George Formby, OBE (26 May 1904 – 6 March 1961), born George Hoy Booth, was a British comedy actor, singer-songwriter, and comedian. He sang light, comical songs, accompanying himself on the banjo ukulele or banjolele. He was a major star of stage and screen in the 1930s and 1940s.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Formby was born at 3 Westminster Street, Wigan, Lancashire, as George Hoy Booth. The eldest of seven surviving children, Formby was born blind because of an obstructive caul. His sight was restored during a violent coughing fit or sneeze when he was a few months old.^[8][9] His father James Booth used the stage name George Formby, adopted from the town of Formby, Lancashire. He was one of the great music hall comedians of his day, fully the equal of his son's later success. His father, not wishing him to watch his performances, moved the family to Atherton Road in Hindley. It was from there that the younger Formby was apprenticed as a jockey when he was seven. He rode his first professional race at 10, when he weighed under 4 stone (56 lb; 25 kg).

The family next moved to Stockton Heath, Cheshire in a home on London Road. It was from there that the young George began his career as an entertainer.

Stage career[link]

In 1921, three months after the death of his father, Formby abandoned his career as a jockey and began appearing in music halls using his father's material. At first he called himself George Hoy, using the name of his maternal grandfather, who came from Newmarket, Suffolk, where the family was engaged in racehorse training. In 1924 he married dancer Beryl Ingham, who managed his career (and, it is said, his personal life) until her death in 1960. He allegedly took up the ukulele as a hobby and first played it on stage for a bet.

Formby endeared himself to his audiences with his cheeky Lancashire humour and folksy north of England persona. In film and on stage, he generally adopted the character of an honest, good-hearted but accident-prone innocent who used the phrases: "It's turned out nice again!" as an opening line; "Ooh, mother!" when escaping from trouble; and a timid "Never touched me!" after losing a fight of almost any description.

What made him stand out, however, was his unique and often mimicked musical style. He sang comic songs, full of double entendre, to his own accompaniment on the banjolele, for which he developed a catchy and complicated musical syncopated style that became his trademark. His best-known song, "Leaning on a Lamp Post" was written by Noel Gay. He recorded two more Noel Gay songs, "The Left-Hand Side of Egypt" and "Who Are You A-Shoving Of?" Over two hundred of the songs he performed, many of which were recorded, were written by Fred Cliff and Harry Gifford, either in collaboration or separately, and Formby was included in the credits of a number of them, including "When I'm Cleaning Windows". Some of his songs were considered too rude for broadcasting. His 1937 song, "With my little stick of Blackpool Rock" was banned by the BBC because of the suggestive lyrics.^[10] Formby's songs are rife with sly humour, as in "Mr Wu's a window cleaner now" where Formby is about to sing "ladies' knickers" and suddenly changes it to "ladies' garters"; and in 1940's "On the Wigan Boat Express," in which a lady passenger "was feeling shocks in her signal box." Formby's cheerful, innocent demeanour and nasal, high-pitched Lancashire accent neutralised the shock value of the lyrics; a more aggressive comedian like Max Miller would have delivered the same lyrics with a bawdy leer.

Film career[link]

Formby had been making gramophone records as early as 1926; his first successful records came in 1932 with the Jack Hylton Band, and his first sound film Boots! Boots! in 1934 (Formby had appeared in a sole silent film in 1915). The film was successful and he signed a contract to make a further 11 movies with Associated Talking Pictures, earning him a then-astronomical income of £100,000 (roughly USD 4 million in 2009 terms) per year, despite the fact that studio head Michael Balcon reportedly considered Formby "an odd and not particularly loveable character".^[11] Between 1934 and 1945 Formby was the top comedian in British cinema, and at the height of his movie popularity (1939, when he was Britain's number-one film star of all genres^[12]), his film Let George Do It was exported to America. Although his films always did well in Britain and Canada, they never caught on in the United States. Columbia Pictures hired him for a series, with a handsome contract worth £500,000, but decided not circulate his films in the US.

Formby appeared in the 1937 Royal Variety Performance,^[13] and entertained troops with Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) in Europe and North Africa during World War II. He received an OBE in 1946.^[14] His most popular film, still regarded as probably his best, is the espionage comedy Let George Do It, in which he is a member of a concert party, takes the wrong ship by mistake during a blackout, and finds himself in Norway (mistaking Bergen for Blackpool) as a secret agent. In one dream sequence he punches Hitler on the nose and addresses him as a "windbag".

For many years Fred Knight was Formby's chauffeur, driving him to the studios and music halls across the country. At that time Formby had a prestigious Lanchester car.

Formby suffered his first heart attack in 1952, during the run of his successful stage musical "Zip Goes a Million." He withdrew from the show, and confined his performances to occasional guest appearances on stage and TV. In July 1960, he scored a chart hit with "Happy Go Lucky Me" / "Banjo Boy", which peaked at number 40 in the UK Singles Chart.^[15] His final television appearance, broadcast in December 1960, was a 35-minute solo spot on BBC Television's The Friday Show.

