Arthur Haynes

<The Times, November 20, 1966>

<MR ARTHUR HAYNES: DROLL TELEVISION COMEDIAN>

Mr. Arthur Haynes, who died on Saturday at the age of 52, was a comedian whose success was due rather to the native drollery of his personality than to the undoubted skill with which he worked. The son of a baker, he had been a bus conductor and was a railway man when he first began to appear in public, earning 1s. 3d. a song as a public house entertainer. From public house singing he graduated into a Forces entertainer and later joined the team with which Mr. Charlie Chester was presenting his radio show, _Stand Easy_.

The public first seemed to notice something novel in Arthur Haynes's style when, 10 years ago, he was appearing on television in _Strike a New Note_, and by 1960 he had succeeded to the point at which, in offerng a three-year contract for £75,000, Associated Television made him one of the most highly paid of British artists.

In 1961 he won the Variety Club of Great Britain award and was elected Television Personality of the Year. He played at the London Palladium for the first time in 1963, in _Swing Along_, a sucess interrupted by illness, and in 1964 he went to Hollywood to play against Miss Gina Lollobrigida - possibly the most improbable of partnerships in _Strange Bedfellows_. His extremely English style was as successful on American television, in The Ed Sllivan Show, as it was in England, where he had recently completed his first major film role in _Doctor in Clover_. With a new series of television shows due soon to be seen, he was playing in cabaret at the Grosvenor Hotel up to the time of his sudden death.

Arthur Haynes appealed to the anarchist hidden inside all respectable members of society, to whom, perhaps, his activities offered a safety valve. His bemedalled tramp, Oscar Pennyfeather convinced the world tat this tramp's life, his ribald rejection of convention, his total lack of respect for the authorities he arrogantly dismissed, was normality. It was the hard-working conventional everyman who seemed suddenly to become ridiculously abnormal.

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