John Hudson delves into a new biography of TV favourite Arnold Ridley and discovers a heartwarming account of life with one of Britain’s acting legends.

Nicolas Ridley says he wants to ride the Bristol-Bath cycle path one day and look over the remains of Mangotsfield railway station.

It’s not that he’s any great cyclist or railway buff – but his father, Arnold Ridley, was inspired by that lonely spot to write The Ghost Train, a stage play as popular now as back in the Twenties.

And what fascinates Nicolas is the way West End celebrity engulfed his father nearly 50 years before his career was transformed in old age when he became Godfrey, the deferential, doddery old Private in Dad’s Army.

Arnold Ridley, born and brought up in Bath, spent dark, lonely hours on Mangotsfield station when he was going home for Sunday from his week’s acting at Birmingham Rep.

Mangotsfield was where the Midland mainline met the Somerset and Dorset’s Bristol-Bath link, and there was no question of the two companies dovetailing services.

The Ghost Train, as a small-cast whodunnit, is still one of the most performed am-dram plays.

They say never a day goes by when it’s not being put on in some corner of the world.

So the money’s still rolling in for the family?

Not likely, says Nicholas.

“He sold the amateur rights for £200 very early on.

“He never had any sense of grievance.

“At the time, the play looked as if it would flop.

“He badly needed the money and felt he had been lucky to have been offered it.”

But Nicolas is aware of his father’s links with our region in other ways; after Arnold Ridley’s death in 1984, he donated an assortment of his belongings to Bristol University’s theatre collection, including 30 original scripts.

“My father was at the university around the beginning of World War I,” Nicolas says.

The other link with the university is much more recent:

“Our elder daughter Catherine has just finished a degree in philosophy and economics there.”

Arnold Ridley was born in Pera Place, Walcot, Bath, in 1896, the son of a gym instructor who was new to the city and his wife Rosa Morrish, whose father had a shoe shop in Manvers Street.

The boy’s first school was the seemly Miss Eva Silversides’ seminary at Prior Park Buildings, which later became Clarendon School.

Bath City Secondary School was not so rarified, and made worse for young Ridley by the fact that his father taught gym there, and the head felt he had to address him by his Christian name.

The other boys were not impressed, and the actor recalled: “I felt obliged to prove my integrity by neglecting every task so successfully that for four years I occupied one of the bottom places in every class, at the same time appointing myself a ringleader of general loutishness.”

On his 17th birthday, hopes of a Civil Service career scuppered by his poor school record, he became a student teacher at East Twerton School.

And it was from there that he was selected to study at Bristol University’s education department.

There, theatre became his love, and the book contains pictures of him in roles from a youthful Hamlet to Little Aminadab “that grinds the music box” in She Stoops to Conquer.

It was also from Bristol University that he made his professional stage debut – at £1 a week – in the Arthurian fantasy Prunella at the city’s Theatre Royal, in 1914.

He called himself John Robinson, to keep it dark from the university.

And it was in Bristol that he started writing; a one-act play he created with a fellow student was due to be put on by the university’s drama society in 1915 before war ended that and many more momentous plans.

Arnold Ridley served bravely in both World Wars – in the Second, as a most un-Godfrey- like major.

But he kept up close ties with Bath rugby and Somerset cricket – very close, in the case of rugby, since he was fixtures secretary at the Rec in 1928, and later club president.

He and his wife Althea Parker were a devoted pair who came through the hard times to share in the excitement of his late flowering as a TV star.

She was also a professional actor, though one too stagey to be suited to television.

She would doubtless have revelled in her husband’s success if it had come decades earlier but played a loyal, upstaged, supporting role as he plied his hard trade.

She and her son were very close.

For a long time, Nicolas felt uneasy about all the Dad’s Army furore.

He was travelling around the world when his father landed the Godfrey role at the age of 72, and found it difficult to reconcile the household name in the family with the hard pressed, hard working jobbing ac tor he knew as a child.

He says writing this biography has dispelled those feelings.

In so doing, he has produced a memoir of warmth and honesty.

Godfrey’s Ghost: From Father to Son, by Nicolas Ridley, Mogzilla Life, £9.99 paperback