Perry writes for himself 52
and pilot episode 85–6
and Series Two 110
and Series Three 111
see also Beck, James
Walter-Ellis, Desmond 39
Walters, Thorley 55
‘War Dance’ episode (Series Three) 235
Ward, George 70
‘warm-up man’ 109
Watts, Queenie 52
‘We Know Our Onions’ episode (Series Six) 193, 243
weapons used by Home Guard 28–9
Weldon, Duncan 179, 181
Wheldon, Huw 9, 76–7, 90, 189, 228–9
‘When Did You Last See Your Money?’ episode (Series Five) 120, 241
‘When You’ve Got To Go’ episode (Series Eight) 198, 245
Whitaker, Colin 80 Whitehouse, Mary 46
Whitfield, June 39
‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler?’ (theme song) 71–2
Wiggin, Maurice 97
Williams, Frank 112, 158, 165, 184, 218, 222, 223
Wilson character 5, 49, 53, 75, 134–8
and ‘A. Wilson (Manager)?’ episode 115–18
casting of 56–7, 258
formation 53
and Jones 150
and Mainwaring 7–8, 97–8, 118, 125, 134–6, 138
and ‘The Making of Private Pike’ episode 209–10
and Pike 145–6
and pilot episode 84–5
potted biography 124–5
and Series Two 110
and Series Three 111
Wilson, Dennis Main 38, 41
Wilson, Harold 46
Windsor, Barbara 97
Women’s Home Defence 28
Women’s Voluntary Service 28
Wood, Duncan 38, 43, 69
Woolworth bomb 28
Writers’ Guild of Great Britain awards 100
Wyldeck, Patrick 96
Yeatman character see verger character
Yorkshire Post 95
You Rang, M’Lord? 222
Young, B.A. 183
Acknowledgements
I am happy to express my heartfelt thanks to David Croft and Jimmy Perry for their support, advice and memories. I am also extremely grateful to Ian Lavender, Bill Pertwee, Harold Snoad and Frank Williams for their personal recollections of Dad’s Army, and to Sir Bill Cotton, Sir Paul Fox and Barry Took for their insights into the BBC. My sincere appreciation extends to Brad Ashton, Colin Bean, Julius Cain, Lynsay Carruthers-Jones, Fiona Cushley, John Davis, David Jason, Bobbie Mitchell, Laura Palmer and Sir Tom Stoppard for their invaluable help with particular queries.
I would also like to thank the staff from the following organisations, libraries and archives for their assistance: the BBC Photographic Library; BBC Worldwide; the BBC Written Archives Centre; Birmingham University Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Film Institute; the British Library; the Gloucestershire Record Office; the Imperial War Museum; the Liddell Hart Centre, King’s College, London; the Public Record Office, Kew; and the University Library, Cambridge.
I am indebted to my agent, Mic Cheetham, and to everyone at Fourth Estate – especially Christopher Potter and Catherine Blyth – for having faith in me, and for being patient. Finally, my profound thanks go to my parents and Silvana Dean, without whose unstinting support and encouragement this book would not have been completed.
Notes
1 Opening epigraph: Huw Wheldon, The Achievement of Television (London: BBC, 1975), p. 16.
PROLOGUE
1. Randy Newman, ‘My Country’, from the album Bad Love (Dreamworks, 1999), published by Randy Newman Music.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 78.
3. J. B. Priestley, English Humour (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1929), p. 4.
4. In a survey of 600 viewers conducted by Classic Television magazine for its June 1999 issue, the top three funniest moments in the history of British television were: (1) the ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ scene from the Dad’s Army episode ‘The Deadly Attachment’ (first broadcast on BBC1 on 31 October 1973); (2) the scene featuring Del Boy’s unexpected fall in the wine bar from the Only Fools and Horses episode ‘Yuppy Love’ (first broadcast on BBC1 on 8 January 1989); (3) the ‘Don’t mention the war’ exchange from the Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Germans’ (first broadcast on BBC1 on 24 October 1975). Other, similar, surveys confirm that the scene is rated highly by the majority of television viewers and critics: the Observer ‘TV 1,000’ readers’ poll concerning ‘TV’s greatest moments’ (both comic and serious) rated the ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ scene at number 34, just behind the Sex Pistols’ live, expletive-laden clash with Bill Grundy and just ahead of the coverage of Churchill’s funeral (see Observer, ‘TV 1,000’ booklet, 12 September 1999, p. 18), while the Radio Times list of the ‘50 funniest sitcom moments’ (compiled by a panel of actors, writers and producers) placed the scene at number 4 (see the Radio Times, 19–25 August 2000, pp. 18–22).
