title: George Formby

text: During the Second World War Formby worked extensively for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), and entertained civilians and troops, and by 1946 it was estimated that he had performed in front of three million service personnel. After the war his career declined, although he toured the Commonwealth, and continued to appear in variety and pantomime. His last television appearance was in December 1960, two weeks before the death of Beryl. He surprised people by announcing his engagement to a school teacher, Pat Howson, seven weeks after Beryl's funeral, but died in Preston three weeks later, at the age of 56; he was buried in Warrington, alongside his father.


title: George Formby

text: Formby's biographer, Jeffrey Richards, considers that the actor "had been able to embody simultaneously Lancashire, the working classes, the people, and the nation". Formby was considered Britain's first properly home-grown screen comedian. He was an influence on future comedians—particularly Charlie Drake and Norman Wisdom—and, culturally, on entertainers such as the Beatles, who referred to him in their music. Since his death Formby has been the subject of five biographies, two television specials and two works of public sculpture.


title: George Formby

text: George Formby was born George Hoy Booth at 3 Westminster Street, Wigan, Lancashire, on 26 May 1904. He was the eldest of seven surviving children born to James Lawler Booth and his wife Eliza, Hoy, although this marriage was bigamous because Formby Sr was still married to his first wife, Martha Maria Salter, a twenty-year-old music hall performer. Booth was a successful music hall comedian and singer who performed under the name George Formby (he is now known as George Formby Sr). Formby Sr suffered from a chest ailment, identified variously as bronchitis, asthma or tuberculosis, and would use the cough as part of the humour in his act, saying to the audience, "Bronchitis, I'm a bit tight tonight", or "coughing better tonight". One of his main characters was that of John Willie, an "archetypal Lancashire lad". In 1906 Formby Sr was earning £35 a week at the music halls, which rose to £325 a week by 1920, and Formby grew up in an affluent home. Formby Sr was so popular that Marie Lloyd, the influential music hall singer and actress, would only watch two acts: his and that of Dan Leno.


title: George Formby

text: Formby was born blind owing to an obstructive caul, although his sight was restored during a violent coughing fit or sneeze when he was a few months old. After briefly attending school—at which he did not prosper, and did not learn to read or write—Formby was removed from formal education at the age of seven and sent to become a stable boy, briefly in Wiltshire and then in Middleham, Yorkshire. Formby Sr sent his son away to work as he was worried Formby would watch him on stage; he was against Formby following in his footsteps, saying "one fool in the family is enough". After a year working at Middleham, he was apprenticed to Thomas Scholfield at Epsom, where he ran his first professional races at the age of 10, when he weighed less than .


title: George Formby

text: In 1915 Formby Sr allowed his son to appear on screen, taking the lead in "By the Shortest of Heads", a thriller directed by Bert Haldane in which Formby played a stable boy who outwits a gang of villains and wins a £10,000 prize when he comes first in a horse race. The film is now considered lost, with the last-known copy having been destroyed in 1940. Later in 1915, and with the closure of the English racing season because of the First World War, Formby moved to Ireland where he continued as a jockey until November 1918. Later that month he returned to England and raced for Lord Derby at his Newmarket stables. Formby continued as a jockey until 1921, although he never won a race.


title: George Formby

text: On 8 February 1921 Formby Sr succumbed to his bronchial condition and died, at the age of 45; he was buried in the Catholic section of Warrington Cemetery. After his father's funeral Eliza took the young Formby to London to help him cope with his grief. While there, they visited the Victoria Palace Theatre—where Formby Sr had previously been so successful—and saw a performance by the Tyneside comedian Tommy Dixon. Dixon was performing a copy of Formby Sr's act, using the same songs, jokes, costumes and mannerisms, and billed himself as "The New George Formby", a name which angered Eliza and Formby even more. The performance prompted Formby to follow in his father's profession, a decision which was supported by Eliza. As he had never seen his father perform live, Formby found the imitation difficult and had to learn his father's songs from records, and the rest of his act and jokes from his mother.


title: George Formby

text: On 21 March 1921 Formby gave his first professional appearance in a two-week run at the Hippodrome in Earlestown, Lancashire, where he received a fee of £5 a week. In the show he was billed as George Hoy, using his mother's maiden name—he explained later that he did not want the Formby name to appear in small print. His father's name was used in the posters and advertising, George Hoy being described as "Comedian. (son of George Formby)". While still appearing in Earlestown Formby was hired to appear at the Moss Empire chain of theatres for £17 10s a week. His first night was unsuccessful and he later said of it, "I was the first turn, three minutes, died the death of a dog". He toured around venues in Northern England, although he was not well received, and was booed and hissed while performing in Blyth, Northumberland. As a result he experienced frequent periods of unemployment—up to three months at one point. Formby spent two years as a support act touring round the northern halls, and although he was poorly paid, his mother supported him financially.


title: George Formby

text: In 1923 Formby started to play the ukulele, although the exact circumstances of how he came to play the instrument are unknown, and he introduced it into his act during a run at the Alhambra Theatre in Barnsley. When the songs—still his father's material—were well received, he changed his stage name to George Formby, and stopped using the John Willie character. Another significant event was his appearance in Castleford, West Yorkshire, where appearing on the same bill was Beryl Ingham, an Accrington-born champion clogdancer and actress who had won the All England Step Dancing title at the age of 11. Beryl, who had formed a dancing act with her sister, May, called "The Two Violets", had a low opinion of Formby's act, and later said that "if I'd had a bag of rotten tomatoes with me I'd have thrown them at him". Formby and Beryl entered into a relationship and married two years later, on 13 September 1924, at a register office in Wigan, with Formby's aunt and uncle as witnesses. Upon hearing the news, Eliza insisted on the couple having a church wedding, which followed two months later.


title: George Formby

text: Beryl took over as George's manager, and changed aspects of his act, including the songs and jokes. She instructed him on how to use his hands, and how to work his audience. She also persuaded him to change his stage dress to black tie—although he appeared in a range of other costumes too—and to take lessons in how to play the ukulele properly. By June 1926 he was proficient enough to earn a one-off record deal—negotiated by Beryl—to sing six of his father's songs for the Edison Bell/Winner label. Formby spent the next few years touring, largely in the north, but also appearing at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, his official London debut. Although he had a further recording session in October 1929, performing two songs for Dominion Records, "Beryl's avaricious demands would prevent any serious contract from coming George's way", according to David Bret, Formby's biographer. That changed in 1932, when Formby signed a three-year deal with Decca Records. One of the songs he recorded in July was "Chinese Laundry Blues", telling the story of Mr Wu, which became one of his standard songs, and part of a long-running series of songs about the character. Over the course of his career Formby went on to record over 200 songs, around 90 of which were written by Fred Cliffe and Harry Gifford. In the 1932 winter season Formby appeared in his first pantomime, "Babes in the Wood", in Bolton, after which he toured with the "George Formby Road Show" around the north of England, with Beryl acting as the commère; the show also toured in 1934.


title: George Formby

text: With Formby's growing success on stage, Beryl decided it was time for him to move into films. In 1934 she approached the producer Basil Dean, the head of Associated Talking Pictures (ATP). Although he expressed an interest in Formby, he did not like the associated demands from Beryl. She also met the representative of Warner Bros. in the UK, Irving Asher, who was dismissive, saying that Formby was "too stupid to play the bad guy and too ugly to play the hero". Three weeks later Formby was approached by John E. Blakeley of Blakeley's Productions, who offered him a one-film deal.


title: George Formby

text: The film, "Boots! Boots!", was shot on a budget of £3,000 in a one-room studio in Albany Street, London. Formby played the John Willie character, while Beryl also appeared, and the couple were paid £100 for the two weeks' work, plus 10 per cent of the profits. The film followed a revue format, and Jo Botting, writing for the British Film Institute, describes it as having a "wafer-thin plot" that is "almost incidental". Botting also considers the film has "poor sound quality, static scene set-ups and [a] lack of sets", and while it did not impress the critics, audience figures were high. Formby followed this up with "Off the Dole" in 1935, again for Blakeley, who had re-named his company Mancunian Films. The film cost £3,000 to make, and earned £80,000 at the box office. As with "Boots! Boots!", the film was in a revue format, and Formby again played John Willie, with Beryl as his co-star. According to Formby's biographer, Jeffrey Richards, the two films for Blakeley "are an invaluable record of the pre-cinematic Formby at work".


title: George Formby

text: The success of the pictures led Dean to offer Formby a seven-year contract with ATP, which resulted in the production of 11 films, although Dean's fellow producer, Michael Balcon, considered Formby to be "an odd and not particularly loveable character". The first film from the deal was released in 1935. "No Limit" features Formby as an entrant in the Isle of Man annual Tourist Trophy (TT) motorcycle race. Monty Banks directed, and Florence Desmond took the female lead. According to Richards, Dean did not try "to play down Formby's Lancashire character" for the film, and employed Walter Greenwood, the Salford-born author of the 1933 novel "Love on the Dole", as the scriptwriter. Filming was troubled, with Beryl being difficult to everyone present. The writer Matthew Sweet describes the set as "a battleground" because of her actions, and Banks unsuccessfully requested that Dean bar Beryl from the studio. "The Observer" thought that parts of "No Limit" were "pretty dull stuff", but the race footage was "shot and cut to a maximum of excitement". Regarding the star of the film, the reviewer thought that "our Lancashire George is a grand lad; he can gag and clown, play the banjo and sing with authority ... Still and all, he doesn't do too bad." The film was so popular it was reissued in 1938, 1946 and 1957.


title: George Formby

text: The formula used for "No Limit" was repeated in his following works: Formby played "the urban 'little man' defeated—but refusing to admit it". He portrayed a good-natured, but accident-prone and incompetent Lancastrian, who was often in a skilled trade, or the services. The plots were geared to Formby trying to achieve success in a field unfamiliar to him (in horse racing, the TT Races, as a spy or a policeman), and by winning the affections of a middle-class girl in the process. Interspersed throughout each film is a series of songs by Formby, in which he plays the banjo, banjolele or ukulele. The films are, in the words of the academic Brian McFarlane, "unpretentiously skilful in their balance between broad comedy and action, laced with ... [Formby's] shy ordinariness".


