’s boy in the 1938 movie Goodbye, Mr Chips, Perry in the 1952 Anna Neagle vehicle The Glorious Days); both had worked in holiday camps (Croft as a producer, Perry as a Redcoat); and both had married women from within showbusiness. Both enjoyed fine wines, classic movies and great comedy, and both had the same motto: ‘Never take no for an answer.’
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They wrote quickly but carefully. A good pilot script, they appreciated, was an introduction, not an imposition; it needed to appear familiar without appearing false, to intrigue without seeming to intrude, to inform without straining to educate. In the space of half an hour, the pilot episode would have to set the right tone, establish the essential situation, adumbrate the key characters, touch on some special central tension, nod at its probable causes, wink at its possible consequences, and, last but by no means least, entertain a curious but uncommitted audience sufficiently to make it want to come back for more. It was not a task for either the faint-hearted or the foolhardy, and countless talented writers before Croft and Perry had tried to come to terms with it and failed. Nevertheless, through a combination of courage and prudence, the two men came up with a creation that seemed as if it might, with a little luck, serve each of their multiple needs.
The first episode of Dad’s Army, they had decided, would mirror the real-life sequence of events that began on Tuesday, 14 May 1940, with Anthony Eden’s announcement of plans for the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers, and continued with the frantic rush to enrol and the scramble to establish some kind of broadly recognisable hierarchy. With only the minimum exercise of artistic licence – the timing of Eden’s announcement was brought forward to a brighter, more television-friendly hour – this structure allowed each character to be introduced to the audience simply as a matter of course. George Mainwaring, Arthur Wilson and Frank Pike (the ‘pompous man – passive man – young boy’ comic triangle replacing Perry’s earlier arrangement) would hear the radio broadcast inside the Walmington-on-Sea branch of Swallow
(#litres_trial_promo) Bank; Mainwaring would assert his authority (‘Times of peril always bring great men to the fore … ’), and then, later that day, the action would shift to the inside of the church hall, and the arrival of the first few volunteers – Frazer, the fierce-looking Scotsman; Godfrey, the genial old gent; Walker, the cheeky spiv; Jones, the eager veteran; and Bracewell, the sweet-natured, wing-collared, bow-tied toff – as well as the rude intervention of a brash, bumptious ARP warden and an officious little fire chief. It was an eminently productive pilot script: lean and energetic (the only character who is allowed to sit down, and then only briefly, is Mainwaring: first to read out an important message from the War Office, and later to write down the names of the new recruits); informative (a remarkable number of historically-accurate facts, relating to the LDV’s chaotic formation, are woven neatly into the narrative); socially suggestive (with a bank manager exploiting his position, a chief clerk exploiting his good looks, a butcher exploiting the demand for rationed meat and a ‘wholesale supplier’ exploiting the demand for everything else); and, unlike many opening episodes, encouragingly funny.
The right idea really had come to fruition. On 4 October 1967, Michael Mills not only confirmed that the pilot script had been accepted, but also announced that he was ready to commission an initial series of six programmes (‘with an option for a further six’).
(#litres_trial_promo) On 25 November, Croft and Perry signed the contract and committed themselves to Dad’s Army.55 They were ready: ready for their finest half-hour. Now all that was needed was a cast.

CHAPTER III You Will Be Watching … (#ulink_87abcdcb-e6b5-5524-b68c-30187369861b)
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
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DAD’S ARMY
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Anyone other than David Croft would surely have been in grave danger of hyper-hyphenating: already installed as producer-director-co-writer of Dad’s Army, he now added to his multiple responsibilities by assuming control of casting as well. ‘There was never going to be any doubt about that,’ he explained. ‘Right back in the earliest days of my career, when I was offered a casting person, I’d said, “No way – that’s my business!”, and I’ve always stuck to that. If you don’t know who you want in a show, you shouldn’t be doing the job, quite frankly. Certainly, as far as the established characters are concerned, you should know exactly who you want – even if you can’t get them.’
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Croft, in fact, was not just good at casting a show; he had a genius for it. Just like the classic Ealing movie comedies of the 1940s and 1950s – whose distinctive tone and texture owed as much to those actors (such as Miles Malleson, Hugh Griffith, Jack Warner, Gladys Henson, Clive Morton, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) who regularly animated the background as they did to those (such as Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood and Cecil Parker) who frequently filled in the foreground – Croft’s situation-comedies were all about believable little worlds rather than brilliantly big stars. Throughout the first half of the 1960s he had cherry-picked the choicest character actors in British television comedy until, in effect, he had assembled his own unofficial repertory company, his own private Ealing. All of the following actors were used by Croft in one or more episodes of both Hugh and I and Beggar My Neighbour and would go on to feature in one or more episodes of Dad’s Army: Arnold Ridley, Bill Pertwee, James Beck, Edward Sinclair, Harold Bennett, Felix Bowness, Arthur English, Carmen Silvera, Robert Raglan, Queenie Watts, Robert Gillespie, Julian Orchard, Jeffrey Gardiner and Jimmy Perry. The familiarity bred contentment: the audience knew who was who, and the director knew who could do what. It was inevitable that the close-knit community of Walmington-on-Sea would be composed predominantly of Croft’s people.
