The Unconvincing Hero

The casting office for the 1950 film The Wooden Horse produced one of cinema’s better ironies. The production set out to restage one of the more ingenious prison breaks of the Second World War—the one involving a hollow vaulting horse used to hide a tunnel dug beneath the exercise yard. When Peter Butterworth, a young actor with a growing reputation for comedy, auditioned, he was turned away. The casting directors judged him insufficiently athletic and, more damningly, not “convincingly heroic” enough to play a prisoner of war.

Butterworth had not merely read the script; he had lived it. As a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm, he had been shot down over the Netherlands and interned at Stalag Luft III, where the real escape was hatched. He sat on the organizing committee and was one of the vaulters, performing gymnastics on the horse day after day to cover the scratch of shovels below.

The camp doubled as a training ground for the career that followed. To drown out the noise of tunneling, Butterworth and a fellow prisoner, the screenwriter Talbot Rothwell, staged boisterous variety shows; laughter turned out to be a tactical asset, useful for distracting guards and holding the camp’s sanity together. While he clowned on a makeshift stage, he was also working as a code writer for MI9, folding intelligence into his letters home.

The producers wanted chiseled jawlines, not the man who had actually stood on the sand. Butterworth, ruled unpersuasive as the lead in his own life, found a different sort of immortality. He became a fixture of the Carry On films, playing the flustered, grasping, delightfully incompetent men the public adored—spending a career as the bumbling buffoon while concealing, in plain sight, that he was quite literally the man who had helped others vault to freedom.