Army vicar’s service with a smile
FRANK Williams performed a range of film and stage roles but was probably best known as Reverend Timothy Farthing, the tetchy vicar in Dad’s Army.
Although he joined the cast in the third series as a one-off, he became a permanent fixture in the following six series.The vicar’s run-ins with Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) and Sergeant Wilson (John Le Mesurier) became pivotal in the show’s plot lines.
One of his best scenes featured him conducting an open-air service to bless the harvest, unaware his flock was getting riotously drunk. Inevitably, a brawl broke out.
Born in Edgware, London, his father was a draper and his mother encouraged his interest in theatre.
He moved to London after leaving school and wrote the play No Traveller, which was performed at London’s Gateway theatre. In the 1952 film Ivanhoe, starring Elizabeth Taylor, he played an archer and the following year he was in The Story Of Gilbert And Sullivan. Williams got to know Dad’s Army scriptwriter Jimmy Perry in a play at Watford Palace theatre, run by Perry and his wife Gillian. So when the vicar role came up in 1969 he didn’t even have to audition.
He loved socialising with Lowe and Le Mesurier in Norfolk until the series ended in 1977.
Religion played a major part in the actor’s life. Brought up as a Presbyterian, he later became an Anglo-Catholic and had a seat on the General Synod for years.
He never lost his affection for his Dad’s Army days, and shot behind-the-scenes footage during filming of the series, and established the Dad’s Army Appreciation Society.
He told one interviewer: “The last episode is quite moving. They all drink a toast to the Home Guard and you get the sense these funny old men would have died for their country if they had to.”