Formby's wife Beryl died of leukaemia on 24 December 1960. In the spring of 1961 he planned to marry Pat Howson, a 36-year-old schoolteacher whom he had known since the 1930s, but he suffered a second heart attack and died in hospital on 6 March 1961. His funeral was held in St. Charles's Church in Aigburth, Liverpool. An estimated 100,000 mourners lined the route as his coffin was driven to Warrington Cemetery, where he was buried in the Booth family grave. Pat Howson was well provided for in Formby's will, but died in 1971 after a long legal battle with Formby's family, who contested the will.

Beryl Ingham: wife and manager[link]

Beryl Ingham was born in 1901 in Accrington,^[16] Lancashire. She was a champion clogdancer and actress, winning the All England Step Dancing Title at the age of 11. Later she formed a dancing act with her sister, May, called "The Two Violets".^[17] It was in 1923 while they were appearing in music hall in Castleford, Yorkshire that she met Formby. They married in Formby's birth town of Wigan, Lancashire the following year.^[18]

The couple worked together as a variety act until 1932, when she became his full-time manager and mentor, though she appeared in two of his films for which Formby was paid up to £35,000 per performance. It was Beryl's business skill that guided Formby to be the UK's highest-paid entertainer.

In 1946 Beryl and George toured South Africa shortly before formal racial apartheid was introduced, where they refused to play racially-segregated venues. According to Formby's biographer, when George was cheered by a black audience after embracing a small black girl who had presented his wife with a box of chocolates, National Party leader Daniel François Malan (who later introduced apartheid) phoned to complain; Beryl replied "Why don't you piss off you horrible little man?"^[19]

Beryl continued to manage Formby's career until she contracted leukaemia, and died on 24 December 1960 in Blackpool, Lancashire. After her death, Formby publicly confessed that "My life with Beryl was hell".^[20] Two months later he became engaged to schoolteacher Pat Howson, 20 years his junior, declaring that he had achieved a happiness which had never existed with Beryl.^[20]

Playing styles[link]

Formby's trademark was playing the ukulele-banjo in a highly syncopated style, referred to as the 'Formby style'.

Among the several syncopation techniques that he used, the most commonly emulated stroke of Formby's is a rhythmic technique called the "Split stroke", which produces a musical rhythm easily recognised as Formby's. He sang in his own Lancashire accent. Other strokes in Formby's repertoire include the triple, the circle, the fan, and the shake. In his act, Formby often had several ukuleles on stage tuned in different keys, as in some solos it required an open string to be sounded, not possible when using Barre chords.

On Formby's last television appearance, in The Friday Show, he modestly told the audience that he could play in only one key. Research has shown that this statement is false, as Formby played transposed solos on songs such as "On the HMS Cowheel", a melodic solo on "I Told my Baby with the Ukulele", and many more.

Catchphrases[link]

Formby's best-known catchphrase is 'Turned out nice again!', but he also had a few others such as 'Eeh, champion!' or 'Eeh, isn't it grand!' or, when managing to escape from anybody, 'Haha! Never touched me!' Formby often exclaimed, 'Eeh! Well, I'll go to our house!' or, 'Mother!'

Tributes[link]

There is a bronze statue of Formby leaning on a lamppost on Ridgeway Street, close to the intersection with Lord Street, in Douglas, Isle of Man. On 15 September 2007, another bronze statue was unveiled in Formby's birthtown of Wigan, Lancashire in the Grand Arcade shopping centre.

Motorcycle[link]

A Norton International motorcycle owned by Formby, registration HVU 111 (Formby was superstitious, and insisted that all his motorbikes had the same three numbers in their registration, although he was not bothered which number), sold for £30,582 at an auction on 3 December 2007. The 1947 Norton International was one of several motorcycles owned by Formby, who starred in the film No Limit, a spoof of the 1935 Isle of Man TT motorcycle race, and had been presented to him during a visit to Norton’s Bracebridge Street factory in Birmingham in July 1947.^[21]

In popular culture[link]

This "In popular culture" section may contain minor or trivial references. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's impact on popular culture rather than simply listing appearances, and remove trivial references. (May 2012)

