Fred Karno

Fred Karno ran the music-hall companies that trained Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, invented the custard pie in the face, and died running a wine shop in Dorset. He was born Frederick Westcott in Exeter, worked as a plumber's apprentice and then as an acrobat, and built from the 1890s a chain of touring comedy troupes performing wordless sketches - a form he pushed because silent knockabout could play to the noisy back of any hall and could tour abroad without translation. Mumming Birds, his most successful piece, was a sketch about a disastrous variety show watched by a drunk in a stage box, and it toured for decades. He was a serious employer: at one point he had companies playing across Britain and America simultaneously, and he built a studio complex at Tagg's Island on the Thames. Chaplin joined at eighteen and Arthur Stanley Jefferson, later Stan Laurel, was his understudy; both went to America with the Karno company in 1910 and again in 1912, and both were recruited into films from it. Chaplin said afterwards that Karno had taught him the value of silence and of playing a scene to the point of pain and then past it. The British soldiers of the First World War sang a song calling themselves Fred Karno's Army, and the phrase survives in English for a shambolic organisation. Talkies and the collapse of the halls ruined him; he went bankrupt in 1926, sold up, and Chaplin sent him money in his last years. He built a houseboat called the Astoria that later belonged to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and is still a recording studio. Karno is said to have taken the name from a fellow acrobat. He is buried in Poole.

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