Ralph Lynn
The death of Ralph Lynn brings back memories. Not that I was old enough to see the Aldwych farces in their heyday, but I was taken to some of the films made around them, and I retain dim impressions of amusement derived from complicated plots involving a large fat Woman, a thin nagging woman, a small, hen- pecked husband (Robertson Hare) and a gang- ling fop with a monocle and an inane grin (Ralph Lynn). It was all good fun or seemed so at the ago of eight or nine. A little later I read Rookery Nook—funny if over-elaborate and without the Stylistic felicities of P. G. Wodehouse. Later still I was taken to my first play at the Aldwych, a Play called Banana Ridge, in which the place of
Ralph Lynn and Tom Walls had been taken by Alfred Drayton and Robertson Hare, but which was still recognisably a farce and where Mr. Hare's loss of his trousers had attained the status of a hallowed ritual. The play had been carefully selected by my mother with an eye to its 'suit- ability.' What she did not realise was that the plot turned around which of three or four soldiers billeted in the same house during the war was the father of the landlady's daughter's child.
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