The Irish village of Trenchcoat. Another quiet, peaceful day - the residents had run out of bricks to throw at each other.
Opening caption of Stan Laurel 1924 short Near Dublin
I remember once reading a thread on the "Exiles" section of the main Belfast history internet forum where a lady in her sixties from Canada wistfully recalled the good old days and the friends she left behind. She mentioned three of them by name in the hope that the possibility may arise in the scary new digital age that somebody would know them and there might be a way to re-establish contact. The first reply from a jet black Ulster cyber-comedian simply noted: "They're all dead".
My first interface with the fateful circularity of life came as a child when I was watching one of those old compendium of clips from Laurel and Hardy movies - I sense it was 1967's The Crazy World of Laurel and Hardy as it concluded with the famous Way Out West sequence of their charming soft-shoe shuffle outside a saloon bar. On asking my mother about their whereabouts thereafter I was informed that alas they were gone in body and spirit. A crushing and literally tearful blow I recall to this day.
For many people in their forties and fifties Laurel and Hardy were a mainstay of television viewing in their youth. In hindsight, and while cross-referencing their filmography, I can distinctly recall seeing the entireity of their 1929-1935 talking shorts output on the small screen. These were often transmitted around the 6pm slot on BBC2 in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Likewise for all thirteen of their Hal Roach- directed feature films made between 1931 and 1940. I also remember that Channel 4 showed some of the later Twentieth Century Fox and RKO features during the Nineties - A-Haunting We Will Go, Air Raid Wardens, The Big Noise etc - though these were essentially of interest to movie buffs only by virtue of their status as some of the worst films ever made (albeit through no fault of the artists' doing).
One of the final Laurel and Hardy features to be generally well regarded - and which I have recently revisited - was 1940's A Chump At Oxford. In this film Stan and Ollie are a pair of total witless eejits in America who manage to foil a bank raid. The kindly and decent bank manager subsequently offers them a reward of their own choosing. Being conscious of being complete morons they decide upon "an education". They are subsequently dispatched to Oxford University England while dressed as Eton schoolboys - as fifty year olds.
On arriving in Oxford the world's most beloved comedy duo are mercilessly harried and bullied by the resident sneering and well-heeled students including a particularly young Peter Cushing. They are directed to their digs by way of a maze and - while lost therein - are practically scared to death by a genuinely terrifying apparition of a ghost-demon which of course is nothing more than a merciless prank by the resident privelaged rotters. Their accomodation also turns out to be the Dean's residence and he is well furious at the turn of events in his cosy academic ivory tower.
This of course is trumped by Stan Laurel bashing his head and transforming into Lord Paddington - the ultimate upper-class arrogant braggard imaginable. Ear-wiggling and monocoled Paddington physically thrashes the student body ranged against him before turning on his erstwhile buddy Ollie and tormenting him mercilessly. Calling him "Fatty" every minute and denigrating his physical bearing, it is truly painful to watch even seven decades later. Stan finally snaps out of his reverie but not before directly inducing Oliver Hardy's nervous breakdown.
This ten minute segment alone - as an extraordinary prefiguring of modern British political and social culture - is a priceless moment of magnificent comedy and arguably one of the highlights in the entire career of Ulverston's finest son Arthur Stanley Jefferson. The rock group Mott The Hoople once reflected upon the light-year distance between the Liverpool docks and the Hollywood Bowl. Cumbria to Culver City in the early 20th Century was certainly no mean feat either let's face it. Take some time and watch it through.
Time has been very kind to a lot of Laurel and Hardy material. Even the introduction to the RKO Dancing Masters feature is quite hilarious with Oliver Hardy's toddler clowning on the dancefloor with some Gil Elvgrenesque beauties while his lapses into folksy down home Southern patter as at the end of Way Out West never fails to raise a warm smile.
After their movie careers ended with the dispiriting mess of Atoll K, Messrs Laurel and Hardy performed on stage in many UK and European theatrical venues in the late Forties and early Fifties. In June 1952 they appeared for a fortnight at The Grand Opera House in downtown Belfast. During their visit they stayed in a fan-besieged Midland Hotel near York Road station in the north of the city. The pair had their hair cut in James Mulgrew's local Whitla Street barbers - a fact subsequently advertised prominently by the business - and some recollections of the visit gathered online talk of the couple walking with their wives in the nearby Sailortown district and tipping a busker outside the Great Victoria Street venue they played at.
One individual remembered how their West Belfast grandmother saw the couple on the Dublin train and how Oliver Norvell Hardy responded to a compliment from the lady by wiggling his tie and saying "Thank you ma'am". The late Belfast comedian Frank Carson also would recollect shaking their hands at the Midland Hotel entrance. A feature on the visit produced by the Belfast online movie review website Banterflix references a possible meeting the pair had with the legendary lion-wrestling Belfast hardman extraordinaire Buck Alec and a seaside visit to Bangor's Tonic cinema to judge a singing competition.
The show that Laurel and Hardy performed in Belfast was named A Spot of Trouble and was based on their 1930 short Night Owls. During the time in Northern Ireland Stan Laurel was taken ill and spent a brief period in either the Royal Victoria Hospital on the Falls Road or Musgrave Park in South Belfast - online information differs. The Stan Laurel Correspondence Archive includes a letter sent from the Midland Hotel dated the 24th June that references his pending hospital stay and the scale of the welcome in Ireland:
Haven't had much chance to get down to personal correspondence due to the exciting visit to Ireland. Being our first time here, they went ALL OUT to give us a true Irish Welcome and didn't miss a thing. Bus(iness). as you can imagine was enormous - broke house record here (57 years).
Prior to the Grand Opera House dates the comedians had performed in Dublin's Olympia Theatre on Dame Street and stayed at the Gresham Hotel on O'Connell Street. In the following year of
1953 Laurel and Hardy resided for 33 nights at Dun Laoghaire's Royal Marine Hotel (as pictured above) and pending a one-night performance at The Olympia for a polio charity. A return visit to Belfast on this trip to the British Isles had to be cancelled because of Hardy's visa problems. This was also the Irish visit so often mentioned because of the resounding harbour welcome the people of Cork gave the actors on the 9th September which they would remember for the rest of their lives - Stan Laurel recalling:
It's a strange, a strange thing, our popularity has lasted so long. Our last good pictures were made in the thirties, and you'd think people would forget, but they don't. The love and affection we found that day at Cobh was simply unbelievable. There were hundreds of boats blowing whistles and mobs and mobs of people screaming on the docks. We just couldn't understand what is was all about. And then something happened that I can never forget. All the church bells in Cobh started to ring out our theme song, and Babe looked at me, and we cried. Maybe people loved us and our pictures because we put so much love in them. I don't know. I'll never forget that day. Never.
It is sixty five years now since Laurel and Hardy visited my home town. The once grand Midland finished long ago as a hotel business and was finally torn down this month, York Road Railway Station is demolished and much of residential York Street and Sailortown long gone. The Grand Opera House and the Europa Hotel next door however survived the thirty years of grotesque terror that came to pass and of which the Royal Victoria Hospital and the Musgrave saw much of the bloody consequences.
A certain seven-year-old boy resident in Belfast at the time of the comedians' visit grew up to change the world of football and pop culture forever while an eight-year-old Donegal kid who arrived to live in Cork just three years after the famous appearance of the Hollywood stars in Cobh Harbour went on to produce some the most timeless electric blues rock ever on vinyl and stage. George Best and Rory Gallagher never forgot Belfast City - it would appear that Belfast and Ireland too left its mark on the greatest comics in history. All four beautiful souls long gone from this world but still casting an extraordinary light into our dark and utterly desperate times.
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