title: George Formby

text: "No Limit" was followed by "Keep Your Seats, Please" in 1936, which was again directed by Banks with Desmond returning as the co-star. Tensions arose in pre-production with Banks and some of the cast requesting to Dean that Beryl be banned from the set. Tempers had also become strained between Formby and Desmond, who were not on speaking terms except to film scenes. The situation became so bad that Dean avoided visiting his studios for the month of filming. The film contained the song "The Window Cleaner" (popularly known as "When I'm Cleaning Windows"), which was soon banned by the BBC. The corporation's director John Reith stated that "if the public wants to listen to Formby singing his disgusting little ditty, they'll have to be content to hear it in the cinemas, not over the nation's airwaves"; Formby and Beryl were furious with the block on the song. In May 1941 Beryl informed the BBC that the song was a favourite of the royal family, particularly Queen Mary, while a statement by Formby pointed out that "I sang it before the King and Queen at the Royal Variety Performance". The BBC relented and started to broadcast the song.


title: George Formby

text: When production finished on "Keep Your Seats, Please", Beryl insisted that for the next film there should be "no Eye-Ties and stuck-up little trollops involved", referring to Banks and Desmond, respectively. Dean had tired of the on-set squabbles, and for the third ATP film, "Feather Your Nest", he appointed William Beaudine as the director, and Polly Ward, the niece of the music hall star Marie Lloyd, as the female lead. Bret describes the songs in the film as "comparatively bland", but "with the exception of the one which would become immortal": "Leaning on a Lamp-post".


title: George Formby

text: By the time of the next production, "Keep Fit" in 1937, Dean had begun to assemble a special team at Ealing Studios to help develop and produce the Formby films; key among the members were the director Anthony Kimmins, who went on to direct five of Formby's films. Kay Walsh was cast as the leading lady and, in the absences of Beryl from the set, Formby and Walsh had an affair, after she fell for his "flirtatious behaviour off-camera". Although Beryl was furious with Walsh, and tried to have her removed from the film, a showdown with Dean proved fruitless. Dean informed her that Walsh was to remain the lead in both "Keep Fit", and in Formby's next film ("I See Ice", 1938); to mollify her Dean raised Formby's fee for the latter film to £25,000.


title: George Formby

text: When filming concluded on "I See Ice", Formby spent the 1937 summer season performing in the revue "King Cheer" at the Opera House Theatre, Blackpool, before appearing in a 12-minute slot in the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium that November. The popularity of his performances meant that in 1937 he was the top British male star in box office takings, a position he held every subsequent year until 1943. Additionally, between 1938 and 1942 he was also the highest-paid entertainer in Britain, and by the end of the 1930s was earning £100,000 a year.


title: George Formby

text: In early 1938 Dean informed the Formbys that in the next film, "It's in the Air", Banks would return to direct and Walsh would again be the leading lady. Beryl objected strongly, and Kimmins continued his directorial duties, while Ward was brought in for the female lead. Beryl, as she did with all Formby's female co-stars, "read the 'keep-your-hands-off-my-husband' riot act" to the actress. In May, while filming "It's in the Air", Formby purchased a Rolls-Royce, with the personalised number plate GF 1. Every year afterwards he would purchase either a new Rolls Royce or Bentley, buying 26 over the course of his life.


title: George Formby

text: In the autumn of 1938 Formby began work on "Trouble Brewing", released the following year with 19-year-old Googie Withers as the female lead; Kimmins again directed. Withers later recounted that Formby did not speak to her until, during a break in filming when Beryl was not present, he whispered out of the corner of his mouth "I'm sorry, love, but you know, I'm not allowed to speak to you", something she thought was "very sweet". His second release of 1939—shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War—was "Come On George!", which cast Pat Kirkwood in the female lead; the pair disliked each other intensely, and neither of the Formbys liked several of the other senior cast members. "Come On George!" was screened for troops serving in France before being released in Britain.


title: George Formby

text: At the outbreak of the Second World War Dean left ATP and became the head of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), the organisation that provided entertainment to the British Armed Forces. Over the course of five months Formby requested to sign up for ENSA, but was denied; Dean relented in February 1940, and Formby was signed on a fixed salary of £10 per week, although he still remained under contract to ATP. He undertook his first tour in France in March, where he performed for members of the British Expeditionary Force.


title: George Formby

text: The social research organisation Mass-Observation recorded that Formby's first film of 1940, "Let George Do It!", gave a particularly strong boost to early-war British civilian morale. In a dream sequence after being drugged, Formby's character ropes into a Nuremberg Rally and punches Hitler. According to Richards, the scene provided "the visual encapsulation of the people's war with the English Everyman flooring the Nazi Superman". The scene was so striking that the film became Formby's first international release, in the US, under the title "To Hell With Hitler", and in Moscow—where it was released in 1943 under the title "Dinky Doo"—it was shown to packed houses and received record box-office takings for over ten months. The critics also praised the film, and the "Kinematograph Weekly" called it Formby's "best performance to date", and the film, "a box office certainty".


title: George Formby

text: Formby's ENSA commitments were heavy, touring factories, theatres and concert halls around Britain. He also gave free concerts for charities and worthy causes, and raised £10,000 for the Fleetwood Fund on behalf of the families of missing trawlermen. He and Beryl also set up their own charities, such as the OK Club for Kids, whose aim was to provide cigarettes for Yorkshire soldiers, and the Jump Fund, to provide home-knitted balaclavas, scarves and socks to servicemen. Formby also joined the Home Guard as a dispatch rider, where he took his duties seriously, and fitted them around his other work whenever he could.


title: George Formby

text: Formby continued filming with ATP, and his second film of 1940, "Spare a Copper", was again focused on an aspect of the war, this time combating fifth columnists and saboteurs in a Merseyside dockyard. Cinema-goers had begun to tire of war films, and his next venture, "Turned Out Nice Again" returned to less contentious issues, with Formby's character caught in a domestic battle between his new wife and mother. Early in the filming schedule, he took time to perform in an ENSA show that was broadcast on the BBC from Aldwych tube station as "Let the People Sing"; he sang four songs, and told the audience, "Don't forget, it's wonderful to be British!" Towards the end of 1940 Formby tried to enlist for active military service, despite Beryl informing him that by being a member of ENSA he was already signed up. The examining board rejected him as being unfit, because he had sinusitis and arthritic toes. He spent the winter season in pantomime at the Opera House Theatre, Blackpool, portraying Idle Jack in "Dick Whittington". When the season came to an end the Formbys moved to London and, in May 1941, performed for the royal family at Windsor Castle. He had commissioned a new set of inoffensive lyrics for "When I'm Cleaning Windows", but was informed that he should sing the original, uncensored version, which was enjoyed by the royal party, particularly Queen Mary, who asked for a repeat of the song. King George VI presented Formby with a set of gold cuff links, and advised him to "wear them, not put them away".


title: George Formby

text: With the ATP contract at an end, Formby decided not to renew or push for an extension. Robert Murphy, in his study of wartime British cinema, points out that Balcon, Formby's producer at the time, "seems to have made little effort to persuade him not to transfer his allegiance", despite the box office success enjoyed by "Let George Do It" and "Spare a Copper". Numerous offers came in, and Formby selected the American company Columbia Pictures, in a deal worth in excess of £500,000 to make a minimum of six films—seven were eventually made. Formby set up his own company, Hillcrest Productions, to distribute the films, and had the final decision on the choice of director, scriptwriter and theme, while Columbia would have the choice of leading lady. Part of Formby's reasoning behind the decision was a desire for parts with more character, something that would not have happened at ATP.


title: George Formby

text: At the end of August 1941 production began on Formby's first film for Columbia, "South American George", which took six weeks to complete. Formby's move to an American company was controversial, and although his popular appeal seemed unaffected, his "films were treated with increasing critical hostility", according to John Mundy in his 2007 examination of British musical film. The reviewer for "The Times" wrote that the story was "confused" and considered that "there is not sufficient comic invention in the telling" of it. Murphy writes that the criticism "had more to do with the inadequate vehicles which he subsequently appeared in than in any diminution of his personal popularity."


title: George Formby

text: In early 1942 Formby undertook a three-week, 72-show tour of Northern Ireland, largely playing to troops but also undertaking fund-raising shows for charity—one at the Belfast Hippodrome raised £500. He described his time in Ulster as "the pleasantest tour I've ever undertaken". He returned to the mainland by way of the Isle of Man, where he entertained the troops guarding the internment camps. After further charity shows—raising £8,000 for a tank fund—Formby was the associate producer for the Vera Lynn film "We'll Meet Again" (1943). In March he also filmed "Much Too Shy" which was released in October that year. Although the film was poorly received by the critics, the public still attended in large numbers, and the film was profitable.


title: George Formby

text: In the summer of 1942 Formby was involved in a controversy with the Lord's Day Observance Society, who had filed law suits against the BBC for playing secular music on Sunday. The society began a campaign against the entertainment industry, claiming all theatrical activity on a Sunday were unethical, and cited a 1667 law which made it illegal. With 60 leading entertainers already avoiding Sunday working, Dean informed Formby that his stance would be crucial in avoiding a spread of the problem. Formby issued a statement, "I'll hang up my uke on Sundays only when our lads stop fighting and getting killed on Sundays ... as far as the Lord's Day Observance Society are concerned, they can mind their own bloody business. And in any case, what have "they" done for the war effort except get on everyone's nerves?" The following day it was announced that the pressure from the society was to be lifted.


