Ian Lavender
◆ Actor who made Private Pike in classic sitcom Dad’s Army one of TV’S most lovable characters
Ian Lavender, actor. Born: 16 February 1946 in Birmingham. Died: 2 February 2024, aged 77
Ian Lavender’s death marks the end of an era. He was the last surviving member of the platoon in Dad’s Army, a landmark in a golden age of post-war television sitcom. For a decade he was Private Pike, the “stupid boy”, still sucking his thumb, surrounded by grizzled old men in the gentle, character-driven comedy series about the Second World War Home Guard, ready to defend our shores with pluck and luck and not much else.
Lavender played the baby of the platoon, an immature mummy’s boy, a teenager too young to join the regular army. And Lavender was the youngster in a distinguished cast of veteran actors. He was 22 when the series premiered. He was 70 by the time of the misjudged big-screen reboot of Dad’s Army in 2016, when he had a cameo as a brigadier.
Back in the late 1960s I watched the first episodes in black and white on my grandparents’ television. I would later take Dad’s Army as a specialist subject on Mastermind. In between I played golf with Ian Lavender. Sort of.
I do not actually play golf – the ball does not leave the ground. But Robin Askwith had asked me to make up a three with him and Lavender when they were appearing in a touring show at the Eden Court in Inverness. I agreed to go round with them and caddy for Askwith instead. I remember Lavender from that time as a thoroughly decent, unstarry individual.
Many actors, especially those associated with a single role, bear a marked resemblance to their characters, and this was true of Lavender’s Dad’s Army co-stars Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier, who played the pompous Captain Mainwaring and the easy-going Sgt Wilson respectively. But Lavender was quite unlike the goofy mummy’s boy he played on screen.
On screen he was clumsy and accident prone, forever falling face first into the mud, and on one occasion getting his head stuck between railings. Lavender was in fact an accomplished handyman. And, far from being a stupid boy, he was a bright scholar and later adept at crosswords and the game of backgammon. Before becoming an actor he had thought of becoming a police detective, but baulked at the idea of being a beat bobby first.
Arthur Ian Lavender was born in Birmingham in 1946 and was a lifelong Aston Villa fan. The addition of a scarf in Villa colours to Private Pike’s Home Guard uniform was Lavender’s idea, helping to define his rather sickly, mollycoddled character.
His father was a policeman, hence Lavender’s early interest in the possibilities of becoming a detective. But he was also
involved in acting from an early age and was cast as Mozart in a primary school play on the basis that he had been taking piano lessons.
He studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, joined the repertory company at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury and played the lead role of an aspiring writer in a television play called Flowers at My Feet shortly before being cast in the career-defining role of Private Pike.
He appeared in all 80 episodes of Dad’s Army between 1968 and 1977, the 1971 feature film adaptation, 59 episodes of the radio show version and the stage show on tour and in the London West End.
Off-screen he was particularly close to the Scottish actor John Laurie, who played Private Frazer and who was almost 50 years older. “John Laurie and Ian were great chums, discussing the business of acting, doing the crossword together and sometimes travelling together to locations,” Bill Pertwee, who played the air raid warden Hodges, wrote in his book Dad’s Army – The Making of a Television Legend. “Ian was inclined to look after John, in the nicest possible way, and John looked on Ian as a son who was always ready to absorb the experience of John’s knowledge.”
In the 1980s Lavender reprised the role of Pike in the shortlived radio sequel It Sticks Out Half a Mile (the title being a reference to a seaside pier), in a cast that also included Le Mesurier and Pertwee. Pike was now a manager at Woolworths and it is effectively confirmed that Le Mesurier’s character Arthur Wilson was indeed his dad, whereas this was just hinted at on television.
After Dad’s Army Lavender co-starred with Jimmy Edwards and Patricia Brake
in The Glums, which Frank Muir and Denis Norden adapted from their own 1950s radio scripts.
Much later Lavender played the recurring character of Derek Harkinson on Eastenders. He had two stints on the soap between 2001 and 2005 and then in 20162017. Derek was a childhood friend of Pauline Fowler (Wendy Richard). She fancies him, but it transpires he is gay.
Lavender worked extensively in theatre and made numerous guest appearances on television shows. He shared the stage with Dustin Hoffman in a production of The Merchant of Venice in London in 1989 and he played an old prisoner who cannot face the prospect of release and freedom in The Shawshank Redemption at the Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013.
He appeared on Celebrity Mastermind in 2008. When John Humphrys asked him his name, fellow guest Rick Wakeman shouted out “Don’t tell him, Pike”, a reference to a line from Dad’s Army, which was voted the funniest single sitcom line ever in a poll of comedians a few years ago.
Pike makes fun of Hitler with a childish ditty, “Whistle while you work, Hitler is a twerp, he’s half barmy, so’s his army.” A captured German U-boat commander demands to know his name so he can add it to a list of people who will be dealt with after the war, prompting Captain Mainwaring to bark “Don’t tell him, Pike!”
Lavender’s specialist subject on Mastermind was Buster Keaton. He came second to Tim Vine on Elvis, with Wakeman third, answering on Just William. He is survived by his second wife Miki Hardy and by two sons from a previous marriage that ended in divorce.