Will Percy in the US, 1914
Like so many of his contemporaries, Will Percy made the decision to try his luck overseas. As early as February 1911, Sydney’s monthly Theatre Magazine had reported he was about to leave for London, but the trip was repeatedly delayed. In the end, Will and Jessie departed for the US on the SS Marama in December 1913. Their daughter Joan was sent to live with Jessie’s extended family in Dunedin—suggesting the trip was not necessarily intended to be a permanent one.1
Arriving in New York in early 1914, Will Percy found himself at the studios of the prolific Thanhouser Film Company. Somehow or other, the result of the visit was another filmed comedy short—Percy’s First Holiday. This film has also disappeared, but at least details of the 10-minute comedy have survived—it was based around Percy’s imagined adventures in New York.2
Thanhouser film flyer for Percy’s First Holiday, 1914. Chapman University, Special Collections.
At about the same time, Percy gained a role in Maids of Athens, a comic opera that opened at New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre in mid-March 1914. While the play wasn’t very well reviewed and only ran for a few weeks, ‘English comedian’ Will Percy was heralded by one New York paper as a ‘genuine find … his comical antics, his dancing and his facial expression show that he is a genuine comedian capable of carrying a whole comic opera on his shoulders’.3 Two months later he appeared in a short run of the musical Phyllis at Boston’s Cort Theatre. But soon after this, Will and Jessie left the US. They were in England by the end of June.
Percy’s scrapbook contains no references to the time he spent in the US, however Sydney’s Theatre Magazine reported a letter he had written to Australia from New York in early 1914. His report was, not surprisingly, wide-eyed, but it also made mention of time spent with other aspiring actors including Australian Ivy Scott. Joyful suppers with groups of Australians were held at the Waldorf and Astor hotels and included the singing of patriotic Australian songs. However, he noted that an African-American waiter took issue with him over Australia’s policy of ‘exclusion of coloured people …’ The waiter ‘seemed very upset about it’, he wrote.4
Postcard of Will Percy c.1913, about the time he left Australia
Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne
Bert Gilbert and W.S. Percy in Maids of Athens at New York’s New Amsterdam theatre. English born Gilbert had been married to Ada Reeve and had enjoyed a long career in Australia
New-York Tribune 15 March 1914, p.27
Will Percy in Britain
By November 1914, Percy was touring England in variety, with a farce act that he may have written, called A Cold Douche.5 As was often the case for newly arrived Australian performers, it took some time to establish himself in London. The Stage newspaper finally welcomed Percy in November 1915, in a review of the farce Who’s Who, which had opened at the Oxford Theatre. It reported that he was ‘a most versatile performer, excellent alike in song, pantomime, or dancing’. He would ‘be in great demand with English audiences’, the paper predicted.6 Opinion in the press was that he only came to be appreciated after he had toured provincially.7
In 1915, with fighting having begun in Europe, Will Percy told a few tall stories of the enthusiasm Australians were showing to enlist in the army and rush to the assistance of the mother country. ‘I know one man … who rode 360 miles on a camel across the desert and then travelled over 600 miles by train before he came to a recruiting station’, he told London’s Evening Express.8 (Of course, he had left Australia eight months before war had broken out.) As well as being a purveyor of humorous Australian anecdotes, over time Will Percy would become increasingly keen to emphasize Australia’s loyalty to the Empire.
In February 1916, Will Percy was added to the cast of Albert de Courville’s new revue Joy-land!, This was followed by a long tour with Alfred Butt’s High Jinks. He was now regarded as a specialist character comedian, sometimes brought in to strengthen a show, or to replace principals after plays left London to go on tour.9
As the First World War dragged on, like so many Australians working in London (these included Toots and Lorna Pounds and Dot Brunton), he lent his services to entertaining Australian soldiers on leave.10 Unfortunately, not all the Australian soldier contingents in London audiences assisted in making his stage performances a success. In reviewing Oh, Don’t Dolly, a new musical adaption of Betsy, in March 1919, a reviewer for The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News was annoyed by the ‘wild cries’ of Australian members of the audience, signifying the ‘vast delight’ with which they greeted Will Percy, playing Washington Pollock. The reviewer felt that ‘with a little more moderation displayed by his devotees, one would have been able to appreciate him better as a very fair comic dancer and a humourist of some breadth’. 11 However, theatre historian J.P. Wearing notes that the play only ran for 36 performances in London.12
Reviews of Oh, Don’t Dolly are the final entries in the Will Percy scrapbook—slipped into the pages almost as an afterthought. These reviews also refer to the enthusiastic Australians in the opening night audience.
