From Arbroath pig-feeder to the world’s highest-paid performer
Sir Harry Lauder was born in 1879 in Portobello. His father, a potter, died from pneumonia when Harry was only three. His mother and her eight children moved to Arbroath where Harry, as the eldest child, took various jobs to help the family – as a pig feeder, a strawberry picker and golf caddy. When he was 12, he worked part-time at the flax mill, in between going to the mill school.
The young Lauder won prizes at singing competitions but when the family moved to Hamilton, he worked down the coal mines. His paid singing engagements led to him leaving the pit at 19.
After touring Scottish theatres, he took the leap to London in 1900. He was inundated with offers after his first week and was soon the toast of London, playing four venues in one night with a horse-drawn carriage waiting to take him to different theatres.
Harry began to make records that were listened to all over the world. In 1907 he sailed to New York where he was met by a pipe band and a tartandraped motor car. He went on to make 22 tours of the US, and by 1911 he was the highest-paid performer in the world, commanding $1,000 a night.
Lauder had his own train in the US, including a Pullman sleeping car for the company and a parlour-car for himself, his wife and his American agent, William Morris.
He became friends with Charlie Chaplin – they began to make a silent film together that was never completed – and he was feted by the President Theodore Roosevelt.
Lauder described himself as being “quite good friends” with the Prince of Wales, who added to his collection of twisted sticks, bringing one back from Japan for him. These knobbly sticks, or crummocks, became his trademark – one is held in the University of Glasgow Theatre Archive along with his make-up box, kilt jacket and pipe – and he was presented with them wherever he went, on tours to Australia, South Africa and the Far East.
He was in Australia with his family when the First World War broke out in 1914 and his only son John, a captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, was recalled to his regiment.
Lauder spent the war entertaining the troops at the front, visiting hospitals, and fund-raising, raising more than £1 million for maimed servicemen. Despite his stage persona’s famous meanness, he was a generous man and to this day, wounded servicemen benefit from the royalties from his estate.
He was performing in London when on New Year’s Day 1917 he received the dreaded telegram from the War Office, stating simply: “Captain John Lauder, killed in action”. Despite his tremendous grief, he went back on stage three days later, and wrote Keep Right On To The End Of The Road in the wake of his son’s death.
Later that same year, Lauder went to France and entertained the troops in the trenches at the front, against War Office advice to stick to the bases. His war work was acknowledged in 1919 when he became the first popular entertainer to receive a knighthood.
The first knight of the music hall retired in the 1930s to his 22,000-acre estate on Dunoon with its own loch – he joked it was “cheaper to keep clean than a swimming pool”. But during the Second World War, he was again entertaining the troops and helping war charities, with Churchill describing him as “Scotland’s greatest ever ambassador”. His last stage appearance was in 1947 at a concert in the Gorbals in Glasgow and he died three years later in his home in Strathven, Lauder Ha’, aged 79. The Duke of Hamilton, a close friend, led the funeral cortege through Hamilton, and wreaths were sent by the Queen Mother and Winston Churchill.