Remembering Will Hay
Will Hay was an English comedian famous for his schoolmaster persona that started out in music hall and variety and later transferred to radio and films becoming popular across the world. He was at his height from the nineteen twenties to the forties. He died in 1949.
The basic idea was simple. Will
Hay was an incompetent schoolmaster who had attained his teaching position by
fraud. He bumbled through his lessons. His class was made up of dim schoolboys
who were so ignorant they were unable to graduate school. Therefore, they were
all played by adults and sometimes older adults at that.
The ‘joke’ was that Will Hay was
useless and the schoolboys knew that; and Will Hay knew that they knew. The
boys ‘ragged’ him endlessly; that is they played tricks on him.
Of course, being a schoolmaster
Will Hay needed to be dressed in mortar-board cap and gown and to constantly
carry a whippy cane.
Despite many threats the cane was
rarely seen in action and when it was it was for comedy effect as in this
photograph from the film Boys Will Be Boys where the boys have tampered with
the cane to make it useless.
Two of the schoolmaster films Good Morning Boys and Boys Will Be Boys appear to be out of copyright and can be viewed
and downloaded on the Internet (click on the titles).
A 1944 episode of The Will Hay
Programme originally broadcast on BBC radio includes his antics at St Michael’s
School and is available on YouTube.
Will Hay’s schoolmaster character
also transferred to children’s comics. Stories in The Pilot had him as a
bumbling schoolmaster at Bendover College. The stories were written by the writer best known as Frank Richards, who also wrote the famous Billy Bunter stories (more here).
Unlike with the films in these
stories Will Hay was constantly dusting the trousers of his schoolboys.
Hamilton under his many pen names was never afraid to have a boy touching his
toes or bent over a desk for a stiff Six.
The stories in The Pilot,
some of which more than forty years later were collected together as a book
called Tales of Bendover College (Howard Baker Press, 1981), were comical in
intent. The jokes were deliberately corny.
The boys of whom Will Hay was Form master, included a
Dicky Bird, the Captain; Issy Gumming and the two cads and black sheep, Reggie
Pyke and Fruity Snell. Will Hay was, of course, ragged unmercifully but he
always managed to hold his own by sheer cunning and great wit. Although a
buffoon in appearance, he was shrewd.
One of the tricks the boys played
tricks on Will Hay (as in the films) involved his cane.
The Pilot, No 73, 6 March 1937
In other stories the so-called
plotline was contrived to reach these sorts of conclusions.
The Pilot No 106, 9 October 1937
The Pilot No 109, 30 October 1937
The Tales of Bendover College
stories from The Pilot are available to read or download free-of-charge here.
Here’s an extract from one of the
stories (The Pilot No 106, 3 April 1937). The boys have decided to ‘rag’ Will Hay
and if he retaliates they will go on strike.
Form-master Will Hay, beaming all over his frontispiece,
sailed into the Form-room, his mortar-board aslant on his head, his
nose-nippers perched at a precarious angle on his nose.
‘Did I hear that beautiful spring bird, the Beaky Pykewart,
singing its little song as I came in?’ he asked, tapping his nose, and peering
over his nippers. He’ll be singing another sort of song pretty soon the little
squirt. H’m! Quite so! What would you like to learn this morning boys?’
The angel-faced Piper rose, and looked timidly at Will Hay.
‘Please sir, can you teach grammar?’
Will Hay hitched up his nose-nippers and gave him a severe
look. He was no longer taken in by Piper’s angelic expression.
‘You’re going to start your backchat, my lad! Well, I’ll buy
it! Suppose I can teach grammar, what then?’
‘Go and teach your grammar to suck eggs!’ yelled the form.
‘Yes,! No doubt! Most amusing!’ Will stared at them with a
frozen grin. ‘Well just for that, we’ll do a morning’s grammar if it kills me!
Well start with a sentence! Take a hundred lines each!’
‘Aaaa-tishooo!’
