Comedy actor Windsor Davies, who was immortalised as the sergeant major in TV series It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, has died aged 88.
Davies, who also topped the pop charts with sitcom partner Don Estelle in 1975, had modelled the role on men he knew on National Service.
“Apart from the brilliance of the writing, I think It Ain’t Half Hot Mum was brilliant because that is how it really was,” he told BBC Wales in 2012.
“Sergeant majors had these recognisable forms of expression and all that stuff. A lot came from [writers] David Croft and Jimmy Perry who were both ex-Army.”
Born in August 1930 in Canning Town, east London, Windsor Davies returned home to his father’s home village, Nant-y-Moel in the Ogmore valley, when World War Two broke out.
He was educated at Ogmore Grammar School and also worked as a miner, like his father, before National Service with the Army in north Africa.
After training to be a teacher in Bangor, Davies taught English and Maths for four years in the 1950s at Leek in Staffordshire, where he was known as a joker and making his pupils laugh.
But he was also involved in amateur dramatics and was persuaded by his wife Lynne to answer an advert for a short drama course run by the Kew theatre company in London.
“Lynne said to me, ‘you’ll never be really happy unless you have a go at this, will you?'” he recalled to BBC Wales in 2012.
But he had a false-start to his acting career when he was cast in a TV series called Probation Officer. “It was a terrible mistake to have taken that job because I didn’t know one end of a TV camera from the other and I didn’t know how to tackle the job properly,” he recalled.
He was given roles in uniform in police series from Z Cars to Callan and more bit-part work, not always easy with a growing family.
“I worked with virtually every comedian the BBC employed as a feed man – I’d go along and do the one scene, working with people like Dick Emery, Norman Wisdom and Charlie Drake,” he said.
And it was a comedy which was to propel him from jobbing actor to stardom and make him a familiar face to millions in the 1970s.
