PERHAPS one of the main changes in society since the 1950s is our relationship with the police. Dixon of Dock Green embodied the friendly local bobby, familiar with the area he patrolled and its residents, and respected by all (except criminals). George Dixon was played in all 485 episodes by Jack Warner.
He was born Horace John Waters in 1895. He soon dumped his first name, becoming John, then Jack.
His first love was cars, and he became a qualified mechanic. During the First World War he served in France as a driver in the Royal Flying Corps, acquiring a working knowledge of French, and was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal in 1918.
After the war he was a car salesman and amateur racer, regularly appearing at Brooklands and circuits in Europe. As far as I can tell he did not have much success, though some sources say he once finished third in the Monte Carlo Rally. I can’t back that up.
In the Twenties he and his friend Jeff Darnell started a double act featuring singing, comedy and comic monologues, with Darnell at the piano. By this time Jack’s sisters Elsie and Doris Waters had become popular entertainers (I wrote about them here). Jack did not want to appear to be cashing in on their success so he adopted the stage name Jack Warner, and the duo became Warner & Darnell. (It must have taken a while to come up with that.) The act was a success and Warner decided to be a professional entertainer in the late Twenties, when he was over 30.
Here is a clip from 1940 in which Warner calls upon his French accent.
During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard as a Warrant Officer Class 2 (WO2) while continuing with his showbusiness career. He starred in a BBC radio programme called Garrison Theatre which played to a raucous audience of servicemen and women. In the role of a Cockney private, each week Warner arrived on his bicycle, which would end up in the way, to cries of ‘Mind my bike!’
A regular routine was a reading of his brother Syd’s letters, which were heavily marked by the censor’s blue pencil, especially where swearing might be involved: ‘Yesterday the colonel caught his thumb in a tank. His only remark was 24 blue pencils.’
Here is a sample:
Warner’s film debut was in a variety theatre mystery, The Dummy Talks (1943), and he soon became an Ealing regular. One of his best villains was an escaped convict handcuffed to a young George Cole in My Brother’s Keeper (1948). Here is a clip (Warner’s character has stolen an Army uniform):
In 1950 Warner got the role which was to keep him going for the rest of his life, as PC George Dixon in the film The Blue Lamp. It was scripted by Ealing Studios regular ‘Tibby’ Clarke from a story by Ted Willis and Jan Read.Here is the introductory sequence:
It is worth noting that Jack Warner was now 55, the standard retirement age for policemen at that time (now typically 55-60).
A mere 21 minutes into the film, we have this scene (with Dirk Bogarde):
Here is a great subsequent scene:
The Blue Lamp was the most successful film at the box office that year.
The death of Dixon in the film did not inhibit the BBC from resurrecting him in 1955 for a new series called Dixon of Dock Green intended as a bulwark against the imminent launch of ITV, featuring ‘everyday stories of a London policeman’ and starring a much-loved entertainer. The first episode went out on July 9, 1955, by which time Jack Warner was 60.
The series was created by Ted Willis, who as I mentioned co-wrote the treatment for The Blue Lamp.
I don’t think you would know it from Dixon of Dock Green but Willis was a Labour firebrand. Born in London in 1918, he was elected chairman of the Labour League of Youth in 1937. In 1939, he joined the Young Communist League, and he became General Secretary in 1941. The Labour Party under Harold Wilson rewarded his activism with a life peerage in 1963, when he became Baron Willis of Chislehurst in the County of Kent.
After leaving school he did a variety of unskilled jobs before enlisting in the Royal Fusiliers in 1939, subsequently serving in the Army Kinematograph Service making documentaries. During the war he wrote plays for the Unity Theatre in London, which had links with the Communist Party of Great Britain. Afterwards he became a writer with 34 stage plays, 39 feature films and 40 TV series to his name (Guinness World Records lists him as the most prolific writer in TV history), plus 14 novels. He was an early writer on Mrs Dale’s Diary, but is remembered most for Dixon of Dock Green.
