Michael Flanders

• 1. Introduction

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  Michael Henry Flanders stood six feet three inches tall, was a fine oarsman and quarter-miler, and by the time he reached Oxford his contemporaries had no doubt he would become the Olivier or Donat of his generation. His biographer and Oxford contemporary Michael Meyer described him as "formidably, perhaps completely, equipped" for a great acting career: the height, the athleticism, the thin handsome face, the deep intelligence, and a splendid voice. Then, in 1943, while serving at sea with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, he contracted poliomyelitis. He would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

  What happened next is not a story of tragedy overcome by sheer will. It is something stranger and funnier than that. Flanders reinvented himself as a broadcaster, a writer of opera librettos, a children's author, a narrator of distinction, and above all as one half of a two-man comedy revue that ran from 1956 to 1967 and played on Broadway, in Australia, and across the British Isles. The show was called At the Drop of a Hat, and his partner was Donald Swann, an old school friend from Westminster. The question is how a man refused re-entry to his own university because of a disability turned that closed door into something that delighted audiences on three continents.

• 2. Westminster and Oxford

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  Flanders was born in Hampstead, London, on the 1st of March 1922, the third child and only son of Percy Henry Flanders and his wife Rosa Laura, known as Laurie. His father worked as an actor and cinema manager at various points; his mother was a professional violinist. The household had art running through it from the beginning.

  From 1936 to 1940, Flanders attended Westminster School, where his contemporaries included Peter Ustinov, Peter Brook, Tony Benn, and Donald Swann. In his final term in 1940, he and Swann collaborated on a school revue called Go To It. That shared creative instinct would lie dormant for years before flowering into something much larger.

  At Christ Church, Oxford, where he went to read History, Flanders acted and directed for the Oxford University Dramatic Society and the Experimental Theatre Club. His roles included Brabantio in Othello, Pirandello's Henry IV, and Shawcross in Auden and Isherwood's The Ascent of F6. He also wrote drama criticism for the Oxford magazine Cherwell. In October 1941 he made his professional acting debut at the Oxford Playhouse, playing Valentine in Shaw's You Never Can Tell. The trajectory pointed unmistakably upward.

• 3. Polio and Its Aftermath

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  In 1942, Flanders joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, serving first as an able seaman before being commissioned as a sub-lieutenant. He survived a torpedo attack on his ship, HMS Marne, in 1942. The following year, at sea, he contracted poliomyelitis. The next three years were spent in hospitals.

  He was discharged in 1946, permanently dependent on a wheelchair. When he sought to return to Oxford to resume his History degree, the university authorities refused him on the grounds of his disabilities. Flanders was deeply upset by that decision. The acting career that Meyer and his Oxford peers had considered inevitable was now closed to him on the stage.

  He returned to the family home in Hampstead Garden Suburb and began to rebuild his professional life entirely on different terms. He directed and produced plays with a local amateur theatre group and arranged small musical gatherings with other music enthusiasts, including Gerard Hoffnung and Frank Hauser. Radio broadcasting offered what the stage could not: a medium where a wheelchair made no difference to anyone listening. He began writing song lyrics at the same time, and it was through that work that the partnership with Swann was quietly rekindled.

  Flanders later said he preferred performing to writing and wrote mainly "to give myself something to perform." That preference for the live moment would eventually drive him back in front of audiences in a form nobody had quite anticipated.

• 4. Songs for the West End

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  In the summer of 1948, Donald Swann visited Flanders at his home near Hampstead Heath with a tune he had written. The two of them worked out some words for it together, and Swann recalled in 1974 that the result sounded, they agreed, a bit like Gilbert and Sullivan. That conversation produced a song called "In the D'Oyly Cart" (with a characteristic misspelling), a trio for three disgruntled Savoyards. The producer Laurier Lister accepted it for his new show, Oranges and Lemons. Both the revue and the trio did well.

  Lister commissioned further material for his next production, Penny Plain, in 1951. Among the Flanders and Swann contributions were "Prehistoric Complaint," a solo for Max Adrian as a mis-fit caveman dressed in bits of fur, and "Surly Girls," in which Adrian, Desmond Walter-Ellis, and Jimmy Thompson played a trio of appalling St Trinian's schoolgirls. The material was funny, specific, and already marked by the pair's fondness for unlikely comic juxtapositions.

  By 1953 Lister trusted them enough to invite them to write much of his next revue, Airs on a Shoestring. Their subjects ranged from economics and politics to London's last tram to a send-up of Benjamin Britten's works. That same year Flanders wrote the libretto for a short opera by Antony Hopkins, Three's Company, followed in 1954 by A Christmas Story. Also in 1954, in partnership with Kitty Black, Flanders translated Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat for the Edinburgh Festival. The production played to capacity audiences in Edinburgh and returned to London's Royal Festival Hall in 1956, with Flanders as narrator, Sir Ralph Richardson as the Soldier, and Peter Ustinov as the Devil. That translation remained the standard English version of the work well into the 21st century.

