Clive Dunn

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Clive Robert Benjamin Dunn OBE (born 9 January 1920) is a retired English actor, singer and entertainer best known for his role as Lance-Corporal Jack Jones in the BBC sitcom Dad’s Army, and Sam Cobbett in the Yorkshire Television sitcom My Old Man.

Born in London, he is the cousin of actress Gretchen Franklin. Dunn played small film roles from the 1930s onwards. After a break for service in the army in World War II, in the course of which he spent four years in prisoner-of-war camps and labour camps in Austria, he worked for many years in music halls and theatres. In 1956 and 1957, Dunn appeared in The Tony Hancock Show. In the 1960s he made many appearances with Tony Hancock, Michael Bentine, Dora Bryan and Dick Emery, among others, before winning the role of Jones in Dad’s Army in 1968.

From an early time his trademark character was that of a doddering old man. This first made an impression in the show Bootsie and Snudge, a spinoff from The Army Game. Dunn played the old dogsbody at a slightly seedy gentlemen’s club where the characters Pvt. “Bootsie” Bisley (Alfie Bass) and Sgt. Claude Snudge (Bill Fraser) found work after leaving the Army.
In 1967 he made a guest appearance in an episode of The Avengers, playing the proprietor of a toy shop in “Something Nasty in the Nursery”.