(8th
January 1908 – 23rd April 1975)
William Henry Hartnell
was born on 8th January 1908 in the slums of London. He was an only child to Lucy Hartnell who was
an unmarried mother. His father was
never mentioned on his birth certificate and although steps were taken to
locate him, he was never found.
William was brought up
mostly by Lucy’s sister who became his foster mother and he enjoyed holidays in
Devon on a farm belonging to his mother’s family, he learnt how to ride and
wanted to become a jockey but he left school at 14, with no prospects, no
qualifications, and dabbled in petty crime.
He joined a boxing club
and was noticed at the age of 16 by Hugh Oswald Blaker when he was fighting
bouts as a flyweight boxer at Kings Cross.
He was taken under the wing of Blaker who became his unofficial
guardian. Blaker born 1873 was an
English artist, connoisseur, dealer in Old Masters, writer and a socialist and
was passionate about theatre. Blaker
gave the young Hartnell a roof over his head and enlisted him into the Italia
Conti Academy of Theatre Arts.
The Academy of Theatre
Arts was the dream child of Italia Conti, an established actress, who after discovering
her natural gift of managing children, devoted nearly all of her time to
teaching children to act, sing, dance and speak.
Blaker paid to send
Hartnell to the Imperial Service College for some strict refinement of manners,
but the strictures were too much for Hartnell and he left.
At the age of 17
Hartnell began his career in theatre as a general stagehand, working under
Frank Benson’s Shakespearian group. He took on many roles before he had the
opportunity of acting within the theatre, from dogsbody, call-boy, assistant
stage manager, property master and assistant lighting director, and occasional
small walk on parts. In 1926 he appeared in many Shakespearian plays such as The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar,
Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest,
before leaving the theatre company two years later to go on tour, working for
various companies around Britain.
When he returned to the
UK he married actress Heather McIntyre whom he’d appeared with in the theatre
production Miss Elizabeth’s Prisoner
in 1928, a play written by Robert Neilson Stephens and E. Lyall Swete. They lived in one of Blaker’s adjacent
properties in Isleworth and in 1929 Heather gave birth to their only child
Heather Anne.
Over the years William
Hartnell was to appear in almost 75 feature films, including Say it with Music in 1932. In the Noel
Coward film In Which We Serve he was
to play Albert Fosdyke but he turned up late on the first day of shooting, and
after he was berated and made to personally apologise to the entire cast and
crew, was sacked.
At the outbreak of the Second
World War, Hartnell served with the Tank Corps but was invalided out after 18
months after suffering a nervous breakdown.
He returned to acting.
The films Hartnell
appeared in were mainly comedic characters until he took the role of Sergeant
Ned Fletcher in The Way Ahead in
1944. During the early years in film and stage he was referred to as Billy
Hartnell.
The
Way Ahead was written
by Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov and directed by Carol Reed and told the story
of Lieutenant Jim Perry played by David Niven, who was a veteran of the British Expeditionary Force who is
posted to the fictional Duke of Glendon’s Light Infantry known as the ‘dogs’,
in which to train a bunch of grumbling ex civilians into soldiers. After their training they were shipped to
North Africa to do battle against Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
On the back of this film
Hartnell was to become known for his roles such as policemen, soldiers and
thuggish characters. It bothered him
greatly that he was typecast in these roles, even in comedy he was portrayed as
a ‘heavy’.
In 1958 he played
Sergeant Grimshaw in the first of the Carry On films – Carry On Sergeant. It was
written by Norman Hudis and directed by Gerald Thomas. The story told of Sergeant Grimshaw who was
due to retire and who took on a £50 bet from Sergeant O’Brien (Terry Scott) to
prove that his last bunch of squaddies would be his first champion platoon.
The film was in black
and white and featured the familiar faces of Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams
and Hattie Jacques. It was entertaining
and had a happy ending for the Sergeant in the story.