title: George Formby

text: At the end of the year Formby started filming "Get Cracking", a story about the Home Guard, which was completed in under a month, the tight schedule brought about by an impending ENSA tour of the Mediterranean. Between the end of filming "Get Cracking" and the release of the film in May 1943, Formby undertook a tour of Northern Scotland and the Orkney Islands, and had nearly completed shooting on his next film, "Bell-Bottom George". The reviewer for "The Times" opined that ""Get Cracking", although a distinct improvement on other films in which Mr Formby has appeared, is cut too closely to fit the demands of an individual technique to achieve any real life of its own".


title: George Formby

text: "Bell-Bottom George" was described 60 years later by the academic Baz Kershaw as being "unashamedly gay and ... peppered with homoerotic scenes"; Bret concurs, and notes that "the majority of the cast and almost every one of the male extras was unashamedly gay", The film was a hit with what Bret describes as Formby's "surprisingly large, closeted gay following". The reviewer for "The Manchester Guardian" was impressed with the film, and wrote that "there is a new neatness of execution and lightness of touch about this production ... while George himself can no longer be accused of trailing clouds of vaudevillian glory". The reviewer also considered Formby "our first authentic and strictly indigenous film comedian". After completing filming, the Formbys undertook a further ENSA tour. Although Dean personally disliked the Formbys, he greatly admired the tireless work they did for the organisation. In August Formby undertook a 53-day tour in a significant portion of the Mediterranean, including Italy, Sicily, Malta, Gibraltar, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine; visiting 750,000 troops in thirteen countries, touring in the process and returning to England in October. The couple travelled around the countryside in a Ford Mercury that Formby had purchased from the racing driver Sir Malcolm Campbell, which had been converted to sleep two in the back.


title: George Formby

text: In January 1944 Formby described his experiences touring for ENSA in Europe and the Middle East in a BBC radio broadcast. He said that the troops "were worrying quite a lot about you folks at home, but we soon put them right about that. We told them that after four and a half years, Britain was still the best country to live in". Shortly after he began filming "He Snoops to Conquer"—his fifth picture for Columbia—he was visited on set by the Dance Music Policy Committee (DMPC), an organisation responsible for vetting music for broadcast, which had also been given responsibility for checking if music was sympathetic towards the enemy during the war. The DMPC interviewed Formby about three songs that had been included in "Bell-Bottom George": "Swim Little Fish", "If I Had a Girl Like You" and "Bell-Bottom George". Formby was summoned to the BBC's offices to perform his three songs in front of the committee, with his song checked against the available sheet music. A week later, on 1 February, the committee met and decided the songs were innocuous, although Formby was told that he would have to get further clearance if the lyrics were changed. Bret opines that he had been the victim of a plot by a member of the Variety Artists' Federation, following Formby's scathing comments on entertainers who were too scared to leave London to entertain the troops. The comments, which appeared in the forces magazine "Union Jack", were then widely reported in the press in Britain. The Variety Artists' Federation demanded that Formby release names, and threatened him with action if he did not do so, but he refused to give in to their pressure.


title: George Formby

text: Formby went to Normandy in July 1944 in the vanguard of a wave of ENSA performers. He and Beryl travelled over on a rough crossing to Arromanches giving a series of impromptu concerts to troops in improvised conditions, including on the backs of farm carts and army lorries, or in bomb-cratered fields. In one location the German front line was too close for him to perform, so he crawled into the trenches and told jokes with the troops there. He then boarded HMS "Ambitious" for his first scheduled concert before returning to France to continue his tour. During dinner with General Bernard Montgomery, whom he had met in North Africa, Formby was invited to visit the glider crews of 6th Airborne Division, who had been holding a series of bridges without relief for 56 days. He did so on 17 August in a one-day visit to the front line bridges, where he gave nine shows, all standing beside a sandbag wall, ready to jump into a slit trench in case of problems; much of the time his audience were in foxholes. After the four-week tour of France, Formby returned home to start work on "I Didn't Do It" (released in 1945), although he continued to work on ENSA concerts and tours in Britain. Between January and March 1945, shortly after the release of "He Snoops to Conquer", he left on an ENSA tour that took in Burma, India and Ceylon (the last is now Sri Lanka). The concerts in the Far East were his last for ENSA, and by the end of the war it was estimated that he had performed in front of three million service personnel.


title: George Formby

text: In 1946 the song "With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock", which Formby had recorded in 1937, began to cause problems at the BBC for broadcasts of Formby or his music. The producer of one of Formby's live television programmes received a letter from a BBC manager that stated "We have no record that "With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock" is banned. We do however know and so does Formby, that certain lines in the lyric must not be broadcast". Other sources, including the BBC, state that the song was banned from being broadcast. Between July and October 1946 Formby filmed "George in Civvy Street", which would be his final film. The story concerns the rivalry between two pubs: the Unicorn, bequeathed to Formby's character, and the Lion, owned by his childhood sweetheart—played by Rosalyn Boulter—but run by an unscrupulous manager. Richards considers the film to have "symbolic significance"; at the end, with the marriage between the two pub owners, Formby "bowed out of films unifying the nation mythically, communally and matrimonially".


title: George Formby

text: The film was less successful at the box office than his previous works, as audience tastes had changed in the post-war world. Fisher opines that because of his tireless war work, Formby had become too synonymous with the war, causing the public to turn away from him, much as they had from the wartime British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Bret believes that post-war audiences wanted intrigue, suspense and romance, through the films of James Mason, Stewart Granger, David Niven and Laurence Olivier. Bret also indicates that Formby's cinematic decline was shared by similar performers, including Gracie Fields, Tommy Trinder and Will Hay. Formby's biographers, Alan Randall and Ray Seaton, opine that in his late 40s, Formby "was greying and thickening out", and was too old to play the innocent young Lancashire lad. The slump in his screen popularity hit Formby hard, and he became depressed. In early 1946 Beryl checked him into a psychiatric hospital under her maiden name, Ingham. He came out after five weeks, in time for a tour of Scandinavia in May.


title: George Formby

text: On his return from Scandinavia Formby went into pantomime in Blackpool; while there, he learned of his appointment as Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1946 King's Birthday Honours. Although delighted, he was upset that Beryl went without official recognition, and said "if somethin' was comin' our way, ah'd like it to be somethin' Beryl could have shared". Later that year the Formbys toured South Africa shortly before formal racial apartheid was introduced. While there they refused to play racially-segregated venues. When Formby was cheered by a black audience after embracing a small black girl who had presented his wife with a box of chocolates, National Party leader Daniel François Malan (who later introduced apartheid) telephoned to complain; Beryl replied "Why don't you piss off, you horrible little man?"


title: George Formby

text: Formby returned to Britain at Christmas and appeared in "Dick Whittington" at the Grand Theatre, Leeds for nine weeks, and then, in February 1947, he appeared in variety for two weeks at the London Palladium. Reviewing the show, "The Times" thought Formby was "more than ever the mechanized perfection of naive jollity. His smile, though fixed, is winning, and his songs ... are catchy". In September that year he went on a 12-week tour of Australia and New Zealand. On his return he was offered more film roles, but turned them down, saying "when I look back on some of the films I've done in the past it makes me want to cringe. I'm afraid the days of being a clown are gone. From now on I'm only going to do variety". He began suffering increasing health problems including a gastric ulcer, and was treated for breathing problems from his heavy smoking. He finished the year in pantomime, appearing as Buttons in "Cinderella" at the Liverpool Empire Theatre, with Beryl playing Dandini.


title: George Formby

text: In September 1949 Formby went on a 19 city coast-to-coast Canadian tour, from which he returned unwell. While subsequently appearing in "Cinderella" in Leeds, he collapsed in his dressing room. The attending doctor administered morphine, to which Formby briefly became addicted. Further poor health plagued him into 1950, with a bout of dysentery, followed by appendicitis, after which he recuperated in Norfolk, before giving another royal command performance that April. He undertook two further international tours that year: one to Scandinavia, and a second to Canada. His earnings of Ca$200,000 were heavily taxed: Canadian taxes took up $68,000, and UK taxes took 90% of the balance. Formby complained to reporters about the level of taxation, saying "That's it. So long as the government keeps bleeding me dry, I shan't be in much of a hurry to work again!"; he and Beryl spent the rest of the year resting in Norfolk, in temporary retirement.


title: George Formby

text: Formby was tempted back to work by the theatrical impresario Emile Littler, who offered him the lead role of Percy Piggott in "Zip Goes a Million", a play based on the 1902 novel "Brewster's Millions" by G. B. McCutcheon; Formby was offered £1,500, plus a share of the box-office takings. The show premiered at the Coventry Hippodrome in September 1951 before opening at the Palace Theatre, London on 20 October. "The Times" commented unfavourably, saying that although the audience were appreciative of the play, they "could not conceivably have detected a spark of wit in either the lyrics or the dialogue"; the paper was equally dismissive of Formby, writing that "he has a deft way with a song or a banjo, but little or no finesse in his handling of a comic situation".


title: George Formby

text: A month after the play opened in London, Formby was the guest star on "Desert Island Discs", where one of his choices was his father's "Standing on the Corner of the Street". In early 1952 Formby's health began to decline and, on 28 April, he decided to withdraw from "Zip Goes a Million". On the way to the theatre to inform Littler, Formby suffered a heart attack, although it took the doctors five days to diagnose the coronary and admit him to hospital. He was treated for both the attack, and his morphine addiction. He stayed in hospital for nine weeks before returning home to Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, where he announced his retirement.


title: George Formby

text: During his recuperation Formby contracted gastroenteritis and had a suspected blood clot on his lung, after which he underwent an operation to clear a fishbone that was stuck in his throat. He had recovered sufficiently by April 1953 to undertake a 17-show tour of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), before a special appearance at the Southport Garrick Theatre. That September he turned on the Blackpool Illuminations.


title: George Formby

text: From October to December 1953 Formby appeared at the London Palladium in 138 performances of the revue "Fun and the Fair", with Terry-Thomas and the Billy Cotton band; Formby appeared in the penultimate act of the evening, with Terry-Thomas closing the show. Although Formby's act was well-received, the show was not as successful as had been hoped, and Terry-Thomas later wrote that "Formby put the audience in a certain mood which made them non-receptive to whoever followed ... Even though my act was the star spot, I felt on this occasion that my being there was an anti-climax". He requested that the order be changed to have Formby close the show, but this was turned down. Formby suffered from stage fright during the show's run—the first time he had suffered from the condition since his earliest days on stage—and his bouts of depression returned, along with stomach problems.


