Big Red Book
Celebrating television's This Is Your Life
Major Percy FLOOD MBE, MC
THIS IS YOUR LIFE – Percy Flood, charity founder, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the audience at the King's Theatre, Hammersmith.
Percy, a Major with the Royal West Kent Regiment, was captured by the Germans during the Second World War and imprisoned in Oflag 79, a prisoner-of-war camp in Brunswick, Germany. While in captivity, Percy and his fellow imprisoned officers developed the idea of a boys club, for underprivileged British youngsters, as 'a memorial to the comradeship we have shared in our captivity'.
After the war, Prime Minister Clement Attlee led a national appeal, and the Brunswick Boys Club was officially opened in Fulham, London, by the Duke of Edinburgh in July 1949.
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Photographs of Percy Flood This Is Your Life
Daily Express 30 April 1957
BY wrapping his modesty in a cloak of shoddy American-style sensationalism, the BBC last night very nearly ruined the TV story of Major Percy Flood, a man worth meeting.
Flood's inspiration raised £13,000 to found a London boys' club from fellow war prisoners in a German camp. But the false sentimentality poured over the story by Eamonn Andrews in "This Is Your Life" reduced charity to the level of a fairground gimcrack.
Even when the programme is "live" this tawdry exploitation of fine human instincts is painful enough. Done, as last night, on poor quality film and edited to taste - if that is the word - it becomes merely mechanical excitement.
Series 2 subjects
Peter Scott | Ada Reeve | Peter Methven | Sue Ryder | Harry S Pepper | Compton Mackenzie | Maud Fairman | Billy Smart