I was looking forward to showing a few episodes but there are no complete ones on YouTube. The BBC lists 14 episodes but not one is available to view. I feel that since the public paid for them to be made we should have free access to them. They are not the BBC’s property, they are ours. Wikipedia says that 33 episodes survive. The BBC have released three collections of episodes on DVD totalling 20, but of course you have to buy them.
Anyway all I can offer are a measly four scenes.
The police station featured in the original opening titles was the old Ealing nick, but the opening and closing segments of each episode, with PC Dixon delivering the lines ‘Evening, all’ and ‘Goodnight, all’ and a short homily, were filmed on the front steps of the nearby Ealing Grammar School for Boys. The BBC would attach a blue lamp next to the double doors, and the oak-floored vestibule of the old school would glow warmly behind.
In the introductory scene of the first series Jack Warner as Dixon whistled a few bars of Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner, but he explained later that police officers from other parts of the country felt excluded so his old friend and partner Jeff Darnell wrote an instrumental theme tune which Tommy Reilly played on the harmonica.
Reilly (1919-2000) was born in Canada, the son of a military band leader. He studied the violin and began playing harmonica at age 11 as a member of his father’s band. In 1935 the family moved to London. At the outbreak of the Second World War Reilly was a student at the Leipzig Conservatory. He was arrested and interned for the duration of the war in prisoner of war camps in Germany, Poland and France, using the enforced leisure to develop his virtuosity on the harmonica.
After the war he became a popular performer on the radio, and his determination to establish the harmonica as a concert instrument led to 30 works being written for him.
He played the theme tunes to the BBC radio series The Navy Lark,
Last of the Summer Wine
and The Singing Detective.
He was not available to play John Barry’s theme tune for the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy but performed on the soundtrack album. It was his idea to ‘bend’ some of the notes.
The Dixon of Dock Green theme was released as a single called An Ordinary Copper with words spoken and sung by Jack Warner. (On the original 1958 Prestige label and re-release on Oriole the writing credit goes to ‘Dunhill-Warner’ but on a 1968 remake it is corrected to Darnell-Warner.)
As Jack Warner aged, so did PC Dixon. He was promoted to sergeant in series 11 (1964) when Warner was 69, and by the time the final series (22) went out in 1976, when Warner was 80, Dixon had retired and become the civilian collator. By this time Warner’s arthritis made it difficult for him to move around and the series came to a natural end.
It is surprising to me that it lasted as long as it did. In 1962 the BBC had launched its own opposition in the form of Z-Cars.
This was a much pacier and grittier drama set in the fictional town of Newtown, based on Kirkby, near Liverpool. Yet the two programmes continued side by side for 14 years, with Z-Cars ending in 1978.
Dixon of Dock Green retained a faithful following throughout its run. It was voted second-most popular programme on British television in 1961 and Warner was made an OBE in 1965 for services to drama. It was well received by police forces and Warner, who lived in the Broadstairs area of Kent for 35 years, was made an honorary member of both the Margate and Ramsgate police forces in the 1950s. At his funeral in Margate on June 1, 1981, his coffin was borne by officers from Paddington Green police station where Dixon of Dock Green creator Ted Willis did much of his initial research for the show in 1955, and where Dixon was stationed in The Blue Lamp. Six Margate constables stood as guards-of-honour outside the chapel while delegations of officers attended from as far from Wales and Newcastle upon Tyne. There were 16 from the Metropolitan Police, led by Deputy Assistant Commissioner George Rushbrook and Commander John Atkins.
The IMDb website gives this quote from Jack Warner, though I have not been able to track down the source:
‘While I was immensely thrilled to be voted top British male star by the Motion Picture Herald, after The Blue Lamp, I received another award I treasured above everything! It was a casket and scroll presented to me by officers of the Metropolitan Police “F” Division and gave me “the freedom of police stations, the freedom of their tea, the freedom to criticise its quality and if he does, the freedom of the cells”. This tribute was made to me after the film’s premiere by Chief Superintendent F H Archer, of Hammersmith, who had taught me how to walk, talk and salute like a policeman.’
