Noel Gay

Noel Gay was the professional name of Reginald Moxon Armitage, a British composer of popular music born on 15 July 1898 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England, who died on 4 March 1954 from cancer. His output encompassed 45 songs, music for 28 films, and scores for 26 London shows, a body of work that established him as one of Britain's foremost composers of popular musical entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s. Sheridan Morley described him as the closest Britain came to producing a local Irving Berlin.

Armitage demonstrated exceptional musical ability from childhood, deputising for the choirmaster of Wakefield Cathedral at the age of eight and serving as honorary deputy organist there by twelve. He attended Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield before earning a scholarship at fifteen to the Royal College of Music in London. By eighteen he had become music director and organist at St. Anne's Church in Soho. Following a brief period of military service during the First World War, he studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, where his interest shifted from religious composition toward musical comedy and popular songwriting.

It was during his Cambridge years that Armitage adopted the stage name Noel Gay, a pseudonym Morley traced to a London bus advertisement he encountered in 1924 reading "NOEL Coward and Maisie GAY in a new revue." He occasionally used the additional pseudonym Stanley Hill for more sentimental compositions. After contributing to revues including Stop Press, he was commissioned to write the complete score and lyrics for André Charlot's 1926 revue. His subsequent show, Clowns in Clover, featured the husband-and-wife performers Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert. Gay continued writing for revues associated with The Crazy Gang and composed songs for prominent artists including Gracie Fields, Flanagan and Allen, and George Formby. His World War II material included "Run, Rabbit, Run," written with lyricist Ralph Butler, and he contributed two songs to the 1938 film Save a Little Sunshine.

Gay's most celebrated work was Me and My Girl, for which he composed the music. The show originally opened in 1937 at the Victoria Palace Theatre in London, starring Lupino Lane as Bill Snibson, and ran for 1,646 performances despite being forced out of two theatres by wartime bombing. A BBC radio broadcast on 13 January 1938 proved pivotal in building its audience. The production's signature number, "The Lambeth Walk," became the subject of a leader in The Times in October 1938, which noted that while dictators raged and statesmen talked, all of Europe was dancing to it — a distinction unique among popular songs. The show was revived in 1952 and again in 1984, with the book revised by Stephen Fry to incorporate additional songs by Gay. That revival opened at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester before transferring to the Adelphi Theatre in London, where it ran for eight years, subsequently touring Britain and transferring to Broadway. The Broadway production earned Gay a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in 1987.

In 1938 Gay established Noel Gay Music as a business enterprise, a venture that later expanded into the Noel Gay Organisation, a significant British showbusiness agency with divisions in television and theatre that remained under the control of his family. His son, Richard Armitage, founded the Noel Gay Artists agency and became a prominent talent agent. In the years following World War II, Gay's musical output declined as increasing deafness and a shift in popular taste away from cheerful Cockney-themed material led him to focus more on production work.