5. Apart from all of the celebratory books – such as Bill Pertwee’s Dad’s Army: The Making of a Television Legend (London: Pavilion, 1998) – and the positive critical summaries – such as the entry included in Mark Lewisohn’s splendid Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy (London: BBC, 1998, pp. 176–7) – the programme has also figured prominently in a succession of polls, including one from 1993 which rated it the most popular television comedy show of the past two decades (see the Daily Mail, 21 August 1993, p. 9), and one from 2000, compiled by the British Film Institute, which rated it thirteenth in a list of the hundred best British television programmes from 1955 to 2000 (see Guardian, p. 3, and Daily Mail, pp. 8–9 – both 6 September 2000 – and Financial Times, 13 September 2000, p. 29).
6. These viewing figures are based on the percentages of the viewing public recorded in the BBC’s internal Daily Viewing Barometers for the following dates: 31 October 1973, 25 April 1974, 24 June 1978 and 21 November 1989. (For an account of the BBC’s method of measuring viewing figures, see Roger Silvey, The Measurement of Audiences, London: BBC, 1966, pp. 7–15.)
7. Everyone, some claim – except for those independently-minded souls who write about it – is drawn to the programme for reasons of nostalgia. Stuart Jeffries, for example, argues in his Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy (London: Flamingo, 2000, p. 36) that Dad’s Army ‘was part of the nostalgia industry that held this country by the throat’, but there is no real empirical evidence to justify such critical claims. (For a more sympathetic consideration of this aspect of the programme’s appeal, see Jeffrey Richards’ ‘Dad’s Army and the politics of nostalgia’ in his Films and British National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).)
8. Priestley, English Humour, p. 18.
9. J. B. Priestley, The English Comic Characters (New York: Phaeton Press, 1972), p. 242.
10. The ‘Englishness’ of Dad’s Army has been commented on before, most notably by Jeffrey Richards in his ‘Dad’s Army and the politics of nostalgia’. Richards argues that the programme embodies the six common characteristics of Englishness defined and summarised by Sir Ernest Barker in his The Character of England (London: Oxford University Press, 1950, pp. 563–70): (1) a tendency to social homogeneity qualified by a preoccupation with ‘position’; (2) a love of amateurism and a concomitant distrust of professionalism; (3) a gentlemanly code; (4) a voluntary habit; (5) eccentricity; and (6) youthfulness. Richards is a little rash, however, in forcing what Barker offered as ‘examples’ rather than ‘a complete list’ into such a formulaic construction; Dad’s Army could be said to epitomise such qualities, but, then again, it could be said to epitomise several others as well.
11. Dennis Potter, ‘Where comedy is king’, Sunday Times (weekly review section), 16 October 1977, p. 37.
12. Transcribed from the episode ‘Never Too Old’ (first broadcast 13 November 1977, written by David Croft and Jimmy Perry, reproduced here with their permission)
. As readers will be more familiar with the programmes than with the scripts, I will quote the dialogue in the form that it was actually performed rather than as it was written in the original script.
13. George Orwell, ‘The lion and the unicorn’ (1940), in The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 156. Orwell signed up as a member of the Local Defence Volunteers – as the Home Guard was originally called – on 10 May 1940. He eventually became a sergeant in ‘C’ company of the 5th County of London Home Guard Battalion in St John’s Wood. He left, on medical grounds, on 23 November 1943. Some of his writings on the Home Guard are included in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters Vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 1970).
14. Orwell, ‘The lion and the unicorn’, p. 156.
15. George Santayana, Soliloquies in England (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), p. 30.
16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1903), p. 313.
17. Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 512.
18. Orwell, ‘The lion and the unicorn’, p. 149.
19. Huw Wheldon, ‘A reply to charges of trivia in BBC-TV programmes’, published originally in the Sunday Times, 8 November 1970, and reproduced in Charles Curran et al., In The Public Interest (London: BBC, 1971), p. 16.
