Bernard Cribbins
Comic actor whose characters included Perks in The Railway Children and the voices of the Wombles
BERNARD CRIBBINS, the actor, who has died aged 93, was one of Britain’s most accomplished postwar practitioners of whimsical light comedy and farce, an unexpectedly skilful exponent of silly songs which inched into the pop charts, and a stalwart of British cinema throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
With his curly hair, long face, sad, honest eyes, jutting chin and unfailing affability, Cribbins defaulted to a figure of lugubrious innocence and vulnerability in scores of plays, films and television programmes. But he was far from unversatile, camping it up in 1960s Carry On films; playing the belligerent barman in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Frenzy (1972); and on television the obnoxious Mr Hutchinson, unwarrantedly suspected of being an undercover hotel inspector, in Fawlty Towers (1975).
Wry, jovial, glum or self-pitiful, Cribbins could adapt his voice to multiple timbres and accents, and was a particular favourite on children’s television from 1973 as the narrator and the many voices of The Wombles. He starred in his own ill-fated series, Cribbins (1969), which was cancelled after only two seasons, and later in more successful ones like Cuffy (1983), Langley Bottom (1986) and High and Dry (1987).
He read more Jackanory stories than anyone else and, in 2009, was awarded a Bafta for his children’s television work. “Children’s TV is so frantic now, they’ve neglected the fundamentals of traditional storytelling,” he observed. In 2007 Cribbins acquired a new generation of fans when he co-starred opposite David Tennant in
Doctor Who as the Time Lord’s sidekick Wilfred Mott, and starred as the retired fisherman in the Cbeebies series Old Jack’s Boat (2013-14).
It was while appearing in West End revues and comedies in the 1960s that Cribbins first ventured into the pop charts with a number from the revue And Another Thing (Fortune, 1960) called Folksong.
Produced by George Martin at EMI’S Abbey Road studios just before he started recording the Beatles, Cribbins followed up with three Top 30 novelty hits in 1962, The Hole in the Ground (which climbed to No 9, and was the record Noël Coward would have rescued from the waves on Desert Island Discs because “I could translate it into French as I walked up and down on the beach”), Right Said Fred (No 10) and Gossip Calypso (No 25). In 1984 he was the narrator on the album of The Snowman.
In the cinema he was cast in several Carry On comedies, among them Carry On Jack and Carry On Spying (both 1964), but he resisted joining the regular ensemble for fear of being typecast. On the other hand he won genuine admiration for his kindly portrait of Albert Perks, the crotchety porter in The Railway Children (1970), perhaps his best-known role, and one for which he was nominated for a Bafta as best supporting actor.
Directed by his actor friend Lionel Jeffries, The Railway Children led to Cribbins being cast by the director Alfred Hitchcock as the Covent Garden publican Felix Forsythe in Frenzy (1972).
Cribbins belonged to a breed of light comedian or straight character actor of no great driving ambition who could win over audiences without evident effort. In a career spanning 60 years he distinguished himself by cornering the market in animal roles. His first major part was that of a giant hen in John Ormerod’s The Chicken Play (New Lindsey, 1957), superseded later the same year by a performance as a dog in the musical Antarctica (Player’s).
On television he was Buzby the talkative cartoon bird in a series of British Telecom commercials.
The son of a plumber’s mate, Bernard Joseph Cribbins was born in the Glodwick district of Oldham, then in Lancashire, on December 29 1928 and educated at St Anne’s Catholic school, Oldham. He made his stage debut at the Oldham repertory theatre aged 13 in Daisy Fisher’s 1920s comedy Lavender Ladies and abandoned a youthful ambition to become a carpenter by joining the company as a professional in 1943.
He undertook his National Service as a paratrooper in Germany and Palestine before returning to Oldham Rep, alternating small speaking parts with spells as stage manager, scene shifter and prompter, remaining with the company for a further eight years.
After seasons with Frank Dunlop’s young theatre company, the Piccolo Players – at Manchester, the Liverpool Playhouse and the Queen’s, Hornchurch – he moved to London but failed to find any acting work and supported himself and his wife (he had married earlier the same year) by taking jobs as a dishwasher, window cleaner, navvy and newspaper vendor.
That all changed when he scored a London hit as the Dromio twins in Julian Slade’s musical adaptation of The Comedy of Errors (Arts, 1956). It was well-received, and Cribbins recalled being “inundated with offers of work”. With his warm, jaunty personality and excellent sense of comic timing, he went on to join Slade’s longrunning musical Salad Days (Vaudeville). His first TV part was in The Black Tulip, followed by an adaptation of David Copperfield (both 1956), in which he was Tommy Traddles to Robert Hardy in the title role.
His other 1950s credits included the motor-racing musical Lady at the Wheel (Lyric, Hammersmith, and Westminster); Ronald Millar’s light marital comedy The Big Tickle (Duke of York’s); Andre Roussin’s Hook, Line and Sinker (Piccadilly); and John Cranko’s revue New Cranks (Lyric, Hammersmith).
Having made his film debut in Yangtse Incident (1957), followed by a small role in
Dunkirk (1958), Cribbins made his first major film appearance as Paco in the eminently forgettable Tommy Steele vehicle
Tommy the Toreador (1960).
During the 1960s Cribbins featured in no fewer than 20 films, usually playing workmen, petty criminals or policemen. He was Lennie Price in Two-way Stretch (1961), Nervous O’toole in The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963) and Squirts in Crooks and Cloisters (1964). On television he starred opposite Sir Donald Wolfit in Charley’s Aunt (BBC, 1961) and took the lead in The Close Prisoner (ITV, 1966).
Meanwhile in the West End he starred opposite Patricia Routledge in the shortlived American musical spoof of Wild West operettas, Little Mary Sunshine (Comedy, 1962), and in the London premieres of two hit farces by Ray Cooney and John Chapman, Not Now, Darling (Strand, 1968) and There Goes the Bride (Criterion, 1974).
In the 1970s Cribbins became known on television as the narrator for the animated film series The Wombles, also providing the voices for the various characters. In 1979 he played Gertrude Stein to Wilfrid Brambell’s Alice B Toklas in the surreal Swedish film comedy The Adventures of Picasso. In the same year Cribbins collapsed during rehearsals for the farce Forty Love and was found to be suffering from an acute form of Ménière’s disease.
After playing in Cooney’s bedroom farce
Run For Your Wife at the Adelaide Festival, Cribbins returned to London in the same show to reopen the Shaftesbury Theatre as the Theatre of Comedy, and to play Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre’s longrunning revival of Frank Loesser’s Broadway musical Guys and Dolls (1988). He appeared opposite Elaine Paige in the revival of Anything Goes, clad in an oversized zoot suit as the incompetent gangster Moonface Martin.
He was appointed OBE in 2011. In November 2014 he received the JM Barrie Award in recognition of his career in children’s broadcasting. Away from his work, Cribbins enjoyed fly fishing, golf and clay shooting. His autobiography, Bernard Who? 75 Years of Doing Just About Everything, appeared in 2018.
He married, in 1955, Gillian Mcbarnet, his assistant when he was stage manager at Oldham Rep; she died in 2021. There were no children.
Bernard Cribbins, born December 29 1928, died July 28 2022