In the spring of 1942, morale-sapped British cinema-goers could enjoy watching one of the country’s most popular comedians help sink one of Nazi Germany’s notorious ‘pocket battleships’. Back-room Boy starred pint-sized Arthur Askey as a meteorologist exiled to a remote Scottish lighthouse, where he thwarts the plans of a quisling attempting to clear a path through a British minefield.
In real life, the Royal Navy had already eliminated one of these iconic vessels, the Admiral Graf Spee, at the Battle of the River Plate, and the sinking of the Bismarck was still fresh in the national collective memory. However, in spite of these and other British successes against surface units of the Kriegsmarine, most notably in Norway, Germany still possessed a sizeable, evasive, yet potentially menacing ‘Fleet-in-Being’. Thus, Back-room Boy forms part of British cinema’s fictional War at Sea that reflected the anxieties of the time and rehearsed its desired outcomes.
Born in 1900, Arthur Askey had begun his entertainment career in the army during World War One, later graduating to musical hall and BBC radio, where he formed a popular comedy duo with Richard Murdoch on the show Bandwaggon. The pair also starred in a filmed version of this show, released in 1940. Askey had already appeared on screen in the 1937 musical revue Calling All Stars. Bandwaggon was the first in a series of comedies Askey would make for Gainsborough Pictures during the war years that would cement his public appeal. Formed in 1924, the Gainsborough had produced a number of Alfred Hitchcock’s early films as well as popular Will Hay comedies of the 1930s such as Oh Mr Porter!
In fact, Back-room Boy was originally intended as a vehicle for Will Hay. The film was penned by the writers of Oh Mr Porter! – Val Guest and J.O.C. Orton – and made by the same director, Marcel Varnel. It even featured Hay’s former comedic sidekicks, Moore Marriott and Grahame Moffat. Indeed, Back-room Boy was essentially a remake of the earlier film; both featured an incompetent public servant (a meteorologist replacing Hay’s station master) relocated to a remote part of the British Isles (the station at Buggleskelly becoming a lighthouse located 40 miles off the north coast of Scotland on ‘the bleakest collection of desolate rocks in the whole of the United Kingdom’), where he faces down a threat to national security (Irish republican gunrunners being substituted by a Nazi quisling). Askey had made his own railway-related comedy the previous year with The Ghost Train, and with Hay having left Gainsborough for Ealing Studios in 1940, Askey was the obvious candidate to step into his comedic boots.
The fiction film was an ideal media for disseminating wartime propaganda, as real-life events could be re-imagined and re-memorised in more patriotic and heroic terms. A minority of these films explored naval themes. For example, Ships with Wings, which premiered in November 1941, enthused audiences with a fantastical attack on a Nazi-held Greek island by heroic pilots of the Fleet Air Arm stationed aboard the fictional aircraft carrier ‘HMS Invincible’. The film included real film footage taken aboard HMS Ark Royal. This ship, the obvious source for the fictional one, was unfortunately sunk shortly before the film’s release, the very kind of military reversal such pictures aimed to erase from the public conscience.
Film comedy was demonstrated to have the particular power to lift cinema audiences out of the gloom and austerity of the early years of World War Two. The most prolific star of British wartime comedies was undoubtedly George Formby. First-ranked at the British box-office from 1938 to 1943, Formby made a total of 9 war films, including Bell-Bottom George, another Varnel-directed production in which the entertainer foils a Nazi plot to blow up a British submarine. Other British comedians who featured in such films included Will Hay, Tommy Trinder, Arthur Lucan (aka Old Mother Riley), and The Crazy Gang, whose members included Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen. At the start of 1942, Askey was ranked 3rd on The Motion Picture Herald’s poll of money-making British stars, behind Formby and Lucan, but ahead of Hay.[1] His appeal was summed up in the following terms:
There is not much better palliative than the comedy of big-hearted Arthur Askey, one of the greatest drolls of stage, radio, and screen, who in his second year of films has leapt to third place in the popularity poll… His comedy, which is reminiscent both of the conger eel and the machine guns of a Spitfire, is inimitable, and he is one comedian who suffer no plagiarism.[2]
Back-room Boy also belongs to a subgenre of ‘lighthouse thriller’. The most likely origin for this film type had been the inexplicable disappearance of the three keepers of the Eileen Mor Lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides in December 1900, an incident that shared some of the characteristics of the Marie Celeste mystery. Subsequent films set on lighthouses invariably played on themes of mystery, murder and madness. Early examples of this subgenre included Cape Forlorn (1931) and The Phantom Light (1935), and Back-room Boy was one of four more released in the years 1941-42.
The historian Robyn Ludwig has explored the iconography of lighthouses in wartime cinema, interpreting them as ‘a propagandistic emblem, symbolising sovereignty and militarism’ and ‘metaphors for wartime insecurities’. The patriotic associations of the lighthouse are obvious; a beacon of light in a darkening world standing alone against a hostile sea; and Guest and Orton will have been aware of a spate of German air attacks on British lighthouses and lightships which had claimed the lives of several civilians.[3] However, according to Ludwig, the lighthouse in Back-room Boy is more a symbol of wartime social anxieties and the fear that British culture was being emasculated, as women and less ‘macho’ non-combatants, like Askey, took over traditional male occupations.[4]
Back-room Boy begins with intelligence of an ‘enemy battleship sighted off Newfoundland, believed to be the Nuremberg.’ It is interesting that the screenwriters chose to give their fictional warship the name of one then serving in the Kriegsmarine. The real Nurnberg was a light cruiser of 6,500 tons armed with nine six-inch guns. In the spring of 1942, she was being refitted after a period as a training cruiser in the Baltic, having missed the Kriegsmarine’s more offensive surface operations during the early part of the war. Thus, she posed no particular danger to British waters.
