Books
The possibility of happiness. The Carry On films represented the best of England. Or was it the worst? Peter Bradshaw on the life of the saddest act in the history of British cinema
Published 01 October 2001
Charles Hawtrey 1914-1988: the man who was Private Widdle
Roger Lewis Faber and Faber, 111pp, £9.99
ISBN 0571210643
You can see him in Tower Records any day of the week, on the album cover of The Very Best of The Smiths. Charles Hawtrey: that perky, bespectacled, innocent face, the poster boy for English littleness. So intense was Morrissey's whimsical admiration for the Carry On star that, in the early 1980s, The Smiths approached Hawtrey to sing on a new version of their debut single, "Hand in Glove". Hawtrey did not respond. Morrissey went with his second choice, Sandie Shaw, and poor Hawtrey's one chance to reinvent his career vanished.
Roger Lewis does not mention this moment in his pungent, opinionated and brilliantly intuitive biography of the saddest act in the history of British cinema. But from his eloquent recreation of Hawtrey's desolate final years, it is easy enough to imagine. In "retirement" in the seaside town of Deal, the pathetically broken, profoundly alcoholic Hawtrey lived in squalor: aggressive, unpleasant, banned by every pub and cab firm for miles around.
As Lewis recounts, Hawtrey was once the exuberant interpreter of roles such as "Special Constable Gorse standing smartly to attention, his truncheon quivering . . ." or "Private Widdle guarding the Khyber Pass and inadvertently losing his woollen underpants to Khazi of Kalabar". He was camp, but also boyish and faintly ambiguous, even delicate. But there was nothing ambiguous or delicate about what, in those later years, passers-by could hear coming from Hawtrey's bedroom window: "Come on and give it to me, big boy. Slap your bollocks against my arse!" Furious if anyone recognised him, yet driven by a need to confide in his pick-ups and fellow drunks about how shabbily he had been treated by Peter Rogers, the notoriously autocratic and mean producer of the Carry On series, Hawtrey had more or less retreated into a world of his own. The letter from Morrissey, along with correspondence from necrophiliac carryonologists, probably wouldn't even have been opened.
It's no surprise to discover that Hawtrey was sad. It's almost mandatory for Carry On stars to be sad. They looked sad in the films, and really the films themselves looked sad - in every sense. Joan Sims died recently, in genteel poverty, complaining to the last about the astonishingly low fees. The women got less than the men (an unanswerable charge of sexism), while Hawtrey got £5,000 per picture in 1958 and this figure didn't change for 20 years. Some Carry On stars did well. Jim Dale went to Broadway, and Barbara Windsor was the Queen Mum of the Queen Vic. But sadness is surely the order of the day.
It is now de rigueur to repudiate the stigma of political correctness to say that we adore the Carry On movies. But really we are thinking of a few clips played on TV - or perhaps just one clip: the one in Carry On Camping where Barbara Windsor's bra flies off as she's doing those exercises (cut to Kenneth Williams doing his startled-moose face). But when was the last time you sat down and watched a Carry On film all the way through? It just isn't possible without a great cloud of sadness settling on top of you. Perhaps the saddest thing is Jack Douglas, a minor regular from the late Carry On films. Did anyone think his jerky arm movements were in any way funny? But Lewis, in this diverting little book, hits on Hawtrey as the most interesting of the regular cast and distils something alchemical from his (and their) sadness: a quintessence of a certain sort of Englishness.
Hawtrey was in some ways a remarkable man. According to his admittedly unreliable CV, which Lewis includes as an appendix, Hawtrey directed two films (now lost) and, in addition to a longish stage career as an actor in comedy and musical revues from the 1920s to the 1950s, he directed 19 theatre productions. Lewis makes one of his most extraordinary revelations after his harrowing description of Hawtrey's death. After collapsing in the foyer of a seafront hotel and being taken to hospital, Hawtrey was told that decades of smoking had given him gangrene and that his legs had to be amputated. "No - I want to die with my boots on," he said, lighting a cigarette. On almost the next page, Lewis reveals that, in 1945, Hawtrey had directed Oflag 3, a Second World War play co-written with Douglas Bader. For deadpan comedy, this disclosure could hardly be beaten. Elsewhere, Lewis reveals that he has imbibed something of the spirit of Talbot Rothwell, the Carry On scriptwriter: ". . . a costume girl found [Hawtrey] with the skirt over his head and smearing ointment on his anus - but that could mean anything." Ooo-er, missus!
The official Carry On history claims that Hawtrey was the son of the Edwardian actor-manager Sir Charles Hawtrey. Lewis reveals that this is pure fiction. Hawtrey was born George Hartree, in Middlesex, the son of an engineer. His first break was as an Italia Conti stage-school mite in one of Sir Charles's plays. Another Conti alumnus, and follower of the original Charles Hawtrey, was Noel Coward, and Lewis divines an almost occult connection between Hawtrey and Coward. Both were lower-middle-class boys from the Home Counties, both imbued with the theatrical spirit of self-invention and, indeed, self-delusion - though only Coward had the chutzpah and the je ne sais quoi to make it in America. Back in Blighty, Lewis has been through the Carry On production minutes, and found in their list of locations a prose-poem version of John Betjeman's Metroland: the Odeon, Uxbridge; the Red Lion public house, Iver; the maternity wing at Heatherwood Hospital, Ascot; and Camber Sands, near Hastings, was used for Carry On Follow That Camel.
The story of Hawtrey's career is very melancholy - despite Lewis affecting to find in his chirpy performances "the possibility of happiness". Hawtrey never got his longed-for television or radio work from the BBC, never got anything like Sid James's ITV show Bless This House, and he never had a sitcom hit, that nirvana of regular work, regular exposure, ad work, voice-over work and juicy repeat fees. He got just the Carry On films, with their terrible pay and humiliating billings. Lewis's book becomes almost like a seance - a seance carried out in the gloomy, cluttered house that Hawtrey shared with his ageing mother - as he divines the actor's misery and fretfulness, and he channels the cantankerous queeniness into his own writing, querulously defending Hawtrey not only against those mean-minded BBC producers who didn't give him a break, but also against those who presume to patronise him now. In a footnote, Lewis takes a peevish slap at Jonathan Coe for daring to call Hawtrey "a very, very strange little man". "Fact:" snaps Lewis, "before he became a distinguished novelist Jonathan Coe used to play the piano in a lesbian pub in Welwyn Garden City."
In the end, Hawtrey had to put what passed for his genius into his life, which is packed with anecdotes. Saved from his burning house in Deal, Hawtrey quivers with joy at being carried naked out of an upstairs window by a hunky fireman. (Given a big yellow helmet to hide his modesty, Hawtrey put it on his head.) He brought his mother to Pinewood Studios, and she had to be locked in his dressing room because of her habit of stealing the lavatory paper. She once attempted to flush away the evidence and caused a major plumbing disaster, halting work on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It's all very funny in an appalling sort of way. As for the Carry On films themselves, I agree with Ken Russell, the one dissentient voice in a recent TV celebration: "Surely we can do better than this."
Peter Bradshaw is a novelist, and film critic for the Guardian
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