title: George Formby

text: Formby took a break from work until mid-1954, when he starred in the revue "Turned Out Nice Again", in Blackpool. Although the show was initially scheduled to run for 13 weeks, it was cut short after six when Formby suffered again from dysentery and depression. He again announced his retirement, but continued to work. After some television appearances on "Ask Pickles" and "Top of the Town", in late 1954 and early 1955 respectively, Formby travelled to South Africa for a tour, where Beryl negotiated an agreement with the South African premier Johannes Strijdom to play in venues of Formby's choice, and then sailed to Canada for a ten-day series of performances. On the return voyage he contracted bronchial pneumonia, but still joined the cast of the non-musical play "Too Young to Marry" on his arrival in Britain.


title: George Formby

text: In August 1955 Beryl felt unwell and went for tests: she was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus and was given two years to live. The couple reacted to the news in different ways, and while Beryl began to drink heavily—up to a bottle of whisky a day to dull the pain—George began to work harder, and began a close friendship with a school teacher, Pat Howson.


title: George Formby

text: "Too Young to Marry" toured between September 1955 and November 1956, but still allowed Formby time to appear in the Christmas pantomime "Babes in the Wood" at the Liverpool Empire Theatre. The touring production was well received everywhere except in Scotland, where Formby's attempted Scottish accent is thought to have put people off. For Christmas 1956 he appeared in his first London pantomime, playing Idle Jack in "Dick Whittington and His Cat" at the Palace Theatre, although he withdrew from the run in early February after suffering from laryngitis. According to Bret, Formby spent the remainder of 1957 "doing virtually nothing", although he appeared in two television programmes, "Val Parnell's Saturday Spectacular" in July and "Top of the Bill" in October.


title: George Formby

text: From March 1958 Formby appeared in the musical comedy "Beside the Seaside", a Holiday Romp in Hull, Blackpool, Birmingham and Brighton. By the time it reached Brighton the play was playing to increasingly small audiences, and the run was cut short as a result. The play may not have been to southern audiences' tastes—the plot centres on a northern family's holiday in Blackpool—and the Brighton audiences may have been too small, but those in the north, particularly Blackpool, thought highly of it and the show was a nightly sell-out. When the show closed Formby was disappointed, and vowed never to appear in another stage musical. The year 1958 was professionally quiet for him; in addition to "Beside the Seaside", he also worked in one-off appearances in three television shows. He began 1959 by appearing in "Val Parnell's Spectacular: The Atlantic Showboat" in January, and in April hosted his own show, "Steppin' Out With Formby". During the summer season he appeared at the Windmill Theatre, Great Yarmouth, although he missed two weeks of performances when he was involved in a car crash on the August Bank Holiday. When doctors examined him, they were concerned with his overall health, partly as a result of his forty cigarettes-a-day smoking habit. He also had high blood pressure, was overweight and had heart problems.


title: George Formby

text: Formby's final year of work was 1960. That May he recorded his last session of songs, "Happy Go Lucky Me" and "Banjo Boy", the former of which peaked at number 40 in the UK Singles Chart. He then spent the summer season at the Queen's Theatre in Blackpool in "The Time of Your Life"—a performance which was also broadcast by the BBC. One of the acts in the show was the singer Yana, with whom Formby had an affair, made easier because of Beryl's absence from the theatre through illness. His final televised performance, a 35-minute BBC programme, "The Friday Show: George Formby", was aired on 16 December. Bret considers the programme to be Formby's "greatest performance—it was certainly his most sincere", although reviewing for "The Guardian", Mary Crozier thought it "too slow". She went on to say "George Formby is really a music-hall star, and it needs the warmth and sociability of the theatre to bring out his full appeal". Beryl's illness was worsening. Worn down by the strain, and feeling the need to escape, Formby took the part of Mr Wu in "Aladdin" in Bristol, having turned down a more lucrative part in Blackpool.


title: George Formby

text: Two hours before the premiere of "Aladdin"—on Christmas Eve 1960—Formby received a phone call from Beryl's doctor, saying that she was in a coma and was not expected to survive the night; Formby went through with the performance, and was told early the next morning that Beryl had died. Her cremation took place on 27 December, and an hour after the service Formby returned to Bristol to appear in that day's matinee performance of "Aladdin". He continued in the show until 14 January when a cold forced him to rest, on doctors' advice. He returned to Lytham St Annes and communicated with Pat Howson; she contacted his doctor and Formby was instructed to go to hospital, where he remained for the next two weeks.


title: George Formby

text: On Valentine's Day 1961, seven weeks after Beryl's death, Formby and Howson announced their engagement. Eight days later he suffered a heart attack which was so severe that he was given the last rites of the Catholic Church on his arrival at hospital. He was revived and, from his hospital bed, he and Howson planned their wedding, which was due to take place in May. He was still there when, on 6 March, he had a further heart attack and died at the age of 56. The obituarist for "The Times" wrote that "he was the amateur of the old smoking concert platform turned into a music-hall professional of genius", while Donald Zec, writing in the "Daily Mirror", called him "as great an entertainer as any of the giants of the music-hall". "The Guardian" considered that "with his ukulele, his songs, and his grinning patter, the sum was greater than any of those parts: a Lancashire character", while in the eyes of the public, Formby's "passing was genuinely and widely mourned".


title: George Formby

text: Formby was buried alongside his father in Warrington Cemetery with over 150,000 mourners lining the route. The undertaker was Bruce Williams who, as Eddie Latta, had written songs for Formby. An hour after the ceremony the family read the will, which had been drawn up two weeks previously. Harry Scott—Formby's valet and factotum—was to receive £5,000, while the rest was to go to Howson; at probate Formby's estate was valued at £135,000. Formby's mother and siblings were angered by the will, and contested it. In the words of Bret "mourning ... [Formby] was marred by a greedy family squabbling over his not inconsiderable fortune".


title: George Formby

text: Because the will was contested, Formby's solicitor insisted that a public auction was held for the contents of Formby's house, which took place over three days in June. Howson offered to honour an earlier will by providing £5,000 for Eliza and £2,000 each for Formby's sisters, but the offer was rejected, and the matter went to the High Court in London. The case was heard in May 1963 before Mr Justice Ormrod. At the end, Eliza was granted £5,000, and the sisters received £2,000 each. Formby's solicitor, John Crowther, acted for Howson, and explained that the bequest to Formby's sisters from the older will was made "with reluctance" by Formby, who had described his family as "a set of scroungers". The family appealed the decision and the matter lasted until September 1965, when it was finally dismissed in Howson's favour.


title: George Formby

text: Richards considers that Formby "had been able to embody simultaneously Lancashire, the working classes, the people, and the nation"; Geoff King, in his examination of film comedy, also sees Formby as an icon, and writes that "[Gracie] Fields and Formby gained the status of national as well as regional figures, without sacrificing their distinctive regional personality traits". While the national aspect was important for success outside the north, "the Lancashire accent remained to enhance his homely comic appeal". The media historian Brian McFarlane writes that, on film, Formby portrayed "essentially gormless incompetents, aspiring to various kinds of professional success ... and even more improbably to a middle-class girlfriend, usually in the clutches of some caddish type with a moustache. Invariably he scored on both counts".


title: George Formby

text: On an edition of ITV's "The South Bank Show" in November 1992, Richards commented that Formby "embodied qualities that people admired and found reassuring in the depression ... and you thought that here's a man whom whatever is thrown at him, will come through and come out smiling—and people wanted that". H.J. Igoe, writing in "The Catholic Herald", thinks that "Formby has a common English touch. We warm to the kindly turnip face, the revolving eyes, the mouth like a slashed coconut, the silly little songs ... the melodiously tinny voice and twanging banjo. The comedian is the universal works—platoon and bar-room simpleton—mother's boy—the beloved henpeck—the father who cannot hang a picture and underlying his everyday folly there is the sublime wisdom of the ordinary fool who loves and trusts the world. His comedy is earthy, but never lascivious".


title: George Formby

text: Richards identifies in Formby "an innocence that was essentially childlike ... which explains why George was as popular with children as he was with adults"; Igoe agrees, and writes that "we know he loves children, because himself he is a child". Formby's screen and stage persona of innocence and simplicity was not seen as ignorance or stupidity, although Basil Dean disagreed and thought that Formby "didn't act gormless as many successful Lancashire comedians have done, he was gormless". Much of the innocence in Formby's performance is connected to sex, and the use of double entendres within his songs. John Caughie and Kevin Rockett, in their examination of British film, and Richards, see a connection between Formby's approach to sex and the saucy seaside postcards of Donald McGill. Richards sees the function of Formby's humour as being the same as McGill's: "the harmless diffusion of a major source of tension in a deeply repressed and conventional society". Formby's delivery of the sexual content—what McFarlane identifies as being "sung with such a toothy grin and air of innocence"—negated any possible indignation, and this contrasts with the more overtly sexual delivery of other performers of the time, such as Max Miller and Frank Randle.


title: George Formby

text: The ukulele expert Steven Sproat considers that Formby "was incredible ... There hasn't really been a uke player since Formby—or even before Formby—who played quite like him". Much of Formby's virtuosity came from his right-hand technique, the split stroke, and he developed his own fast and complicated syncopated musical style with a very fast right-hand strum. Joe Cooper, writing in "New Society", considered that "Nobody has ever reproduced the casual devastating right hand syncopation, which so delicately synchronised with deft left hand chord fingering".


title: George Formby

text: Formby's screen persona influenced Norman Wisdom in the 1950s and Charlie Drake in the following decade, although both these performers used pathos, which Formby avoided.