Will Percy as Washbourne in Oh, Don’t Dolly!, 1919; illustration by MacMichael
The Bystander (London), 19 March 1919, p.25
Will Percy as Dadoolah in Medorah, 1920; illustration by MacMichael
The Bystander (London), 11 February 1920, p.27
Will Percy’s Australian sojourn 1921-23
In March 1921, Australian newspapers announced the exciting news—Will Percy had been engaged by J.C. Williamson again—for a performance tour of Australia of several years, as their principal comedian. Interviewed extensively on his return in August 1921, he indicated that he wanted to see Australia again, as well as Jessie’s family in New Zealand. ‘Something tugs away inside you’, he said.14 However, his surviving J.C. Williamson contract also shows the Firm was being very generous to entice him home. They undertook to pay the return first-class sea-fare for Will, Jessie and their two children (a second daughter had been born in 1919), and were offering a very attractive salary of between £50 and £85 per week.
The musical comedy Theodore and Co. was his first appearance in Sydney—in October 1921—and of course, the return of a talented Australian actor was greeted as a triumph.15 Sydney’s weekly The Arrow was typically enthusiastic:
W.S. Percy absolutely carries Theodore and Co, the new JCW attraction at the Royal. His restless, unremitting energy is amazing. He never pauses or lets up for an instant, and he pulls off a lot of good, new stuff, as well as re-hashing some old fare quite attractively.16
As the AusStage database shows, over the next two years Will Percy appeared in a continuous program of pantomimes, revues and musical comedy, throughout the major cities of Australia and New Zealand. To the delight of Australians, he had maintained his reputation for humorous anecdotes and witty responses:
An interviewer asked Mr. W.S. Percy what was his favourite role. ‘The Baron in Babes in the Wood’, replied the actor, who is at present appearing in that character … at Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s. ‘But I remember you once saying, years ago, that your favourite part was the Judge in The Girl in the Train,’ was the astonished interviewer’s query. ‘That is so,’ replied Mr. Percy, ‘whichever part I am playing when that question is put to me is my favourite part.’17
Australians also discovered Will Percy’s art at this time. The press printed examples of his work as he moved around the country with the J.C. Williamson Musical Comedy Company, and some of it was publicly exhibited.18 While Percy’s etchings and paintings were principally romantic renderings of English villages, there were also some Australian and New Zealand scenes. He named Charles Marques of Adelaide as a teacher from his younger days, and Melbourne artist Cyril Dillon as an influence and friend.19 He was an admirer of cartoonists Phil May and Will Dyson.
St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane: undated etchings from the time of Will Percy’s 1921-23 tour. From The Triad, 1923.
Will Percy at work in Britain 1924-1946
The Percy family had returned to London by December 1923, and Will was soon back on stage in Oswald Stoll’s panto Aladdin. From mid-1924 he toured the UK and Ireland—for almost a year—with the popular musical comedy Katinka. This was followed by tours with the musical Betty and the revue Oh Patsy!
Etching by Will Percy of Samuel Butler’s cottage, Canterbury, New Zealand
National Library of Australia, Canberra
Will Percy as Alf in Alf’s Button, 1927, a comedy based on W.A. Darlington’s popular novel and subsequent film. The humour of this wartime story is that Alf’s new army uniform has a magic button made from Aladdin’s lamp, enabling him to summon up a genie.
Evening Express (Liverpool), 28 July 1927, p.3
In the mid-1920s Percy also began to be heard on radio, and to make recordings for the Parlophone label. Some of these recordings survive today, giving us a chance to hear his clear diction and the style of popular music that was his speciality. While discussing his recordings, Will Percy expressed a desire to see the British Empire embrace ‘Imperial preference’ not just with regard to recorded music, but to all products. Although ultimately impractical, this was a concept of tariff protection that appealed to many between the two world wars.22
It was during his Australian tour that Will Percy made comments on changing directions in British theatre. He told a Sydney paper that; ‘before the war there was a strong tendency to the morbid, and what has been described as the ultra-modern school. With the war came a change to plays consisting chiefly of simple fun, and now musical comedy with a plot … is fast winning popularity’.23 He did not comment on the rise of the revue, which became such a feature in British theatres after the First World War. By the later 1920s he was appearing in the Maurice Cowan revues All for Love and Sunny Skies.