Jimmy Perry, however, was disappointed to learn that he would not, on a regular basis, be joining them. Michael Mills had argued that the show’s creator and co-writer would have to make up his mind as to which side of the camera he most wanted to be, and David Croft had concurred: ‘Jimmy, I knew, had set his heart on playing the spiv – he’d actually written it with himself in mind – but I felt that, as one of the writers, he would be needed in the production box to see how things were going. I also felt, I suppose, that it wasn’t going to make for a particularly happy cast if one of the writers gave himself a role – the other actors would’ve been inclined to say that he’d written the best lines for himself.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Perry was by no means the first writer to find that his cunning plan had suddenly gone awry. Back in 1960, for example, the American writer Carl Reiner had created his very own starring vehicle (Head of the Family), basing the leading role of Rob Petrie expressly on himself, only to be informed by his producer that Dick Van Dyke was much more suited to playing himself than he was (and the show, as a consequence, was relaunched as The Dick Van Dyke Show).5 Perry’s sense of disappointment, nonetheless, was immense: ‘I always resented it. Always. I wrote Walker for myself. That’s how it had all started. And I wanted to be on both sides of the camera. But Michael Mills didn’t think it was a good idea and neither did David, and, in those days, I was in no position to argue. So that was that: very sad, but there you are – you can’t have everything.’
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The casting process, from the first casual discussion to the final collection of contracts, lasted several months, beginning in mid-October 1967 and ending in early March 1968. The genealogy of the characters (who were little more, so far, than garrulous strangers on paper but already intimate friends within the minds of Croft and Perry) contained the clues. Mainwaring, for example, was a composite of three people from Perry’s past: the manager of his local bank, the head of a Watford building society and Will Hay’s chronically incompetent, permanently harassed, on-screen persona (there had been a ‘Colonel Mannering’ – ‘known to the press as “the uncrowned king of Southern Arabia”’
(#litres_trial_promo) – in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but the name ‘Mainwaring’ was chosen for its comically ambiguous, class-sensitive pronunciation). Wilson was prompted by Perry’s aversion to the stereotypical sergeant figure:
I’d been a sergeant myself, you see, and one day, while I was serving in the Far East, this major had come up and said to me: ‘Sergeant Perry, why do you speak with a public school accent?’ And I’d replied: ‘Well, I suppose because I went to a public school.’ So he said, ‘Oh. But still: a sergeant speaking like that – it – it’s most strange!’ Well, the man was an idiot. There were more than a million men in the Royal Artillery alone, and they came from all walks of life. So this cliché that a sergeant should always look a certain way and sound a certain way – it’s just a cliché, and I wanted to get right away from that.
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Jones owed much to the elderly raconteur with whom Perry had served in the Home Guard, and a little to the bellicose sergeant at Colchester barracks who had taught him bayonet drill (‘Any doubt – get out the old cold steel, ’cause they don’t like it up ’em!’).
(#litres_trial_promo) Godfrey was a throwback to the Edwardian era, when discreet and deferential shop assistants would inquire politely if one was ‘being attended to’;
(#litres_trial_promo) Walker was drawn from memory – not only of real wartime wide boys, but also, inevitably, of the still-vivid ‘Slasher Green’, Sid Field’s kinder, gentler, comic parody; Frazer was formed from all of the old anecdotes about those Scots who had grown progressively – and aggressively – more ‘Scottish’ while in exile down south among the Sassenachs; and Pike was modelled on Perry’s own youthful experiences as a movie-mad, scarf-clad, impressionable raw recruit.
Casting Mainwaring, Perry believed, would be easy. There was one actor in particular who, in his opinion, bore a striking family resemblance to Walmington-on-Sea’s uppity little fusspot: Arthur Lowe. What impressed Perry most about Lowe was his technical brilliance: his timing – like that of Jack Benny or Robb Wilton – was flawless; his mid-sentence double takes – like those of Bob Hope or Cary Grant – were exquisite; and his control of crosstalk – like that of Will Hay or Jimmy James – was seemingly effortless. ‘You just had to watch him,’ said Perry. ‘It takes an awful long time to learn how to do those things even moderately well, but he did them beautifully.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Lowe had been acting professionally for more than twenty years, starting off in Manchester rep before graduating to West End musicals (including Call Me Madam, Pal Joey and The Pyjama Game), plays (Witness for the Prosecution, A Dead Secret, Ring of Truth) and movies (including a brief role as a reporter in Kind Hearts and Coronets and a more significant part in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life). By the mid-sixties he was best known for his long-running role on television as the irascible and fastidious Leonard Swindley – first, from 1960, in Coronation Street (where he managed Gamma Garments boutique, unsuccessfully fought a local election as the founder and chairman of the Property Owners and Small Traders Party, and was jilted at the altar by the timid Emily Nugent), and then, from 1965, in a broader spin-off situation-comedy, Pardon the Expression (which saw him leave Weatherfield to become assistant manager at a northern branch of a department store called Dobson and Hawks). ‘I’d seen him in those two things,’ said Perry, ‘and somehow he’d clicked with me. He was such a funny little man.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1967, after appearing in yet another spin-off series called Turn Out the Lights, Lowe, having tired of being associated so closely with one long-running role, had left Mr Swindley behind and returned to the theatre. He was available, but, much to Perry’s surprise, the BBC did not appear to want him.
‘Arthur Lowe?’ exclaimed Michael Mills when the name first came up. ‘He doesn’t work for us!’
(#litres_trial_promo) This was not entirely true – he had, in the past, appeared in the odd episode of such programmes as Maigret and Z Cars – but it was true enough to make Mills (ever protective of the BBC’s distinctive identity) urge his producer to look elsewhere. David Croft had, in fact, already done so, and had settled on Thorley Walters – an actor whose most recent role on television had been that of Sir Joshua Hoot QC in BBC1’s A. P. Herbert’s Misleading Cases. Walters was no stranger to playing either stuffy or inept military characters – and in the Boulting Brothers’ satire Private’s Progress (1956) he had played Captain Bootle, who was both – although his movie career now centred on such Hammer horrors as Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966) and Frankenstein Created Woman (1967). Croft went ahead and offered him the role. Walters turned it down. ‘He thanked me very much for asking,’ recalled Croft, ‘but he said that he couldn’t think why I’d thought of him. But he would have been very good.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Perry, once again, suggested Arthur Lowe, but Croft, once again, already had someone else in mind: this time it was Jon Pertwee.
