Alastair Sim was 'destined for gallows' but became an authority figure

Regularly voted among the top 10 box office stars, his comedic roles often involved portraying eccentric figures of authority, but he also excelled in more earnest works like An Inspector Calls (1954).

Tall and bald with baleful eyes, his comic characters combined bewilderment with capacity for cunning, the execution of which was invariably defeated by farcical circumstance.

Less farcically, Alastair George Bell Sim was born on 9 October 1900 in Edinburgh, just a three-minute walk from where, in a more straitened street 30 years later, Sean Connery first drew breath. So much talent in such a small space.

Notably, both had to modify their accents, the Scots tongue generally being an impediment – the mot juste – to social mobility.

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Alastair, a practising elocutionist in his early career, became kind of accentless, not even “educated Edinburgh” but leaning more towards received pronunciation. His distinctive drawl was central to his personations, so much so that he sued – unsuccessfully – Heinz over an advert for its baked beans, which had a voiceover sounding remarkably like him.

In its own way the advert paid tribute to his singular voice. As critic Michael Brooke put it: “Only Gielgud rivalled his tonal control and sensitivity to the musicality of the English language.”

Alastair was the youngest of four children. His father, Alexander, had a tailor’s shop on Lothian Road, and the family lived in the rooms above. Alexander later became a school governor and Justice of the Peace.

Clean conscience

ALASTAIR'S mother, Isabella (née McIntyre), moved to Edinburgh as a Gaelic-speaking teenager from the island of Eigg. After a day’s work looking after her family, she had to go down and scrub the floors. As a fan website put it: “The family would not have been able to afford outside help and Scottish husbands did not scrub floors.”

Later, improved finances allowed a move to nearby, wealthier Bruntsfield (in a street round the corner from where author Muriel Spark was born in 1918).

Alastair was educated at Bruntsfield Primary and James Gillespie’s and George Heriot’s secondaries. At Gillespie’s, his father advised staff not to spare the boy punishment just because he was a governor.

Even more encouragingly, Alastair remembered father saying more than once: “Mark my words, that boy will end on the gallows.” Well, it’s nice to be ambitious for your son.

After sensibly leaving school at 14 (16 in some accounts), Alastair’s ambition dimmed when Dad offered him a job in his shop as a messenger boy. However, when he forgot to deliver a suit to an important customer, he was banished from the family business.

Dad then wangled a job for him at men’s outfitters Gieves, on Princes Street. Once more, the boy’s talent for retail remained absent, particularly when tying parcels and so, once more, he was let go.

In 1918, Alastair enrolled at Edinburgh University to study analytical chemistry but was soon called up for the Officers’ Training Corps, narrowly missing assignment to the front when the Armistice ending the First World War was agreed.

Sim told his folks that, rather than return to university, he wanted to be an actor, which did not go down well, so he left home and spent a year in the Highlands with itinerant workers, sleeping in bothies and barns. They introduced the boy to whisky, which made him so ill he never touched it again. Silly sod.

A prize guy

BACK in Edinburgh, after an advanced course in elocution and winning prizes for poetry reading, he secured a lecturing position at Edinburgh University, while also teaching private pupils and setting up a drama school for children.

A production for the latter was spotted, and Sim was cast in his first professional production, Othello at London’s Savoy Theatre, where he played a messenger (thankfully not in retail).

Numerous stage performances followed, including many classic plays at the Old Vic, until the big screen beckoned with 1935’s The Riverside Murder, where he played an earnest but dim Scottish police sergeant.

By the mid-1940s, Sim was being cast in starring roles, such as the detective in whodunnit Green for Danger. One role he turned down was that of Joseph Macroon in Whisky Galore! (1949), saying: “I cannot bear professional Scotsmen.”

In 1950 came the aforementioned The Happiest Days of Your Life, in which Sim played Wetherby Pond (Sim), headmaster of a boys’ school, upon which is mistakenly billeted a girls’ school headed by Muriel Whitchurch (the incomparable Margaret Rutherford).

Happiest Days was the precursor of the St Trinian’s films, the first of which – The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954) – saw Sim play both financially harassed headmistress Millicent Fritton and her shady bookmaker brother Clarence. The film was based on Ronald Searle’s cartoons (themselves inspired by an Edinburgh school – I can point out the building to you).

School for Scoundrels (1960), my favourite, is based on comic writer Stephen Potter’s Lifemanship, “the science of being one up on your opponents at all times”.

It’s a fabulous film for the less assertive among us. Regrettably, there is a love element and, indeed, it triumphs in the end. But, remember, this is a film. It’s not real life.

'Peter needs me'

SIM resumed his theatre career in the 1960s, only returning to cinema in the 1970s, with his last role being the Earl in the 1976 television remake of Rogue Male opposite Peter O’Toole, a production for which he left his sick bed, saying: “Peter needs me.”

Alastair Sim died, aged 75, in London on 19 August 1976, from complications of lung cancer. He had always guarded his privacy, seldom giving press interviews and refusing a knighthood in the early 1970s, believing it would compromise his family’s privacy (though he had accepted a CBE in 1953).

During the Second World War, he and his wife had taken in London evacuees, including 15-year-old George Cole, who remained until he was 27, learning his trade from Alastair and eventually appearing alongside him in films such as Scrooge.

In 1948, Sim was elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh, the first celebrity candidate elected to the post. In his rectorial address, he told students: “[T]here is one gift which we … shall always share – the gift of laughter.”