[Will Fyffe, Scottish comedian and music hall entertainer.] Two drafts of Typed Obituary of Fyffe [by theatre historian W. Macqueen-Pope].

From the Macqueen-Pope papers. See the two men’s entries in the Oxford DNB. MP is not named as the author, but there is no doubt that he is. Item one has corrections in his hand. Both versions are simply titled ‘Will Fyffe’. The two versions exhibit a number of differences from one another. It is not clear where the obituary was published, but it was probably the London magazine ‘Everybody’s’, for which MP contributed a weekly column. ONE: 4pp, 4to, double-spaced, on four leaves. Autograph corrections to first sentence, and an altogether more untidy effect (including an additional passage on the last page which is correctly positioned in the second draft below) suggest that this is an earlier draft. Begins: ‘It was a freak [of fortune] that made Will Fyffe [into a] music hall [star] instead of remaining on the legitimate stage, where he had made his beginning as a small boy.’ Contains information not present in the second version, including several astute assessments. For example: ‘Unlike Sir Harry Lauder, the other great Scot of the Halls, Will Fyffe was a realist. He could create a character and be it. It was not Will Fyffe at whom you gazed, it was a gamekeeper, a centenarian, a Scots engineer on a steamship, a guard on the Highland Railway - finding a report of the Battle of Waterloo in the lining of his ill fitting cap, a country doctor, a real country bumpkin, the blacksmith at Gretna Green or the inebriated gentleman to whom Glasgow belonged on a Saturday night. He studied his types and he reproduced them magnificently. They were real people.’ Other topics include his mastery of make-up, international popularity and ‘magnificent service’ in the First World War. TWO: 3pp, 4to, single-spaced, on three leaves. More polished than One, and with emendations, deletions and recasting. Ends: ‘Our stage has lost one of its greatest artists and finest men. How fine an actor he was few knew, although one celebrated critic glimpsed it when he wrote “Mr Fyffe has a sob here of which Garrick had bee proud.......’