In truth, the model and film images used to portray Askey’s naval nemesis clearly represent one of the three Deutschland Class ‘panzerschiffe’. The German designation translates literally as ‘armoured ships’, but owing to their unusually powerful armament of six 11-inch guns, British propaganda chose to characterise them as ‘pocket battleships’. Although the Nurnberg resembled the Deutschland Class in having a single triple turret mounted on her foredeck, her silhouette differed substantially.
Askey was not the first comedian to face up to a pocket battleship. In the Ealing comedy Sailors Three, released in December 1940, Tommy Trinder and two shipmates had three-handedly captured a ship of this type after accidentally boarding her after a drunken night out in a Brazilian port. The South American setting along with the warship’s fictional name; the ‘Ludendorff’, indicate the film’s plot was loosely derived from the activities of the Graf Spree; Ludendorff closely resembling ‘Langsdorff’, the name of the warship’s commander at the time of her scuttling. This is also confirmed by the ship models used, one being a Leander Class light-cruiser of the same type as those that had fought at the River Plate; HMS Achilles and HMS Ajax. Interestingly, the model used to represent the Ludendorff was not of the Graf Spree but rather her sister the Deutschland; the latter vessel lacked the distinctive tower-like bridge structure of the two succeeding panzerschiffe.
This unmistakable difference in superstructure helps to identify Askey’s pocket battleship as either the Graf Spee or the Admiral Sheer. Though less celebrated than the former, the Admiral Sheer had enjoyed even greater success as a commerce raider, sinking 113,000 GRT of Allied shipping during an Atlantic sortie in late 1940. Moreover, at the time of Back-room Boy’s release on 17th April 1942, she was still a potential threat to Allied trade, having recently relocated to Trondheim in Norway, from where she was capable of intercepting Arctic convoys to Russia. Perhaps Gainsborough’s screenwriters had the Admiral Sheer in mind when casting a naval opponent for Askey. However, it is possible their inspiration had come from another recent and more publicised movement of German warships, one that had shocked the nation and dented the pride of both the Royal Navy and the RAF.
Operation Cerberus was an operation that took place on 12th-14th February 1942 to extricate the German battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen from the port of Brest. The objective was for these ships eventually to join the Kriegsmarine’s nascent Fleet-in-Being in Norway, then consisting chiefly of the Admiral Sheer, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, and the Bismarck’s sister-ship Tirpitz. To achieve this objective, the German naval command decided on an audacious high-speed dash up the English Channel. British intelligence had been alerted of this so-called ‘Channel Dash’, and commanders of the Home Fleet and the RAF had formulated plans to intercept and destroy the German ships.
In the event, the German squadron, led by Vizeadmiral Otto Ciliax, managed to evade British detection for 12 hours, by departing under cover of the night and timing their run up the Channel to occur in daylight. Moreover, poor weather hampered British efforts to locate and engage the warships as they steamed at maximum speed through the Dover Straits. What attempts were made to attack the squadron by light and heavy bombers, motor-torpedo boats, and destroyers were beaten back by a combination of potent air cover by the Luftwaffe, and defensive fire from the German ships. Although both battle-cruisers hit mines off the Dutch coast, all of the German ships safely reached port in Germany.
The failure of British forces to stop Operation Cerberus was roundly condemned, The Times newspaper famously complaining:
Vice Admiral Ciliax has succeeded where the Duke of Medina Sidonia failed. Nothing more mortifying to the pride of our sea-power has happened since the seventeenth century… It spelled the end of the Royal Navy legend that in wartime no enemy battle fleet could pass through what we proudly call the English Channel.
The scandal of the Channel Dash would have been fresh in the minds of many during the making of Back-room Boy. In fact, there are clues in the screenplay that suggest this event was the primary source for the film’s plot. First, there is the denouement in which the fictional Nurenberg is crippled by mines; unwittingly brought to the surface when Askey and his hapless associates accidentally release the paravene on board the minesweeper they are escaping in. Second, is a line spoken when the approaching battleship is recognised as German; ‘This must be the ship they’re sweeping the channel for’ declares Moffat’s character.
Back-room Boy ends with Askey paying tribute to ‘the boys in the backroom who rise every morning to the sound of the factory hooter and make us those mines’. However, it was not mines but bombs that would sink most of the Kriegsmarine’s Fleet-in-Being, including its two remaining pocket battleships. Admiral Sheer would meet her end in a massive RAF bombing raid on 9th April 1945, capsizing in Kiel harbour. The Lutzow was sunk in shallow water by Lancaster bombers one week later in the Piast Canal, later being raised by the Russians for use as a target ship. As for the real Nurnberg, she was one of the few German surface units to survive the war, being ceded to the Soviet Union in 1946 and serving in the Soviet navy for at least another ten years.
[1] The same publication ranked Askey 4th in 1940, 5th in 42, and 9th in 43.
[2] A. Flanagan, British Stars who beat the Bombers, 3rd Jan 1942. Available at:
https://archive.org/stream/motionpictureher146unse#page/n41/mode/2up
[3] An attack on the East Dudgeon Lightship in 1940 had led to the deaths of seven crewmen; prompting the making of a propaganda film of the event. Two recent attacks on the Fair Isle South Lighthouse in Shetland had killed two keepers’ wives and a child, along with a soldier manning a nearby anti-aircraft gun.
[4] Ludwig, R. Beacons in the Dark: Lighthouse Iconography in Wartime British Cinema (1941-1942), available at: https://www.governmentcheese.ca/~governme/writings/11-beacons-in-the-dark-lighthouse-iconography-in-wartime-british-cinema
Bow Creek to Anatahan 