Sir Norman Joseph Wisdom, OBE (4 February 1915 – 4 October 2010)
As comfortable, celebrated, and wealthy as Norman Wisdom would become in later life, his early years was a joyless period of poverty, deprivation and hardship. Having already described Max Miller’s childhood as a ‘Chaplinesque evocation of poverty’, that period of Miller’s life spent on the south coast in Edwardian Brighton seems relatively rosy compared to Norman Wisdom’s squalid and desperate Dickensian existence in post-World War One London.
Born in 1915 in Marylebone, the second son of a dressmaker mother and a chauffeur father, both parents were gainfully employed but all was far from well in the Wisdom household. His father was a violent alcoholic and regularly took his temper out on both Norman and elder brother Fred. Norman was slight and small even then, and by all accounts light enough for his father to hurl, at will, around their small family home. Although those years of grim domestic violence and abuse helped Norman learn the art of tumbling without bruising, inadvertently preparing him for a lifetime of pratfalls and slapstick, it seems scant consolation.