Smashing!
Dad's Army Page 29
I just read in the Daily Mail (yes I do believe it!) that the last British military bayonet charge (not ceremonial) was in Helmand Province in 2011 led by a Lance Corporal Jones. "They don't like it up 'em!"
Shouldn't they be facing each other, Wilson? ... Back to back like that makes them look as if they've quarrelled
I'm not sure if I mentioned this before(getting senile) but apparently on Clive Dunn's LP he's got a track called Polishing my Rifle.
It was 55 years ago tonight that Dad's Army first hit our screens. "The Man and the Hour." I remember it well.
... and it is 50 years ago today that we sadly lost James Beck, aged just 44.
He was one of those under-sung comedy talents, much better than he is recognised for. A huge loss.
Extract from an article by Nicholas Ridley, son of Arnold Ridley:
When my father was awarded an OBE 'for services to the theatre', I refused to go to Buckingham Palace to see him receive it. I was too angry on his behalf.
The OBE seemed to me a poor, overdue reward for his service to his country - though he appeared pleased enough to receive his decoration. Like me, he was fully aware that the honour had nothing to do with his frontline service in both World Wars; nor even his later success as a playwright. It was in recognition of his late-flowering fame as the dim-witted Private Charles Godfrey in the TV series Dad's Army.
And dear old Godfrey, if you recall, was famously the only conscientious objector in the Home Guard platoon of Walmington-on-Sea. The irony of my father being given an OBE for playing a conscientious objector was hard to bear. For my father, Arnold Ridley, had been one of the brave young men who went 'over the top' at the Battle of the Somme. He ended up being wounded three times and suffered from shellshock, blackouts and haunting nightmares.
And he never received any recognition at all for his courage and sacrifice.
My father talked about his experiences of World War I only reluctantly, but I knew that the 'war to end wars', with its sucking mud, rats the size of cats and appalling death toll, had caused him untold anguish.
Once, he told me, he passed out on the battlefield and was woken by the sound of appalling screams. He realised he was in a shell-hole. On the other side of it, the man who'd presumably carried him there had just been mortally wounded by shrapnel, and was screaming with pain as he clung to life. Did his unknown companion ask my father to spare him further agony - or did the screaming simply become insupportable? The question was too terrible for me to ask him. But the screaming had to be stopped - and it was L/Cpl Ridley who did the deed.
After leaving the shell-hole, he led a group of stragglers back through no-man's-land to the British frontline. All the soldiers were recommended for the Military Medal - but an officer, spotting that my father was nominally in command, recommended him for the DCM - the Distinguished Conduct Medal. The other members of the party duly received their MMs but my father was turned down for the DCM and received nothing. He told the story ruefully, with little bitterness. This was simply how things were, he said.
But I knew how hurt he'd been; the MM was the only recognition he'd hoped for, and he didn't even get that.
Of his time on the front, he later recalled: 'The mental suffering was far in excess of the physical. To anyone of sense and imagination, it was quite clear that the vital question wasn't "if" I get killed, but when I get killed. Battalions were wiped out, not once but time after time. 'One's only hope was that one might receive a "Blighty one"- an injury severe enough to get you repatriated, but not so bad that it would kill you. That is why the war correspondents could rightly describe the wounded as being so cheerful.'
In September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme, where 58,000 British troops lost their lives, my father finally received his 'Blighty one'.
'I was badly wounded - particularly in my left arm and hand,' he wrote in his unpublished memoirs. '(But) I was left for some days behind the uncaptured German frontline - and it was some time before I received medical first aid at Le Tréport, where I was admitted by mistake into a Canadian hospital.' What he didn't put in his account was that he woke up with a start that night because a terrible weight was pressing down on his chest. Someone was kneeling on him, sewing him into a sheet. He'd been sleeping so deeply that they assumed he was dead. Afterwards, he had several operations. 'I was quite certain that my hand would be amputated, and I felt a strong measure of disappointment when I found that it hadn't been. The loss of a hand would, at the worst, reduce me to Home Service and save my life. I was 20. Rather young to welcome a prospect of being maimed for life!' It was only after his return to Britain that he was deemed unfit for service, even though his hand had been saved.