THE SITUATION
1. Robb Wilton, ‘The Home Guard’ (1944), Music Hall to Variety, Vol. 3 (World Records SH 150).
Chapter I
1. J. B. Priestley, BBC radio broadcast, 20 October 1940; reproduced in Postscripts (London: Heinemann, 1940), p. 99.
2. Dad’s Army: ‘The Deadly Attachment’, first broadcast on BBC1, 31 October 1973, script by David Croft and Jimmy Perry
3. Anthony Eden, Freedom and Order: Selected Speeches 1939–1946 (London: Faber, 1947), pp. 71–3.
4. It is beyond the scope of a book such as this to provide a detailed historical account of the Home Guard. Interested readers might wish to consult the following specialised studies: Charles Graves, The Home Guard of Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1943); John Brophy, Britain’s Home Guard: A Character Study (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1945); Norman Longmate, The Real Dad’s Army (London: Arrow, 1974); A. G. Street, From Dusk Till Dawn (London: Blandford Press, 1945); Frank and Joan Shaw (eds), We Remember the Home Guard (Hinckley: Echo Press, 1983); S. P. Mackenzie’s excellent paper, ‘Citizens in arms: the Home Guard and the internal security of the United Kingdom, 1940–41’, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 6, no. 3 (July 1991) pp. 548–72; and Ian Beckett’s broader and equally well-researched history of volunteer forces, The Amateur Military Tradition 1558–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). Policy papers relating to the Home Guard are kept in the Public Records Office among the following classes: Cabinet Office – Historical Section Files (CAB 106), Ministry of Defence Secretariat Files (CAB 120); Ministry of Home Security – Air Raid Precautions Registered Files 1931–57 (HO 186), Intelligence Branch Registered Files 1939–50 (HO 199); Prime Minister’s Office – Operational Papers (PREM 3); and the War Office – Registered Papers (WO 32 Code 66), Reports/Miscellaneous Papers (WO 33), War Diaries Home Forces 1939–45 (WO 166), Military Headquarters Papers, Home Forces 1939–45 (WO 199).
5. Quoted by Martin Gilbert in Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 6 (London: Heinemann, 1983), pp. 59–60. (See also Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, Appendix C, pp. 177–8.)
6. The so-called ‘Phoney War’ lasted from the fall of Poland in September 1939 to the German invasion of Norway in April 1940.
7. Public Record Office (PRO): INF 1/264: ‘Public Opinion on the Present Crisis’, 30 May 1940. See also The Times, 18 May 1940, p. 3, column 1.
8. Imperial War Museum (IWM): HR V. Jordan, ‘Military Security’, p. 24.
9. The Times, 11 May 1940, p. 7.
10. See, for example, the proposal Lord Mottistone made to the House of Lords on 8 May 1940, which involved ‘local levies armed with rifles … to guard isolated places of importance’ (Hansard, vol. 116, HL (DEB) 5s, col. 329), and also the opinions expressed in such newspapers as the Sunday Express (12 May 1940, p. 6), the Sunday Pictorial (12 May 1940, p. 11) and the Daily Mail (17 May 1940, p. 4).
11. IWM: Hawes Papers, ‘Formation of the L.D.V.’, encl. Anderson to Hawes, 26 June 1941.
12. Brophy, Britain’s Home Guard, p. 16. Two plans, in fact, were debated during the second week of May 1940: one – originating in GHQ Home Forces – had been proposed by General Sir Walter Kirke, the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces; the other – originating in the War Office – was put forward by Major General Sir Robert Gordon-Finlayson, the Adjutant General. Kirke’s plan envisioned a loosely organised volunteer force raised in towns and villages, and led at county level by the lords lieutenant, for the defence of the immediate locality. Gordon-Finlayson’s plan, which, as the more cautious of the two, sought to ensure that the new force be kept as controllable as possible, proposed utilising small groups of British Legion volunteers attached to searchlight companies; the volunteers, upon sighting an invader, would enable the regulars to report the landing area to a higher authority. On 12 May, after a lengthy and intensive period of debate (it seems that neither party, to begin with, had been aware of the other’s proposals), it was eventually agreed within the War Office that Kirke’s plan should be the one to go forward. (See IWM: Brigadier William Carden Roe Papers, 77/165/1, ‘Birth Pangs of the Home Guard’; PRO: WO 199/3236, ‘Home Guard [Local Defence Volunteers] Origins’, memo by Major J. Maxse; Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, pp. 10–13, 18–20; and Mackenzie, ‘Citizens in Arms’, p. 553.)
