Nicolas Ridley’s play at the Mission Theatre examines the rich and varied life of his father, Dad’s Army actor and Bathonian, Arnold Ridley – better known as Private Godfrey. Words by Chris Allsop. Image above: Arnold Ridley as Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army. Private Godfrey image credit: Mirrorpix, Alamy
The challenge of writing a play about my father,” says writer Nicolas Ridley, “is that his life was so full of triumphs, disasters, and reinventions that getting it into a hundred minutes is almost impossible.”
We’re talking in the art deco surrounds of the café of the Everyman Cinema – a suitably theatrical setting to discuss his father, Arnold Ridley, best known to millions as the gently dithering Private Godfrey in the BBC’s famous television sitcom Dad’s Army. Following a successful London run, Nic’s one-man show, Were You Anyone Before Dad’s Army? is about to open at Bath’s Mission Theatre – a homecoming of sorts for his father, a man whose life was intertwined with this city.
Nic himself is genial, reflective and tenderly funny in person while recounting stories about his father. And the stories are astonishing, with Arnold’s CV offering a near-embarrassment of narrative riches for his writer son to tap: playwright, war veteran, Intelligence Officer, Home Guard member, and latterly one of the most beloved comic creations in British television history.
The Ghost Train
Born in Bath in 1896, Arnold grew up in Walcot, in an environment that one might think would discourage any thoughts of treading the boards. His father was an enterprising Cockney who’d relocated to the West Country and ran a shoe shop on Manvers Street, while Arnold’s mother, as Nic recalls, wasn’t crazy about the arts.
“My grandmother’s people were very strict Methodists,” Nic says. “Fierce, really. Anti-drink, very upright. They regarded the theatre as, more or less, the work of the devil.”
However, demonstrating the inner steel that would see him succeed, Arnold pursued a theatrical career. In his early twenties, he headed to London, determined to make his name on the stage. Success was elusive. Roles were scarce, money scarcer, and by his mid-twenties he’d returned to Bath, penniless and chastened, to work alongside his father.
Fortunately, scarcity of a different kind helped imbue Arnold’s dream with fresh momentum. While enrolled at the University of Bristol to train as a teacher, he joined the Drama Society. “They were desperately short of male actors,” Nic says. “So, he ended up playing all the great Shakespearean roles.”
Just as a career appeared to beckon, the First World War intervened. Arnold was wounded at the Somme and eventually invalided out. The physical injuries healed; the psychological ones lingered.
“He suffered from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder,” Nic says carefully. “But while he was the gentlest, kindest father, he was also incredibly tough. At some point he realised that he had to snap himself out of the depression and melancholy – and he did. The strength of the man still astonishes me.”
After the war, Arnold set about rebuilding his career with almost heroic persistence. He wrote to virtually every theatre company in the country seeking work. Engagements followed – Birmingham, then Plymouth – before disaster struck once more: all his savings were lost in an ill-fated investment in a Bath-based theatre company.
…His outward frailty raised an
awkward question: would he live long enough to complete a full series? (of Dad’s Army)
Once more, he found himself back home, broke. For three years he worked as a salesman in his father’s shop. “He absolutely hated it,” Nic says. “And whenever he could, he’d escape upstairs above the shop and start writing plays.”
One of those plays was The Ghost Train, destined to become Arnold’s greatest playwriting success. When it reached the West End, it broke records for its run, was translated into seventeen languages, adapted into multiple films, and continues to be staged nearly a century later.
Called Up
Alongside his playwriting success, Arnold continued working as an actor. During this time, he was always involved in the city’s community life, as his stint as President of Bath Rugby Club in the early 1950s demonstrates.
It was over a decade later, however, that he would get his big break. A rumour reached him that producer David Croft – the man behind Hi-de-Hi! and Are You Being Served? – was assembling a new sitcom that required, as Nic puts it, “a lot of old men”.
Croft had previously seen Arnold perform as a tailor’s assistant in another of his sitcoms, Hugh and I. When Arnold auditioned, Croft and his co-creator Jimmy Perry were impressed, but did have concerns. His outward frailty raised an awkward question: would he live long enough to complete a full series?
As it transpired, Arnold, the only member of the cast who had fought in both world wars and served in the Home Guard, would go on to appear in all 80 episodes of Dad’s Army across nine series. For Nic, who was travelling and living abroad when Dad’s Army began, his father’s transformation into a national treasure was a vague, distant reality.
While Nic himself was always interested in the theatre – acting and directing during his own life – he chose a different path, working as an English-language teacher abroad before a career in publishing.
“My mother used to say, ‘You’re far too sensible to be an actor,’” Nic recalls. “Which is a very effective way of putting you off. And seeing your father live with constant financial anxiety – waiting for the phone to ring with the offer of an audition – didn’t help. As a child, I saw none of the glamour. Only the worry.”
The idea of writing about his father came much later, in 2017, when a director suggested Arnold’s life would make an ideal one-man show. The result is Were You Anyone Before Dad’s Army? – a portrait of the long, complex, and often hilarious life story of the man behind the gentle Godfrey.
Before we part, Nic offers a final anecdote about his father that seems to succinctly weave all of Arnold Ridley’s goodness, generosity and proximity to genuine, life-threatening danger into one neat story. “One Christmas,” he says, “in my parents’ flat in Highgate, we had dinner with both of my father’s ex-wives.”
He smiles. “I think that gives you the measure of the man.”
Nic Ridley’s play, Were you Anyone before Dad’s Army? is on at The Mission Theatre from 19-21 March. For further details and tickets visit: bathboxoffice.org.uk