title: George Formby

text: Shortly after Formby's death a small group of fans formed the George Formby Society, which had its inaugural meeting at the Imperial Hotel Blackpool. George Harrison was a fan of Formby, a member of the Society and an advocate of the ukulele. The rest of the Beatles were also fans—they improvised with ukuleles during the recording breaks on "Let It Be"—and Formby's influence can be heard in the song "Her Majesty". The Beatles' penultimate song, "Free as a Bird", ends with a slight coda including a strummed ukulele by Harrison and the voice of John Lennon played backwards, saying "Turned out nice again".


title: George Formby

text: As of 2014 there are two public statues of Formby. The first, by the Manx artist Amanda Barton, is in Douglas, Isle of Man, and shows him leaning on a lamp-post and dressed in the motorcycle leathers of a TT racer. Barton was also commissioned to provide a second statue for the Lancashire town of Wigan, which was unveiled in September 2007 in the town's Grand Arcade shopping centre.


title: George Formby

text: Formby has been the subject of five biographies as of 2014. In the late 1960s Harry Scott published his reminiscences of Formby, "The Fabulous Formby", in 14 issues of "The Vellum", the magazine of the George Formby Society; John Fisher published "George Formby" in 1975 before Alan Randall and Ray Seaton published their book in 1974 and David Bret produced "George Formby: A Troubled Genius" in 1999. The last of the five to be published was by Sue Smart and Richard Bothway Howard in 2011, "It's Turned Out Nice Again!". There have also been two documentaries on British television, an edition of "The South Bank Show" in 1992, and "Frank Skinner on George Formby" in 2011.


title: George Formby

text: In 2004 Formby was inducted into the Ukulele Hall of Fame, a non-profit organisation for the preservation of ukulele history. His citation reads, in part: "He won such love and respect for his charismatic stage presence, technical skill and playful lyrics that he remains popular forty years after his death." In June 2012 a Blackpool Boat Car tram, number 604, was repainted and returned to service with sponsorship from the George Formby Society. The tram was named "George Formby OBE" and images of him are affixed within the trolley.


title: Aerodynamics

text: The formal study of aerodynamics began in the modern sense in the eighteenth century, although observations of fundamental concepts such as aerodynamic drag were recorded much earlier. Most of the early efforts in aerodynamics were directed toward achieving heavier-than-air flight, which was first demonstrated by Otto Lilienthal in 1891. Since then, the use of aerodynamics through mathematical analysis, empirical approximations, wind tunnel experimentation, and computer simulations has formed a rational basis for the development of heavier-than-air flight and a number of other technologies. Recent work in aerodynamics has focused on issues related to compressible flow, turbulence, and boundary layers and has become increasingly computational in nature.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Modern aerodynamics only dates back to the seventeenth century, but aerodynamic forces have been harnessed by humans for thousands of years in sailboats and windmills, and images and stories of flight appear throughout recorded history, such as the Ancient Greek legend of Icarus and Daedalus. Fundamental concepts of continuum, drag, and pressure gradients appear in the work of Aristotle and Archimedes.


title: Aerodynamics

text: In 1726, Sir Isaac Newton became the first person to develop a theory of air resistance, making him one of the first aerodynamicists. Dutch-Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli followed in 1738 with "Hydrodynamica" in which he described a fundamental relationship between pressure, density, and flow velocity for incompressible flow known today as Bernoulli's principle, which provides one method for calculating aerodynamic lift. In 1757, Leonhard Euler published the more general Euler equations which could be applied to both compressible and incompressible flows. The Euler equations were extended to incorporate the effects of viscosity in the first half of the 1800s, resulting in the Navier–Stokes equations. The Navier–Stokes equations are the most general governing equations of fluid flow but are difficult to solve for the flow around all but the simplest of shapes.


title: Aerodynamics

text: In 1799, Sir George Cayley became the first person to identify the four aerodynamic forces of flight (weight, lift, drag, and thrust), as well as the relationships between them, and in doing so outlined the path toward achieving heavier-than-air flight for the next century. In 1871, Francis Herbert Wenham constructed the first wind tunnel, allowing precise measurements of aerodynamic forces. Drag theories were developed by Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Gustav Kirchhoff, and Lord Rayleigh. In 1889, Charles Renard, a French aeronautical engineer, became the first person to reasonably predict the power needed for sustained flight. Otto Lilienthal, the first person to become highly successful with glider flights, was also the first to propose thin, curved airfoils that would produce high lift and low drag. Building on these developments as well as research carried out in their own wind tunnel, the Wright brothers flew the first powered airplane on December 17, 1903.


title: Aerodynamics

text: During the time of the first flights, Frederick W. Lanchester, Martin Kutta, and Nikolai Zhukovsky independently created theories that connected circulation of a fluid flow to lift. Kutta and Zhukovsky went on to develop a two-dimensional wing theory. Expanding upon the work of Lanchester, Ludwig Prandtl is credited with developing the mathematics behind thin-airfoil and lifting-line theories as well as work with boundary layers.


title: Aerodynamics

text: As aircraft speed increased designers began to encounter challenges associated with air compressibility at speeds near the speed of sound. The differences in airflow under such conditions lead to problems in aircraft control, increased drag due to shock waves, and the threat of structural failure due to aeroelastic flutter. The ratio of the flow speed to the speed of sound was named the Mach number after Ernst Mach who was one of the first to investigate the properties of the supersonic flow. Macquorn Rankine and Pierre Henri Hugoniot independently developed the theory for flow properties before and after a shock wave, while Jakob Ackeret led the initial work of calculating the lift and drag of supersonic airfoils. Theodore von Kármán and Hugh Latimer Dryden introduced the term transonic to describe flow speeds between the critical Mach number and Mach 1 where drag increases rapidly. This rapid increase in drag led aerodynamicists and aviators to disagree on whether supersonic flight was achievable until the sound barrier was broken in 1947 using the Bell X-1 aircraft.


title: Aerodynamics

text: By the time the sound barrier was broken, aerodynamicists' understanding of the subsonic and low supersonic flow had matured. The Cold War prompted the design of an ever-evolving line of high-performance aircraft. Computational fluid dynamics began as an effort to solve for flow properties around complex objects and has rapidly grown to the point where entire aircraft can be designed using computer software, with wind-tunnel tests followed by flight tests to confirm the computer predictions. Understanding of supersonic and hypersonic aerodynamics has matured since the 1960s, and the goals of aerodynamicists have shifted from the behaviour of fluid flow to the engineering of a vehicle such that it interacts predictably with the fluid flow. Designing aircraft for supersonic and hypersonic conditions, as well as the desire to improve the aerodynamic efficiency of current aircraft and propulsion systems, continues to motivate new research in aerodynamics, while work continues to be done on important problems in basic aerodynamic theory related to flow turbulence and the existence and uniqueness of analytical solutions to the Navier–Stokes equations.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Understanding the motion of air around an object (often called a flow field) enables the calculation of forces and moments acting on the object. In many aerodynamics problems, the forces of interest are the fundamental forces of flight: lift, drag, thrust, and weight. Of these, lift and drag are aerodynamic forces, i.e. forces due to air flow over a solid body. Calculation of these quantities is often founded upon the assumption that the flow field behaves as a continuum. Continuum flow fields are characterized by properties such as flow velocity, pressure, density, and temperature, which may be functions of position and time. These properties may be directly or indirectly measured in aerodynamics experiments or calculated starting with the equations for conservation of mass, momentum, and energy in air flows. Density, flow velocity, and an additional property, viscosity, are used to classify flow fields.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Flow velocity is used to classify flows according to speed regime. Subsonic flows are flow fields in which the air speed field is always below the local speed of sound. Transonic flows include both regions of subsonic flow and regions in which the local flow speed is greater than the local speed of sound. Supersonic flows are defined to be flows in which the flow speed is greater than the speed of sound everywhere. A fourth classification, hypersonic flow, refers to flows where the flow speed is much greater than the speed of sound. Aerodynamicists disagree on the precise definition of hypersonic flow.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Compressible flow accounts for varying density within the flow. Subsonic flows are often idealized as incompressible, i.e. the density is assumed to be constant. Transonic and supersonic flows are compressible, and calculations that neglect the changes of density in these flow fields will yield inaccurate results.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Viscosity is associated with the frictional forces in a flow. In some flow fields, viscous effects are very small, and approximate solutions may safely neglect viscous effects. These approximations are called inviscid flows. Flows for which viscosity is not neglected are called viscous flows. Finally, aerodynamic problems may also be classified by the flow environment. External aerodynamics is the study of flow around solid objects of various shapes (e.g. around an airplane wing), while internal aerodynamics is the study of flow through passages inside solid objects (e.g. through a jet engine).


title: Aerodynamics

text: Unlike liquids and solids, gases are composed of discrete molecules which occupy only a small fraction of the volume filled by the gas. On a molecular level, flow fields are made up of the collisions of many individual of gas molecules between themselves and with solid surfaces. However, in most aerodynamics applications, the discrete molecular nature of gases is ignored, and the flow field is assumed to behave as a continuum. This assumption allows fluid properties such as density and flow velocity to be defined everywhere within the flow.


title: Aerodynamics

text: The validity of the continuum assumption is dependent on the density of the gas and the application in question. For the continuum assumption to be valid, the mean free path length must be much smaller than the length scale of the application in question. For example, many aerodynamics applications deal with aircraft flying in atmospheric conditions, where the mean free path length is on the order of micrometers and where the body is orders of magnitude larger. In these cases, the length scale of the aircraft ranges from a few meters to a few tens of meters, which is much larger than the mean free path length. For such applications, the continuum assumption is reasonable. The continuum assumption is less valid for extremely low-density flows, such as those encountered by vehicles at very high altitudes (e.g. 300,000 ft/90 km) or satellites in Low Earth orbit. In those cases, statistical mechanics is a more accurate method of solving the problem than is continuum aerodynamics. The Knudsen number can be used to guide the choice between statistical mechanics and the continuous formulation of aerodynamics.