Pertwee was one of those actors who seemed almost too serviceable for their own good. Whenever a radio producer wanted someone to play a gibbering Norwegian, or a spluttering English aristocrat, or a windy Welshman, or just about any other comical accent, tic or turn, Pertwee invariably came top of the list (in The Navy Lark, for example, he supplied the voices for no fewer than six distinctive characters);
(#litres_trial_promo) whenever a television show or movie required a piece of Danny Kaye-style verbal dexterity or a quirky characterisation, Pertwee would, inevitably, find himself in demand. Croft had worked with him on an episode of Beggar My Neighbour,
(#litres_trial_promo) and had been very impressed: ‘He’d played this major – quite similar, really, to the part [of Mainwaring] as it was conceived at that time – and he’d been very funny. So I sent him the script and offered him the part.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This time, it seemed, Croft had succeeded in getting his man. On 13 November 1967, Michael Mills instructed the BBC bookings department to ‘negotiate a fee with [the agent] Richard Stone for the services of Jon Pertwee’, adding that ‘Pertwee is in America at the moment, and has seen [the] script and wished to do [the] show. I would like him to be aware of the fee that we are offering, so that we can make a firm casting.’
(#litres_trial_promo) What happened next remains unclear: it could have been the case that Pertwee, or his agent, judged the proposed fee (which would not, at best, have been many shillings more than £250 an episode)
(#litres_trial_promo) too low, or he might have decided, on reflection, that he did not wish to risk being typecast in a series that might just possibly run for several years, or he might simply have been enjoying himself too much in New York (where he was appearing in the Broadway production of There’s a Girl in My Soup) to seriously consider making an early return, but, whatever the real reason, the result was that he changed his mind and chose to drop out. Croft, once again, found himself back at square one.
It was at this point that Perry saw his chance. Knowing that Arthur Lowe was currently appearing in a play called Baked Beans and Caviar at Windsor, he persuaded David Croft to go along with him to see it. ‘Unfortunately,’ Perry recalled, ‘Arthur was dreadful in it – it wasn’t his sort of thing at all – but David, to his great credit, backed me and agreed to consider him for Mainwaring.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Perry’s persistence was about to pay off, but not without one final scare – courtesy of none other than Arthur Lowe himself. Croft had arranged for the actor to meet him and Perry at Television Centre:
It didn’t get off to a good start. We’d whistled him up to the Centre so that we could talk over lunch in the canteen, and the first thing he said was: ‘I’m not sure, you know, about a situation-comedy. I hope it’s not going to be one of those silly programmes. The sort of show I hate is Hugh and I.’ So I had to tell him the fact that I’d done about eighty Hugh and Is! He quickly backed out of that one. After all, it was work, and he wasn’t over-employed at the time.
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Croft forgave the faux pas; he knew that Lowe, so long as he could shake off the ghost of Mr Swindley, had both the wit and the ability to make the role his own. It was, he concluded, a risk, but a risk well worth taking. A fee was agreed of £210 per programme, and a contract was sent out on 21 February 1968. Lowe signed it immediately. Captain Mainwaring, at long last, was cast.
Sergeant Wilson, Perry would later reveal, could have been played by the portly and bespectacled Robert Dorning: ‘I’d seen him with Arthur in Pardon the Expression – he’d played Arthur’s boss – and I’d thought to myself: “Wouldn’t they make a good couple to play the leads [in Dad’s Army]?” So I was very keen on getting them both, and Dorning could certainly have been good as Wilson, but then, of course, Michael Mills stuck his oar in … ’
(#litres_trial_promo) Mills – who was indeed an ex-Navy man – announced that he was absolutely convinced about who was the right man for the role. David Croft – who was never surprised to hear that Michael Mills was absolutely convinced about anything – invited him to share this information. ‘You must have John Le Mesurier!’ barked Mills. ‘He suffers so well!’
(#litres_trial_promo) Croft found, on reflection, that he rather liked this idea. Le Mesurier did suffer well. No post-war British movie seemed complete without his furrowed brow, frightened eyes, sunken cheeks and world-weary sigh. He had been the psychiatrist with the nervous twitch in Private’s Progress, the time-and-motion expert (also with a nervous twitch) in I’m All Right Jack (1959) and the City office manager (sans twitch) in The Rebel (1961), as well as innumerable other bewildered-looking barristers, bureaucrats, officers and doctors who together seemed to sum up a certain sense of home-grown ennui. He had reprised the role on television in both Hancock’s Half-Hour (1956–60) and Hancock (1961), and more recently he had shown a little of the warmer side to his nature as the retired Colonel Maynard – ‘a dear old stick’
(#litres_trial_promo) – in the situation-comedy George and the Dragon (1966–8). Croft sent him the pilot script of Dad’s Army. Le Mesurier, on reading it, thought it had the potential to become a ‘minor situation comedy’, but he was intrigued by the news that he was wanted for the role of the sergeant rather than the captain – ‘casting directors usually saw me as officer material’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He read the script again, and liked it a little more: Perry, he felt, ‘knew how to turn a funny line’, and Croft, he noted, was ‘a theatre man who had brought to television a reputation for cool, calm organisation’. ‘Promising,’ he thought to himself, ‘all promising.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He informed his agent, Freddie Joachim, that he only had one real reservation: the fee. Joachim, who regarded the medium of television as beneath his calibre of client, proceeded, without the slightest sign of enthusiasm, to haggle on Le Mesurier’s behalf.
