Frank Williams, actor best remembered as the vicar Timothy Farthing in Dad’s Army – obituary

Frank Williams, who has died a few days short of his 91st birthday, was a theatre and television actor who applied his talent to such diverse roles as Satan, Queen Boadicea and, in a cinema advertisement for Guinness, a man who, having consumed the Irish beverage, acquires the ability to walk through walls; but he was most widely recognised for playing the Reverend Timothy Farthing in Dad’s Army.

Farthing, in the battle to resist the temptations against which he warned his parishioners, suffered repeated reverses. He maintained a jealously proprietorial attachment to his Walmington-on-Sea church hall and office, which circumstances obliged him to share with Captain Mainwaring, Arthur Lowe’s Home Guard commander.

Farthing also struggled with patience, and no list of the vicar’s attributes would be complete without such adjectives as petulant, indignant and fractious. The virtues of abstinence and generosity also tended to elude him: a recurring joke in Dad’s Army was that, in scenes on licensed premises, the vicar would attempt to order large whiskies at others’ expense. The request would invariably be thwarted either by the purchaser, or by the fretful, bespectacled verger, Maurice Yeatman (played by Williams’s friend Edward Sinclair), ever-vigilant against the detrimental effects of strong liquor.

Dad’s Army, a series conceived and written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, is celebrated for the bravura performances of its leading actors: Lowe’s Mainwaring, John Le Mesurier as Sergeant Wilson, and veterans John Laurie and Arnold Ridley. Another of the writers’ great strengths was the care with which they developed supporting characters and allowed them to shine. In this respect the Rev Farthing – leader of an embattled trinity comprising Verger Yeatman and air raid warden William Hodges, played by Bill Pertwee – represented one of their most notable achievements.

If his character’s attributes were sometimes less than saintly, the role of a fastidious clergyman and bachelor was one to which Frank Williams was eminently suited. The natural tone in his high-pitched, adenoidal voice was one of exasperation.

A life-long Christian, whose faith embraced both Anglicanism and Catholicism, Williams, who in later life would serve on the General Synod, was so well suited to his character that the Dad’s Army producers would consult him on matters including order of service and ecclesiastical decor.

Though he did not join Dad’s Army until the third of nine series, and usually had only a few lines, many classic episodes involved the vicar, typically enduring situations of trial and adversity. Williams is central to some of Dad’s Army’s most memorable scenes: helping to steer a hand-cranked railway bogie away from a steam train driven by Ian Lavender’s hapless Private Pike or attempting to conduct an open-air church service blessing the harvest, while his congregation – who have accepted with vigour the offer of unlimited quantities of the farmer’s potato wine – instigate a brawl.

At one point in the episode, “When Did You Last See Your Money?” (in which butcher and uncompromising patriot Lance Corporal Jones, played by Clive Dunn, has mislaid £500 in charitable donations) John Laurie, as the elderly undertaker Fraser, attempts to hypnotise Jones in the hope of restoring his memory. The scene is witnessed by the verger, who bursts into Farthing’s bedroom and shakes him awake.

“Oh,” Farthing snaps, “you are a beastly nuisance.”

“There is a horrible black mass,” Yeatman informs him, “in the church hall.”

“A horrible black mass?” Farthing replies. “Of what?”

Frank John Williams was born on July 2 1931 in Edgware. His father was a Welsh draper whose own name, William Williams, earned him the sobriquet “Twice”; his mother Alice encouraged her son’s attempts at staging revues to support the war effort. As a boy, Williams used his middle name, and only adopted “Frank” when he entered the theatre. He was brought up a Presbyterian.

His first experience of cinema was an excursion with his father to see the 1936 film Captain January, starring Shirley Temple, at the Ritz in Edgware. He was educated at Broadfields School which took boys until 11, after which he moved to Parkside Preparatory, and at 12 to Ardingly College, West Sussex, a Woodard School in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. It was in the chapel there that Williams received First Holy Communion.

It was also there that, as Williams would recall in his autobiography, an unnamed master used to offer him tea and toast: “I would sit next to him on the sofa. His arm would go round my shoulder and his hand would go up my trouser leg.”

A fellow pupil, three years older, was Bill Cotton, later to become head of light entertainment at BBC Television.

Williams subsequently attended Hendon County School, by which time he was already planning a career in the theatre. In his final year he appeared in a production of The Ghost Train, written in 1923 by Arnold Ridley, his future colleague in Dad’s Army.

On leaving school Williams moved to London and became assistant stage manager at the Gateway Theatre in Westbourne Grove. His own first play, No Traveller, about a man who suffers amnesia, was performed at the Gateway, where his contemporaries included Liz Smith.

Williams accepted numerous small roles in films. He appeared as an archer in Ivanhoe (1952) starring Elizabeth Taylor and filmed at Elstree. He brought his best efforts to the demands of lying on a stretcher while tended by Anna Neagle’s Florence Nightingale in Lady With a Lamp (1951) and appears as “An angry man” in The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953).

