Stanley Unwin (comedian)
| Stanley Unwin | |
|---|---|
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|
| Born |
7 June 1911 Pretoria, South Africa |
| Died | 12 January 2002 (aged 90) Daventry, Northamptonshire, England |
| Resting place |
Long Buckby, Northamptonshire |
| Residence | Long Buckby, Northamptonshire |
| Nationality | English |
| Other names | "Professor" Stanley Unwin |
| Alma mater | Regent Street Polytechnic |
| Occupation | Comic actor and writer |
| Years active | Late 1940s–1998 |
| Employer | BBC (1940s) |
| Agent | Johnnie and Patsy Riscoe |
| Known for | Inventing "Unwinese" language |
| Spouse(s) | Frances Anne (m. 1937–93) (her death) |
| Children | Marion (b. 1939), Lois (b. 1940) and John (b. 1944) |
| Parent(s) | Ivan Oswald Unwin (d. 1914) Jessie Elizabeth, née Brand (d. 1967) |
| Website | www |
Stanley Unwin (7 June 1911 – 12 January 2002), sometimes billed as "Professor" Stanley Unwin, was an English comedian, actor and comic writer.
He invented his own comic language, "Unwinese", referred to in the film Carry On Regardless (1961) as "gobbledygook". Unwinese was a corrupted form of English in which many of the words were altered in playful and humorous ways, as in its description of Elvis Presley and his contemporaries as being "wasp-waist and swivel-hippy". Unwin claimed that the inspiration came from his mother, who once told him that on the way home she had "falolloped (fallen) over" and "grazed her kneeclabbers".
Unwin's parents, Ivan Oswald Unwin and his wife Jessie Elizabeth, née Brand, emigrated from the United Kingdom to South Africa in the early 1900s. Their son was born in Pretoria in 1911. Following his father's death in 1914, Unwin's mother arranged for the family to return to England. By 1919, Unwin had been sent to the National Children's Home in Congleton, Cheshire. In the late 1920s, he studied radio, television and languages at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in London.
In 1937, he married his wife Frances, with whom he had two daughters and a son. Unwin later stated that Unwinese had its roots in enlivening the bedtime stories that he used to tell his children. In 1940, he was given a job in transmitter maintenance for the BBC, and was assigned to the Borough Hill transmitting station in Daventry. Unwin, Frances and their nine-month-old daughter, Marion, moved to Long Buckby in Northamptonshire, where Unwin would reside for the rest of his life.
Unwin's early career and training introduced him to wireless and radio communication, and this, coupled with work in the BBC's War Reporting Unit from about 1944, ultimately proved to be his passage into the media.
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Wikipedia