George Formby

This article is about the Ukulele player, singer and comedian. For his father (1875–1921), see George Formby, Sr.
George Formby OBE

Publicity photo of Formby possibly taken in the 1940s
Background information
Birth name George Hoy Booth
Also known as George Hoy
Born (1904-05-26)26 May 1904
Wigan, Lancashire, England, UK
Died 6 March 1961(1961-03-06) (aged 56)
Preston, Lancashire, England, UK
Genres Oldies, swing, dance-hall
Occupations Musician, singer-songwriter,
comedian, actor, entertainer
Instruments Vocals, ukulele, banjulele
Years active 1921 (1921)–61 (61)
Labels Various[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
Associated acts George Formby, Sr.

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

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. 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

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 1923 while he was appearing in music hall in Castleford, Yorkshire he met Beryl Ingham (born in 1901 in Accrington, Lancashire), a champion clogdancer and actress, who had won All England Step Dancing Title at the age of 11 and had formed a dancing act with her sister, May, called “The Two Violets”. They married in Formby’s birth town of Wigan, Lancashire the following year.

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.

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, and which he had allegedly taken up as a hobby and first played it on stage for a bet. 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 Cliffe and Fred 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. 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

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 films 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”. Between 1934 and 1945 Formby was the top comedian in British cinema, and at the height of his film popularity (1939, when he was Britain’s number-one film star of all genres]), 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,[16] and entertained troops with Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) in Europe and North Africa during World War II. He received an OBE in 1946. 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”.

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?”

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. His final television appearance, broadcast in December 1960, was a 35-minute solo spot on BBC Television’s The Friday Show.

Death

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”. Two months later in the spring of 1961 he became engaged to Pat Howson, a 36-year-old schoolteacher whom he had known since the 1930s, declaring that he had achieved a happiness which had never existed with Beryl.

Formby 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.

Playing styles

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.

Tributes

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.

Here is George singing…

Ps…He was once banned by the BBC..!!

This makes him quite cool..

Copyright Peter Mowbray Live in Blackpool