Warm-hearted actor best known for It Ain’t Half Hot Mum
Windsor Davies 1930-2019
Windsor Davies, who has died aged 88, was a gentle, warmhearted man, best known for playing a bristling martinet in David Croft and Jimmy Perry’s sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. From 1974 to 1981, Davies delighted British TV audiences as the larger-thanlife Battery Sergeant Major “Shut Up” Williams, a swaggering, puffed-up NCO in command of a Royal Artillery concert party stationed in India during the Second World War, said The Daily Telegraph. A twitching, eye-rolling bigot, Williams is desperate to see action in the jungle, lectures the locals about the triumphs of British civilisation and derides the military misfits under his command as a “bunch of poofs”. Owing to its attitudes to race and sexuality, the show is no longer repeated on British TV, but in the 1970s, it attracted 15 million viewers, and spawned a No. 1 single, a novelty version of the old Ink Spots hit Whispering Grass featuring Davies and his diminutive co-star Don Estelle (a talented singer) in character.
Windsor Davies was born to Welsh parents in Canning Town, now in London, in 1930, but moved to Nant-y-moel, his father’s village in the Valleys, in 1939. On leaving school, he did national service in North Africa and worked down a mine before training as a teacher, largely to escape the colliery. Davies had always enjoyed amateur dramatics, and when he was 31, his wife, Eluned (he called her Lynne), urged him to have a go at acting professionally. Several tough years followed, said The Times: with a growing family, they were only able to scrape by because her parents offered them free use of a flat above their sweetshop in Kentish Town. But by the late 1960s, he was regularly appearing in “every kind of drama from Ibsen to Z-cars”.
When It Ain’t Half Hot Mum finished, Davies was cast opposite Donald Sinden in Never the Twain, a sitcom about two feuding antiques dealers that ran for 11 series. He lent his distinctive voice to an ad campaign for Cadbury’s Wispa Gold and starred in the well-loved Welsh rugby film Grand Slam (1978). Latterly, he and Lynne had retired to France; they’d been married for 62 years when she died last September. They had five children, who recalled that when they were naughty, their mother would threaten them with their father’s “sergeant-major treatment”. But Davies was such a “softie”, he could never keep a straight face.