Jimmy Logan

''I was born in 1928, the same year as Mickey Mouse,'' Jimmy wrote in his absorbing autobiography, It's a Funny Life. His whole family were in showbusiness in a small way, taking concert parties on tours around the country. Jimmy's mother once went out to buy a three-piece suite and came home with a set of drums.

Jimmy Logan's life-long dedication to wounded ex-servicemen really began with his father, whose shrapnel wound turned gangrenous and left him with a wooden leg. Jimmy raised much money for Erskine Hospital, where Sir William MacEwen, with the help of craftsmen from Yarrow's shipyard, designed an artificial leg from willow wood from two trees surreptitiously cut down in the grounds of Glasgow University. As a boy scout at Gourock, Jimmy sang for wounded ex-servicemen during the Second World War.

Jimmy's first big showbusiness break, and his veneration of Sir Harry Lauder, began when he was allowed on the same bill as the famous comedian at the King's Theatre in Greenock. ''As we rehearsed our music, we heard a voice from the distance: 'He's coming in the door.' The place froze. It was Sir Harry. He strolled in and there was utter silence throughout a theatre that moments before had been a hive of activity.

The stage that had been extraordinarily busy was, in seconds, totally empty. Everyone, including me, went into the wings waiting for a glimpse of the great man.''

Jimmy left school at 14, with no academic qualifications, but knew what he wanted to do. He recalled: ''Our family were all natural entertainers, and very good at what they did, but it was noticed at an early stage that I had the talent to go that extra mile, and maybe break into the big-time.''

Jack Short was a hard task-master. Most things came down to money. ''I was born James Allan Short, but my father soon decided it wasn't a good idea to have the same name as him because the audience wouldn't think they were getting their money's worth. So he said I should be called Jim Logan, which eventually became Jimmy Logan as my popularity caught on with the public. And when that happened my father came up with the Fabulous Logan Family.''

Jimmy Logan, accordionist, could play only in the key of C, but did that matter as the rain hammered on the corrugated tin roof of the Hippodrome Theatre in Hamilton? Jimmy Logan, consummate pantomime performer, had to wear a too-tight catsuit in Dick Whittington because his Aunt Jean had shrunk it through washing it.

Jimmy was 19 when he married the dancer Grace Pagan, his junior by a year. He was a young man of inexhaustible energy when Howard Lockhart signed him up for a comedy series for the BBC Scottish Home Service. He worked with Stanley Baxter and produced the famous catch-phrase: ''Sausages is the boys''. The coat of arms on Jimmy's Rolls-Replica had a white square in the middle to represent film, a pair of boots to represent his stage character, and a microphone. Where there should have been a Latin motto was the slogan ''Smashin' int't!''

Jimmy worked with all the big names in Scottish entertainment: Harry Gordon, Duncan Macrae. Jimmy couldn't stand the way Macrae appropriated other actors' applause. ''I feel he could have been another artist who wrote a great page in our book of theatre history, but he lacked the generosity of

spirit that, in the end, stopped him scaling the tremendous heights he could so easily have reached,'' was Jimmy's judgment.

By the mid-fifties Jimmy Logan had appeared at the London Palladium and was earning #500 a week in pantomime. ''Everything I touched may not have turned to gold but it certainly seemed like it.''

His house in the west end of Glasgow was like a mansion. His Rolls-Royce number plate was JL10. The Five Past Eight Show had made him instantly recognisable on the street. He flew his own plane to Dublin, and slept in his country ''pad'', 16 rooms plus four bathrooms in Culzean Castle,

Ayrshire, administered by the National Trust for Scotland.

But bad luck was waiting in the wings. The Jimmy Logan Show flopped on television. His first marriage had collapsed. Glasgow's Metropole Theatre, where the Logan family had performed, had gone up in smoke in 1961. The following year Alex Frutin bought the Falcon Theatre, formerly the Empress Theatre, at St George's Cross. It was refurbished and renamed the New Metropole. Jimmy paid #80,000 for it.

His father was managing director, but their relationship was strained. Jimmy brought the nudity of Hair to Glasgow, but couldn't make ends meet. The bank phoned him one morning in 1973 to tell him that his overdraft had been pegged at #170,000. Jimmy was one of the original shareholders in Scottish Television. If the bank hadn't forced him to sell his #1000 stake, it would have cleared his debts, with plenty left over. As it was, vandals burned out the abandoned Metropole, and a developer got the extensive ground it stood on for #7000. Jimmy was left with the bank debt.

Then, as he recalled bitterly, ''open season'' was declared on Jimmy Logan for promoting the kilt, heather, haggis. ''At the age of 49 I had no home, no wife, no money, no theatre, no Rolls-Royce, no chauffeur, no castle, no plane, no boat, and most certainly no laughs.''

He slept on the settee in his father's one-bedroom flat in Ibrox and hung his clothes on the piano. Jimmy Logan got his act together again at an age at which some entertainers are taking it easier. He revealed great gifts as a serious actor as Archie Rice in The Entertainer, as the colour sergeant in The Big Picnic, as Harry Lauder in the one-man show Jimmy wrote.

Despite the vicissitudes of three failed marriages and a quadruple heart by-pass operation, Jimmy Logan kept taking the curtain calls. He was an inspiration to many entertainers. It was watching Jimmy in the Alhambra Theatre in Glasgow as a teenager that made Billy Connolly decide he was going to be a comedian.

Jimmy was happy in his fourth marriage to Angela, and immensely proud of his sister, Annie Ross, the great cabaret artist, revered in America; proud, too, of his OBE. He was a generous man of indomitable spirit who fought the cancer that killed him, as he had fought so many battles. It was a funny life, often tragic, but, ultimately, triumphant.

Jimmy Logan; born April 4, 1928, died April 13, 2001.