Croft, in the meantime, was busy trying to persuade Clive Dunn to accept the role of Lance Corporal Jones. Jack Haig, an old favourite of Croft’s from his time at Tyne Tees in the 1950s, had been first choice, but, after discussing the offer with the ultra-cautious Tom Sloan (who appears to have given him the impression that the show was by no means assured of a long run),
(#litres_trial_promo) Haig had turned the part down in order to concentrate on a lucrative new vehicle for his popular children’s character, ‘Wacky Jacky’. Dunn, though a mere forty-eight years of age, was the obvious alternative: like Haig, who was nine years his senior, he knew how to portray elderly comic characters. An alumnus of the Players’ Theatre, which was a well-respected club in Villiers Street, London WC2, specialising in Victorian/Edwardian-style music hall, pantomime and melodrama, Dunn had appeared in everything from Windmill revues to children’s situation-comedies (such as The Adventures of Charlie Quick, broadcast by BBCTV in 1957), and had first made his name on television as Old Johnson, the aptly-named 83-year-old waiter and Boer War veteran in Granada’s Bootsie and Snudge (1960–3), the popular follow-up to The Army Game. Like Croft, he came from an established showbusiness family – his maternal grandfather, Frank Lynne, had been a moderately popular music-hall comedian, his uncle, Gordon Lynne, was also a comic and both his parents, Bobby Dunn and Connie Clive, had been professional entertainers – and the two men had known and liked each other for years (Dunn’s mother, in fact, had once had an affair with Croft’s father).
(#litres_trial_promo) Putting their friendship to one side, however, he had not jumped at the offer when Croft first made his approach: he had just started work on The World of Beachcomber, BBC2’s fine adaptation of J. B. Morton’s much-admired newspaper columns, and, as he would put it later, he ‘wasn’t particularly hungry’.
(#litres_trial_promo) As a former prisoner of war – he had spent four harrowing years in a German labour camp in Liezen, Austria – he would have been forgiven for regarding the subject matter with suspicion, but, in fact, he found it quite appealing. The reason for his reluctance had more to do with the high casualty rate of new situation-comedies: ‘The ups and downs of the profession had made me cautious.’
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He decided to phone a friend: John Le Mesurier. ‘I’ll do it if you do it,’
(#litres_trial_promo) said Dunn. ‘Yes,’ replied Le Mesurier, ‘but … ’, and suggested that they ‘hung out a little’ in the hope that the money might improve.
(#litres_trial_promo) Dunn agreed with ‘Le Mez’ (as he was known to his friends), and delayed making a decision. Croft, however, had already enlisted a standby: an inexperienced but very promising 28-year-old actor by the name of David Jason. ‘I didn’t know him very well,’ Croft explained, ‘but my wife represented him and I’d used him fairly recently in an episode of Beggar My Neighbour and he’d been marvellous.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Jason had just started work on the show that represented his first real breakthrough on television – the ITV/Rediffusion teatime sketch show Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967–9) – but, even so, was quite prepared to commit himself to a high-profile David Croft comedy. Late in February 1968, Croft, who was now growing impatient, spotted Dunn in the BBC canteen, and took the opportunity to ask him if he had reached a decision yet about joining the cast; an embarrassed Dunn stalled again, and then slipped quietly away ‘hoping that John would [soon] make up his mind and that David would not resent the delay’.
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Wheels began turning within wheels: Dunn’s agent, Michael Grade, was a close friend of Bill Cotton, and spoke to him on an informal basis in order to ensure that someone at the BBC realised that his client really was predisposed to join the show. David Croft, meanwhile, had begun taking steps to resolve the matter once and for all. The following day, David Jason recalled, proved full of surprises: ‘The order of events was as follows: I went to the BBC and read for the part at 11 a.m.; soon after, my agent received the message that I had the part; by 3 p.m., I was out of work! Over the lunch period Bill Cotton had persuaded Clive to take the part, and hadn’t informed the producer. The rest is history!’
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Dunn, it seems, had just heard via Freddie Joachim that Le Mesurier had finally decided to accept, and the news had sparked him into action.
(#litres_trial_promo) Once his billing had been secured – third, below Lowe and ‘Le Mez’ – and the assurance had been given that he would be handed the pick of the ‘Joey Joeys’ – the physical comedy – he proceeded to make a commitment. Both men received and signed their contracts on 29 February 1968 (although Le Mesurier’s fee was set at a sum £52 10s higher than Dunn’s – or Lowe’s),
(#litres_trial_promo) and the first tier of the cast was complete.
The remainder of the platoon proved somewhat easier to assemble. Croft cast Arnold Ridley as Private Godfrey. Up until this point, Ridley’s life had been chequered with bad luck: he had been invalided out of the Army on two separate occasions (first in 1917, following the Battle of the Somme, then after talking his way back into service, in 1940, following the evacuation from Dunkirk); his production company, Quality Films, went bust after just one, well-received release (Royal Eagle, 1936), and he had been forced to sell the rights to some of his most enduringly popular – and lucrative – plays (including The Ghost Train, 1925) in order to stave off bankruptcy. There had been spells in various soap operas – including Crossroads (as the Revd Guy Atkins) and Coronation Street (as Herbert Whittle, the would-be wooer of Minnie Caldwell), as well as an ongoing role in The Archers (as Doughy Hood) – and undemanding one-off appearances in such series as White Hunter (1958) and The Avengers (1961 – as, all too predictably, ‘Elderly Gent’), but, at the beginning of 1968, the septuagenarian actor was still performing primarily because he could not afford not to. ‘He was another one who’d worked for me before,’ Croft recalled:
He’d been very good, very funny, and he was a lovely, gentle character. He looked right, sounded right. I was a bit worried about him because I think he was already 72 when I first interviewed him for the part. I’d said, ‘I don’t think I can save you from having to run about a bit now and then. Are you up for it?’ And he’d said, ‘Oh, yes, I think I’ll manage.’ As it turned out, of course, he couldn’t, but we got an enormous amount of capital out of helping him on to the van and things like that, you know. So he turned out to be a very successful character.
