Few showbusiness celebrities presented a sharper contrast between their public image and personal life than Will Hay. Whilst millions flocked to see his scatterbrained screen characters in such box office hits as Good Morning, Boys and Oh, Mr Porter!, Hay was in private a multilingual polymath, an accomplished pilot and a respected amateur astronomer who discovered a ‘white spot’ on Saturn.
Born in 1888 in Stockton-on-Tees, William Thomson Hay was the son of an award-winning engineer and inventor whose work kept his family on the move, eventually establishing his own company in Manchester, producing automatic lifts.
The young Will displayed an aptitude for both languages (fluent in French, German and Spanish by his teens) and science, but his employment prospects were severely undermined by having missed his school examinations due to the family’s transient lifestyle. However, he found work as an interpreter, which allowed him time for night classes and the romantic pursuit of Gladys Perkins, eight months his junior, whom he married in October 1907.
Despite the newlyweds’ strained finances, Will showed he’d inherited his father’s dogged determination by announcing in 1909 his intention to seek a career on the music stage. He’d already built up a sideline performing comic monologues at local functions, but the final spur appears to have been seeing the legendary W.C. Fields present his juggling act at the Manchester Hippodrome.
It was a massive gamble, but Will pressed ahead, buoyed by winning a prestigious talent contest at the city’s Palace Theatre, swiftly followed by the offer of a week’s engagement at the Hull Empire. Inspired by anecdotes told him by his sister Eppie, a schoolteacher, Will devised a musical sketch entitled ‘Bend Down’, in which a schoolmistress describes the pranks pulled by her pupils. Uncomfortable with the image of a woman administering punishments, Will decided to play it as a pompous schoolmaster, launching a hugely popular character who would serve him for nearly forty years.
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Astonishingly, Hay was able to balance his burgeoning comedy career and growing family with interests in both aviation and astronomy. He built his first glider in 1909 and seized every opportunity to get airborne, eventually making his first solo aeroplane flight in 1926. Two years later, he met and befriended Amy Johnson, destined to become the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia. However, the death of another close friend in a plane crash led Hay to lapse his pilot’s licence in 1933 and sell his cherished Puss Moth.
A strict divide was meanwhile maintained between Hay’s entertainment career and stargazing activities, publishing his 1935 textbook Through My Telescope as ‘W.T. Hay’. Sir Patrick Moore considered him “a very skilful astronomer indeed”.
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Ever the perfectionist, Will played no favourites, even when press-ganging his son Will Jr into playing one of the errant schoolboys. “He was quite a taskmaster,” the younger Hay recalled in a 1976 BBC radio documentary. “Off-stage, I was his son, he was my father, but as soon as you walked onto that stage, there was no relationship whatsoever. No family, just purely business.
“He was quite a professional: he did everything perfectly first time, and you had to do the same thing – and if you didn’t, he wanted to know why. But when you consider the things he could do, it was just impossible to follow him.”
This somewhat humourless approach to the mechanics of comedy was later noted by Barry Morse, who made his screen debut opposite Hay in the wartime comedy The Goose Steps Out (1942): “He was not communicative, rather introspective and gruff. Mind you, we were all kids. More or less beginners. So he had no particular reason to be on a chummy kind of basis with us.” It’s an opinion echoed in a 1997 interview with Sidney Cole, former supervising editor at Ealing Studios: “(Hay) was a great comedian, but a most miserable person. He was very gloomy.”
One of the few people shown any warmth on that particular set was future Carry On star Charles Hawtrey, whose fourth appearance in a Hay movie saw him billed immediately below its star. A knock on their shared dressing-room wall would summon Hawtrey for breakfast and a discussion of Hay’s latest revisions to the script, when any failing to elicit a chuckle from the young actor were quickly discarded. Hawtrey subsequently became a regular on the radio series The Will Hay Programme, but disappeared from the line-up following a VE Day special in May 1945, amid rumours he now considered himself his mentor’s equal and wanted a commensurate pay rise.
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Hay’s discomfort with sharing the limelight had previously soured his most popular movie partnership, with Graham Moffat (a former runner at Gainsborough Studios) as the Billy Bunteresque ‘Albert’ and screen veteran Moore Marriott as the aged dimwit ‘Harbottle’ (a character lifted from Hay’s stage act, based upon the father of a stage manager he’d worked with). The trio proved an instant hit in the nautical comedy Windbag the Sailor (1936), and Gainsborough quickly went full steam ahead on a follow-up, Oh, Mr Porter! (1937). Loosely inspired by Arnold Ridley’s 1923 stage play ‘The Ghost Train’, it was set in Northern Ireland but filmed at a derelict station near Basingstoke, which was being dismantled even as the crew raced to get their last shot in the can. Their efforts paid off: Porter! grossed a very respectable £500,000 at the UK box office (equivalent to more than £35m today).
Despite the formula’s success, Hay attempted to escape what he reportedly dubbed “a three-legged stool” and made an unsuccessful attempt to break into the US market with Hey! Hey! USA (1938), co-starring Edgar Kennedy. When he moved to Ealing Studios in 1940, Marriott and Mofatt remained at Gainsborough, with Arthur Askey stepping into the lead.
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Hay suffered a stroke in 1946, made a slight recovery but fell to a fatal second stroke in April 1949. Val Guest, who co-wrote many of Hay’s Gainsborough features, recalled in 1976: “I’ve worked with a lot of comedians who have great timing, but I don’t think any of them are better than Bill Hay. He was a past master at knowing how to get a laugh by not trying to get a laugh, by saying nothing, by looking. I think he was a great man.”
[A version of this article appeared in Yours Retro #70, January 2024]