Those were the days Gordon Jackson, one of Scotland’s best-loved actors
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IN his book The Straight Man: My Life in Comedy, the late Nicholas Parsons relates a fine anecdote involving a young Gordon Jackson. The two men had roles in Marigold, a period play staged at Molly Urquhart’s MSU rep theatre in Rutherglen. In one scene, Parsons was supposed to enter through a door and join Jackson on stage; but the door was stuck fast, and the two men suddenly had to ad-lib.
“The two of us,” Parsons writes, “continued to ad-lib through the shut door, trying to sound as natural as possible. The audience by this time were laughing delightedly at our embarrassment as we tried to force the door and shook the whole set in the process.”
At length, Parsons decided to enter the stage via a chimney. “The audience gave me a round of applause. Gordon said something about it not being Christmas and asked why I had come in that way...”
Jackson was born in Glasgow and had attended Hillhead High. As a teenager he had worked in Children’s Hour on the radio while still studying for a “proper job”. He was a draughtsman at Rolls-royce in Hillington and was just 17 when he was given a role in a 1940 propaganda film, The Foreman Goes to France. (The main image here shows Jackson at a Highland ball in Glasgow, six years after that film).
His acting career gradually took off, and there came a point where he had to decide between his job and acting. In what he later described as “a moment of utter lunacy”, he chose the latter. In 1948 he appeared in the Ealing classic, Whisky Galore!, directed by Alexander Mackendrick. In 1949 he starred in the film Floodtide: during the shooting he met and fell for a co-star, Rona Anderson. They married in 1951, and are pictured together, above.
Other high-profile films in which he played included the Oscar- and Bafta-nominated Tunes of Glory (1960) and The
Great Escape (1963), in which his character, an escapee from Stalag Luft North about to board a bus, inadvertently gives the game away when a cunning German officer says to him, in English, “Good luck” and he responds, “Thank you.”
Jackson also had many stage roles and of course found lasting fame on television when he appeared in Upstairs Downstairs, and The Professionals. He was awarded the MBE in1979.
Jackson, who died, aged 66, in January 1990, was an essentially modest man. Fellow actors paid fond tributes when they learned of his passing; John Alderton, who also starred in Upstairs, Downstairs, described him as “the sweetest, gentlest man I have ever met”.
When Nicholas Parsons, incidentally, appeared on This Is Your Life, Jackson came on as a guest, and related the Rutherglen anecdote, adding that during the scene the stage manager noisily fixed the door, walked through it onto the stage and announced: “It’s all right. It’s shifted.”