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Casting Dumfries-born John Laurie as Private Frazer had been another one of Michael Mills’ suggestions. Laurie, who at 71 was Ridley’s junior by a single year, was a hugely experienced actor: he had played all of the great Shakespearean roles at the Old Vic and Stratford, and appeared in a wide range of movies, including two directed by Alfred Hitchcock – Juno and the Paycock (1930) and The 39 Steps (1935) – three by Laurence Olivier – Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1954) – and four by Michael Powell (the most notable of which was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, in which he played the ever-loyal Murdoch), as well as one starring Will Hay – The Ghost of St Michael’s (1941). He had been working intermittently on television since the mid-1930s, but it had only been since the start of the 1960s that he had begun appearing on a relatively regular basis (first as thriller writer Algernon Blackwood in Associated-Rediffusion’s 1961 Tales of Mystery, and later as Dr McTurk in the 1966 TVS children’s science-fiction series The Master, as well as several cameo roles in both The Avengers and Dr Finlay’s Casebook). David Croft was well aware of what Laurie could do – he had worked with him before in a 1965 episode of Hugh and I,
(#litres_trial_promo) and had every faith in his ability to flesh-out the still-skeletal figure of Frazer – but was apprehensive about the actor’s reaction to such an under-developed character:
‘Frazer’, at that time, was described in the script simply as ‘A Scotsman’. It can’t have been very inspiring to such an experienced actor. Michael Mills said, ‘Make him into a fisherman.’ So Jimmy and I made him into a fisherman for that first episode. No use to us at all, of course, as a fisherman never went out to sea in those days because it was the invasion coast. Later on, we started allowing him to make coffins in his workshop, and that developed into him becoming the undertaker – and then he became very useful indeed, a marvellous character. But we did find it difficult, at the start, to write for him, as this ‘Scottish fisherman’, and I doubt that John was too impressed either.
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Laurie, sure enough, was far from impressed, but he had a policy of never refusing offers of work, and so he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to play a character whose lifetime he confidently expected to last no longer than six half-hour episodes.
James Beck was a far more willing recruit. The 39-year-old actor from Islington had been working extremely hard at establishing himself on television since the start of the 1960s – following a formative period spent in rep at York – but had not yet succeeded in securing a regular role in a significant show. At the end of 1963 he had written a typically polite letter to Bush Bailey, the BBC’s assistant head of artists’ bookings, asking if there was any chance of an interview (‘as I don’t seem to be making a great deal of headway’).
(#litres_trial_promo) Bailey did see him early the following year, and filed a favourable report, but nothing tangible came of the meeting except for more of the same old bits and pieces. By 1968, most viewers would have glimpsed him at some time or other in the odd episode of such popular police drama series as Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green and Softly Softly, or in a one-off role in a situation-comedy such as Here’s Harry, but few could have put a name to the face. The prospect of a major role in a new show such as Dad’s Army, therefore, was precisely the kind of opportunity that Beck had been waiting for. Playing a spiv actually represented something of a departure for an actor who had grown used to being cast as characters on the right side of the law: even in his two previous appearances in Croft situation-comedies he had played a police constable on the first occasion and a customs officer on the second.
(#litres_trial_promo) As someone who had grown up in the same working-class environment that had (with more than a little help from capitalism and rationing) formed such ambiguous characters, and also as a great fan – and gifted mimic – of Sid Field, it was a departure that Beck relished. ‘He was obviously a talented actor,’ Croft recalled. ‘He just came to me, in fact, in an audition. I had used him before, and I fancied him very much for that particular part. There weren’t any other real competitors for it – except Jimmy, of course, and we’d already ruled him out – so casting Walker turned out to be one of the easiest ones of the lot.’
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Ian Lavender had Ann Callender to thank for the part of Private Pike. Lavender – a 22-year-old, Birmingham-born actor whose fledgling career up to this point consisted simply of two years in drama school at Bristol’s Old Vic followed by a six-month season playing juvenile leads at Canterbury’s Marlowe Theatre – had recently become one of Callender’s clients, and early in 1968, just before he was due to make his television debut on 5 March in a one-off ITV/Rediffusion drama called Flowers At My Feet, she urged her husband to watch him. ‘So I did,’ recalled Croft, ‘and I was most impressed. He played a young juvenile delightfully.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Croft had no qualms, as a BBC producer, about casting one of his wife’s clients, partly because he had great faith in her – as well as his own – judgement, and partly because he already had the BBC’s blessing to go ahead and do so:
I’d had a considerable number of interviews at this time with Tom Sloan, because of the fact that my wife was an agent. I said, ‘Tom, look: we’ve got this corporate situation – my wife’s an agent, she’s got some good clients, but, at the same time, I don’t want to use them if somebody is going to say, “He uses his wife’s talent all the time.”’ So he said, ‘Well, no, you mustn’t not use them, David; you must also forbear to use them when somebody else of superior ability is available. But you must not deny her actors a chance for employment.’ And that was fine; that was settled. He did go on to say, ‘When you do use somebody in your wife’s list, just drop me a note’, which I always did.
