Spotlight on George Formby's Get Cracking 7

More Musings

During the course of ‘Get Cracking’ we get other glimpses of wartime initiatives. While introducing his new tank to the people of Minor Wallop, George gets back into the sulking Mary’s good books by using it to help her to sell saving stamps. The government encouraged people to use their national savings scheme in order to fund the war. Stamps could be purchased for various amounts and stuck onto a card. Full cards could then be exchanged for a bond which attracted a good interest rate. This use of a tank to help publicise them reflected real life, where communities might be encouraged to buy enough stamps to meet the cost of a Spitfire.

 Strangest wartime glimpse of them all in this film is the young girl evacuee that is billeted at George’s house.  For the purposes of the film it appears that they live together alone, something that is highly incongruous to modern eyes. Perhaps another example of Formby trying, but being no longer able to pass himself off as a youngster. Having said that, there is one scene where a housekeeper figures appears to be hovering in the background, waiting to take the young girl inside.  But still, would a single little girl have been billeted with a single man? I’m torn between finding this hard to believe and that knowledge that evacuees were often difficult to place – and perhaps some were put into unsuitable houses just to get them off the billeting officer’s hands. Or is it all artistic licence?

My new collection of short stories is available for download now. Three of the five stories are set in wartime Skipton, Yorkshire. Each one was inspired by a Yorkshire Post newspaper article about something connected with the Belle Vue Mill, home of the Sylko cotton reel.

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Spotlight on George Formby's Get Cracking 6

Tank Top

After George’s disgrace over failing to secure the spare gun for Minor Wallop Home Guard, he must redeem himself. This is what George Formby films are all about, after all. And this redemption stays on the theme of weaponry by George constructing himself a tank. That’s right lads and lasses, a tank.  In civilian life, George is a mechanic, running his own garage that currently boasts no petrol and no spares. So, he is able to spend his days converting his work truck with corrugated iron pinched from a chicken coop. Back in the platoon’s good books, George and his tank (christened Mary Mk 1) are commissioned to represent Minor Wallop in manoeuvres against Major Wallop. Being on the receiving end of Ronald Shiner’s dirty tricks, George gets properly shot at by the real army while he is in the process of invading the neighbouring village.  But of course, George rolls into Major Wallop triumphant and gets a promotion to boot.  Finally, the two platoons are told that they are to merge – which they agree to do quite happily – and they begin making plans to trounce another neighbouring settlement’s platoon. After all at the bottom of it, they are all one against Jerry.

Formby sang about Frank on his Tank being a Swank - then built his own!

Along the way, there is a reminder of a more sinister aspect of the Home Guard’s manoeuvres – that is, what they have been formed to do. George has difficulty in getting his tank going because he is missing a rotor arm for the truck’s engine.  We learn during the process that rotor arms had been removed from the engines of vehicles in case of invasion – an early immobiliser. The invasion that was so anticipated in the early 1940s never took place, so we don’t fully know what tactics the Home Guard would have used to hold enemy forces back…but this little part of the storyline gives us one clue and it is momentarily sobering – invasion really could have happened, and how many of these parochial soldiers that we now laugh at every week in ‘Dad’s Army’ and in this film would have given up their lives?

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Spotlight on George Formby's Get Cracking 5

Home Guard Games

The story within the film ‘Get Cracking’ is all rather like an extended episode of ‘Dad’s Army’ and one wonders how well Croft and Perry knew this film. George Formby plays a member (occasional Corporal) of the Home Guard in the village of Minor Wallop. The story begins, after the initial scene setting, when it is discovered that a gun has been left at the local railway station goods depot without a label. A porter telephones to see if it belongs to their platoon, or to the one at Major Wallop. George is immediately despatched on his motor bike to go and claim it before the Major Wallopers hear about it. But the Home Guard office is situated in the back room of the pub, and little do they know, but the barmaid is a fifth columnist. She fancies Ronald Shiner’s character, who is part of Major Wallop’s platoon. The barmaid telephones Shiner and delivers the information on the gun in the hope of a back row liaison at the flicks in return. Shiner’s character sets out for the gun too, and the usual trademark Formby chaos ensues as they collide, then fight to get there first. George loses the gun and to add insult to injury he is accused of giving the game away. He is stripped of his stripe and is in disgrace. So, what with the local Home Guard rivalry between platoons and the acute lack of proper weapons there is more than a touch of Dad’s Army here.

You can have a gun and no uniform, or you can have a uniform and no gun, but you can't have both.

 Of course, I’m not accusing Croft and Perry of plagiarism – the point is that they both reflect the Home Guard as it was, each corroborating the other’s evidence.  It is known that the lack of available uniform and weaponry beset the Local Defence volunteers from the beginning. But I think that it also shows what we all suspect about men of a certain age. Get them together in a unit that has to compete with another one, then they will try their best to outdo each other at all costs as if they were back in the playground!

Mention must also be made at this point of the welcome appearance of E V H Emmett’s voice as the film opens. The famous tones of the Gaumont News narrator (well known to Carry on fans as the voiceover in ‘Carry On Cleo’) is used to commentate on the initial formation of the Home Guard in Major and Minor Wallop, describing how one got weapons while the other got uniform. He really gets the film going with a smile and sets the scene brilliantly.

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Spotlight on George Formby's Get Cracking 4

Dinah Might

George’s potential squeeze in ‘Get Cracking’ is Dinah Sheridan, aged 23 and at the start of her career. Dinah will always be best known to me (and probably much of my generation) as the mother in the 1970s film of ‘The Railway Children’ and to see her so early on in her life is a happy curiosity. But she does seem to be rather an odd choice for the role of Mary Pemberton. Both George and the actor who plays Mary’s father (Lancashire born Frank Pettingell) sound as northern and as common as can be, while she talks like she has half a pound of plums in her gob and it’s just too noticeable and incongruous. I have to really try hard to believe that snooty Mary fancies dippy George. Lovely as she is, I can’t think why they chose her. I wonder if it was an attempt to appeal to the officers as well as the privates in the Home Guard audience?

"I can't tell a word you're saying"

A much better bit of casting is the glorious appearance from one of my favourite bit-part actresses, Irene Handl. She ramps up the dizzy, wandering in and out of the Home Guard office wittering on about “our Ben”, a mythical character who is always elsewhere. My favourite part is where she comes in seeking the teapot, and finds that their Ben, the tidy soul, has put it in the filing cabinet (under T of course). She adds a great bit of down-to-earth fun to the film and it would be much duller without her. Here we see on screen the forerunner of those Carry On characters that Irene was to so memorably play over a decade later on.

Her role also serves to re-inforce the message that these Local Defence Volunteers were ordinary men with other lives running parallel. Much is made at the beginning of the film of the trouble of fitting guard duties around social lives – you can’t put so and so down for Tuesday because that’s his night at the flicks and so on. The Home Guard had jobs, meetings to attend, courting to do and dippy sisters chasing round after them. It puts the British in a good light – that men were doing this job out of choice, and not because it had been dictated to them.

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