Hartnell’s first regular
role on television came in The Army Game
when he played Sergeant Major Percy Bullimore from 1957-1961. The creator had
been inspired by the 1956 film Private’s
Progress which also starred William Hartnell as well as Ian Carmichael,
Richard Attenborough and Terry-Thomas.
The story was based around the latest conscripts who were assigned to
the Surplus Ordnance Department at
Nether Hopping, Staffordshire. Billeted in Hut 29. It was a very similar in story to the Carry
On Sergeant where the recruits were men who were doing their National Service
and had more fun than actual training.
The programme ran on the
ITV channel and out of the 155 episodes made, only 50 are thought to have
survived.
But it was his role in This Sporting Life where he played an
ageing rugby league talent scout known to everyone as ‘Dad’ that caught the
attention of Verity Lambert, who was at that time looking for the ideal person
to play the cantankerous old man who lived in a junk yard and travelled in a
‘magical’ blue box. At first Hartnell
was sceptical about the role, given that this was a children’s series and he’d
played very adult roles in the past. But
with the help of Waris Hussein, Hartnell accepted the role of the Time Lord and
became the iconic figure we know of today.
Hartnell was to play the
role of the Doctor from its launch on 23rd November 1963 till 1966.
During his tenure as the
Doctor, Hartnell enjoyed the new found attention it gave him. Stepping away from the typecast thuggish
roles of the past and becoming this ‘grandfather’ figure to children ‘of all
ages’ who watched his performance in the sci fi show every week around their
black and white television sets, he was also recognised in the street by a new
generation. Children. For his role as the Doctor Hartnell had to
wear a wig as the First Doctor had long hair but in private life, Hartnell
favoured the short back and sides look.
In the role of the
Doctor, Hartnell was paid £315 per episode which in modern terms would be
around £4,050 a week, which was much less than his co-stars in the programme
received.
As the years progressed
and the workload grew heavier, and scenes were usually filmed in the first
take, Hartnell’s health began to suffer.
William Hartnell suffered from Arteriosclerosis which
caused a hardening and thickening of the arterial walls in the arteries. It also affected Hartnell’s ability to read
his lines. By 1966 he was too ill to
continue, and stepped down from his role as the Doctor. But this left the producers with a
problem. How do you continue with Doctor
Who when the main star leaves?
Simple! As the Doctor was an
alien it was decided by the producers that he could regenerate, change his
whole DNA to a completely new body. But
who could they find at such short notice?
"There's
only one man in England who can take over, and that's Patrick Troughton."
In the 4th
episode of the Tenth Planet, the
First Doctor regenerated into the Second Doctor Patrick Troughton.
Although that was
theoretically Hartnell’s last moment as The Doctor, he was to return in an
audio drama called Peer Pressure, playing a separate character to Colin Baker’s
Doctor. Although he reprised his role as
the Doctor during the television episode celebrating the 10th
anniversary of Doctor Who in The Three
Doctors although when his wife Heather found out about it, she insisted
that he played all his appearances seated and read his lines from cue
cards. This was to be his last ever role
as an actor.
In the early 1970’s
Hartnell’s health worsened and he was permanently hospitalised in 1974. He suffered a series of strokes brought on by
cerebrovascular disease and died in his sleep on April 23rd, 1975, he
was 67.
I was too young to know
of William Hartnell’s first outing as the Doctor, but over the years I have
watched many of the programmes he was to appear in before his tenure as the
Time Lord from Gallifrey.
In 2013, Hartnell’s life
as the Doctor was immortalised in the drama An Adventure in Space and Time
where his role was portrayed by David Bradley who looks uncannily like
Hartnell. It gave people like me an
insight into the man and the history of Doctor Who.
There is a published
biography of William Hartnell written by the one person who would know him very
well, his grand-daughter Judith “Jessica” Carney, an actress herself. The book entitled ‘Who’s There? The Life and Career of William Hartnell was
originally published in 1996 by Virgin Publishing but in light of the 50th
Anniversary of Doctor Who was revised and republished in 2013 with Fantom
Publishing.
Research
source:
©BBC Doctor Who 1963
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