• 5. At the Drop of a Hat

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  In 1956, Flanders and Swann were invited to lecture on songwriting at Dartington International Summer School. Flanders noticed that his spoken introductions to the songs were going over as well as the songs themselves. The two of them decided to build an entire show around that dynamic.

  They booked the New Lindsey Theatre, a venue outside the London West End district that held around 150 people, for a limited three-week run. The show opened on the 31st of December 1956. The press notices were good, the box office did excellent business, and a West End transfer was offered. Both men hesitated. Swann recalled in 1977 that they "turned it down unanimously"; Flanders had by then done at least a thousand broadcasts, and the move seemed to threaten both careers. After two or three sleepless nights each, they changed their minds.

  The show transferred to the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden on the 24th of January 1957. The Times reported it "took the audience by storm". The critic J. C. Trewin wrote that even W. S. Gilbert might have applauded the intricate neatness of their numbers and urged readers to hear Flanders explain the precise derivation of the word "Greensleeves." The show ran for 808 performances at the Fortune, closing on the 2nd of May 1959.

  In August 1959 the show went to the Edinburgh Festival, and on the 8th of October they opened in New York at Broadway's John Golden Theatre, playing 215 performances there. Walter Kerr, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, said that whatever ran through both men's veins made them "lively, witty, literate, ingratiating, explosively funny and excellent company for a daffy and delightful evening." After Broadway they toured through twelve cities in the US, one in Canada, and three in Switzerland.

• 6. At the Drop of Another Hat

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  During tours in 1962 and 1963, Flanders and Swann continually swapped new songs in and old songs out. By the time they returned to London in October 1963, the programme had changed so thoroughly from their last London appearance more than four years earlier that the show had earned a new name.

  At the Drop of Another Hat opened on the 2nd of October 1963 at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. The Haymarket held 900 seats compared to the Fortune's 438. The Daily Express called it "an instant success." The Times described it as "a delicious entertainment, an inimitable evening" and noted songs celebrating a love affair between an armadillo and a derelict tank, laments about vanishing railway stations, a prestissimo Mozart movement attached to a song about amateur horn players, and two Flanders monologues: one about an olive-stuffing fiesta in the Andorran foothills, and one offering a derisive commentary from a contemporary onlooker at the building of Stonehenge.

  The duo played the Haymarket until the 21st of March 1964, then toured Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and southern England, before returning to London at the Globe Theatre in September 1965. They played there until February 1966, then took the show on a final tour of Canada and the US, concluding with a Broadway run at the Booth Theatre from the 31st of December 1966 to the 9th of April 1967. The decision to stop was chiefly Swann's; he felt the Hat shows were restricting his range as a serious composer. The two men remained friends and continued to collaborate occasionally.

• 7. Beyond the Hat Shows

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  While the Hat shows were running, and after they ended, Flanders kept a full and varied professional life on several fronts. In 1962, he appeared at the Aldwych Theatre as the Storyteller in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle. He acted in the films Doctor in Distress in 1963 and The Raging Moon in 1971. His 1970 revue Ten Years Hard by Peter Myers was praised for his performance but closed within a month.

  On BBC radio he served as anchorman for the "Scrapbook" and "Battle for the Atlantic" series, and was a regular on quiz programmes including "Twenty Questions" and "Animal, Vegetable and Mineral." On television he presented the concert, opera, and ballet series "Gala Performance." He provided the storytelling voice on the British soundtrack of the Barbapapa animated cartoon series and narrated many documentaries, among them the 1969 BBC Royal Family film.

  As a writer, Flanders produced a book of poems, Creatures Great and Small, published in 1964, and a children's book, The Sayings and Doings of Nasrudin the Wise, published in 1974. His text for the children's cantata Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo, with music by Joseph Horovitz, won an Ivor Novello Award in 1976, the year after his death. For EMI he recorded the narration of Peter and the Wolf with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Efrem Kurtz in 1959, and recorded Edith Sitwell's Facade poems with Walton's music played by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Marriner, in 1972. Of Facade he said: "It is an extraordinarily difficult work, even an impossible one. There are times when you are just forced to babble, others when you are completely swamped by the orchestra."

  Flanders was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1964 New Year's Honours. He was an eloquent advocate for better theatre access for people with disabilities, and after his death on the 14th of April 1975 his wife Claudia continued promoting wheelchair accessibility as a cause. His ashes were scattered in the grounds of Chiswick House in west London, a place where he had often liked to sit in the afternoon during the final years of his life.