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Carry On films: The star who helped World War II prisoners escape
respect.
Carry On films: The star who helped World War II prisoners escape
The long arm of coincidence raises its head once more, At the end of last week I switched the television on and an episode of Last of the Summer Wine was either starting or ending and the name Tyler Butterworth appeared. I wondered whether he was related to Peter Butterworth and there he is in the photo with his father!
Carry On films: The star who helped World War II prisoners escape
Peter Butterworth and his son, Tyler, who knew nothing about his father's war history when he was younger
The Great Escape and The Wooden Horse are two classic British World War II escape films, but what is perhaps less well known is that one of the team involved in both of the escapes that inspired them would go on to become a star of the Carry On movies.
Now, 80 years on, Peter Butterworth's recently discovered German prison identity card is going on display as part of an exhibition telling the story of his life as a prisoner of war.
Butterworth served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm during the war but was shot down in 1940, spending the rest of it as a prisoner of war.
Butterworth, who appeared in 16 Carry On films, helped hide the sand for the escape tunnels featured in the Great Escape and was on the organising committee for the tunnels featured in The Wooden Horse, but it has taken decades for the full story to emerge.
It was his wartime role - working alongside Carry On screenwriter Talbot Rothwell whose plane was also shot down - that helped birth the Carry On humour Butterworth later became famous for.
A cache of prisoner of war documents recently released from a German archive is now going on display at the National Archives in London, which adds new detail to the gradually unfolding story.
The documents arrived from Germany and have been catalogued by a team of volunteers.
For his son Tyler Butterworth, it has been a revelation.
"They keep declassifying things and more seems to bubble up. It's remarkable."
Peter Butterworth was an officer and a code writer
In Carry on Camping, Peter Butterworth played the avaricious campsite owner, Josh Fiddler. In Carry On Up The Khyber, he was the libidinous preacher, Brother Belcher, and in Carry on Don't Lose Your Head, he was Citizen Bidet.
However, in Stalag Luft 3, he was an officer and code writer in MI9, the military intelligence agency responsible for organising escapes from prison camps. It was a mystery to even his own son until long after his death in 1979.
"He did suffer from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He never said this to my sister and I, but my mother (the impressionist Janet Brown) told me about things that happened, especially right at the start of their marriage, after the war, where he'd suddenly leap out of bed at night and throw himself on the floor and start hiding. She had to barricade the bedroom door because the staircase was outside."
Peter Butterworth (standing at the back) with the theatre company at Stalag Luft 3
In the escape immortalised in the classic film The Great Escape, Butterworth helped hide the soil from the tunnels in the camp theatre. Inmates would be encouraged to smoke pipes near where the soil was stored to mask the smell.
In the Wooden Horse escape, in which a tunnel was dug underneath a vaulting horse, he was one of the organising committee. When the story was adapted in 1950 for the big screen, he auditioned for a role but was turned down for not looking sufficiently like a prisoner.
Carry On beginnings
Alongside him in Stalag Luft 3 was another prisoner, Talbot Rothwell, who would go on to write many of the best Carry On films. He and Rothwell convinced the camp commandant to allow them to build a theatre, with the sounds from the performances helping drown out the noise of digging the tunnels.
"It's where the (Carry On) humour kind of had its start, in this place surrounded by watchtowers and guard dogs," Tyler Butterworth explains.
"They worked out what made guys laugh. And that was the funny thing, he played these bumbling characters, always getting things wrong.
And there's this complete flip side of this man that was totally focused writing code, working with his friends who were tunnelling on the other side of the compound."
However, all of this was never discussed within his family and it was only years later that the younger Butterworth began to understand some of his father's actions.
"He had all this going on in his mind in his life. My mother told me that when they first bought the house that we grew up in, dad would religiously put on a dressing gown and walk around the garden in the morning, every morning, because he could, because there (in the camp) he couldn't. And those are the sort of things he brought back. But I didn't know about this until after he was dead."
As the bewildered Brother Belcher in the shell-torn dining room scene in Carry On Up the Khyber proves, Peter Butterworth was a marvellous comic actor. However, given that he escaped from one camp near Frankfurt and helped two of the most celebrated escapes in World War Two, we should be perhaps remembering him for more than just Carry On.
The Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives is on at the National Archives in London from 2 February until 21 July.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68209738
Sounds like a Film-maker could do well to follow his life and give the man proper credit!Why did the self-styled “Blind Traveller” go from celebrated author to threadbare old man living in poverty?
James Holman racked up more than a quarter of a million miles in his lifetime—further than anyone had ever traveled before. As Eitan Bar-Yosef points out, his exploits are the stuff that once filled the pages of boys’ annuals and penny magazines: a naval career that began when he was a child; fighting the slave trade in Africa (where the Holman River was named in his honor); being wrongly accused of spying in Siberia; and surviving a bout of malaria that killed all but eleven of his crew mates in Equatorial Guinea. He also penned five books, two of which were bestsellers.
Despite these dizzying achievements, Holman’s name has gradually disappeared from our collective consciousness. No publisher would accept his fourth book, which detailed his travels in the Middle East and Mediterranean. Nor would they accept his memoir. A brief sketch of his life in the Encyclopedia Britannica dwindled to a single paragraph in the 1910 edition. When another edition of the encyclopedia was printed in 1960, his name was missing altogether.
https://daily.jstor.org/james-holma...=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
Now the subject of a film, apparently:
The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n03/bee-wilson/merely-a-warning-that-a-noun-is-coming
After the movie, a court case.
A university academic has said he is likely to take legal action against the makers of a new film about Richard III, which he said was "littered with inaccuracies".
Richard Taylor was part of the University of Leicester team that found and identified the king 10 years ago. A character bearing his name features in the film The Lost King, starring Steve Coogan and Sally Hawkins.
But Mr Coogan has said: "The university are responsible for their own undoing." ...
But the university said claims its staff sidelined Ms Langley and took the credit for the find are "far removed" from the truth.
Mr Taylor, former deputy registrar at the university, told the BBC he had felt "absolutely shell-shocked" by the way he was portrayed.
He said: "I think the film is inaccurate, and I think the writers have been very reckless in how they've put it together. Anybody who knows me knows my integrity is important to me. There are lots of people I have to work with who don't know me - what are they to think, seeing a film like that?"
Mr Taylor said the film-makers had not sought to speak to him at any point.
"The film is littered with inaccuracies," he said. "It makes up a scene where I mimic Richard III's disability, and have to be told by Philippa that it's wrong to equate physical characteristics with evilness. That is the most hurtful personally and the most damaging reputationally. It is not true; it did not take place. I'd hoped my concerns would have chimed with Steve Coogan, who had his privacy invaded by newspapers over phone hacking. To see him on the other side of the fence now, doing this to me is quite frustrating. I feel kind of powerless in the way Steve would have felt."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-62833429
Mark Kermode is the only reviewer I routinely agree with. Here's his view:
Loved the film, very clever and funny.
MIght have to give this one a watch.
This is wonderful:
this 400-year old book should have changed mathematics Forever
This Is The Swiss clockmaker Jost Bürgi arithmetic and geometric progression tables
the book contains an ingenious mathematical hack that Bürgi called red numbers
and the design of a powerful computing device that uses these red numbers
Remarkably, DNA testing found a direct descendant of Cheddar Man, living just a mile away from where his prehistoric ancestor's remains were found.Yeah, like those politically correct idiots at University College London & Natural History Museum who decided that Cheddar Man was likely dark skinned. What do they know eh?..
And the court case is on!
Steve Coogan is being sued for libel by a university official over how he was portrayed in a film about the discovery of Richard III's remains.
Richard Taylor, formerly deputy registrar of the University of Leicester, is bringing legal action against Coogan over his portrayal in the 2022 film The Lost King, which he claims was "devious" and "weasel-like".
(snip!)
https://news.sky.com/story/steve-co...-portrayed-in-his-film-the-lost-king-13083825
They are the first non-royal women to get statues in the grounds of Belfast City Hall.
I bet she was absolutely terrifying.That's quite something!
