Will Hay

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Image:Will-Hay.jpg William Thompson Hay (December 6 1888 – April 18 1949) was a British comedian, actor and amateur astronomer. He was born in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, England.

He was trained as an engineer and joined a firm of engineers but at the age of 21 he gave up that profession for acting.

He had a relatively brief screen career: by the time he made his first film he was in his mid-40s and an established music hall artist, and his last role came less than a decade later. But between 1934 and 1943 he was a prolific and popular film comedian. He was credited on several films as a writer or co-ordinator, and was arguably the dominant "author" of all the films in which he appeared, in that they were built around his persona and depended on the character and routines he had developed over years on the stage.

He worked at the British film studios of Elstree, then Gainsborough, then Ealing; the Gainsborough period was the most consistently successful, particularly when he worked with the team of Marcel Varnel (director), Val Guest and Marriott Edgar (writers), and Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt (supporting cast) - as on the railway film Oh, Mr Porter! (1937), his most fondly remembered picture with its catchphrase, 'The next train's gone!', spoken by Marriott as the decrepit old deputy stationmaster. Just as Tony Hancock, in some ways a descendant of Hay, would later cut himself off from sidekick Sid James, Hay felt impelled to break up the partnership with Moffatt and Marriott and was, likewise, never quite the same again, although The Goose Steps Out for Ealing (1942) was an effective anti-Nazi piece of slapstick, and My Learned Friend was a masterpiece of black comedy that some regard as his best.

Aside from his day job as a comedian, Hay was a dedicated and respected amateur astronomer. His personal observatory sat in his garden in Mill Hill, the dome very visible from the main Hendon Road. He became a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1932. He is noted for having discovered a white spot on the planet Saturn in 1933 [MNRAS 94 (1933) 85]; the spot lasted for a few months and then faded. He also measured the positions of comets with a micrometer he built himself, and designed and built a blink comparator. He wrote the book Through My Telescope in 1935. At his death, his telescopes were bequeathed to University College, London, and are still used for teaching astronomy.

He was also one of Britain's first private pilots and gave flying lessons to Amy Johnson. He was a polyglot and before entering the acting profession full time, was an accomplished translator - fluent in French, German, Latin, Italian, Norwegian and Afrikaans.

A favourite trick of his for friends, he would write rapidly seeming nonsense on a blackboard, look at it thoughtfully for a minute with a puzzled expression, then turn the blackboard upside down, and there would be a perfectly written statement of some kind. And he could take someone's dictation, and repeat the trick.

In 1943, Will Hay received treatment for cancer, and he returned to his roots in radio.

The 1/2 hour weekly Will Hay Programme began in August 1944, and was broadcast live from the Paris Cinema, which still exists in a basement just off Piccadilly Circus. There, St. Michael's schoolmaster Dr. Muffin (referred to by his students as Old Crumpet) barely kept a kind of order from his desk, perched slightly higher from his unruly students, Charles Hawtrey who played the cheeky Smart (later to go on to the Carry On films), John Clark, a child actor who played the annoying swot D'arcy Minor (later to gain fame as Just William), and an air force recruit, Billy Nichols, who on his days off played the really dumb schoolboy, Beckett. The series lasted about four months, and was prematurely cancelled, owing, it was said, to a dispute with the BBC over scripts. But it found a continuing life on the music hall stage, at the top of the bill at London's Victoria Palace.

The cast was brought together one last time for an all variety anticipatory celebration at midnight May 4, 1945 for the Royal Family and many military notables at a private function at the Life Guards barracks in Windsor, which featured the leading comics of the day. The war in Europe ended just four days later. This may also have been Will Hay's last performance prior to his illness, and his son Will Hay, jr. carried on his father's act for a while.

In 1947 he had a stroke which left him physically crippled. He died after a further stroke in 1949.