Godfrey's Ghost: From Father to Son - Nicolas Ridley > Reviews (1)

‘Godfrey’s Ghost’ is part biography, part memoir. As the author explains in his Prologue, it is a book written about his father Arnold mainly with his own young son in mind. Arnold Ridley (1896-1984) was well known before the Second World War as the dramatist and author of ‘Ghost Train’, though there were other less successful plays. As an actor he had a late flowering on TV in the late 1960s and 1970s as Private Godfrey, the oldest platoon member of the Home Guard in ‘Dad’s Army’. In his last years he wrote his memoirs, ‘The Train and other Ghosts’. As Nicolas admits, the manuscript sadly ran out of steam, and after several very good chapters in which Arnold described his early life, it became ‘muddied, muddled, rambling’, as if he was ‘aching for the end’. Several publishers rejected it, and it remained more or less untouched as a family memento. Now Nicolas has taken extracts and used it to add a first-person dimension to his own memoirs of his father.

At first I found the narrative of the book slightly disjointed. It begins with a few father-to-son one-to-ones, then goes back to 1925 when Arnold was taking his first tentative steps as a playwright. Only in chapter three do we start at 1896 and his birth. After that, we settle into what is on the whole a more straightforward biography-cum-memoir covering his early life and service during World War I. We have a touching portrait of the generation of young men in 1914, of which he was one, all potential soldiers, who welcomed the declaration of war with great enthusiasm. Some months later, while stationed at Plymouth with every prospect of being sent out to the western front to replace a regiment who had been killed at Ypres, he walked up to a high point above the town, looking in the direction of Bath, his home town, staying there most of the night as he thought about the horrors which lay in store for most if not all of them - ‘the saddest point in his life.’ During the battle of the Somme he was badly wounded in his left arm and hand, and while in the field hospital one night he woke up to find somebody kneeling on him, sewing him into a sheet. He had been sleeping so heavily that it was assumed he had died and was ready for a hasty burial.

After the war came his career as a playwright and actor. ‘Ghost Train’ was initially a success, but once it had made a couple of failed provincial tours, he was persuaded to sell the amateur rights. Had he been able to foresee that it would be performed by many an amateur company as well as being revived professionally – these days it is said to be staged somewhere every night of the year – he would have been able to retire comfortably on the proceeds. He wrote about thirty other plays, although they are hardly remembered today.

During the Second World War he served with the British Expeditionary Force, before being discharged on health grounds. Various other acting roles in theatre, film and radio (including ‘The Archers’) followed, but he was in his seventies when he found himself a household name in ‘Dad’s Army’, the oldest member of the cast.

Ironically in one episode set partly in a graveyard, James Beck, who played the spiv Private Walker, turned to him as he said, ’Hardly worth your leaving, is it, Arnold?’ Although he was one of the youngest, Beck became the first to die in real life. There are suggestions of rivalry with the rather more acerbic John Laurie (the irascible Private Frazer), and hints that they did not like each other much, though we are given no specific anecdotes of any sparks between them.

Although the programme was one of the most successful sitcoms ever, it proved a mixed blessing for some of the actors, who found themselves typecast and had to wait a long time before being offered more challenging roles in other series. For Arnold, it was a case of being confronted by thoughtless fans in the street with ’Permission to be excused, sir!’ which quickly became rather tiresome.

Nicolas, who was born just after World War II, the only child of an already middle-aged father, comments that as a young adult he was hardly aware of the first few series of ‘Dad’s Army’. How, he asks, can he explain his extraordinary lack of curiosity in the TV show that was changing the lives of his parents? Was it a kind of jealousy that made him unwilling to accept that they were living their lives without him?

This is for the most part a very gentle book, with plenty of poignant if not sad moments between the tales of success, and ends on a none too cheerful note. At 88 Arnold was too frail to stay in the family home any longer. His wife was find him increasingly hard to look after, so he went rather reluctantly to spend his last days at Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors in North London, where he died after a fall with the family unable to reach him in time.

If you’re looking for a biography of Arnold Ridley – and I'm fairly certain there is no other – this does the job quite well, if not perfectly. It is however partly a family memoir, with fairly frequent flashbacks (or even flash forwards) and has to be judged as such. Sometimes I found the inconsequential family episodes, mainly father and son exchanges, rather intrusive. With all due respect to the author, some years later I suspect a theatrical biographer will approach the subject and produce a rather more objective account. Nevertheless this is a very pleasant, gentle read about somebody who was for most of his long life just as gentle as his most famous small screen character.