Film maker Jono McLeod, one of the major pledgers for the VIP project, asked Boo and I to write him a song. The song was to be about his Uncle, an actor,comedian and Very Interesting Person called Jimmy Mac.
I had made two rather cringeworthy attempts at this song before Boo emailed me the completed song.
This is Jono’s email outlining the amazing story:
‘My great granny Annie used to sell oranges to the queue on the street outside the Alhambra theatre. One day the manager of one of the nearby picture houses pulled her in and told her that her son Jimmy was on the Pathé news getting married to a ‘midget’—as little people were known then. It came as something of a shock to Annie, the family had no idea he was even courting.
Jimmy started in showbiz aged thirteen and got his break working as a stunt double for Doodles the Clown. He also did a comedy act with his brother Norrie for fourteen summer seasons in Blackpool.
It was during this time that he must have met Fred Roper—owner
and proprietor of Fred Roper’s Wonder Midgets. Fred recruited his troupe during the summer season of 1929 from the stars of the Midget Town attraction which had just wrapped its run nearby. With Fred, the troupe was to go on to major success over the next several years— mainly due to his great aptitude for publicity.
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Little folk were a big deal at that time. Collectible postcards and memorabilia of them were all the rage and the biggest draw of all was a midget wedding. Fred had already ‘arranged’ a couple of weddings between little brides and grooms but in the summer of 1930 he set up his biggest publicity coup so far—a ‘mixed marriage’ between Jimmy and one of Fred’s biggest little stars—Winnie Yelland.
Winnie was 43 inches high and from Devon. As a young girl her
dad died in the Great War and Winnie began to work as a male impersonator to help support her family. That led to a job as a stripper at Blackpool Tower ballroom with a troupe by the name of John Lester’s Jazzing Midgets. From there she joined Fred Roper’s more demure group and the story goes that during one of the big water numbers, she fell into the pool and couldn’t swim. Uncle Jimmy dived in, rescued her and love blossomed.
On August 6th 1930 the wedding took place at St Michael’s Church in Southwark, London. A fleet of Rolls Royces were hired and 20 policemen were needed to get the cars through the massive crowd which had gathered to witness the event. The national press were there too and the wedding made the front pages of many of them. Unfortunately, by all accounts, Winnie the Wonder Midget wasn’t
up to speed on the publicity reasons for the wedding. Turns out she was desperately in love with her new husband—infatuated was the word folk used. But it wasn’t reciprocated—Jimmy didn’t love her
back. Married life presented challenges for the mismatched couple— one time Jimmy and Winnie were on a crowded tram when another passenger, mistaking her for Jimmy’s child, picked her up in the air and plonked her down on her husband’s knee to make room on the seat.
How long they stayed together, I don’t know, but their divorce was declared in 1936. It was Jimmy who petitioned for divorce, she didn’t want it—he perhaps had met his next wife by then. But thanks in part to the publicity around the wedding, Jimmy’s career indeed took off and he went on to star on the variety circuit as a comedian, under the stage name Jimmy Mac.
He went on to play a platoon member of Dad’s Army, the character of Warwick in Are You Being Served? and, perhaps most memorably for me, a nude life model for the art class in Grange Hill.
Winnie died a few months before him in December 1983 in Lewisham. Her marriage to uncle Jimmy was her only one.’