George Formby may have been in semi-retirement due to ill health when he took part in the 1953 Run with 79 year-old Fred Bennett on board Bennett's single cylinder 1903 Cadillac, but he was still a huge star, instantly recognisable to the crowds that lined the route.

By 1953 Formby had released more than 230 records, appeared in 21 hit films and had made countless stage performances. In 1939 he was Britain’s highest-paid entertainer, earning some £100,000 a year (the equivalent of nearly £7million today), and he consolidated his already remarkable popularity by entertaining some three million Allied service personnel during WW2, travelling through Europe and the Middle East and at times performing surrounded by sandbags. 

He was also a motoring fan, performing some of his own motorcycle stunts in ‘No Limit’, a film set in the Isle of Man TT races, and from 1938 onwards he bought himself a new Rolls-Royce or Bentley every year, each one bearing his registration plate GF 1.

Formby was particularly well known for playing a banjo-ukulele hybrid in songs such as ‘The Window Cleaner’ - which was banned by the BBC for risqué content:

"To overcrowded flats I've been,
Sixteen in one bed I've seen,
With the lodger tucked up in between,
When I'm cleaning windows!

Now lots of girls I've had to jilt,
For they admire the way I'm built,
It's a good job I don't wear a kilt,
When I'm cleaning windows!"

Fred Bennett himself was something of a celebrity in motoring terms, as was his 1903 Cadillac!  In 1903 Bennett, the UK importer of Cadillac cars, took part in the 1000 Mile Trial with his then new Cadillac. The car went on to be used as a chemist's delivery van, but Bennett tracked it down and reacquired it after the First World War and used it for the first Daily Sketch ‘Old Crocks’ Brighton Run and for most of the Runs for decades afterwards. In 1924, the car caught fire in Grosvenor Square after heading a procession of modern Cadillacs through London to celebrate the car's 21st birthday. Bill Boddy, writing about the event in MotorSport some decades later, noted that 'More fire engines than ever seen before, it was said, rushed to the scene, but rumour has it that they were not allowed to quell the blaze until the photographers were properly lined up!'