Today is the birthday of Arthur Treacher (1894-1975).
With the exception of Colonel Sanders, we don’t usually bother celebrating fast food magnates on this site, but Treacher does possess some relevance to our usual themes. Treacher was an English actor, (mildly) famous for playing butlers and such on stage, film and television. His entry into the fish ‘n’ chips racket would still seem to be random, and all I can think is that some financial genius made the equation: “English Dude?” = “Fish and chips”! Sounds pretty lame to me, although the chain has been successful enough. More successful at any rate, than “Kenny Rogers’ Roasters”, if not as successful as “Roy Rogers’ Roast Beef”.
Treacher started out on Broadway in 1926 in the revue Great Temptations and also did Billy Rose’s Sweet and Low (1930) and about a dozen other shows. His Hollywood career began in 1929, and included four Shirley Temple films, and two outings as P.G. Wodehouses’s “Jeeves”. He memorably played the Constable in Mary Poppins (1964) and was Merv Griffin’s television sidekick from 1965 to 1970!
Here he is as Jeeves. I notice that he is NOT eating fish and chips/
(Travalanche) 