As a final irony, in Torquay in 1917, my father was handed a white feather - the symbol of cowardice given to young men who weren't in uniform - by a tall young woman wearing a fox fur. Little did she realise that he had served with such courage, and been stood down from duty. He accepted the feather and said nothing. He felt, I believe, the aching guilt of those who survive; the wretched knowledge that they, too, should have died.
All those horrors had come flooding back when, in September 1939, he went to war once more, returning to France with the British Expeditionary Force - this time with the rank of major.
In an unpublished memoir written towards the end of his life, he recalled: 'Within hours of setting foot on the quay at Cherbourg, I was suffering from acute shell-shock again. It took the form of a mental suffering that can best be described as an "inverted" nightmare. 'I (had) suffered badly from nightmares between the wars. They always took the same form. Somehow or other, my discharge had gone wrong and I was back in the Army again. Not amid shot, shell, bayonet and other horrors, but merely back in France awaiting orders to go up to the front line once more. These dreams were so real that sometimes it would take me an hour or more to persuade myself that what I had dreamed was impossible. 'Now it was no longer impossible. My dream had caught up with me. My real and conscious life was now my nightmare - a nightmare from which I had no awakening.'
He never wrote anything more about World War II. 'To recount the events of this time, I would have to relive them. I have no intention of reliving them. I am too afraid,' he explained simply.
Growing up, I'd often see him reading books by generals, historians, politicians - always about World War I. Before long, he'd be asleep, with the open books scattered about his armchair, like bodies laid out in a field. Once, I woke him suddenly, tapping him urgently on the shoulder, as young children do. He sprang to his feet and had his hands round my throat before he saw me. The instincts of trench warfare never left him - but it was an incident we never discussed. Later, I learned from my mother that if we needed to wake him, it was best to knock gently on the door and wait until he remembered he was safe.
Arnold Ridley after the end of World War I:
Thanks for posting that, Bunter.
He was a remarkable man, truly. Quite a few instances of real outstanding service and bravery in comedy. Jimmy Edwards DFC is another who springs to mind.
That Ridley post is very enlightening, didn't know he was so affected by his time in the war, but his anger at that medal farrago is redolent of the war poets. The only thing I knew about it was reading that he had trouble bending down because of his old bayonet wound so they tried to limit this in the series. And apparently Dad's Army brought him some much needed income after some serious money troubles when his kids were younger.
Have been catching the odd episode on R4 Extra and it works so well as an audio sitcom, their voices being very distinctive, and the storylines come more to the fore. I'm pretty sure it would have been a classic had it started as and/or just been a radio show. It's a whole new and quite different way to enjoy the great sitcom with a few more scene chewing opportunities for characters like Jonsey and Colonel Square with some extra lines.
Was watching hi de hi yesterday
The vicar turns up - as a vicar
And Pvt Sponge was playing a verger
Odd name, Sponge. I wonder if they chose that because he was used to soak up some filler with the main cast otherwise occupied?
Quote: lofthouse @ 21st August 2023, 11:48 AMWas watching hi de hi yesterday
The vicar turns up - as a vicar
And Pvt Sponge was playing a verger
Oh yes, Croft & Perry very much used the same ensemble of actors throughout their sitcoms.
Frank Williams was often a vicar. Except in You Rang M'Lord in which he was a bishop.
From the opposite aspect, the actors playing two of Hi-de-Hi's major characters, Spike and Fred Quilley, had both had minor parts in Dad's Army.
There were various cross-overs between Are You Being Served, It ain't Half Hot Mum and 'allo 'allo too. Not to mention Oh Doctor Beeching.
John Le Mesurier also turns up in Hi-De-Hi!.
He was Jeffrey Fairbrother's old form teacher, I think.