McKraken looks like a granny in a fairytale. Mob cap, sweet expression, plaid shawl, half moon glasses...
Fabulous. And from (or lived in) Ulverston, like Stan Laurel.Carry On films: The star who helped World War II prisoners escape
Peter Butterworth and his son, Tyler, who knew nothing about his father's war history when he was younger
The Great Escape and The Wooden Horse are two classic British World War II escape films, but what is perhaps less well known is that one of the team involved in both of the escapes that inspired them would go on to become a star of the Carry On movies.
Now, 80 years on, Peter Butterworth's recently discovered German prison identity card is going on display as part of an exhibition telling the story of his life as a prisoner of war.
Butterworth served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm during the war but was shot down in 1940, spending the rest of it as a prisoner of war.
Butterworth, who appeared in 16 Carry On films, helped hide the sand for the escape tunnels featured in the Great Escape and was on the organising committee for the tunnels featured in The Wooden Horse, but it has taken decades for the full story to emerge.
It was his wartime role - working alongside Carry On screenwriter Talbot Rothwell whose plane was also shot down - that helped birth the Carry On humour Butterworth later became famous for.
A cache of prisoner of war documents recently released from a German archive is now going on display at the National Archives in London, which adds new detail to the gradually unfolding story.
The documents arrived from Germany and have been catalogued by a team of volunteers.
For his son Tyler Butterworth, it has been a revelation.
"They keep declassifying things and more seems to bubble up. It's remarkable."
Peter Butterworth was an officer and a code writer
In Carry on Camping, Peter Butterworth played the avaricious campsite owner, Josh Fiddler. In Carry On Up The Khyber, he was the libidinous preacher, Brother Belcher, and in Carry on Don't Lose Your Head, he was Citizen Bidet.
However, in Stalag Luft 3, he was an officer and code writer in MI9, the military intelligence agency responsible for organising escapes from prison camps. It was a mystery to even his own son until long after his death in 1979.
"He did suffer from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He never said this to my sister and I, but my mother (the impressionist Janet Brown) told me about things that happened, especially right at the start of their marriage, after the war, where he'd suddenly leap out of bed at night and throw himself on the floor and start hiding. She had to barricade the bedroom door because the staircase was outside."
Peter Butterworth (standing at the back) with the theatre company at Stalag Luft 3
In the escape immortalised in the classic film The Great Escape, Butterworth helped hide the soil from the tunnels in the camp theatre. Inmates would be encouraged to smoke pipes near where the soil was stored to mask the smell.
In the Wooden Horse escape, in which a tunnel was dug underneath a vaulting horse, he was one of the organising committee. When the story was adapted in 1950 for the big screen, he auditioned for a role but was turned down for not looking sufficiently like a prisoner.
Carry On beginnings
Alongside him in Stalag Luft 3 was another prisoner, Talbot Rothwell, who would go on to write many of the best Carry On films. He and Rothwell convinced the camp commandant to allow them to build a theatre, with the sounds from the performances helping drown out the noise of digging the tunnels.
"It's where the (Carry On) humour kind of had its start, in this place surrounded by watchtowers and guard dogs," Tyler Butterworth explains.
"They worked out what made guys laugh. And that was the funny thing, he played these bumbling characters, always getting things wrong.
And there's this complete flip side of this man that was totally focused writing code, working with his friends who were tunnelling on the other side of the compound."
However, all of this was never discussed within his family and it was only years later that the younger Butterworth began to understand some of his father's actions.
"He had all this going on in his mind in his life. My mother told me that when they first bought the house that we grew up in, dad would religiously put on a dressing gown and walk around the garden in the morning, every morning, because he could, because there (in the camp) he couldn't. And those are the sort of things he brought back. But I didn't know about this until after he was dead."
As the bewildered Brother Belcher in the shell-torn dining room scene in Carry On Up the Khyber proves, Peter Butterworth was a marvellous comic actor. However, given that he escaped from one camp near Frankfurt and helped two of the most celebrated escapes in World War Two, we should be perhaps remembering him for more than just Carry On.
The Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives is on at the National Archives in London from 2 February until 21 July.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68209738