this was their favourite of all of their joint productions. It ran at the Palace Theatre until April 1940 and was then filmed for the cinema. 1940s and 50s During the Second World War, Courtneidge devoted much time to entertaining the armed forces. In 1941, she presented a nightly three-hour show, raising funds, and then formed a small company which she took to Gibraltar, Malta, north Africa, and Italy, performing for the services and hospitals. She also toured in Hulbert Follies (1941), and Full Swing (1942), which she and Hulbert then brought to the Palace Theatre. Together with other prominent performers including Robert Donat and Florence Desmond, Courtneidge led professional opposition to a wartime proposal to allow theatres to open on Sundays. Instead, they proposed that only charity shows for the troops should be permitted on a Sunday. The Hulberts appeared together in another musical, Something in the Air in 1943. The show received only moderate praise, although the performances of the two stars received good notices. At the end of the war, Courtneidge had a long run in Under the Counter, a comedy produced by Hulbert. Its theme was the black market in luxury goods and the heroine's shamelessness in manipulating it to her advantage. This struck a chord with British audiences after the privations of the war, and the play ran for two years. When Hulbert took the production to Broadway, the premise of the piece meant nothing to New York audiences, and it ran for only three weeks. Hulbert and Courtneidge then took the play to Australia, where it fared better. The Australian Quarterly wrote: On their return to England, the Hulberts presented a new musical, Her Excellency (1949), which did moderately well. In 1950, Courtneidge was cast in one of her greatest successes, Ivor Novello's musical Gay's the Word. Ivor Brown wrote in The Observer, "Miss Courtneidge is so indefatigably and abundantly herself that it is her show or nobody's." After a pre-London tryout, the show opened in the West End in February 1951 and ran until May 1952. In 1951 she was appointed CBE. In the 1950s, Courtneidge's career turned from musicals to straight theatre and revue. In London and on tour she played in the revue Over the Moon (1953), and the plays The Joy of Living (1955), Star Maker (1956), The Bride and the Bachelor (1956), and Fool's Paradise (1959). Later years In