His first lines on the big screen, spoken in the 1956 drama Shield of Faith in which he played a dying infantryman, consisted of the opening lines of the 23rd Psalm.

Williams’s first contact with Jimmy Perry came when he was cast in a play called Honeymoon Beds, staged at the Watford Palace, run by Perry and his wife Gilda. Perry swiftly identified the potential in the young actor and writer, and agreed to produce one of Williams’ plays, The TV Murders.

His big breakthrough came in 1957 when he was cast as a psychiatrist in the ITV comedy, The Army Game. Williams went on to appear in 75 episodes of the series, latterly as Captain Pocket. Fellow cast members included Alfie Bass (“Excused Boots” Bisley), Bernard Bresslaw and Charles Hawtrey. It was in the course of a dream which came to Bisley that Williams appeared as Queen Boadicea with, as he would recall, “a long green dress and horns coming out of my head”.

Religion and drama were the twin pillars of his life, even though, where acting was concerned, he continued to accept modest roles, so as to avoid more mundane forms of employment. He appeared in advertisements for the cough sweet Tunes (declaiming the product’s name with joyful clarity once his sinuses were cleared) and, for the National Coal Board, was cast as the devil in hell.

For a while he was synonymous with “Delikat: the Food No Cat Can Resist”, playing a supporting role to the feline leads, who would throw dinner parties at which the actor was required to serve the delicacy to assembled quadrupeds.

In the 1960s, having attended a midnight mass, he became an Anglo-Catholic, and attended John Keble Church in Mill Hill. Professionally, he remained a journeyman, gravitating towards comedy with parts in television series starring Terry Scott, Harry Worth, Tommy Cooper, Norman Wisdom and others.

Williams was saved from obscurity in the spring of 1969 when he was asked to appear in Dad’s Army, becoming the youngest member of the cast other than Ian Lavender. The series had already been running for six months; Williams made his debut in an episode entitled “The Armoured Might of Jack Jones”, which marked the first occasion on which the butcher’s van was used as Home Guard transport.

From the beginning, Williams said, “the vicar was not very nice. I don’t think he was a terribly good advert for the church.”

Though not himself a heavy drinker, Williams enjoyed socialising with a cast whose most tirelessly gregarious faction was led by Le Mesurier and Lowe, often, after filming, at the Bell Hotel, Thetford.

Williams was often accompanied by a close platonic friend, Betty Camkin, a staunch Conservative who lived near to him in Edgware. Within the family of Dad’s Army, Williams said, “she was accepted in the same way as the wives of the married members of the cast.” When Betty Camkin died of a brain haemorrhage in 1992, Williams’s was the name she left to be contacted in the event of an emergency.

In the autumn of 1975 a live theatrical version of Dad’s Army came to the West End; the television series finally ended in 1977. Williams maintained close friendships with several members of the cast, notably Arthur Lowe and his wife Joan, for years afterwards.

Frank Williams would never capture the public imagination on quite such a scale again, though he had appeared in Monty Python’s Flying Circus as a clerk of the court. “My main function,” he later said, “was to keep asking Michael Palin, whose character was a policeman giving evidence, to refrain from addressing me as ‘Darling.’ ” Otherwise his talents were applied to less highly lauded comedies, such as Perry and Croft’s Hi-de-Hi! and You Rang, M’Lord?, the latter being the two writers’ last collaboration, which ran from 1990 to 1993.

Frank Williams was a devout Anglican and a lay member of the General Synod of the Church of England, on the moderate Anglo-Catholic wing. In November 1992 he voted against the ordination of women. Around that time he was asked by The Daily Telegraph’s religious affairs correspondent, Damian Thompson, about the liturgical preferences of the vicar in Dad’s Army: he judged that the vicar was “Low Church but not evangelical”. He left the Synod in 2000.

Williams maintained a parallel career as a dame on the pantomime circuit and achieved modest success in regional theatre with his own series of murder mysteries. In later life he also completed what he called “serious” scripts, including The Boating Lake, a drama set in 1938, about a family on a seaside holiday, but none was produced.

He did, however, appear in Jonathan Miller’s 1996 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Almeida Theatre in Islington in the role of Quince, a performance described by one critic as “Betjemanesque”.

Frank Williams – unlike some actors whose fame derives from one defining role – never lapsed into bitterness once his most celebrated part had ended.

Williams, who was unmarried, published, in 2002, an autobiography called Vicar to Dad’s Army: The Frank Williams Story. The book is not lacking in detail, mentioning that his childhood house, at 26 Parkside Drive, Edgware, had a “walk-in airing cupboard”, and detailing the property’s generous stock of garden gnomes. But it is more reticent on the subject of the actor’s personal life.

Williams once offered this reflection on the show with which he was most closely associated: “Although Dad’s Army is a comedy, there is always in the background that underlying determination to win through.

“The characters may be comic but they are also heroic. They care about King and Country. The characters on Dad’s Army were not cardboard cut-outs but men with a purpose. There was never anything malicious in the comedy, which is perhaps why it has remained so endearing to viewers of every generation.”

Frank Williams, born July 2 1931, died June 26 2022