Closeted Carry On star who dreamed of a fireman rescue

The Carry On films are ‘abysmal movies, let’s make no mistake about that’, writes Roger Lewis, in his waspishly funny and deeply touching, short reissued biography of one of the Carry Ons’ most-loved actors, Charles Hawtrey, who acted in 23 of the films but is chiefly remembered as Private Widdle of the Queen’s Own Third Foot and Mouth Regiment in Carry On Up The Khyber.

The Man who was Private Widdle is available now from the Mail Bookshop 

The standard of filming was shoddy yet Lewis insists that those films, with their coy fetishisation of bedpans and bedbaths, encapsulate the tawdry, small-town Englishness of the mid-20th century almost as poignantly as the poems of John Betjeman and Philip Larkin. There’s a deep poignancy, too, about the real life of Hawtrey, whom everyone wanted to be as cheerful as he was in the films – but who was actually, as fellow Carry On star Joan Sims said, ‘just this very sad and lonely little man’. On set, he had such a knack for comedy that just ‘by slightly tilting a hat brim, or swirling a stick… he could make all clothes look eccentric’. Lewis rates him more highly as an actor than the over-acting Kenneth Williams, whose ‘flared nostrils threatened to engulf you like railway tunnels’.

But ‘behind Hawtrey’s apparent imperturbability lay a darker ambience, a warped world of irrational needs, ambiguousness and sexual anxiety’. He was petulant, and refused roles if he wasn’t given top billing. It grieved him that he was typecast as a Carry On actor, and ‘never really got anywhere in terms of status and glory’.

‘Feeling unappreciated and ignored’, he retired to Deal, Kent. A closet homosexual, he led a lonely, drunken existence. Two and a half bottles of port every night, plus whisky, was the norm. Breakfast was five double gin and vermouths. He could actually act brilliantly as a dipsomaniac, when genuinely drunk, as he did in At Your Convenience and Abroad. (Lewis names the films without their ‘Carry On’ prefixes.) But the reality was not funny. He was such a trouble-maker that several Deal pubs barred him from entering.

He was attracted to burly young men. When his house caught fire, it gave him an excuse to indulge a fantasy: he ran upstairs because he wanted to be carried downstairs by a fireman, ‘and he insisted it had to be the biggest fireman’.

‘Hawtrey’, Lewis writes, ‘is a minor figure from whom it is possible to extrapolate a major theme: the cold hard nothingness of existence’.