Musical comedians Michael Flanders (1922-1975) and Donald Swann (1923-1994), who delighted West End audiences with their humorous hit songs in the 1950s and 60s, have today (5 September) been commemorated with an English Heritage blue plaque. The plaque was unveiled at 1 Scarsdale Villas, Kensington, in the garden studio of which the pair once lived and worked.

Flanders and Swann burst onto the scene in January 1957 when their cabaret act At the Drop of a Hat opened to acclaim at the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden. Running for over 800 performances, enthusiasts included the royal family, almost all of whom are said to have been heard singing along to ‘Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud’, the chorus of The Hippopotamus Song, one of the pair’s most famous tunes, on the show’s final night of 2 May 1959. Global stardom followed, with the duo embarking on tours of the act and its sequel At the Drop of Another Hat in North America, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and a long run on Broadway that drew huge audiences in 1967, when the show ended. 

Although distinguished in their own fields, it was as the musical duo that they secured their most enduring legacy. For seventeen years from 1950, they wrote and performed a string of hit songs together, Swann seated at the piano and Flanders circling the stage in his wheelchair. While they preferred to work in the theatre, the 1960s saw them appear increasingly on television with a screening of their performance on an all-star 1963 Royal Variety Performance breaking all audience ratings. And their popularity is yet to wane; schoolboy John Cleese had ‘prized’ copies of their records, and their songs have been chosen by Tony Benn, Quentin Blake, Julia Donaldson, and Ian Hislop, to name a few, as one of their Desert Island Discs.

Jane Glover, Blue Plaques Panel Member, said: "Michael Flanders and Donald Swann are icons of British comedy. Their hugely popular shows on the West End and beyond continued the light-hearted traditions set by the music halls and variety acts and yet invoked a witty satire in dissecting serious topics such as the First World War. Flanders and Swann undoubtedly rank among Britain’s best loved double acts and we are pleased to honour their achievements with this blue plaque." 

Laura and Stephanie Flanders, daughters of Michael Flanders, said: "Our father looked back fondly on his partnership with his dear friend and ally Donald Swann and relished creating and sharing with the public their timeless songs and very British sense of humour. We are proud that this unique collaboration continues to be recognised and hope this blue plaque will inspire other generations to explore and enjoy the delights of the work of Flanders & Swann."  

Michael Flanders moved to what was then 1a Scarsdale Villas – a large single-storey studio to the rear of number 1 – early in 1953, and was joined there later that year by Donald Swann. There they worked together on songs for their early revue Airs on a Shoestring, and performed them to friends. Swann lived briefly in the adjacent house – 1 Scarsdale Villas – for a spell in 1955, before getting married and moving to Battersea. This was then considered a downmarket area, and Swann’s residence there was the subject of onstage jokes from Flanders, who remained in what he called the ‘genteel poverty’ of Scarsdale Villas until 1962. As the garden studio is almost entirely invisible from the road, the plaque is sited at 1 Scarsdale Villas, to which the studio is now (as was originally the case) conjoined.

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann

Born in St John’s Wood on 1 March 1922, Michael Flanders attended Westminster School, as did his future co-star Donald Swann. At Oxford he acted and directed for the Oxford University Dramatic Society and the Experimental Theatre Club, and contributed drama criticism to the student newspaper Cherwell. His professional stage debut came in 1941 in George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell. His contemporary, the writer and dramatist Michael Meyer, remembered Flanders at this time as "a lean and long-striding six foot three, a fine oarsman and quarter-miler and by far the outstanding Oxford actor of our year. None of us had any doubt that he would be the Olivier or Donat of our generation".

In 1942, Flanders left Oxford to join the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve where he survived a torpedo attack while serving on HMS Marne. Subsequently contracting polio, he later  needed a wheelchair and was not discharged from hospital until 1948. Distraught at Oxford refusing his application to complete his degree on account of his disability, Flanders moved into radio broadcasting until his old friend Donald Swann made contact and they began writing together professionally. The pair contributed songs to revues by Laurier Lister and performed at private dinner parties, then on the last day of 1956 they risked taking the 150-seat New Lindsey Theatre, Notting Hill, initially for a week. To their surprise, At the Drop of a Hat was warmly received and after three weeks they transferred to the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden. The duo wrote and performed a string of hit songs over the years, with Swann seated at the piano and Flanders circling the stage in his wheelchair.

The pair remained close until Flanders’ death on 15 April 1975, aged 53, leaving behind his daughters Laura and Stephanie and his wife Claudia, who founded The Michael Flanders Centre, a day-care centre in Acton, in his memory.

Donald Swann was born in Llanelli, Wales on 30 September 1923, the second child and only son of Herbert Swann, a Russian doctor of English descent, and Naguimé Sultán, a nurse from Trans-Caspia (modern Turkmenistan). The couple met on the Romanian front of the First World War while working for the Red Cross. Donald was a talented musician and in 1936, a year after his mother died from cancer, he won a scholarship to Westminster School, and received tuition in piano and composition at the Royal College of Music. Swann joined Christ Church, Oxford in 1942 to read Russian but was called up for the war effort a year later. A conscientious objector, he was stationed with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in Egypt and Palestine, and then the United Nations Relief Agency in Greece. He returned to Oxford in 1946 to take his degree, adding Modern Greek and French to his original Russian.

In the 1960s Flanders and Swann increasingly appeared on television. A screening of the 1963 Royal Variety Performance broke all audience ratings, with the peak period of viewing being between 9.45pm and 10pm – during the acts of Flanders and Swann and Marlene Dietrich. The duo, though still hugely popular, began to be seen as mainstream light entertainers, somewhat old-fashioned compared to more acerbic musical comedians. Flanders observed, tongue-in-cheek: “The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth – and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.” Swann told The Stage in 1979: “Ever since our Oxford days and on through the 1,700 live shows we did together, we always represented this English, middle-class liberal view”, although “in fact I used to wheel Flanders on the Aldermaston marches”: one of their most powerful and enduring songs is the anti-nuclear '20 tons of TNT'.

Swann had two daughters, Rachel and Natasha, with his first wife Janet Oxborrow. He married again in 1991, to his long-time companion, art historian Alison Smith. Swann died on 23 March 1994, aged 71.

The English Heritage London Blue Plaques scheme is generously supported by David Pearl and members of the public.