Reggie Pyke broke into an almighty sneeze, and winked at the
others to follow. In a moment, sneezes burst out from all parts of the room.
Will Hay rubbed his chin, and grinned dubiously.
‘Seems to be catching!’ he remarked. ‘Something else will be
catching if this goes on! Pyke you little squirt, if I hear another hoot from
your snoot – h’m – sneeze, I mean – I’ll –’
‘Aaaa-tishooo!’ was Pyke’s reply. ‘I – I think someone’s
blowing snuff about,’ he said surlily.
‘Snuff of that,’ replied Will. ‘The next one who sneezes
gets six on the pants.’
As he spoke, a bit of dust floated into his nasal organ, and
he felt it coming. He gasped and turned red in the face. The Form stopped
sneezing and watched him breathlessly.
‘Aaa-aaa-aaa ---’ gasped Will struggling hard.
‘Aaaaaa-tishoooo!’
The sneeze nearly broke all the windows in the room.
The grinning boys watched him as he wiped his eyes, hitched
up his nose-nippers, and stared over the Form with a solemn face.
‘H’m! Yes! Undoubtedly!’ He scratched his chin and grinned.
‘You little squirts think you’ve got me, don’t you? Smart, my lad, kindly
beetle out here.
Jerry Smart slid out cautiously to the front.
‘Take this cane,’ commanded Will, ‘and give me six on the
pants! When I say a thing I mean it.’
‘You bet your sweet life!’ howled Jerry, rolling up his
sleeves. ‘Bend over and touch your toes, then.’
‘Lay it on Jerry!’ yelled Reggie Pyke.
‘Shut up!’ bawled Will Hay. ‘Next one who speaks gets a
tanning!’ He turned to Jerry. ‘Are you ready?’
‘You bet I am!’
‘Yes; but you shouldn’t have spoken because you’re down for
a tanning now!’ He grinned cheerily at Smart. ‘Don’t worry my lad! I shall lay
it on you just as hard as you lay it on me!’
He then bent over and touched his toes, while Jerry Smart
did a lot of quick thinking. He knew that Will Hay had got him, and he had to
admire the slickness of it.
Reluctantly, he gave Will Hay six light flicks with the
cane, after which Will returned the compliment, with a grin, and they were all
square again. Reggie Pyke whispered to the other fellows who were near:
‘Keep on sneezing! He can’t wallop the lot of us!’
A tornado of sneezing broke out again.
The boys grinned as Will Hay sat, frozen, at his desk,
seemingly at a loss. He couldn’t single out any one boy to speak to, for all of
them were sneezing; and when he bawled to them to shut up, they merely sneezed
all the harder. It was a problem, but problems like that were Will Hay’s meat.
‘Pyke, you little wart, come out and bend over that stool!’
‘Not likely!’ snarled Reggie. ‘You always pick on me! I’m
not doing it more than anyone else.’
‘H’m! Yes! I see! But I told you to stand out because I like
you – ahem! If you don’t want to move ---’ Reggie Pyke slipped out to the
front, with a howl. Will grinned at him cheerily. ‘Now bend over this stool! I
shan’t touch you until I hear another trombone solo – sneeze, I mean – from the
Form. Then you’ll get a swipe, and you can settle it up with the fellow who
snoze. You follow me?’
Reggie Pyke bent over, with a scowl, while Will Hay, cane in
hand, waited for another sneeze. Three came along at once.
Whack, whack, whack!
The cane rang cheerily on Pyke’s pants.
‘That’s three from Fragson, Smythe, and Grubb, with love,’
chuckled Will. ‘If you would like to poke them in the snoot – h’m – damage
their features you’d better do so at once!’
Reggie Pyke sprang to his feet, roaring.
‘Stop it you rotters!’ he bawled. ‘The next beast who
sneezes gets one from me!’
‘That,’ agreed Will, ‘is the material to administer to them,
and with knobs on!’
There was no more sneezing, and Pyke went sullenly back to
his place.
For
more on Comics or Story Papers, click here
Traditional School Discipline
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