The Man Who Was Private Widdle: Charles Hawtrey 1914-1988
Roger Lewis
Faber £9.99, pp115
The man who was Private Widdle, as any aficionado of Sixties British popular culture knows, was Charles Hawtrey. Carry On Up the Khyber, in which he played the part, was typical of its genre. The 1968 film features the Queen's Own Third Foot and Mouth Regiment and Widdle was patrolling the Khyber Pass before he lost his woollen pants to the Khasi of Kalabar.
The Carry On films offered the same sort of cultural glue in 1960s and 1970s Britain that soap operas do today. And Hawtrey - whether organising sandcastle competitions for legionnaires in Follow That Camel or as the Duc de Pommefrit in Don't Lose Your Head - was a central character in most.
He had a penchant for invention, allowing people to believe he was the son of the actor-manager Sir Charles Hawtrey. His early career was, like that of his co-star Kenneth Williams, more serious than the work for which he became best known. Years of virtual unemployment were relieved only by the arrival in 1958 of the films that made him famous. Later, becoming typecast was a source of profound frustration. But unlike Williams, Hawtrey didn't have the comforts of literature, or close friends, or a diary, and he turned early to the bottle.
Lewis begins to explore Hawtrey's personality but in relatively peremptory fashion. He was desperately frugal, bringing sacks of carrots from Yorkshire to Kent because vegetables were cheaper up north, and investing his money with the Royal Bank of Scotland believing that Scots were more likely to mind his cash carefully.
There are other themes that Lewis touches upon, but then swims past. Hawtrey upset fans all his life by telling them to 'piss off' when they asked for autographs. But it was part of his frustration at the celebrity without real financial reward that Carry On films offered. Actors such as Hawtrey and Barbara Windsor were being paid much the same in 1972 as they had earned in 1958, which led to an obsession with position on the billing. It is something that Windsor would almost certainly have been happy to discuss. She was - apparently - not asked.
This is not the only evidence that the book is not as intimately sourced as Lewis might have us believe. The revelation that Hawtrey's 'average evening tippling comprised two-and-a-half bottles of port, a quantity of whisky and a pot of tea' comes, unattributed, from Williams's diary. And the research is casual, too. Hawtrey's father, Lewis informs us, was an engineer: 'Though whether this meant he was a sanitary engineer, an inventor like Brunel, or whether he simply mended cars, I've no idea.'
Roy Jenkins, or even Antonia Fraser, it ain't. The cheery skimming wouldn't matter so much if Lewis were not trying to construct a meaningful narrative about Hawtrey's personality. He ends up hinting at the same sort of cod-psychological conclusion as John Lahr's biography of Joe Orton: sad homosexual, engulfed by lack of fulfilment, tragedy inevitably beckoned. The tragedy for Hawtrey was to become old, even more drunk and lonely. But this is hardly exceptional for retired actors. This catalogue of misery is topped, for Lewis, by the fact that Hawtrey 'ended his days on the Kent coast'. Lawks!
In spite of its lacunae, this brief book rewards reading and it serves as a tribute to an actor who, for all his aggressive eccentricity, was an ensemble player in films that were much, much more than the sum of their - often rather ropey - parts.