THE THREE GREAT LOVES IN RONNIE’S HEART
Comedian who made Britain laugh for decades was happiest in his Scottish home – just a seven iron shot from a golf course
IN the final years of his life, when Ronnie Corbett spent most of his time in the East Lothian town of Gullane, in a house just a stone’s throw from Muirfield golf course, he loved nothing more than to walk across the newly cut fairway on a cool summer’s evening, watching the sun set over the Firth of Forth.
He told friends the scent of grass reminded him of his childhood in Edinburgh, when a young, bespectacled Corbett would take Sunday walks with his parents after church, tramping over the Braid Hills in his Royal Stuart kilt and lovat green sweater before racing back to the family’s tenement flat in Marchmont for fish in breadcrumbs and home-made chips for high tea.
‘The smell of grass and the feel of it under my feet are still a special comfort to me, and a reminder of one of those Sunday walks,’ he said once.
‘It is also one of the best excuses for playing golf.’
Outside of his family, Corbett, who died last week at the age of 85, had few greater loves than Scotland, and golf.
If you were to look closely at the vast array of pastel jumpers Corbett sported during his weekly Two Ronnies monologues, you would have spotted that familiar golden eagle, logo of Scottish knitwear firm Lyle & Scott, which provided the diminutive Edinburgher with much of his eye-popping wardrobe.
For Corbett however, that eagle represented something more: a connection, however tangential, to his homeland. Even at the peak of his fame Scotland was, quite literally, close to his heart.
Pastel jumpers were in short supply on Warrender Park Road, the working class corner of Marchmont where Corbett grew up in pre-war Edinburgh. It was a respectable childhood – his father William was a master baker who could make anything from puff pastry to apple charlottes – and the family scraped by on his salary in a gas-lit flat with an outside toilet.
Corbett always felt the need to impress his severe and sometimes dour father, who had fought at the Somme at the age of 16. But he also inherited his distinctively Scottish sense of humour.
With a well-rounded sense of the absurd, Corbett Senior often came home to his family with tales of disasters at the bake house or a suit shrinking at the dry cleaners and, much like his son, was also ‘ a tremendous bletherer’.
This, of course, later became Corbett’s comedic trademark – an ability to blether away in seemingly unstructured monologues, sounding more like the chap at the end of the bar in the club house on his third glass of gin and bitter lemon than a top comedian at the height of his powers. Then he would seamlessly pull it all together with an impressive, tightly controlled punchline – a Scottish trait if ever there was one.
On the golf course however, where he would so often retreat throughout his career, Corbett’s geniality could mysteriously vanish.
‘He was ferociously competitive,’ recalls Alasdair Good, head PGA Professional at Gullane Golf Club, who knew Corbett well.
‘He was always desperate to beat his old buddies that had been taking his money for years. That’s what I loved about him, that he still had that. That’s part of what made him the man he was and what a career he had.’
That competitive streak first raised its head early on. Indeed, it remains an intriguing footnote that he took evening classes to rid himself of his Scottish accent so he could pick up more work south of the Border.
‘There was a certain ‘down the road’ feel [to Scottish entertainers of the day] that made me think there was a bigger world than the Palladium in Edinburgh or the Pavilion in Glasgow,’ he said once, much later in life.
Corbett was 16 when the local min- ister, the Rev Tom Maxwell, knocked on his mother’s door and told her something ‘quite extraordinary was happening down at the church’.
Corbett, who confessed to having felt ‘sort of unnoticed’ growing up, had taken a role as the wicked aunt in the church pantomime Babes In The Wood, and knocked everyone’s socks off with his performance.
‘It was a real warning beacon that this was what I wanted to do,’ he said once. ‘I took the hint and from then on that was it.’
After National Service he moved to London where he lived in a bedsit, took every job going and waited for
fame. His family back in Edinburgh were overwhelmed at his success, and by the time his father passed away in 1974, he had hit the big time with Ronnie Barker on The Frost Report and was well on his way to becoming a household name.
