FAMILY OF CLOWNS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22142, 22 June 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

FAMILY OF CLOWNS

ITALIANS IN ENGLAND THE CHEERFUL LUPINOS LAUGHTER FOR 300 YEARS If the people who live in grand old houses with, grand o!d crests on their silver think that only such families are proud of their traditions they are wrong. In Queen Elizabeth's reign there landed in England a. poor Italian called Lupino. He carried his baby son strapped on his back. By turning somersaults, making faces, and such tricks he hoped to gain a living. English people laughed at the Italian clown, and he earned enough to feed himself and his son, but never enough to become rich. Ever since that day the Lupinos have been clowning in England, and nearly all of them have been very poor. Yet they have stuck to their trade, and been as proud of it as the greater families who have stuck to soldiering since the days of Agincourt, and the others who have followed the sea out of loyalty to the memory of an ancestor serving under Blake. Stanley Lupino, who was once so poor that he dared not take off his overcoat because of the rags beneath and is now a successful comedian, has written the family history in a book called "From the Stocks to the Stars." j Perhaps the bravest story he has to tell is about his brother Mark, who was a popular jester before the war. He enlisted. One day he was riding a motor-bitfycle when a shell exploded so near that the machine was blown from under him. All he said as he picked himself up was, " And no audience to clap me!" This plucky clown was gassed. The gas did not kill him, but it took away his voice, and ruined him. His brother

tells how painful it was to hear him vainlv struggling to make himself heard. His jests only reached the first rows of the stalls. " Gradually agents and managers dropped him," says his brother, " and he tramped the offices looking for work. At last he looked in one office where they had been paying him a big salary as a star. Huskily he asked for a job, and back came the old reply, " We're full up!" " Mark's sense of humour came up and he croaked out , T)on't you want a tenor for the Queen's Hall?' " He died at 42, brave to the end. It is not a very grand boast to say, "My family have "made people laugh for more than three hundred years," but it is a fine tradition to laugh at misfortune and make a joke of trouble. The Lupinos are right to be proud of it.