• In The Walt Disney 1949 animated feature, The Wind In The Willows, the character of "Cyril Proudbottom", Mr.Toad's horse friend, is based on Formby, both visually and as vocalised by J.Pat O'Malley.
• In an episode of the animated sitcom American Dad! entitled "Failure Is not a Factory-Installed Option", Avery Bullock, voiced by Patrick Stewart gets out a banjo and sings "The Window Cleaner" song in a Wigan accent.
• In the BBC comedy series The Day Today, a mock news story sees Formby playing Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in a video which casts doubt on Dylan's legacy.^[22]
  • The Fast Show later referenced the scene, with Mark Williams playing a character called "Fred Halibut", who sang the song in a broad Wigan accent.
• Mark Williams had previously been seen doing his Formby impression in the 1980s BBC comedy show Alexei Sayle's Stuff, where he sang a song entitled "E=MC2" in grainy 'black and white'.
• In the ITV soap opera, Coronation Street one of the wards in the Weatherfield General Hospital is named after Formby.
• In a BBC TV series Goodnight Sweetheart, series 3 episode 6, Formby's achievements at entertaining the masses are recognised.
• In The History Boys by Alan Bennett when discussing the unconventional teaching methods employed by a teacher the headmaster remarks that the students "know all the words to 'When I'm Cleaning Windows'".
• Commercial radio adverts for a double-glazing company during the 1980s spoofed Formby's recording of "The Window Cleaner" using new lyrics, culminating in the firm's telephone number in place of the words "When I'm Cleaning Windows".
• The song "When I'm Cleaning Windows" was used in the mini game, Wishi Washi on the EyeToy for PlayStation2.
• The Thursday Next series of books by Jasper Fforde feature an octogenarian Formby as President of an alternative Britain; the character works to confront the traitorous politician Kaine.
• Formby is referred to in the Red Dwarf Series VIII episode "Krytie TV", in which Rimmer remarks that they are shown 'lousy B-movies' in prison in order to "sap our morale. Next week is the George Formby season!" He then does an impression of Formby, saying (in an accent similar to Formby's) "come and get your hanging rope while there's still some left." The novel Last Human also mentions him as the only thing potentially more ugly than the Snugiraffe GELF.
• In series 4, episode 6 of Skins, several of Formby's songs are included as background music. In the same episode, JJ Jones owns a ukulele and serenades his girlfriend Lara by performing "True" by Spandau Ballet, with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.
• British comedian Eddie Izzard makes reference to George Formby (instead of George Foreman) in a fictional boxing match versus Muhammad Ali, in his live video Definite Article. Izzard pantomimes being punched while playing a ukulele.
• In the Distant War episode of the television documentary series The World at War, Formby is shown in a newsreel performing "Imagine Me on the Maginot Line"' for a small group of British soldiers. This newsreel can be seen on YouTube, along with other videos of Formby performances.
• In series 6, episode 1 of the British television show Dead Ringers, Formby was portrayed as the secret weapon of the popular British indie rock band Arctic Monkeys, with the final scene going into a mix between "Leaning on the Lamp Post" and Arctic Monkey's song, "Mardy Bum". Jon Culshaw played Formby in the scene.
• In the 2011 film, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the song "Mr Wu is a Window Cleaner Now" is heard on the radio when a call is placed to Peter Guillam.

Selected songs[link]

• "Chinese Laundry Blues" (1932)
• "The Isle of Man" (1932)
• "With My Little Ukulele in My Hand" (1933)
• "The Window Cleaner"/"When I'm Cleaning Windows" (1936)
• "Leaning on a Lamppost" (1937)
• "Hi Tiddly Hi Ti Island" (1937)
• "The Lancashire Toreador" (1937)
• "With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock" (1937)
• "Tan Tan Tivvy Tally-Ho!" (1938, written by Arthur Le Clerq)
• "They Can't Fool Me" (1938)
• "Mother, What'll I do Now?" (1938)
• "Our Sergeant Major" (1938)
• "Imagine Me on the Maginot Line" (1939)
• "It's Turned Out Nice Again" (1939)
• "Mr Wu's a Window Cleaner Now" (1939)
• "My Grandad's Flannelette Nightshirt" (1939)
• "Count Your Blessings And Smile" (1940)
• "Auntie Maggie's Remedy" (1941)
• "Bless 'Em All" (1941)
• "Mr Wu's is Now an Air Raid Warden" (1942)
• "You Don't Need A Licence For That" (1946)
• "Happy Go Lucky Me" (1960)

Filmography[link]

• By the Shortest of Heads (1915)
• Boots! Boots! (1934)
• Off the Dole (1935)
• George Formby Cavalcade (1935, highlights from first two feature films of 1934-35)
• No Limit (1935)
• Keep Your Seats Please (1936)
• Feather Your Nest (1937)
• Keep Fit (1937)
• Christmas Greetings of 1937 (1937)
• I See Ice (1938)
• Christmas Greetings of 1938 (1938)
• It's in the Air (1938)
• Trouble Brewing (1939)
• Come On George! (1939)
• Let George Do It (1940)
• Spare a Copper (1940), also known as Call a Cop
• Turned Out Nice Again (1941)
• South American George (1941)
• Much Too Shy (1942)
• Get Cracking (1943)
• Bell Bottom George (1943/44)
• He Snoops To Conquer (1945)
• I Didn't Do It! (1945)
• George in Civvy Street (1946)
• The Friday Show (BBC Television, 1960; restored 1994)

See also[link]

• Regal Zonophone Records

Box office rating[link]

For a number of years, British film exhibitors voted him among the top ten British stars at the box office via an annual poll in the Motion Picture Herald.

• 1936 - 4th^[23]
• 1938 - 1st^[24]
• 1940 - 1st (5th most popular star over all)^[25]
• 1945 - 9th^[26]

References[link]