Stanley Unwin

Stanley Unwin (7 June 1911 – 12 January 2002), sometimes billed as Professor Stanley Unwin, was a British comic actor and writer. He invented his own comic language, "Unwinese", referred to in the film Carry On Regardless (1961) as "gobbledygook". Unwinese was a corrupted form of English in which many of the words were altered in playful and humorous ways, as in its description of Elvis Presley and his contemporaries as being "wasp-waist and swivel-hippy". Unwin claimed that the inspiration came from his mother, who once told him that on the way home she had "falolloped (fallen) over" and "grazed her kneeclabbers". Early life Unwin's parents, Ivan Oswald Unwin (1880-1914) and his wife Jessie Elizabeth ( Brand; 1883-1968) emigrated from England to the Union of South Africa in the early 1900s. Their son was born in Pretoria in 1911. Following his father's death in 1914, due to the family's poverty Unwin's mother arranged for the family to return to England. She worked as a cook at Bow Road police station. By 1919, Unwin had been sent to the National Children's Home in Congleton, Cheshire. In the late 1920s, he studied radio, television and languages at Regent Street Polytechnic in London. In 1937, he married Frances, with whom he had two daughters and a son. Unwin later stated that Unwinese had its roots in enlivening the bedtime stories that he used to tell his children. In 1940, he was given a job in transmitter maintenance for the BBC, and was assigned to the Borough Hill transmitting station in Daventry. Unwin, Frances and their nine-month-old daughter, Marion, moved to Long Buckby in Northamptonshire, where Unwin would reside for the rest of his life.