Raymond Stanley's Show Buzz

Jimmy Logan

Whatever happened to Jackie Short?  This was something which for many years I vaguely wondered about.

Jackie Short was a boy I was at school with when I was very young.  He was Scottish and would sometimes wear a kilt and never needed much persuasion to do a dance and impersonate Harry Lauder, particularly at school social events.  I believe he was considered something of a child prodigy and big things were predicted for Jackie.

Sometimes Jackie would invite me to his home to play.  He had younger brothers and sisters and I understood that most of the time his parents, who were on the stage, were away on tour.  The children were all looked after by a young girl who would, I suppose, have been in her late teens or early twenties.  She seemed to be employed by Jackie’s parents as a sort of maid of all works.

Eventually Jackie moved away and I never knew if he had ‘made it’ in show business, or indeed if he was still alive.

Many years later, in Australia in 1977, I was sent a press release on Scottish entertainer Jimmy Logan.  Perusing it I read that he was a son of the Scottish singing/comedy act of Jack Short and May Dalziel and that in the mid-forties Short had devised a theatre show starring ‘Ma and Pa Logan’, taking the name from his famous sister-in-law Ella Logan.  Immediately I realized that Jimmy Logan must be a brother of the Jackie Short that I went to school with.

Logan, about to appear in his one-man Lauder show in Sydney, and later was to repeat in Melbourne, was to visit the Victorian city to promote the show just before it opened in Sydney.  I arranged with the publicist to meet Logan on this trip to Melbourne, saying that I believed I had been to school with his brother.

At first Logan was inclined to be sceptical of my claim, until I told him that this had occured in Mitcham, Surrey, and described the house in which the family lived in Streatham Road.  Then he believed me and filled me in with some of the family’s history.  His sister, as I already was aware, was singerAnnie Ross.  Jackie had changed his name to Buddy Logan and for a number of years been a singer fronting a band, but was not now in the best of health.  The young girl who had looked after the family was in fact an aunt.

Logan presented me with a signed copy of his LP, and we agreed to have a get-together when he played Melbourne.   Unfortunately his show did not take in Sydney - which is surprising as there is a large Scottish population around Australia - and so he never performed in Melbourne.

Some years later I read of the death of Buddy Logan.  So the mystery of what happened to Jackie Short was solved!  Jimmy Logan himself died in 2001 at the age of 73.