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When Callender called Lavender with the news that he was wanted at Television Centre he had no idea that the man to whom she was sending him was her husband:
I was just sent along to see this man Croft. About a situation-comedy called Dad’s Army. It was a bit terrifying, really, because at drama school I’d been playing Romeo and Florizel and all that sort of thing, and the only comedy I’d ever done was Restoration Comedy. I knew about the Home Guard, because my father had been station sergeant at a police station that served the Austin motorworks in Birmingham, and he’d had to go and inspect them and make sure they were doing everything right, so I knew what it was. But the thought of being in a comedy – I did find that daunting. Anyway, I went and read for David. Then I was called back again the following week, and then again at the end of the week after that. And then I heard I’d got the part.
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It was only after he had been hired that Lavender discovered just how well-connected his agent actually was:
Ann Callender said to me, ‘I’m going to take you out to lunch, darling.’ Which she did. And she said, ‘By the way, I forgot to tell you that David Croft is my husband.’ And my face obviously dropped, because then she said, ‘Yes. That’s exactly why we didn’t tell you. But you got the part because he wants you. And I’d just like to point out – don’t forget that he can always write you out!’
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Once Pike had been picked, Croft turned his attention to the supporting players. John Ringham, an experienced, self-styled ‘jobbing character actor’,
(#litres_trial_promo) was chosen to play Private Bracewell, the Wodehousian silly ass from the City; Janet Davies, a bright, reliable performer whom Croft had used in a recent episode of Beggar My Neighbour, was hired as Mrs Mavis Pike;
(#litres_trial_promo) Caroline Dowdeswell was recruited to play junior clerk Janet King (a hastily drawn character introduced after Michael Mills had declared that the show needed a soupçon of sex);
(#litres_trial_promo) Gordon Peters, a former stand-up comic who specialised in playing Hancock-style characters, was drafted in for the one-off role of the fire chief; and several seasoned professionals – including Colin Bean, Richard Jacques, Hugh Hastings, George Hancock, Vic Taylor, Richard Kitteridge, Vernon Drake, Hugh Cecil, Frank Godfrey, Jimmy Mac, David Seaforth and Desmond Cullum-Jones – were engaged (at six guineas each per episode) to make up the platoon’s back row.
(#litres_trial_promo) One character now remained to be cast: the nasty, nosy, noisy ARP warden.
Croft thought more or less immediately of Bill Pertwee. Pertwee, in real life, could not have been less like the loud and loutish character Croft and Perry had created to darken Mainwaring’s moods, but he was quite capable of investing such a role with a degree of comic vulnerability that would lift it far above the realm of caricature. Like his cousin, Jon, Bill Pertwee came to television after learning his craft both in Variety – first as a colleague of Beryl Reid, later in partnership with his wife, Marion MacLeod – and radio – as a valued and versatile contributor to both Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) and Round the Horne (1965–7). After catching the eye in a series of The Norman Vaughan Show on BBC1 in 1966, he found himself increasingly in demand not only for comic cameos but also as a warm-up man for various television shows, and he started to think more seriously about pursuing work in the medium ‘to add another string to one’s bow, as it were’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1968, just as he was preparing for a season of performances at Bognor Regis, he heard from David Croft:
I’d worked for David the previous year. It was just a small part in an episode of Hugh and I with Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd: I’d only had a couple of lines, but I had to shout at Terry Scott and push him around a wee bit in a cinema queue. That must have stuck in David’s mind, because when he was casting Dad’s Army he rang up the agency I was with [Richard Stone], found out that I was probably available and gave me a call. He said, ‘I’m starting a programme about the Home Guard, and I’ve got these couple of lines for an air-raid warden. You just come into an office and shout a bit and then go out again.’ And that was it – that was how he cast me in that.
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Even though the air-raid warden was not, at that stage, conceived of as a regular character, Croft knew that Pertwee could be relied on not only to turn in the kind of spirited performance he required to test the role’s comic potential, but also to inject some welcome energy and good humour into a company of tough and occasionally testy old professionals. ‘I booked Bill because he was good, of course, but I also booked him in order to keep everyone else happy and sweet. He was always very bubbly, very well liked by everyone, and he’s marvellous fun.’
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The casting, at last, was complete, and Croft regarded the ensemble that he had assembled with a considerable amount of satisfaction: ‘The cast that you started out thinking about is never the same as the one you finish up with, but I was pretty pleased with the line-up we’d managed to get. There was a great deal of quality there.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He looked ahead at all the potential clashes of egos, all the possible conflicts of ambition, all the inevitable accidents (happy and otherwise), all the long drawn-out set-ups and last-minute revisions, all the budgetary worries, all the problems with props and people and performances, and he could not wait to get started. He was ready to make a television programme.

THE COMEDY (#ulink_37f0b135-4a6c-5416-9e1e-1e9c941dfaa0)
There’s nothing funny on paper. All you are playing with is a bagful of potential. Even when the show’s written you haven’t got anything. Comedy is like a torch battery – there is no point in it until the circuit is complete and the bulb, which is the audience, lights up. It is how strongly the bulb lights up which determines how well you have done your job.
FRANK MUIR
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CHAPTER IV The Pilot (#ulink_ad2771e5-2ae0-5c28-a322-5bacc0095a24)
You put your head on the block every time you televise comedy, for everybody in the audience is an expert in a way that they never are with drama.
DUNCAN WOOD
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It’s folly – sheer folly!/I never doubted you could do it!