Yet while he spent much of the 1970s and 1980s in London, he never forgot his Scottish roots, and bought the house in Gullane as a quiet retreat from the cameras. Although his accent often sounded flat and generic, he could easily slip into the finest of Edinburgh brogues if the circumstances required.
He could also never resist a pair of tartan trousers, despite drily remarking: ‘I tend to look like a Thermos flask.’
He had myriad friends in the showbiz community and often entertained – sometimes rather riotously – at his Gullane home. Guests ranging from Sir Bruce Forsyth to Kristin Scott Thomas would be invited to take the sea air, and perhaps get in a round of golf or two with their host.
Corbett also cultivated pals north of the Border, particularly i n East Lothian.
In later life Lord James Douglas Hamilton – a Scottish Tory MP who had been a page boy at the Queen’s Coronation and boxed against Sir Ranulph Fiennes at Eton – became a great friend, a fact that would no doubt have impressed Corbett’s upwardly mobile father.
Unsurprisingly he was also a wellkent face in Gullane, and in a nod to his early roots, could often be seen queuing up at the local baker.
Roy McGregor, owner of Gullane Art Gallery and another friend, recalled the ‘ordinariness’ of his 5ft 1in pal when he was at home.
‘He’d speak to everybody,’ he says.’ ‘The funny thing about him, because of his height, I remember going into the baker’s on a Saturday morning and there was a long queue so I stood at the counter and I thought, “I know that voice” but you couldn’t see him, just heard him.’
Mr Good said that even in his twilight years, Corbett was keen to improve his golf swing.
‘He was highly intelligent and had high imagination for the game of golf. Somebody in his late 70s and 80s wanted to know how he could improve his golf, how he could hit the ball 300 yards like he had seen the tour pros do,’ he says.
‘He was great company to play with rather than his prowess, so I would play badly with him any day. Trying to get golf clubs that suited his physique, height and stature was a bit of a challenge at times but he understood we could do that.’
In later years Corbett still frequented Edinburgh, but he often sounded like a tourist in his own home town, describing it as a ‘treat to go to – a real buzzing city and so handsome’.
But he appreciated, too, that the country had changed vastly since the days of his gas-lit childhood in the capital.
‘I love the whole feel of Scotland – the shopping,’ he said recently. ‘I’m talking about the shopping for things like vegetables. I get silly about it. I end up going, “Isn’t this potato just marvellous? Is this is a Seton Mains potato?” My wife Anne says, “It’s a bloody potato”.’
He had a tailor’s love of clothes (his aunt was a tailoress and his uncle a tailor), and would often arrive at photoshoots with his own costume changes as well as that de rigueur twinkle in his eye.
‘I’ve always liked to look a little bit sprauncy,’ he would tell the photographer with a grin.
But for all of his surface glitz, he had a keen interest in politics. He had little regard for part-time Scots and in 2008 blasted fellow Edinburgher Sir Sean Connery for living in the Bahamas while being a strong supporter of the SNP.
‘I can’t understand how he sticks to this Scottish Nationalism attitude and lives in the Bahamas,’ he remarked. ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t see that might anger people. He’s rebellious about it.’
He also waded into the Scottish independence debate, and in August 2014, just one month before the vote, was one of 200 signatories of a letter opposing independence.
Asked directly about his nationality he would remark: ‘I feel pretty Scottish, yes. I love the place.’
In his last days, his body wracked by illness, he spent less time in Gullane, mindful also that his daughters and their families were south of the Border.
He missed it desperately, not least for the peace that being on the golf course brought him.
‘I play quite a lot of solitary golf because I go out with the dogs,’ he said once.
‘At the beginning of the day or the end of the day I’ll go out for seven holes or something.
‘It’s not good for the golf because I don’t concentrate enough on it, probably. I watch the dogs and think about things.’
Right until the end, it was those evenings on the course with the sun on his back, and the grass under his feet, that brought him the most comfort.