title: Aerodynamics

text: The assumption of a fluid continuum allows problems in aerodynamics to be solved using fluid dynamics conservation laws. Three conservation principles are used:


title: Aerodynamics

text: Together, these equations are known as the Navier–Stokes equations, although some authors define the term to only include the momentum equation(s). The Navier–Stokes equations have no known analytical solution and are solved in modern aerodynamics using computational techniques. Because computational methods using high speed computers were not historically available and the high computational cost of solving these complex equations now that they are available, simplifications of the Navier–Stokes equations have been and continue to be employed. The Euler equations are a set of similar conservation equations which neglect viscosity and may be used in cases where the effect of viscosity is expected to be small. Further simplifications lead to Laplace's equation and potential flow theory. Additionally, Bernoulli's equation is a solution in one dimension to both the momentum and energy conservation equations.


title: Aerodynamics

text: The ideal gas law or another such equation of state is often used in conjunction with these equations to form a determined system that allows the solution for the unknown variables.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Aerodynamic problems are classified by the flow environment or properties of the flow, including flow speed, compressibility, and viscosity. "External" aerodynamics is the study of flow around solid objects of various shapes. Evaluating the lift and drag on an airplane or the shock waves that form in front of the nose of a rocket are examples of external aerodynamics. "Internal" aerodynamics is the study of flow through passages in solid objects. For instance, internal aerodynamics encompasses the study of the airflow through a jet engine or through an air conditioning pipe.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Aerodynamic problems can also be classified according to whether the flow speed is below, near or above the speed of sound. A problem is called subsonic if all the speeds in the problem are less than the speed of sound, transonic if speeds both below and above the speed of sound are present (normally when the characteristic speed is approximately the speed of sound), supersonic when the characteristic flow speed is greater than the speed of sound, and hypersonic when the flow speed is much greater than the speed of sound. Aerodynamicists disagree over the precise definition of hypersonic flow; a rough definition considers flows with Mach numbers above 5 to be hypersonic.


title: Aerodynamics

text: The influence of viscosity on the flow dictates a third classification. Some problems may encounter only very small viscous effects, in which case viscosity can be considered to be negligible. The approximations to these problems are called inviscid flows. Flows for which viscosity cannot be neglected are called viscous flows.


title: Aerodynamics

text: An incompressible flow is a flow in which density is constant in both time and space. Although all real fluids are compressible, a flow is often approximated as incompressible if the effect of the density changes cause only small changes to the calculated results. This is more likely to be true when the flow speeds are significantly lower than the speed of sound. Effects of compressibility are more significant at speeds close to or above the speed of sound. The Mach number is used to evaluate whether the incompressibility can be assumed, otherwise the effects of compressibility must be included.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Subsonic (or low-speed) aerodynamics describes fluid motion in flows which are much lower than the speed of sound everywhere in the flow. There are several branches of subsonic flow but one special case arises when the flow is inviscid, incompressible and irrotational. This case is called potential flow and allows the differential equations that describe the flow to be a simplified version of the equations of fluid dynamics, thus making available to the aerodynamicist a range of quick and easy solutions.


title: Aerodynamics

text: In solving a subsonic problem, one decision to be made by the aerodynamicist is whether to incorporate the effects of compressibility. Compressibility is a description of the amount of change of density in the flow. When the effects of compressibility on the solution are small, the assumption that density is constant may be made. The problem is then an incompressible low-speed aerodynamics problem. When the density is allowed to vary, the flow is called compressible. In air, compressibility effects are usually ignored when the Mach number in the flow does not exceed 0.3 (about 335 feet (102 m) per second or 228 miles (366 km) per hour at 60 °F (16 °C)). Above Mach 0.3, the problem flow should be described using compressible aerodynamics.


title: Aerodynamics

text: According to the theory of aerodynamics, a flow is considered to be compressible if the density changes along a streamline. This means that – unlike incompressible flow – changes in density are considered. In general, this is the case where the Mach number in part or all of the flow exceeds 0.3. The Mach 0.3 value is rather arbitrary, but it is used because gas flows with a Mach number below that value demonstrate changes in density of less than 5%. Furthermore, that maximum 5% density change occurs at the stagnation point (the point on the object where flow speed is zero), while the density changes around the rest of the object will be significantly lower. Transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flows are all compressible flows.


title: Aerodynamics

text: The term Transonic refers to a range of flow velocities just below and above the local speed of sound (generally taken as Mach 0.8–1.2). It is defined as the range of speeds between the critical Mach number, when some parts of the airflow over an aircraft become supersonic, and a higher speed, typically near Mach 1.2, when all of the airflow is supersonic. Between these speeds, some of the airflow is supersonic, while some of the airflow is not supersonic.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Supersonic aerodynamic problems are those involving flow speeds greater than the speed of sound. Calculating the lift on the Concorde during cruise can be an example of a supersonic aerodynamic problem.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Supersonic flow behaves very differently from subsonic flow. Fluids react to differences in pressure; pressure changes are how a fluid is "told" to respond to its environment. Therefore, since sound is, in fact, an infinitesimal pressure difference propagating through a fluid, the speed of sound in that fluid can be considered the fastest speed that "information" can travel in the flow. This difference most obviously manifests itself in the case of a fluid striking an object. In front of that object, the fluid builds up a stagnation pressure as impact with the object brings the moving fluid to rest. In fluid traveling at subsonic speed, this pressure disturbance can propagate upstream, changing the flow pattern ahead of the object and giving the impression that the fluid "knows" the object is there by seemingly adjusting its movement and is flowing around it. In a supersonic flow, however, the pressure disturbance cannot propagate upstream. Thus, when the fluid finally reaches the object it strikes it and the fluid is forced to change its properties – temperature, density, pressure, and Mach number—in an extremely violent and irreversible fashion called a shock wave. The presence of shock waves, along with the compressibility effects of high-flow velocity (see Reynolds number) fluids, is the central difference between the supersonic and subsonic aerodynamics regimes.


title: Aerodynamics

text: In aerodynamics, hypersonic speeds are speeds that are highly supersonic. In the 1970s, the term generally came to refer to speeds of Mach 5 (5 times the speed of sound) and above. The hypersonic regime is a subset of the supersonic regime. Hypersonic flow is characterized by high temperature flow behind a shock wave, viscous interaction, and chemical dissociation of gas.


title: Aerodynamics

text: The incompressible and compressible flow regimes produce many associated phenomena, such as boundary layers and turbulence.


title: Aerodynamics

text: The concept of a boundary layer is important in many problems in aerodynamics. The viscosity and fluid friction in the air is approximated as being significant only in this thin layer. This assumption makes the description of such aerodynamics much more tractable mathematically.


title: Aerodynamics

text: In aerodynamics, turbulence is characterized by chaotic property changes in the flow. These include low momentum diffusion, high momentum convection, and rapid variation of pressure and flow velocity in space and time. Flow that is not turbulent is called laminar flow.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Aerodynamics is a significant element of vehicle design, including road cars and trucks where the main goal is to reduce the vehicle drag coefficient, and racing cars, where in addition to reducing drag the goal is also to increase the overall level of downforce. Aerodynamics is also important in the prediction of forces and moments acting on sailing vessels. It is used in the design of mechanical components such as hard drive heads. Structural engineers resort to aerodynamics, and particularly aeroelasticity, when calculating wind loads in the design of large buildings, bridges, and wind turbines


title: Aerodynamics

text: The aerodynamics of internal passages is important in heating/ventilation, gas piping, and in automotive engines where detailed flow patterns strongly affect the performance of the engine.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Urban aerodynamics are studied by town planners and designers seeking to improve amenity in outdoor spaces, or in creating urban microclimates to reduce the effects of urban pollution. The field of environmental aerodynamics describes ways in which atmospheric circulation and flight mechanics affect ecosystems.


title: Aerodynamics

text: Sports in which aerodynamics are of crucial importance include soccer, table tennis, cricket, baseball, and golf, in which most players can control the trajectory of the ball using the "Magnus effect".


title: Sa Re Ga Ma Pa

text: Sa Re Ga Ma Pa is an Indian Hindi-language reality singing television show. It started airing on Zee TV in 1995 as "Sa Re Ga Ma". It is the oldest running game show in India as well as the oldest show on private television in India. The name of the show is derived from the first five notes in the octave of classical Indian music.


title: Sa Re Ga Ma Pa

text: The first episode aired on 1 May 1995 and was hosted by Sonu Nigam. In the year 2000, the show was hosted by the Bangash brothers, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash, sons of sarod-player Amjad Ali Khan. From 2001, Shaan started hosting the show. Till 2005, the show used to follow a format wherein experts in the field of music would judge the contestants and score them. The format changed with the advent of "Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Challenge 2005" which introduced the judges as mentors of different teams and scoring was primarily dependent on public voting. After Shaan quit hosting the show, the show was hosted by many others like Purab Kohli, Manish Paul, Karan Singh Rathore, Archana Jani, Vipul Roy, Jay Soni and even kids Dhairya Sorecha and Afsha Musani. The most prominent names to host the show in later seasons were Javed Ali and the current host Aditya Narayan.


title: Sa Re Ga Ma Pa

text: Due to its success and popularity, it has been remade in languages including Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Odia, Bhojpuri and Malayalam.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Walter Winchell (April 7, 1897 – February 20, 1972) was a syndicated American newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator. Originally a vaudeville performer, Winchell began his newspaper career as a Broadway reporter, critic and columnist for New York tabloids. He rose to national celebrity in the 1930s with Hearst newspaper chain syndication and a popular radio program. He was known for an innovative style of gossipy staccato news briefs, jokes and Jazz Age slang. Biographer Neal Gabler claimed that his popularity and influence "turned journalism into a form of entertainment".


