GRAHAM Moffat, seen here on the left, was a noted actor and playwright whose greatest success was a comedy, Bunty Pulls the Strings. Produced in 1911, it sent his fame over the English-speaking world.
The play was staged at the Playhouse, London, then ran for some 600 performances at the Haymarket Theatre. The cast included Moffat, his wife Maggie (who also designed the dresses), their daughter Winifred, two brothers, and a sister.
“It became immensely popular”, said Moffat’s obituary in these pages, in December 1951. “Fashionable London took it up. ‘Bunty’ had conquered the West End. Mr [Herbert Henry] Asquith [the then Prime Minister] was among the classical scholars who found in this quaintly amusing study of Scottish character a source of enjoyment which could not be wholly satisfied with one performance”.
The play was also a hit on Broadway, where, in 1912, the cast was joined by Larbert-born James Finlayson, who would later star with Laurel and Hardy.
Born in Glasgow in 1866 to a notable elocutionist, Graham Moffat took up elocution and photography as hobbies before turning his hand to playwriting. Apart from Bunty, his other works included A Scrape o’ the Pen and The Concealed Bed.
Maggie Moffat, incidentally, was a suffragette who once spent two weeks in prison after a demonstration outside the House of Commons. Graham Moffat established the Glasgow Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage for “the husbands and brothers of active suffragettes and their male sympathisers”.
The couple retired to South Africa in 1936. He died in 1951, aged 85. The Herald obituary said: “In all his work he tried to amuse the public without appealing to what was base or ignoble in human nature. His mind was steeped in Scottish character, the simple ways, the pawkiness and the pathos of the life of the common people ... As actor and playwright [he] won a distinctive place in the history of the theatre”.
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