PRIVATE FRAZER
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The atmosphere, according to Jimmy Perry, was ‘very tense’
(#litres_trial_promo) on the chilly morning at the end of March 1968 when the cast came together for the first time. In those days, before the construction of the BBC’s own rehearsal rooms in North Acton, programmes were prepared in a wide variety of unlikely-looking venues secreted among London’s least alluring nooks and crannies, and, in the case of Dad’s Army, the site for the initial read-through was a stale-smelling back room of The Feathers public house in Chiswick. Here, seated side-by-side around a large mud-coloured table, were the actors whose task it now was to bring the inhabitants of Walmington-on-Sea into life. ‘I looked at that motley crew,’ remembered Perry, ‘and I thought to myself: “This is either going to be my biggest success or my biggest failure – it all depends how they get on.”’
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Some of them – such as Clive Dunn and John Le Mesurier – were old friends; others – such as Arthur Lowe and Arnold Ridley – were merely vague acquaintances; and a few – such as James Beck and Ian Lavender – were total strangers. David Croft took all of the nervy uncertainty in his stride – he was used to the awkwardness of these occasions – but Jimmy Perry could not help scrutinising every look, every nuance, every mild little moan and over-loud laugh for portents of good days or bad days to come. His spirits sagged when John Laurie turned to him and said in a voice of casual menace, ‘I hope this is going to work, laddie, but to my mind it’s a ridiculous idea!’, but later, during a coffee break, they were revived when Bill Pertwee came over and assured him that the show was ‘going to be a winner’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He remained, nonetheless, over-sensitive and apprehensive; this had been his big idea, his personal project, and now it was set to be tested.
Preparations had certainly been thorough. David Croft was determined to make the programme seem as true to its period as was humanly possible. Any line that sounded too ‘modern’, such as ‘I couldn’t care less’, was swiftly removed from the script. The services of E. V. H. Emmett, the voice of the old Gaumont-British newsreels from the 1930s and 1940s, were secured to supply some suitably evocative scene-setting narration. Two talented and meticulous set designers, Alan Hunter-Craig and Paul Joel, were brought in to create a range of believably 1940s-style surroundings, and, after researching the era at the Imperial War Museum, they either found or fabricated the right kinds of food – Spam, snoek, dried egg, fat bacon pieces, rabbit, potatoes, cabbages and carrots – brands – Camp coffee, Typhoo tea, Bird’s custard, Brown’s ‘Harrison Glory’ peas, Porter’s ‘Victory’ self-raising flour, Orlox beef suet, Horlicks tablets, SAXA salt, Sunlight soap, Craven ‘A’ cigarettes – furniture – elderly desks, ‘utility’-style shelves, sideboards, cabinets – portraits – of the King and Queen, and Churchill (‘Let Us Go Forward Together’) – and posters – bearing such advice as ‘Keep it under your hat’, ‘Hitler will send no warning’ and ‘Keep it dark’ – to ensure that every home, hall, bank and butcher’s shop in Walmington-on-Sea would reach the screen reflecting a richly authentic wartime look. Sandra Exelby, an accomplished BBC make-up specialist, developed a variety of period hairstyles and wigs, while George Ward, the costume designer, searched far and wide for genuine LDV and Home Guard brassards, badges, boots, uniforms, respirators and weapons, ordering what other outfits were needed from Berman’s, a London costumier (and he made a point of having Captain Mainwaring’s uniform made from out of a slightly superior quality material in order to reflect the higher salary he would, as a bank manager, have received). Someone even managed to find an old pair of round-rimmed spectacles for Arthur Lowe to wear.
‘It had to look right,’ Croft confirmed, ‘and, of course, people had to be able to really believe in the characters.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Both he and Perry had worked hard to provide each major character with a plausible past – Jack Jones, for example, had been given a long and elaborate military career (which went all the way from Khartoum, through the Sudan, on to the North-West Frontier, back under General Kitchener for the battle of Omdurman, the Frontier again, then on to the Boer War and the Great War in France) to lend more than a little credence to his regular rambling anecdotes. Each actor was encouraged to draw on any memories which might help them to add the odd distinguishing detail (John Laurie remembered his time as a Home Guard in Paddington – ‘totally uncomical, an excess of dullness’ – and found an easy affinity with Frazer’s strained tolerance of ‘a lot of useless blather’).
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The theme song was Jimmy Perry’s idea. ‘I wouldn’t call myself a composer,’ he explained, ‘I’d call myself a pastiche artist. My aim is to write something that makes you know, as soon as the show starts, exactly what it’s going to be about. For Dad’s Army, I wanted to come up with something that took you straight back to the period and summed up the attitudes of the British people.’
(#litres_trial_promo) His lyrics, when they came, could not have seemed more apposite:
Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler
If you think we’re on the run?
We are the boys who will stop your little game.
We are the boys who will make you think again.
’Cause who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler
If you think old England’s done?

Mister Brown goes off to town
On the eight twenty-one
But he comes home each evening
And he’s ready with his gun.
So who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler
If you think old England’s done?
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Everything about these words – their polite defiance, their frail ebullience, their easy grace – belied their belated origin. ‘I was very proud of it,’ Perry admitted.
