Saucy songs turned out nice for George
ENTERTAINER GEORGE FORMBY PASSED AWAY 60 YEARS AGO. MARION McMULLEN LOOKS BACK AT A LIFE OF LAUGHTER
BANNED by the BBC and loved by the Queen, George Formby was one of Britain’s biggest stars making 22 movies bearing titles like He Snoops To Conquer and Bell-Bottom George, and entertaining Montgomery’s troops in the Sahara, where he declared “Ee, it’s just like Blackpool sands.”
But he worked hard for success, recalling of his early days: “I was the first turn, three minutes, died the death of a dog.”
George Hoy Booth was born in Wigan in 1904 and later adopted his father’s stage name of George Formby. George senior had been in a music hall troupe with a young Charlie Chaplin and encouraged him to try his luck in America.
George left school at seven, unable to read or write, and started as stable boy in Yorkshire and later became an apprentice jockey before turning to comedy and making his professional stage debut in 1921 aged of 16. He was paid the princely sum of £5 a week for a fortnight at the Hippodrome in Lancashire and it was his first step to stardom.
Queen Elizabeth loved the king of the ukulele so much she toyed with becoming President of the George Formby Society and it is claimed she once said she knew the words to his songs Leaning On A Lamp Post, When I’m Cleaning Windows and With My Little Stick Of Blackpool Rock ... and could sing them.
Her Majesty had been won over by the comic after his private performances at Buckingham Palace, and the Windsors were said to be huge fans. In 1941, when the BBC banned the saucy track When I’m Cleaning Windows, branding it a “disgusting little ditty”, George reminded the corporation it was a favourite of Queen Mary’s.
The lyrics of many of his songs were rather saucy though. He sang in Andy The Handyman: “A girl gave me a gold watch. I said ‘It’s rather light, it’s got no works inside it, now surely that’s not right’. She said ‘Now don’t you worry, I’ll give you the works tonight’”.
With his catchphrase “Turned out nice again,” George was Britain’s biggest entertainer in the 1930s and 1940s and was seen as a lovable working-class hero with a goofy grin no-one could resist.
His career took off in 1924, when he introduced the ukulele banjo into his act and fell in love with clog dancer Beryl Ingham. They married two years later and she gave up her career to become his manager.
Beryl helped him to memorise the words of his movie scripts and his songs, because of his problems reading and writing, and George was soon the highest-paid entertainer in Britain earning the equivalent of £1.5 million a movie although Beryl only gave him five shillings a week pocket money. Most of his earnings were spent on their home in Lytham St Annes, near Blackpool, which came to be named Beryldene.
George made movie after movie and his work entertaining the troops during the Second World earned him an OBE in 1946. Basil Dean, head of ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) remembered him “standing with his back to a tree or a wall of sandbags, with men squatting on the ground in front of him, he sang song after song, screwing up his face into comical expressions of fright whenever shells exploded in the near distance, and making little cracks when the firing drowned the point lines in his songs.”
Beryl was a controlling influence in George’s life and, when she died from leukaemia on Christmas Day 1960 he admitted: “My life with Beryl was hell”.
He became engaged to teacher Pat Howson, more than 20 years his junior, shortly afterwards and bought her a diamond engagement ring and a car.
He knew the engagement would cause a stir, but said: “I’ll be perfectly honest. I’ve got to have somebody to look after me.”
George died of a heart attack on March 6, 1961, just two days before he and Pat were to married. He was just 56 and had planned a honeymoon cruise to the West Indies for them, before moving to a new home near Preston.
Around 150,000 people lined the streets of Warrington to pay their respects at his funeral and the entertainer was buried next to his comic father in Warrington Cemetery. The inscription on his grave reads: “A tradition nobly upheld.”
The George Formby Society was founded shortly afterwards and he became inducted into the Ukulele Hall Of Fame in 2004 with the citation: “He won such love and respect for his charismatic stage presence, technical skill and playful lyrics.”
As George himself would say, “Turned out nice again.”