title: Walter Winchell

text: He uncovered both hard news and embarrassing stories about famous people by exploiting his exceptionally wide circle of contacts, first in the entertainment world and the Prohibition era underworld, then in law enforcement and politics. He was known for trading gossip, sometimes in return for his silence. His outspoken style made him both feared and admired. Novels and movies were based on his wisecracking gossip columnist persona, as early as the play and film "Blessed Event" in 1932. As World War II approached in the 1930s, he attacked the appeasers of Nazism, then in the 1950s he aligned with Joseph McCarthy in his campaign against communists. He damaged the reputation of Josephine Baker as well as other individuals who had earned his enmity. However, the McCarthy connection in time made him unfashionable, and his style did not adapt well to television news.


title: Walter Winchell

text: He did return to television in 1959 as narrator of the 1920s-set crime drama series "The Untouchables". Over the years he appeared in more than two dozen films and television productions as an actor, sometimes playing himself.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Winchell was born in New York City, the son of Jennie (Bakst) and Jacob Winchell, a cantor and salesman; they were Russian Jewish immigrants. He left school in the sixth grade and started performing in Gus Edwards's vaudeville troupe known as the "Newsboys Sextet", which also featured Eddie Cantor and George Jessel. During this time, Winchell performed as a tap dancer. Winchell served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander.


title: Walter Winchell

text: He began his career in journalism by posting notes about his acting troupe on backstage bulletin boards. He joined the "Vaudeville News" in 1920, then left the paper for the "Evening Graphic" in 1924, where his column was named "Mainly About Mainstreeters". He was hired on June 10, 1929, by the "New York Daily Mirror", where he became the author of the first syndicated gossip column, entitled "On-Broadway". The column was syndicated by King Features Syndicate.


title: Walter Winchell

text: He made his radio debut over WABC in New York, a CBS affiliate, on May 12, 1930. The show, titled "Saks on Broadway", was a 15-minute feature that provided business news about Broadway. He switched to WJZ (later renamed WABC) and the NBC Blue (later ABC Radio) in 1932 for the "Jergens Journal".


title: Walter Winchell

text: By the 1930s, Winchell was "an intimate friend of Owney Madden, New York's no. 1 gang leader of the prohibition era", but in 1932 Winchell's intimacy with criminals caused him to fear he would be murdered. He fled to California and "returned weeks later with a new enthusiasm for law, G-men, Uncle Sam, [and] Old Glory". His coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping and subsequent trial received national attention. Within two years, he befriended J. Edgar Hoover, the no. 1 G-man of the repeal era. He was responsible for turning Louis "Lepke" Buchalter of Murder, Inc. over to Hoover.


title: Walter Winchell

text: His newspaper column was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers worldwide, and he was read by 50 million people per day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. His Sunday night radio broadcast was heard by another 20 million people from 1930 to the late 1950s. In 1948, Winchell had the top-rated radio show when he surpassed Fred Allen and Jack Benny. One example of his profile at his professional peak was being mentioned in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 1937 song "The Lady Is a Tramp": "I follow Winchell and read every line."


title: Walter Winchell

text: Winchell was Jewish and was one of the first commentators in America to attack Adolf Hitler and American pro-fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund, especially its leader Fritz Julius Kuhn. He was a staunch supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal throughout the Depression era, and frequently served as the Roosevelt Administration's mouthpiece in favor of interventionism as the European war crisis loomed in the late 1930s. Early on, he denounced American isolationists as favoring appeasement of Hitler, and was explicit in his attacks on such prominent isolationists as Charles Lindbergh, whom he dubbed "The Lone Ostrich", and Gerald L.K. Smith, whom he denounced as "Gerald Lucifer KKKodfish Smith". Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Winchell was also an outspoken supporter of civil rights for African Americans, and frequently attacked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups as supporting un-American, pro-German goals.


title: Walter Winchell

text: During World War II, he attacked the National Maritime Union, the labor organization for the civilian United States Merchant Marine, which he said was run by Communists, instancing West Coast labor leader Harry Bridges. In 1948 and 1949, he and influential leftist columnist Drew Pearson attacked Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in columns and radio broadcasts.


title: Walter Winchell

text: During the 1950s, Winchell supported Senator Joseph McCarthy's quest to identify Communists in the entertainment industry, but his popularity and influence began to decline as the public turned against McCarthy. His weekly radio broadcast was broadcast on ABC television on the same day as his radio broadcast. His program debuted on TV on October 5, 1952. Sponsored by Gruen Watch Company, it originated from WJZ-TV from 6:45 to 7 p.m. Eastern Time. By 1953, his radio and television broadcasts were simulcast until he ended that association because of a dispute with ABC executives in 1955. He starred in "The Walter Winchell File", a television crime drama series that initially aired from 1957 to 1958, dramatizing cases from the New York City Police Department that were covered in the "New York Daily Mirror". In 1956, he signed with NBC to host a variety program called "The Walter Winchell Show", which was canceled after only 13 weeks—a particularly bitter failure in view of the success of his longtime rival Ed Sullivan in a similar format with "The Ed Sullivan Show". ABC re-hired him in 1959 to narrate "The Untouchables" for four seasons. In 1960, a revival of the 1955 television simulcast of Winchell's radio broadcast was cancelled after six weeks.


title: Walter Winchell

text: In the early 1960s, a public dispute with Jack Paar effectively ended Winchell's career—already in decline due to a shift in power from print to television. Winchell had angered Paar several years earlier when he refused to retract an item alleging that Paar was having marital difficulties. Biographer Neal Gabler described the exchange on Paar's show in 1961:


title: Walter Winchell

text: Hostess Elsa Maxwell appeared on the program and began gibing at Walter, accusing him of hypocrisy for waving the flag while never having voted [which, incidentally, wasn't true; the show later issued a retraction]. Paar joined in. He said Walter's column was "written by a fly" and that his voice was so high because he wears "too-tight underwear" … [H]e also told the story of the mistaken item about his marriage, and cracked that Walter had a "hole in his soul".


title: Walter Winchell

text: On subsequent programs, Paar called Winchell a "silly old man" and cited other examples of his underhanded tactics. No one had previously dared to criticize Winchell publicly, but by then his influence had eroded to the point that he could not effectively respond. The "New York Daily Mirror", his flagship newspaper for 34 years, closed in 1963; his readership dropped steadily, and he faded from the public eye.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Winchell became known for his attempts to destroy the careers of his political and personal enemies as his own career progressed, especially after World War II. Favorite tactics were allegations of having ties to Communist organizations and accusations of sexual impropriety. He was not above name-calling; for example, he described New York radio host Barry Gray as "Borey Pink" and a "disk jerk". Winchell heard that Marlen Edwin Pew of the trade journal "Editor & Publisher" had criticized him as a bad influence on


title: Walter Winchell

text: For most of his career, his contracts with newspaper and radio employers required them to hold him harmless from any damages resulting from lawsuits for slander or libel. He unapologetically would publish material told to him in confidence by friends; when confronted over such betrayals, he typically responded, "I know—I'm just a son of a bitch." By the mid-1950s, he was widely seen as arrogant, cruel, and ruthless.


title: Walter Winchell

text: While on an American tour in 1951, Josephine Baker, who would never perform before segregated audiences, criticized the Stork Club's unwritten policy of discouraging black patrons, then scolded Winchell, an old ally, for not rising to her defense. Winchell responded swiftly with a series of harsh public rebukes, including accusations of Communist sympathies. He spurned any attempts by friends to mitigate the heated rhetoric. The ensuing publicity resulted in the termination of Baker's work visa, forcing her to cancel all her engagements and return to France. It was almost a decade before U.S. officials allowed her back into the country. The adverse publicity of this, and similar incidents, undercut his credibility and power.


title: Walter Winchell

text: In his radio and television broadcasts on April 4, 1954, Winchell helped to stoke public fear of the polio vaccine. Winchell said, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America ... and all the ships at sea. Attention everyone. In a few moments I will report on a new polio vaccine claimed to be a polio cure. It may be a killer." Winchell claimed that the U.S. Public Health Services found live polio viruses in seven of ten vaccine batches it tested, reporting, "It killed several monkeys ... the United States Public Health Service will confirm this in about 10 days." Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, immediately responded that the vaccine, which had been recently tested on 7,500 school children at the University of Pittsburgh, had been triple tested for the absence of live virus by its manufacturers, the National Institutes of Health, and in his own research lab, and that similar testing would continue to screen out future batches containing live virus.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Many other columnists began to write gossip soon after Winchell's initial success, such as Ed Sullivan, who succeeded him at the "New York Evening Graphic", and Louella Parsons in Los Angeles. He wrote in a style filled with slang and incomplete sentences. Winchell's casual writing style famously earned him the ire of mobster Dutch Schultz, who confronted him at New York's Cotton Club and publicly lambasted him for using the phrase "pushover" to describe Schultz's penchant for blonde women. Winchell's best known aphorisms include: "Nothing recedes like success", and "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret".


title: Walter Winchell

text: Herman Klurfeld, a ghostwriter for Winchell for almost three decades, began writing four newspaper columns per week for Winchell in 1936 and worked for him for 29 years. He also wrote many of the signature one-liners, called "lasties", that Mr. Winchell used at the end of his Sunday evening radio broadcasts. One of Klurfeld's quips was "She's been on more laps than a napkin". In 1952, the "New York Post" revealed Mr. Klurfeld as Mr. Winchell's ghostwriter. Klurfeld later wrote a biography of Winchell entitled "Winchell, His Life and Times", which was the basis for the television film "Winchell" (1998).


title: Walter Winchell

text: Winchell opened his radio broadcasts by pressing randomly on a telegraph key, a sound that created a sense of urgency and importance, and using the catchphrase "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press." He would then read each of his stories with a staccato delivery (up to a rate of 197 words per minute, though he claimed a speed of well over 200 words per minute in an interview in 1967), noticeably faster than the typical pace of American speech. His diction also can be heard in his breathless narration of the television series "The Untouchables" (1959–1963), as well as in several Hollywood films.


