Patrick Waddington

Patrick William Simpson Waddington (19 August 1901 – 4 February 1987) was an English actor, educated at Gresham’s School at Holt in Norfolk. He was born and died in York, England. Waddington was the grandson of William Waddington, the piano manufacturer who also took over the management of the Theatre Royal York. After Gresham’s School and St John’s College, Oxford, he started his career singing, and in the 1930s was in That Certain Trio with Peggy Cochrane. On stage from 1924, often in upper-class roles, his theatre work included the original West End run of Patrick Hamilton’s Rope in 1929; a lengthy tour of My Fair Lady, as Colonel Pickering, in 1963–5; and the musical Kean on Broadway, in 1961. Film and TV included The Wooden Horse (1950), A Night to Remember (1958), and two episodes of Dad’s Army, as ‘The Brigadier’. He primarily wrote in English.