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Michael Bates 1942.
The son of an Anglo-Indian civil servant, Michael Hammond Bates
was born in Jhansi, India, on 4th December 1920. Educated in the UK
at Uppingham School, he later went up
to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge.
On the outbreak of war, Bates enlisted
in the Suffolk Regiment before being selected for officer training. Allocated
to D Company at Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the Indian Army on
7th March 1942. Serving with the 9th Gurkha Rifles in Burma, he was MiD in October 1944 and finished the war as a major.
Turning to acting after the war, Bates appeared on stage in Canada in the early 1950s and in London alongside Alec Guinness. On the radio, he played several of the characters in the long-running serial The Navy Lark. A versatile jobbing actor at the time, he also appeared in supporting roles in several British films, including I’m All Right Jack and Dr. Strangelove. By the early 1970s, Bates was rarely out of work, appearing in The Battle of Britain as a warrant officer and memorably as the sadistic chief guard Barnes in A Clockwork Orange. In the film Patton, he was cast as Field Marshal Montgomery, to whom he bore a striking resemblance.
In 1973, Bates was signed up for a new sitcom, Last of The Summer Wine, featuring three retired men behaving like adolescents in a sleepy Yorkshire town. Playing former Royal Signals Sergeant Cyril Blamire, Bates, a staunch Conservative, immediately clashed with Bill Owen playing ‘Compo’ Simmonite, who was a committed Labour supporter. Eventually the producer had to threaten to scrap the whole show unless the two actors settled their differences. However, it was his final role that Bates is perhaps best known for, as the Indian bearer Rangi Ram in the wartime sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.
Featuring the exploits of a hapless Royal Artillery concert party in the Far East, led by an ineffectual colonel and presided over by the stern sergeant-major played by Windsor
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