Larks, a 1930 revue produced by Tommy Lorne and with script by Percy, introducing another Scottish comedian, Dave Willis
The Surrey Advertiser, 16 August 1930, p.8
It was these two revues for Cowan that saw him first appear as a foil for Tommy Lorne, a very popular Scottish comedian. The juxtaposition of Lorne—the very tall Scotsman from Glasgow—and Percy the refined, short ‘Englishman’, was apparently all part of the charm of the act. As noted, Will Percy also wrote at least one script for Lorne—for the 1930 revue Larks. There are hints that he contributed original material for other revues. For example, in Sunny Skies Lorne and Percy appeared ‘in a funny eternal triangle sketch called “Domesticity” and ‘as a housewife and a gas inspector in … “Meter Muddle”’. These were apparently original items.24 In the panto Cinderella, performed over Christmas 1932, the comedy skit “Glasgow subway in 1952” also appears to have been original material, tailored for local tastes. Audiences were assured the panto would give ‘fun and humour of the true Glasgow brand’.25
Percy on tour with Tommy Lorne in the revue Laughs, 1930. From Evening Sentinel (Surrey), 10 May 1930, p.2.
The revue Chuckles of 1934 was Will Percy’s final work with Tommy Lorne. Percy had worked with him for almost six years by this time. Lorne’s declining state of health may have been a reason for the end of the partnership (a chronic alcoholic, Lorne died a year later), but it was also about this time that Percy turned to writing. His four ‘travel books’, published between 1934 and 1937, were really sentimental potted histories of Britain, illustrated with his own etchings and laced with anecdotes of his own and connections to the Empire—especially to Australia and New Zealand.
His fourth and final book, The Empire Comes Home, published in 1937, reveals a world view that has now passed by. It is, in part, a Colonial’s (with a capital C) celebration of the British Empire. Percy began the book posing the question ‘What makes every Colonial look forward to a trip home?’ The point he proceeded to make was that although born in an Australian colony, Britain was his homeland too; meaning ‘the Colonial has an equal share in the glory of [Britain’s] history’. After all, he reasoned, in the Great War a million and a half Colonials had answered the Motherland’s call to arms. Yet his book also emphasized the ‘independent manner of the Colonial’ who had ‘the same spirit of adventure and enterprise which [had] sent their forefathers overseas to found our Dominions’.26
As early as 1917, he had expressed sentiments closely paralleling the imperial views of popular imperial advocates of the day—including Rudyard Kipling—who admonished Britons who did not embrace and celebrate the beneficent influence of their Empire. The politics of the new Federation of Australia (1901) seems to have merely reinforced imperialist and nationalist sentiments in Will Percy, as it did for many others. Interviewed while touring England with High Jinks in 1917, he reportedly spoke with ‘pride of the Australian ideal’, which was the Immigration Restriction Act (1901), one of the first acts of the Australian parliament, which was designed to ‘keep Australia a white country, admitting no coloured settlers, but maintaining the continent … a heritage for millions of British people, as yet unborn’.27
Dust jacket of the third of Percy’s books—Strolling Through Cottage England (1936)
Author’s collection
A drawing of Belmont St, Aberdeen, by W.S. Percy, c.1932
Author’s collection
By the mid-1930s, and now aged in his 60s, Will Percy toured less often. Two London musicals that he took supporting roles in were particularly successful—the opera Merrie England, which played at Prince’s Theatre in 1934 and a modernised version of Offenbach’s Grand Duchess which ran at Daly’s in 1937. There was at least one more appearance in film at this time—as a supporting player in the British “quota-quickie” comedy, Highland Fling, made in 1936 as a vehicle for stage comedians Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold. Other B-film roles may have gone unrecorded.
Will Percy took supporting parts in annual pantomimes every year in the 1930s—including Goody Two Shoes, Aladdin, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and Red Riding Hood. Selections of some of these were often broadcast live on BBC radio. At least one pantomime was broadcast by the BBC’s fledgling television service in 1937. This was a Joan Luxton production of Cinderella, and it is likely there were others, now forgotten.
Pages from the program for the 1938 pantomime Red Riding Hood, showing Percy in makeup as the Baron. Nelson Keys played Mother Hubbard, in this, his final role. Author’s Collection.