title: Walter Winchell

text: On August 11, 1919, Winchell married Rita Greene, one of his onstage partners. The couple separated a few years later, and he moved in with Elizabeth June Magee, who had already adopted daughter Gloria and given birth to her and Winchell's first child Walda in 1927. Winchell eventually divorced Greene in 1928, but he never married Magee, although they lived as a married couple for the rest of their lives.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Winchell and Magee had three children: two daughters, Gloria (whom the couple adopted), Walda and a son, Walter Jr. Gloria died of pneumonia at the age of nine and Walda spent time in psychiatric hospitals. Walter Jr. died by suicide in the family garage on Christmas night of 1968. Having spent the previous two years on welfare, Walter Jr. had last been employed as a dishwasher in Santa Ana, California but listed himself as a freelancer who, for a time, wrote a column in the "Los Angeles Free Press", an alternative newspaper published from 1964 to 1978.


title: Walter Winchell

text: In the 1960s, Winchell wrote some columns for the film magazine "Photoplay". He announced his retirement on February 5, 1969, citing his son's suicide as a major reason as well as the delicate health of his companion, June Magee. Exactly one year after his retirement, Magee died at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, while undergoing treatment for a heart condition.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Winchell died of prostate cancer at the age of 74 on February 20, 1972, in Los Angeles, California. He is buried at Greenwood/Memory Lawn Mortuary & Cemetery in Phoenix. Larry King, who replaced Winchell at the "Miami Herald", recalled:


title: Walter Winchell

text: He was so sad. You know what Winchell was doing at the end? Typing out mimeographed sheets with his column, handing them out on the corner. That's how sad he got. When he died, only one person came to his funeral: his daughter.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Several of Winchell's former co-workers had expressed a willingness to go but were turned back by his daughter Walda.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Even during Winchell's lifetime, journalists were critical of his effect on the media. In 1940, St. Clair McKelway, who had earlier written a series of articles about him in "The New Yorker", wrote in "Time":


title: Walter Winchell

text: the effect of Winchellism on the standards of the press... When Winchell began gossiping in 1924 for the late scatological tabloid "Evening Graphic", no U.S. paper hawked rumors about the marital relations of public figures until they turned up in divorce courts. For 16 years, gossip columns spread until even the staid "New York Times" whispered that it heard from friends of a son of the President that he was going to be divorced. In its first year, "The Graphic" would have considered this news not fit to print... Gossip-writing is at present like a spirochete in the body of journalism... Newspapers... have never been held in less esteem by their readers or exercised less influence on the political and ethical thought of the times.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Despite the controversy surrounding Winchell, his popularity allowed him to leverage support for causes that he valued. In 1946, following the death from cancer of his close friend and fellow writer Damon Runyon, Winchell appealed to his radio audience for contributions to fight the disease. The response led Winchell to establish the Damon Runyon Cancer Memorial Fund, since renamed the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. He led the charity with the support of celebrities, including Marlene Dietrich, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Marilyn Monroe, and Joe DiMaggio, until his death from cancer in 1972.


title: Walter Winchell

text: In 1950, Ernest Lehman, a former publicity writer for Irving Hoffman of "The Hollywood Reporter", wrote a story for "Cosmopolitan" titled "Tell Me About It Tomorrow". The piece is about a ruthless journalist, J.J. Hunsecker, and is generally thought to be a thinly veiled commentary on the power wielded by Winchell at the height of his influence. It was made into the film "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), with the screenplay written by Lehman and Clifford Odets.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Walter Winchell is credited for coining the word "frienemy" in an article published by the "Nevada State Journal" on 19 May 1953.


title: Walter Winchell

text: In his 1961 novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", Robert A. Heinlein introduced the term "winchell" into the American vocabulary as a term for a politically intrusive gossip columnist, in reference to the character Ben Caxton. He contrasted Winchell with Walter Lippmann, another well-known journalist, whose forte was politics rather than celebrity gossip.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Winchell's colorful and widely imitated language inspired the term "Winchellism," meaning "any word or phrase brought to the fore by the columnist Walter Winchell" or his imitators. An etymologist of his day said, "there are plenty of ... expressions which he has fathered and which are now current among his readers and imitators and constitute a flash language which has been called Winchellese. Through a newspaper column which has nation-wide circulation, Winchell has achieved the position of dictator of contemporary slang." His use of slang, innuendo and invented euphemisms also protected him from libel accusations.


title: Walter Winchell

text: Winchell invented his own phrases that were viewed as slightly racy at the time. Some of the expressions for falling in love used by Winchell were: "pashing it", "sizzle for", "that way", "go for each other", "garbo-ing it", "uh-huh"; and in a similar vein, "new Garbo, trouser-crease-eraser", and "pash". Some Winchellisms for marriage are: "middle-aisle it", "altar it", "handcuffed", "Mendelssohn March", "Lohengrin it", and "merged".


title: RMIT University

text: RMIT University, officially the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, is a public research university in Melbourne, Australia.


title: RMIT University

text: Founded in 1887 by Francis Ormond, RMIT began as a night school offering classes in art, science, and technology, in response to the industrial revolution in Australia. It was a private college for more than a hundred years before merging with the Phillip Institute of Technology to become a public university in 1992. It has an enrolment of around 95,000 higher and vocational education students, making it the largest dual-sector education institution in Australia. With an annual revenue of around A$1.5 billion, it is also one of the wealthiest universities in Australia. It is rated a five star university by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and is ranked 15th in the World for art and design subjects in the QS World University Rankings, making it the top art and design university in Australia and Oceania.


title: RMIT University

text: The main campus of RMIT is situated on the northern edge of the historic Hoddle Grid in the city centre of Melbourne. It has two satellite campuses in the city's northern suburbs of Brunswick and Bundoora and a training site situated on the RAAF Williams base in the western suburb of Point Cook. It also has a training site at Bendigo Airport in the Victorian city of Bendigo and a research site in Hamilton near the Grampians National Park. In Asia, it has two branch campuses in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi and a training centre in Da Nang in Vietnam as well as teaching partnerships in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore and Sri Lanka. In Europe, it has a research and collaboration centre in the Spanish city of Barcelona.


title: RMIT University

text: The antecedent of RMIT, the Working Men's College of Melbourne, was founded by the Scottish-born grazier and politician The Hon. Francis Ormond in the 1880s. Planning began in 1881, with Ormond basing his model for the college on the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution (now a constituent college of the University of London), Brighton College of Art (now the University of Brighton), Royal College of Art, and the Working Men's College of London.


title: RMIT University

text: Ormond donated the sum of £5000 toward the foundation of the college. He was supported in the Victorian Parliament by Charles Pearson and in the Melbourne Trades Hall by William Emmett Murphy. The workers' unions of Melbourne rallied their members to match Ormond's donation. The site for the college, on the corners of Bowen Street and La Trobe Street, opposite the Melbourne Public Library, was donated by the Victorian Government.


title: RMIT University

text: The Working Men's College of Melbourne opened on 4 June 1887 with a gala ceremony at the Melbourne Town Hall, becoming the fifth tertiary education provider in Victoria (the Melbourne Athenaeum was founded in 1839, the University of Melbourne in 1853, the Ballarat School of Mines in 1870 and the Bendigo School of Mines in 1873). It took 320 enrollments on its opening night.


title: RMIT University

text: It opened as a night school for instruction in "art, science and technology"—in the words of its founder—"especially to working men". Ormond was a firm believer in the transformative power of education and believed the college would be of "great importance and value" to the industrialisation of Melbourne during the late-19th century. In 1904, it was incorporated under the "Companies Act" as a private college.


title: RMIT University

text: Between the turn of the 20th century and the 1930s, it expanded over the neighbouring Old Melbourne Gaol and constructed buildings for new art, engineering and radio schools. It also made its first contribution to Australia's war effort through training of returned military personnel from World War I. Following a petition by students, it officially changed its name to the Melbourne Technical College in 1934.


title: RMIT University

text: The expanded college made a greater contribution to Australia's effort during World War II by training a sixth of the country's military personnel—including the majority of its Royal Australian Air Force communication officers. It also trained 2000 civilians in munitions manufacturing and was commissioned by the Australian Government to manufacture military aircraft parts—including the majority of parts for the Beaufort Bomber.


title: RMIT University

text: Following World War II, in 1954 it became the first Australian tertiary education provider to be awarded royal patronage (by Elizabeth II) for its service to the Commonwealth in the area of education and for its contribution to the war effort; and was officially renamed the "Royal Melbourne Technical College". It became (and remains to this day) the only higher education institution in Australia with the right of the prefix "Royal" along with the use of the Australian monarchy's regalia.


title: RMIT University

text: Its name was officially changed to the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1960. During the mid-20th century, it was restructured as a provider of general higher and vocational education, and pioneered dual sector education in Australia. It also began an engagement with Southeast Asia during this time (under the Australian Government's Colombo Plan). In 1979, the neighbouring Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy joined with RMIT.


title: RMIT University

text: After merging with the Phillip Institute of Technology in 1992, it became a public university by act of the Victorian Government under the "Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Act 1992", and changed its name to RMIT University.


title: RMIT University

text: During the 1990s, the university underwent a rapid expansion and amalgamated with a number of nearby colleges and institutes. The Melbourne College of Decoration and Design joined RMIT in 1993, to create a new dedicated vocational design school, followed by the Melbourne College of Printing and Graphic Arts in 1995. That same year, it opened its first radial campus in Bundoora in the northern Melbourne metropolitan area. In 1999, it acquired the Melbourne Institute of Textiles campus in Brunswick in the inner-northern Melbourne metropolitan area for its vocational design schools.


title: RMIT University

text: At the turn of the 21st century, it was invited by the Vietnamese Government to become the country's first foreign-owned university. Its first international branch campus opened in Ho Chi Minh City in 2001 with a second in Hanoi in 2004. In 2013, it established a presence in Europe by opening a centre in Barcelona, Spain.


title: RMIT University

text: Located in the Melbourne city centre, the historic City campus of RMIT is the foundation campus of the university as well as its largest and most recognisable. It is known for its striking contemporary architecture as well as its well-preserved Victorian era and interwar period buildings.