Happy Birthday John Cleese - A Local Lad

Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England to Reginald Francis Cleese and Muriel (Cross). His family's surname was previously "Cheese", but his father, an insurance salesman, changed his surname to "Cleese" upon joining the army in 1915.[1] As a boy, Cleese was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, from which he was expelled for defacing school grounds: he used painted footsteps to suggest that the school's statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet.