By Elliott West
“Wake up at the back there and pin back your lugholes”.
Jimmy Edwards
Introduction
Born in 1928 in Barnes, South West London, a place I know so well, having lived there for 22 years, Jimmy Edwards was an instantly recognisable British comedian. His dominant handlebar moustache across his face and a booming voice that spread laughter through radio and television sets for decades. A natural at playing the cane-wielding headmaster in Whacko! and a brilliant comedy sparring partner to Eric Sykes in the stage farce ‘Big Bad Mouse’ and six of Sykes’ dialogue-free films including The Plank in 1967.
Funny Bones
“Nice and steady or I will smash your face in”.
Jimmy Edwards
I was ten years old and in a swimming pool at the Sheraton Hotel in Abu Dhabi. I lived in the capital at the time in a flat not far from the hotel and my parents had membership to the pool area. Swimming in the pool, I felt a sudden wave of water wash past me. Looking up I saw Jimmy Edwards in a pair of trunks swimming back to Eric Sykes after divebombing the water. Eric was reclining in the shallow end with a large Havana cigar in his mouth. My only fond memory of Jimmy but a treasured moment. I later found out they were appearing in the stage play Big Bad Mouse. This fleeting glance at the comedian will stay with me for life and provides a slight insight into the private life of this Gregorian man. A cross between Henry VIII and the actor James Robertson Justice. Loud, proud and a man’s man. A hairy man who was a natural silver fox. Funny, and whacky, he could reduce an audience to tears of laughter with his trombone routine, using the instrument’s slide and the puzzled orchestra as the centre of his polished gag.
A true British eccentric who had his audience eating out of the palm of his hand. Professor Jimmy Edwards, a name adopted to distinguish himself from another actor of the same name at the time at the Windmill Theatre or Mr Glum, you always expected him to take off his bicycle clips from the depths of his dinner suit. Mr Glum is based on a cockney landlord that Jimmy came across in a pub in Barnes. A character that was constantly henpecked by the voice of his wife, Mrs Glum, a woman you never saw. He used to shout “Mother!” to which her reply would be “What do you want?”.
Treading the Boards
Jimmy Edwards realised he wanted to act from early on in life. He acquired a taste for comedy during his years with the Cambridge Footlights. The son of Kenrick, a professor of mathematics at King’s College London and Phyllis from New Zealand, James Keith O’Neill Edwards was the eighth of nine children. His father’s death in 1935 left the family in dire straits and so all his children had to learn to survive for themselves from an early age. Jimmy attended St Paul’s Cathedral School where he became head boy. He then won a scholarship to King’s College School in Wimbledon and went on to become a choral scholar at St John’s College Cambridge where he studied and sang in the choir.
Serving during the Second World War in the RAF, Edwards became a flight lieutenant and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He was based in Doncaster and was shot down in Arnhem, resulting in horrific facial injuries and the main reason he grew his handlebar moustache to hide his plastic surgery. As a result, he became a member of the Guinea Pig Club. He failed the audition for ENSA but performed in Ralf Reader’s gang shows.
After the end of the war, Edwards performed at the Windmill Theatre in London. A theatre where my great-uncle Tommy Scott also performed. He would then appear at the Adelphi Theatre in London Laughs with Tony Hancock and Vera Lynn from 1952 to 1954 and in the radio comedy Take It From Here written by Frank Muir and Dennis Norden. He also appeared in the radio comedies Jim the Great and My Wildest Dream. He would work again with the script pair on Whack-O on television. He was a regular on the celebrity game show Jokers Wild and as Pa Glum in The Glums.
Appearances in the films The Plank (1967) and a remake in 1979, Rhubarb (1969) and The Bed Sitting Room the same year, Jimmy went on to tour the UK, the Middle East and Australia with the farce Big Bad Mouse with Eric Sykes. Sykes would later be replaced by Roy Castle. Initially receiving bad reviews, Edwards and Sykes decided to spice it up and go off-script and ad-lib. This resulted in not only rave reviews but also a long run at the Shaftesbury Theatre. A lover of polo, playing at Ham Polo Club, Jimmy was a lifelong Conservative and stood in the 1964 election as the candidate for Paddington North without success. A supporter of fox hunting and a Rector at the University of Aberdeen in the 1950s, he was a concealed homosexual, hiding his sexuality in his marriage to Valerie Seymour for 11 years. A secret that wasn’t exposed until 1979. A revelation that annoyed him greatly. Living his later life in Fletching, East Sussex, Jimmy died from pneumonia in 1988 at the age of 68. A comedy icon and much missed.