AJ anticipated a career as an actor, and Stan joined his father’s resident company as soon as he was old enough, playing straight roles in melodramas while secretly longing to clown. The little boy spent his time and pocket money making toy theatres and puppet shows. His father, AJ Jefferson, was a playwright, actor-manager and, later, lessee of the Metropole in Glasgow, the Theatre Royal in North Shields and other venues, and after a childhood in the Lancashire town of Ulverston, Stan moved with his family to the Tyneside area on the Scottish border. For anyone even slightly skilled, performing was a viable career option. Every town in Britain and Ireland had a variety theatre, and most cities had two or three.
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I was about 10 when he died, and he left me the bayonet he’d fought with in the war and his make-up case, which had compartments for greasepaint sticks and a selection of wigs and other bits and pieces.įrom this distance it’s hard to appreciate just how potent a phenomenon music hall and variety was in the early years of the last century – the largest mass live entertainment until rock music came along in the 1950s. “After what he’d seen he felt he couldn’t go on and try to be funny,” my nan told me. He came back much changed, and never again set foot on stage. War broke out and Freddie went to fight in France. It was only later, on variety tours, that the comedians got to know each other properlyĬharlie and Stan went to the US with Karno and didn’t come back. Chaplin was nice enough, he said, but had “notions” and held himself aloof from such frivolity.Īt the height of their fame Laurel and Hardy rarely socialised together. Stan Jefferson – often called Ginger because of his hair – was a great lad, Freddie told me, popular and easygoing, fond of a drink or two and with an eye for the ladies, and together they often rambled around the pubs of Dudley, Freddie’s home town, after a show. Freddie wasn’t a member of the troupe, but he performed at local theatres, way down the bill among the wines and spirits, and when a Karno show was touring the British midlands he and his comedy partner, Jack Dutton, would be drafted in to do a knockabout front-cloth parody strongman act while scenery was being changed, then join the others for the riotous finale. Chaplin was Karno’s star a 20-year-old Stan Jefferson (his real name) was second banana and Charlie’s understudy. My old pal Stan.”īefore the first World War Freddie had worked with Stan – and Charlie Chaplin, too – on music hall bills topped by the impresario Fred Karno’s touring company of slapstick comedians.
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When a Laurel and Hardy film came on television my grandad Freddie Elcock would sit me on his knee and point excitedly at the screen.