The Second World War saw no decline in Will Percy’s activities. In the 1939 British census he was still listed as an actor and was a local Air Raid warden. After the 1940 panto season, he led an ENSA entertainment troupe for several years, performing at military hospitals. By mid-1941 he estimated his concert party (he called it “Pop’s Party”) had performed for 3000 sick and wounded soldiers.28 By 1943, he was again touring British centres in a revival of A Country Girl. He had also found time to write a history of the Tom Pollard company for the National Library of New Zealand.
Will Percy remained active until very late in his life. He died at the New End Hospital in London, not far from his home of many years at 25 Cholmley Gardens, Hampstead, following a stroke, in June 1946, aged 73. He had been touring Katinka only a few months before. The New Zealand and British press marked his passing with generous obituaries. As was often the case at the time, the Australian press had forgotten him.
Jessie Percy, who had long since abandoned her career, returned to New Zealand for an enthusiastic welcome and a long stay in 1949. She died in London in 1966.
Will Percy’s younger brother Joseph, a Brisbane fireman, died only a month before him. It is tempting to speculate whether the Will Percy scrapbook had once been left in his care, and never actually left Australia at all.
Listen to W.S. Percy
Endnotes
1. In April 1915, Wellington’s Dominion newspaper reported that Jessie returned to New Zealand to collect their daughter Joan. By this time, the Percys had decided to settle in the UK.
2. The Mail (Adelaide), 9 May 1914, p.10, gives a plausible account of how Percy ended up in the film.
3. Brooklyn Eagle (New York), 20 March 1914, p.7.
4. The Theatre Magazine (Sydney), 2 March 1914, p.30.
5. The traditional English use of this term means a cold shower.
6. The Stage (London), 4 November 1915, p.14.
7. Leeds Mercury (UK), 5 March 1919, p.6.
8. Evening Express (London), 2 November 1915, p.3.
9. Sunday Dispatch (London), 20 February 1916, p.8.
10. The Kalgoorlie Miner, 7 January 1916, p.2.
11. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (London), 8 March 1919, p.40.
12. J.P. Wearing (2013), p.498.
14. The Sun (Sydney), 11 September 1921, p.19.
15. Sydney Morning Herald, 24 October 1921, p.5.
16. Arrow (Sydney), 28 October 1921, p.15.
17. Critic (Adelaide), 15 February 1922, p.12.
18. The Brisbane Courier, 7 April 1923, p.19.
19. The Register (Adelaide), 3 March 1922, p.11.
22. Daily Standard (Brisbane), 21 July 1924, p.10.
23. The Sun (Sydney), 2 September 1921, p.8.
24. West Middlesex Gazette (UK), 15 June 1929, p.11.
25. The Winshaw Press & Advertiser (Strathclyde, UK), 23 December 1932, p.3.
26. W.S. Percy (1937), pp.13–21.
27. The Football Post (Nottingham, UK), 17 March 1917, p.6.
28. The Age (Melbourne), 30 August 1941, p.4.
References
Gillian Arrighi & Victor Emeljanow (eds), Entertaining Children: The participation of youth in the entertainment industry, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
Tobias Becker, ‘Entertaining the Empire: Theatrical touring companies and amateur dramatics in colonial India’, The Historical Journal, Cambridge University Press, September 2014
Fraser Charlton; EdMusCom, The Original Edwardian Comedy website, https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/fraser.charlton/index.html Accessed 14 May 2025
Peter Downes, The Pollards, Steele Roberts, New Zealand, 2002
Gale Research Company, Who Was Who in the Theatre, 1912-1976: A biographical dictionary of actors, actresses, directors, playwrights and producers of the English-speaking theatre, vol. 3, I-P. Detroit, 1977
W.S. Percy, Strolling through Scotland, Collins, London, 1934
W.S. Percy, Strolling through England, Collins, London, 1935
W.S. Percy, Strolling through Cottage England, Collins, London, 1936
W.S. Percy, The Empire Comes Home, Collins, London, 1937
Andrew Pike & Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900-1977. A guide to feature film production, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1980
J.P. Wearing The London Stage 1910-1919: A calendar of productions, performers, and personnel, second edition, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Plymouth, 2014
J. P. Wearing, The London Stage 1920-1929: A calendar of productions, performers, and personnel, second edition, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Plymouth, 2014
