Most obnoxious character ever?

It irritated me as well, though I did stick with the film. In the end I liked the story.

I'm inclined to agree with tali1. I too found the Gander character intensely irritating, especially at the beginning when he was childishly pestering the Winthrops for no apparent reason. However some of the blogs here seem to be confusing actor with character. Sorry if some of what follows constitutes a spoiler.

Arthur Askey was a very popular comedian for several decades of the last century, a radio high spot being his 1938 teaming with Richard Murdoch in 'Bandwagon', a show which regularly emptied pubs when it was on. It was almost certainly for this reason, to team up with Murdoch, that he was given a role in the film which, according to Wikipedia and to my memory of a fairly recent production at my local theatre, did not feature in the original. If memory serves, it was Tommy Deakin who stopped the train to retrieve his hat and generally played the fool until he was revealed near the end to be far more than an amiable idiot. It was this quirk in casting in the film, which must have seemed financially a good idea at the time, which led to Gander being superfluous to the plot and thus little more than the pain in the neck recognised here and to Deakin having nothing much to do until the end.

In the film Gander's hat loss was portrayed as no more than a piece of tomfoolery whereas in the play it was a deliberate act by Deakin to delay the train so that the ultimate plot could be foiled. The film is in any case a bit confusing in this respect as the delay to the train was little more than, say, three or four minute yet it was stated when it arrived at the Halt that the connection had departed fifteen minutes earlier, so the passengers would have missed it anyway.

One more (utterly unrelated) point. Murdoch was known for years as Richard 'Stinker' Murdoch. Why choose such an unattractive nickname?