ANOTHER FINE MESS
In the wake of the new Stan & Ollie film we examine Stan Laurel's roots and the comic duo's love for Scotland
It is no coincidence that the hit film Stan & Ollie was made by a Scot. At his school fancy dress party in Peterhead, celebrated director Jon S Baird dressed up as Stan Laurel while his best friend played Oliver Hardy – proof, if any were needed, of the enduring appeal of a comedy duo who first worked together in 1921 and filmed exclusively in black and white.
But while Baird’s wonderfully evocative movie concentrates on the fertile cinematic tale of the pair’s dog days in the 1950s, when their popularity had waned disastrously, the film barely touches upon one of the main reasons for the director’s fascination with the duo – their Caledonian heritage.
Their first film together was a classic example of that shared history. Their timeless 1927 short film Putting Pants On Philip is based on a true story, and sees Laurel arrive in America as a young Scot whose effeminate Highland attire embarrasses his uncle, Piedmont Mumblethunder, played by Hardy (especially when Laurel stands on a ventilator grate and his kilt flips up, causing several women to faint).
Putting Pants on Philip was Laurel’s favourite silent short, but it was just one of several nods to their Scottish heritage.
Glasgow-raised Stan Laurel, one half of the legendary comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, took Hollywood by storm, but it was his Caledonian roots that truly kick-started his career,
Their most obviously Scottish-themed of their 105 films together was their popular 1935 movie Bonnie Scotland. This sees two hapless jailbirds escape to Scotland to claim Laurel’s grand inheritance, only to find it is not a castle but a dusty old set of bagpipes. After a series of disasters, they unwittingly find themselves in a Highland regiment posted to India.
The Scottish back-story revealed by these films was an important factor in the duo’s partnership, with Scotland being particularly important to Laurel’s career. Although he was born in Ulverston near the Lake District in 1890 as Arthur Stanley Jefferson, his formative years as a performer were spent in Glasgow after he moved north with his parents and four siblings. The move to Rutherglen came when Laurel was aged 14 when his father, Arthur Jefferson, became the theatre manager at Glasgow’s Metropole Theatre. Given that his mother Margaret Metcalfe was a successful actress, it was perhaps unsurprising that the youngster showed a natural affinity for acting.
With the stage in his blood, Laurel certainly wasn’t overly enamoured at the idea of sitting obediently in lessons at Rutherglen Academy, and was often marked ‘in absentia’ from school. Instead he preferred to work on his panto skills and music hall sketches while doing the odd shift at the theatre with his father, especially during the panto season.
Stan was still 15 when he heard that there was to be an amateur night at the Britannia Panopticon in Glasgow – now the world’s oldest surviving music hall – and the aspiring thespian immediately set about persuading the manager to book him as an act. Stealing his father’s suit and hat for the evening, he took to the stage for the first time. His surprised father found out about his son’s theatrical debut moments before it was due to go on stage and rushed across town to see his son perform.
Stan was met with a largely frosty reception from the notoriously difficult audience at the ‘Pots ‘n Pans’, but his luck was about to change. Shocked to spot his father in the front row, he took to his heels, trying to run off stage, only to trip on his oversized trousers, dropping his bowler hat in the process. While trying to retrieve it, he kicked it into the orchestra where a woman bent over to pick it up, only to split her skirt. Much to his delight, the audience was in fits of laughter and Laurel had become an unwitting success story. For the rest of his teens he honed his comic schtick, fiddling with his bowler hat and perfecting his idiotic persona.
By the age of 19, Laurel was such a well-known performer that he was invited to join theatre impresario Fred Karno’s famous troupe. To get around strict stage censorship, Karno, the originator of the custard-pie-in-theface gag, had invented a form of sketch comedy without dialogue – which later became known as slapstick. It was a stage act which was the perfect preparation for Karno’s two most promising proteges – his star, a young performer called Charlie Chaplin, and Chaplin’s close friend and ‘second banana’ Stan Laurel – to succeed in the world of silent movies. In 1912, Laurel was part of the Karno troupe which left to tour the States and the rest, as they say, is history.
If Hardy’s links to Scotland were considerably more tenuous, crucially
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Nowhere was their reception more chaotic than in Glasgow
they were important to him. Born Norvell Hardy in Harlem, Georgia in 1892, his father was a sergeant in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War but his mother was descended from a line of Lowland Scots brought to Georgia in the 1700s to defend the new colony from Spanish raiders. Hardy was acutely conscious of that heritage, and it was one of the reasons he was drawn to Laurel when the two found themselves working together as bit players in a succession of films in the early 1920s.
Although Laurel and Hardy took America by storm after they became an established double act in 1927, with their Oscar-winning 1932 film The Music Box leading to a lucrative 20th Century Fox contract, they never forgot Scotland. When they became rich on the success of The Music Box, they immediately visited, with Laurel, a keen golfer from his years in Rutherglen, indulging his passion at Gleneagles.
A further trip back to the UK followed in the 1940s, when they were at the height of their popularity. Nowhere was their reception more chaotic than in Glasgow, where they were staying at the Central Hotel. An 8,000-strong crowd greeted them at the railway station, with the sheer pressure of the throng causing a stone balustrade to collapse, triggering a stampede in which eight people were badly injured.
However, by the time the duo returned in 1953 their fortunes had nosedived. Overtaken in America’s affections by Abbot and Costello, badly in debt after five divorces between them, ageing fast (Laurel was 63, Hardy 61), and with 24-stone Hardy suffering severe health problems, they hoped they would be more fondly remembered on this side of The Pond. But it was not to be. Playing to nearly empty houses, they performed 13 shows a week during their seven-and-a-half month tour, dire audience numbers forcing a cut in wages. By the time they reached Scotland, they were so hard up that they could no longer afford hotels and stayed with Laurel’s family in Glasgow.
It was a sad end to two stellar careers, yet the duo – and Laurel in particular – remain an inspiration for many Scottish actors. ‘Just knowing that Stan walked the same streets as me and grew up in the same area was a funny feeling,’ says Outlander star Scott Kyle, who is also from Rutherglen.
‘You look back in awe at Laurel and Hardy’s techniques and their talent. It looks effortless, and it’s only once you’ve tried doing it yourself – when you try out a wee sketch with your pal and it’s not nearly as good – that you realise how great they really were.’
The duo’s legacy lives on in Scotland, with the Laurel and Hardy appreciation society ‘The Sons of the Desert’ boasting two Glasgow-based branches – the ‘Calls Of The Cuckoo Tent’, and the ‘Bonnie Scotland Tent’, each led by a Grand Sheik. Laurel has been commemorated with a plaque on 17 Craigmillar Road, the Glasgow tenement he called home during his teens, and there are calls for a statue of the duo to be installed in Rutherglen.
‘It’s nice being able to walk past a statue, to tip your hat every morning to people that you aspire to be like,’ said Kyle, who is an enthusiastic supporter of the idea. ‘I don’t know that they come much bigger than Laurel and Hardy.’