Bud Flanagan, the comedian and leader of the Crazy Gang, is commemorated with a blue plaque at his childhood home, 12 Hanbury Street in Spitalfields.

SPITALFIELDS CHILDHOOD

Flanagan was born and raised at 12 Hanbury Street as Reuben Weintrop, the youngest of the 10 children of the Polish Jewish immigrants Woolf and Yetta ‘Kittie’ Weintrop. Flanagan later described the street of his birth as ‘a patchwork of small shops, pubs, church halls, Salvation Army hostels, doss houses, cap factories and sweat shops’, and noted that it ‘was typical of the Jewish quarter in the ‘90s’.

At number 12, a re-fronted house of about 1712–3, his family ran a fried fish shop until the mid-1920s. As a boy, he anglicised his name to Bud Robert Winthrop and, age 10, found work at the Cambridge Music Hall in nearby Commercial Street.

LONDON TO NEW YORK

In 1910 Bud walked to Southampton and worked his passage to New York, where he became involved with vaudeville. He returned in 1915 to join the Royal Field Artillery. At the rest house founded by Reverend PTB ‘Tubby’ Clayton in Belgium, Bud met Chesney Allen, with whom he formed a lasting comedy double act in 1926. He took the name Flanagan as revenge on a sergeant major of that name who had persecuted him for being Jewish.

THE CRAZY GANG

In 1932 the duo joined with others at the London Palladium to form the Crazy Gang, with Flanagan as the lynchpin of what was then innovatively anarchic and vulgar comedy. With his recordings of ‘Underneath the Arches’ (1937), ‘We’re Going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’(1939) and ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ (1939), Flanagan became a household name.

Although Chesney Allen retired in 1945, the Crazy Gang kept going until 1962. One of Flanagan’s last contributions to comedy was a recording of his ‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?’ for the opening title sequence of Dad’s Army.