The opening of Me and My Girl in 1937 was one of the most notable landmarks in my grandfather’s career. It got off to a shaky start at the Victoria Palace and was in danger of closing until a BBC outside broadcast unit went to the Palace one night. The audience at home heard the laughter from the theatre and, above all, they heard The Lambeth Walk, a show stopper if ever there was one. The next morning queues ran around the block; Me and My Girl went on to run for five years. King George VI saw it three times.
I was reminded of this when my friend Danny Baker gave me a doll for Christmas. It was a rag doll of Lupino “Nipper” Lane, made as a souvenir for that 1937 production. Lane was a music-hall and silent movie star who commissioned my grandfather, Noel Gay, to write the music for Me and My Girl, a show featuring his costermonger alter ego, Bill Snibson.
I never met my grandfather — he died four years before I was born — but I am currently producing a new production of Me and My Girl that has just begun a tour in Plymouth before heading for the West End next year, 70 years after its debut. There has never been a biography about Gay, yet in the Thirties and Forties he was one of the most famous and successful Englishmen alive and his music was known across the world. Today, his name is hardly recognised, but almost everyone will be able to hum at least one of his songs.
He was born Reginald Armitage in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, at the end of the 19th century. A producer who was raising capital for a theatrical revue from a Yorkshire investor heard the praises being sung of “the lad up the road”. Having got young Reg to play him a couple of songs, the producer commissioned him to contribute to the revue Stop Press in 1924. André Charlot, the legendary impresario, saw it and commissioned the unknown young composer to write the entire score of his 1926 West End revue.
My grandfather changed his name to Noel Gay after passing a theatre where Noël Coward and Maisie Gay were performing. Gay rapidly attracted attention and recognition. I believe that he is the only composer other than Andrew Lloyd Webber to have had four shows in the West End at the same time (in the spring of 1940), as well as two of his many films showing in the cinemas. Three of these shows were theatrical revues, a form of theatre that is no longer produced but which dominated the theatrical scene and was a huge moneyspinner for producers and stars alike. The biggest stars of the day headlined with long chorus lines, who performed spectacular routines punctuated by comedians and speciality acts.
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The Lambeth Walk, as well as being a worldwide hit, became part of Cockney folklore. It was one of the few songs to have a Times leading article written about it: “That gay and vigorous little air will be remembered by most of us for the rest of our lives as the signature tune of the Crisis.” Mussolini tripped and fell on the carpet of the British Embassy in Rome while doing the Lambeth Walk and, as the dance craze swept across Europe, Gay was asked to sign a declaration that he had no Jewish blood before the dance would be condoned in Nazi Germany. He refused.
After Lupino Lane died in 1959, Me and My Girl was largely forgotten until a new staging in the mid-Eighties, with a revised script by Stephen Fry and four additional Noel Gay songs — Love Makes the World Go Round, Leaning on a Lamp-post on the Corner of the Street, Hold My Hand and The Sun has Got His Hat On — boosting the new script. It ran for eight years at the Adelphi and three on Broadway.
Now, the revival of the show — directed and designed by the young Broadway team Warren Carlyle and Walt Spangler — reflects the fact that, 21 years after the last production, when America was awash with British musicals and talent, it is now Broadway that is leading the world in musical innovation.
Despite his fame and the exuberance of some of his songs, my grandfather was a quiet, reserved man. He lived on Ham Island near Windsor, writing songs for the pantomimes at the Theatre Royal there as happily as he had done for Palladium revues. He went deaf, a terrible affliction that he found so hard to bear, and he died in 1954.
Noel Gay’s huge success in both theatre and film has never really been matched. Besides his timeless Lambeth Walk, nursery schools still chime to Run Rabbit, Run and Hey, Little Hen. I think that was the way this shy Yorkshireman would have liked it.
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Me and My Girl is at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth (01752 267222), until Sept 9, then touring