(#litres_trial_promo) He composed the music in collaboration with Derek Taverner, whom he had known since their time together in a Combined Services Entertainment unit in Delhi, and then resolved to persuade Bud Flanagan, one of his childhood idols, to perform the finished song. Flanagan (along with his erstwhile partner, Chesney Allen) was still associated firmly and fondly in the public’s mind with such popular wartime recordings as ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ and ‘We’re Gonna Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line’, and his warm and reedy voice was the ideal instrument to age artificially this new ‘old’ composition. Fortunately, although the 72-year-old music-hall veteran was not in the habit of recording songs that he had not previously performed, he agreed, for a fee of 100 guineas, to supply the vocal. On the afternoon of 26 February 1968, he arrived at the Riverside Recording Studio in Hammersmith and, to an accompaniment from the Band of the Coldstream Guards, he proceeded to sing: ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler … ’ Jimmy Perry, standing at the back of the production booth, was visibly thrilled: ‘It sent a sort of shiver up my spine. What a moment! To think that dear old Bud Flanagan, whom I’d sat and watched as a kid up in the gallery at the Palladium, was right there now, singing a song that I’d written. Marvellous!’
(#litres_trial_promo) After eight takes – Flanagan had stumbled a few times over one or two of the unfamiliar lines – the song had been captured to everyone’s satisfaction. It was a sound from a bygone era (the final sound, in a way, because Flanagan would die a few months later), and it set the tone for all that was to follow.
Location filming took place between 1 and 6 April. Harold Snoad, David Croft’s production assistant, had selected the old East Anglian market town of Thetford as the regular base. It was a shrewd choice: inside the town itself, the neat rows of grey-brick and flinty houses implied just the right degree of close-knit intimacy. The surrounding area boasted a rich range of vivid natural sights – pine forests stretching out to the north and west, wide open fields, long meandering streams – and man-made contexts – the Army’s Military Training Area was only six miles away at Stanford – in which to frame the fictional world of Walmington-on-Sea. Arthur Lowe travelled down to Thetford by train, Clive Dunn and John Le Mesurier together by car and the remainder of the cast and crew by coach. ‘Everyone knew exactly what they were doing,’ Ian Lavender recalled, ‘except me’:
I didn’t know anything about location shooting. I lived near Olympia in those days, and the journey to TV Centre wasn’t very long, so I just wandered over in the belief that I was going to spend a few hours in Thetford and then come home on the coach. When I got to TV Centre, however, I noticed that everybody had brought their suitcases with them, so I had to invest several shillings for a taxi ride back to pack some clothes! It had never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be coming home at nights – that was how green I was.
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Every external scene for the whole of the first series had to be filmed during that single (unseasonably chilly) week in Norfolk, and, as Lavender remembered, the pace was unrelenting:
It was all a bit of a blur. The only thing I remember of the filming, quite honestly, was when I accidentally came up with Pike’s voice. Most of the filming was mute – because it was going to be mixed in with stock newsreel footage – but one scene, featuring these circus horses going round and round, was done with sound. And all I said was, ‘Have you got the rifles, Mr Mainwaring?’ And this voice came out: ‘Have you got the rifles, Mr Mainwaring?’ Pure shock, I think. And so I more or less stuck with that voice for the next nine years.
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The most surreal moment, said Clive Dunn, occurred when the cast was racing through a few light-hearted scene-setting motions: ‘As we filmed our bits of comedy showing the Home Guard changing road signs to fool the German invaders, a staff car loaded with German NATO officers passed by …, smiling and unaware that we were about to launch into a long comedy series about the Second World War.’
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The evenings were reserved for socialising. ‘There was a good atmosphere right from the very first day,’ Ian Lavender recalled:
I’d been terrified at the start – terrified – but they were all so welcoming. I think I’d already been put through my ‘initiation process’ back in that pub at Chiswick by Arthur. He’d shown me how to smoke a cigarette ‘Arabian style’. He had his own private supply of these cork-tipped Craven ‘A’ cigarettes, and he’d got me to hold one of them like he did, suck it – phew! – and I’d fallen off my stool. That was my first memory of Arthur, socially – making me fall off a bar stool. And then in the hotel at Thetford they were lovely. They’d sort of say things like, ‘Come on, this is your bit as well’, you know, ‘Don’t be afraid of … ’ It wasn’t a matter of taking me under their wing and protecting me, but neither was it a matter of leaving me to sink or swim. They were just very, very, welcoming.
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After Thetford came the rehearsals: at 10.30 on the morning of Monday, 8 April, the cast, Croft and Perry reassembled at St Nicholas Church Hall in Bennett Street, Chiswick, to begin work on the pilot episode, which by this time had been given the title ‘The Man and the Hour’. Some of the actors seemed well-advanced in their characterisations – Arthur Lowe, for example, was quietly confident that both his look (a compressed Clement Attlee) and manner (proud, pompous and pushy) would work rather well, and Ian Lavender (whose prematurely greying hair would be disguised on screen by a combination of colour spray and Brylcream) had decided to give Pike a long Aston Villa scarf (hastily replaced, in the opening credits sequence, by a blue towel because the wardrobe van had left Thetford early), a mildly quavering vocal manner and a childishly inquisitive expression – but one or two, it seemed, were still in need of some advice. Bill Pertwee kept being urged by David Croft to make Hodges even louder and more obnoxious, delivering each line in the music-hall style of ‘on top of a shout’, and Jimmy Perry was and would remain astonished by John Le Mesurier’s unorthodox methods of assimilation:
Talk about casual! The previous week, on the first day of filming at Thetford, John was sitting there very nonchalantly in the lounge of the hotel, and he’d said to me: ‘Oh, James: how do you want me to play this part?’ Well, that was a laugh for a start! As far as I knew, John Le Mesurier only had one performance. Anyway, I said to him: ‘Look, John, it’s all yours on a plate – just do it as you feel.’ So he said, ‘Yes, oh, all right, old boy’, and then he lit a cigarette and said, ‘Who are you going to bet on in the 2.30 today?’ Make no mistake, he was very, very, good, but, really, that man just swanned

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