Will Fyffe

Will Fyffe, CBE (16 February 1885 – 14 December 1947) was a Scottish music hall performer, singer-songwriter, comedian, and screen actor born in a tenement at 36 Broughty Ferry Road, Dundee. The eldest child of John Fyffe, a ship's carpenter, and Janet Rhynd Cunningham, a music teacher, Fyffe grew up in a household with theatrical inclinations. His father operated a Penny Geggy, a form of travelling theatre, and it was there that Fyffe first worked as a character actor at around age six.

In his twenties, Fyffe joined Will Haggar Junior's Castle Theatre company, which toured the South Wales Valleys from its base in Abergavenny. A 1911 advertisement in the Portable Times places both Fyffe and his wife with the Castle Theatre during this period. His screen debut came in 1914, when William Haggar — Will Junior's father and a pioneer of silent film — produced a fifty-minute adaptation of the Welsh tale The Maid of Cefn Ydfa, first screened in Aberdare in December of that year. Fyffe played Lewis Bach, the loyal servant of the maid. Thirty-eight minutes of the film survive in the Welsh Film Archive in Aberystwyth, having been rediscovered in 1984 in a family cupboard after disappearing from public knowledge. Fyffe appealed against military conscription in 1918, citing his occupation, serious hardship, and ill health.

Fyffe built his reputation across the music halls of Scotland and the broader United Kingdom, developing a distinctive performance style in which he would begin a song, pause to deliver a spoken monologue elaborating the song's narrative, and then resume the melody. Among his recurring characters was Daft Sandy, a village idiot figure that the drama critic James Agate described as a masterpiece of tragi-comedy. By the 1930s, Fyffe ranked among the highest-paid music hall artists in Britain, and in 1939 he was the ninth most popular British star at the box office. He appeared in the Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium in 1937 and was regarded as a favourite entertainer of Queen Elizabeth. For a period he maintained a successful stage partnership with Harry Gordon, performing in pantomime with him at the Alhambra Theatre in Glasgow.

Fyffe's Broadway appearance came in 1932, and his American credits also include the revue Earl Carroll's Vanities from 1925. A screen test filmed for Pathé in New York in 1929 captured rare footage of his stage act, including a performance of the Broomielaw sketch and the song Twelve and a Tanner a Bottle, material now held in the Scottish Screen Archive.

His most celebrated composition, I Belong to Glasgow, is believed to have been written in 1920. A known release from 1921 issued it as the B-side to I'm 94 To-Day, and it was released as an A-side in 1927. According to Albert Mackie's The Scotch Comedians, published in 1973, Fyffe drew inspiration for the song from a conversation with an intoxicated man he encountered at Glasgow Central Station, who, when asked whether he belonged to Glasgow, replied that at that moment Glasgow belonged to him. The song was subsequently covered by Danny Kaye, Eartha Kitt, Gracie Fields, and Kirk Douglas. So closely did the song associate Fyffe with Glasgow that the Empire Theatre there held a Will Fyffe competition in which contestants sang the number; Fyffe entered the contest in heavy disguise on a bet and finished second. Despite this association with Glasgow, Fyffe was born in Dundee, seventy miles to the east, and a street in that city bears his surname. He was buried in Glasgow at Lambhill Cemetery.

Fyffe appeared in twenty-three films, working alongside actors including John Gielgud, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Margaret Lockwood, Finlay Currie, Patricia Roc, and Charles Hawtrey. His performance in Owd Bob, released in America as To the Victor, drew particular notice from The New York Times, which placed it in what the paper called a mental dossier of great performances. Producer Ted Black at Gainsborough Pictures developed a series of films around Fyffe's screen persona. His final film, The Brothers, was released shortly after his death. Over the course of his career Fyffe also recorded more than thirty songs. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1942 Birthday Honours. Fyffe was also a Freemason, having been initiated into and becoming a full member of Lodge St John, Shotts No 471.

Following an operation on his right ear in 1947, Fyffe went to recuperate at his own hotel in St Andrews. He died on 14 December 1947 after falling from the window of his suite at the Rusacks Hotel, with the fall attributed to dizziness resulting from the ear surgery. He was taken to the local cottage hospital, where he later died. Fyffe was survived by a son, Will Fyffe Jr. (1927–2008), who became a musical director and wrote a musical about his father's life, and a daughter, Eileen.