Will Hay: Forgotten hero of English comedy
In the Thirties Will Hay was a major box office star but this forgotten hero of English comedy, who created a seamless link between the music hall and films for Gainsborough and Ealing Studios, was never truly loved by the masses…
Areserved, cerebral man who studied astronomy and built telescopes for a hobby – as well as having his own aeroplane, which he learned to fly in the Twenties – Will Hay was a far cry from his onscreen persona of a bumbling, ignorant and slightly shifty authoritarian figure.
But it is those screen roles as an incompetent schoolmaster, police sergeant or station master which have left a rich legacy of film characters that are well worth rediscovering.
The gem in the comedy crown has to be Oh! Mr Porter (1937) in which he becomes the station master of a tumbledown, rural Irish station called Buggleskelly. A blustering, abrasive Hay is joined by the Bunteresque Graham Moffatt who plays Albert and toothless Moore Marriott as Harbottle, to create a perfect trio of delinquency and cynicism. The story borrows some familiar themes from Arnold Ridley’s play The Ghost Train, but the role was to become a defining and enduring one for Hay.
His incompetent railway worker is elevated to station master of an off-the-beatentrack country halt where he attempts to whip his rag-tag staff into shape. It is a film full of moments to cherish – from Harbottle's memorable first line, ‘Next train's gone!’ to Hay’s explanation of why wheeltappers tap wheels – but it also has many longer scenes of comic brilliance such as when the trio, having blocked the line in a shunting exercise, try to calculate how much time they have before the express is due. You know what’s going to happen but it’s just perfect comic timing and interaction.
In spite of their ineptitude while dealing with gun-runners, ghosts, secret windmills and missing trains, Hay and his two stooges come out on top in a film that remains hilarious today. It was a box office smash, taking some £500,000 in British cinemas alone – the equivalent of £15 million today.
MAKING HAY
After turning his back on engineering Hay pursued a career in the music halls to make more money for his young family. He had created a drag schoolmistress but switched the gender when he realised he could get more comic mileage from clipping the ears of schoolboys. The Fourth Form of St Michael's was the sketch that became the prototype for his later film scenarios. Scenes were built around wordplay and rambling dialogue, rather than gags, and there would be arguments about whether Hastings 1066 was a telephone number, or if Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, or an ohm was ‘somewhere what there's no place like’.
By 1935 he had signed a contract with Gainsborough Pictures where, in four years, he starred in ten films that would make him a major movie star. The schoolmaster act appeared on the big screen in Boys Will Be Boys (1935), Good Morning Boys (1937) and The Ghost of St Michael's (1941).
Hay would dominate the comedy scene during this period and was matched in box office terms only by the ukulele-playing George Formby. Many future luminaries of stage and screen would make some of their first appearances in his productions, including Sir John Mills, Ted Ray, Roddy McDowall, Claude Hulbert, Thora Hird, Mervyn Johns, Carry On star Charles Hawtrey and Dad’s Army stalwarts Clive Dunn and John Laurie.
NOISES OFF
Away from the screen Hay was an accomplished linguist – he spoke fluent French, German, Italian and Afrikaans, while his two passions were aviation and astronomy. He built his first glider in 1909, flew and owned his own planes from the mid-Twenties and was a close friend of pioneering female aviator
Amy Johnson, whom he taught to fly. In 1935 he also published an accomplished astronomy book Through My Telescope. Throughout the Second World War, as a SubLieutenant in the Royal Navy, he gave lectures on astronomy and navigation to the sea scouts.
In 1941 he returned to film-making with Ealing Studios and starred in four films for them, co-directing three including his last, My Learned Friend in 1943.
Ill health stopped his film career and return to radio with appearances on the illustrious The Brains Trust and as the quiz master on Merry Go Round. His performing career came to an end in 1946 when he suffered a stroke. The remaining years of his life were spent travelling. He died on April 18, 1949. His achievements as a comic actor and astronomer were honoured in 2000 with the unveiling of an English heritage Blue Plaque at his former Norbury home. Will Hay remains a pre-TV star of British comedy, whose shambolic manner was an influence on comedians from Eric Morecambe to Tommy Cooper and Harry Worth. While Hay split from Marriott and Moffatt because he argued the routines were becoming repetitive, it was the melding of the trio that was a perfect blend. To steal a line from Oh! Mr Porter… they were never wasting their time.