13. See Sir Anthony Eden, The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 103.
14. Quoted by Longmate, The Real Dad’s Army, pp. 9–10.
15. See Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, p. 21.
16. Ernest Raymond, quoted by Longmate, The Real Dad’s Army, pp. 8–9.
17. See The Times, 27 May 1940, p. 3; Central Statistical Office, Statistical Digest of the War (London: HMSO, 1951), p. 13, table 15; PRO: T 162/864/E1628/1, Humphreys-Davies to Crombie, 14 May 1940.
18. It is not practicable, in a book such as this, to discuss in detail the evolution of the LDV/Home Guard administrative structure. To put it briefly: the LDV was, to begin with, organised by Areas (like the Regular Army’s Military Commands); each Area was subdivided into Zones; each Zone was broken down into Groups; each Group was then subdivided into Battalions; each Battalion consisted of several Companies; each Company was composed of several Platoons; and each Platoon was made up of several Sections. There was a regular chain of command all the way down from the Area to the Section. See the explanatory speeches made in the House of Commons by Sir Edward Grigg on 22 May 1940 (Hansard, vol. 361 HC (DEB) 5s, col. 239) and by Anthony Eden on 23 July 1940 (Hansard, vol. 363 HC (DEB) 5s, col. 577).
19. Sir Edward Grigg, 22 May 1940: Hansard, vol. 361 HC (DEB) 5s, col. 241.
20. Ibid., col. 242.
21. See The Times, 16 May 1940, p. 3, and Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, p. 17.
22. See B. G. Holloway (ed.), The Northamptonshire Home Guard, 1940–1945 (Northampton: n.p., 1949), p. 59; Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, pp. 15–16, 85; and Brophy, Britain’s Home Guard, p. 19. The Germans, in a propaganda broadcast, had warned the British public that: ‘Civilians who take up arms against German soldiers are, under international law, no better than murderers, whether they are priests or bank clerks’ (quoted by Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, p. 16).
23. The wait was longer for some: according to Captain F. W. Simkiss, it was not until mid-September 1940 that a supply of uniforms began to ‘trickle in’ to the unit based at Broadcasting House (Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, p. 183).
24. Lt Col. L. W. Kendish, DSO, Records and Reminiscences of the 4th Buckinghamshire Battalion Home Guard (London: Vernon Lock, 1946), p. 19.
25. Street, From Dusk Till Dawn, p. 62.
26. See Longmate,
The Real Dad’s Army, Chapter 4; Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, p. 32.
27. General Edmund Ironside (the successor to General Kirke as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces), 5 June 1940; quoted by Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, p. 70.
28. See PRO: INF 1/264, ‘Public Opinion on the Present Crisis’, 15 June 1940. In the national newspapers of the time one or two military critics described the LDV as ‘a complete failure’, and began calling for it to be scrapped and replaced by a more organised force (see Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, p. 83).
29. See Hansard, vol. 362 HC (DEB) 5s, col. 62.
30. Pownall, Diary entry, 20 June 1940, reproduced in Chief of Staff: The Diaries of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall, vol. 2, ed. Brian Bond (London: Leo Cooper, 1974), p. 5.
31. PRO: PREM 3/223/3, Churchill to Eden, 22 June 1940.
32. Ibid., 26 June 1940.
33. See Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, p. 57; letter from Lt Col. C. P. Hawkes to The Times, 18 May 1940, p. 7.
34. See Longmate, The Real Dad’s Army, p. 28.
35. PRO: PREM 3/223/3, Churchill to Eden, 26 June 1940. See also Herbert Morrison, An Autobiography (London: Odhams, 1960, p. 185), and Gilbert, Finest Hour, p. 600.
36. PRO: PREM 3/223/3, Eden to Churchill, 28 June 1940.
37. Ibid., Cooper to Churchill, 3 July 1940.
38. Cited by Norman Longmate, How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life during the Second World War (London: Arrow Books, 1973), p. 103.
39. As the journalist W. F. Deedes (‘With pikes and pitchforks, they waited for Hitler’, Sunday Telegraph, 16 July 2000, p. 22) has recalled: ‘Nobody argued much with Churchill in those days.’
40. PRO: PREM 3/223/3, Churchill to Cooper, 6 July 1940.
41. Liddell Hart Centre, King’s College, London: Pownall Diary (unpublished entry), 29 July 1940.
42. Churchill, BBC Home Service, 14 July 1940. Quoted by Graves, The Home Guard of Britain, p. 84.
43. The Woolton Papers (Bodleian Library, Oxford): Diary, Box 2, 30 November 1940.
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