In the working men’s clubs the entertainments secretaries were roughly the equivalent of agents, and like agents they were always visiting other clubs, on the look-out for new acts. They were unpaid, but every so often the club would run a benefit night for its entertainments secretary. These were known as ‘nanty’ jobs (the word comes from niente, Italian for ‘nothing’), because the performers offered their services free. Artists would try hard to appear on these shows, for apart from anything else, they were the accepted way of getting into a new club. If you could do a nanty job for an entertainments secretary who didn’t know your act, then it worked like an audition. If he liked you, you’d go down in his book of contacts and you could expect him to remember you later for a paid performance.
Some artists remained more or less permanent fixtures on the club circuit; others used the clubs as a way into ‘the business’ and a step towards bigger things. The comedy team of Bennett and Williams began in the clubs as a double act known, if I remember rightly, as Prop and Cop; the comedian and actor Max Wall started in the clubs too. The Beverley Sisters’ parents were a club act called The Corams. These were names and faces from the bills I used to appear on as a child.
For my first appearance, when Pat Barry got an entertainments secretary to put me on, I learned three songs and had a new dress made: white lace with little mauve bows—I can see it now. You didn’t have ‘dresses’ in those days; you had one dress and that was it. (When that one got shabby, if you were lucky you got another one.) I had a pair of silver pumps, a tiny briefcase from Woolworth’s for sixpence and my rolled-up music, and off I went. Later I would suffer from nerves, like everybody else, but at seven I was simply too young to feel anxious. The thing that excited me was the medal I’d been promised for going on. Our next-door neighbour in Ladysmith Avenue was Charlie Paynter, the trainer/manager of West Ham United football team, and he had said he’d give me a West Ham United medallion if I sang in public. He kept his promise, and I was thrilled, because he was a very important man in our locality. My parents would have been with me that first time too, but I don’t remember them telling me that I’d done well or anything like that. I just remember not wanting to do it but knowing that I had to. The applause made me feel good, though, and I got an encore—and got paid for that.
I don’t remember what I sang on that first occasion, but I know that from my earliest days I seemed to be attracted naturally to the straightforward sentimental ballad. In spite of—or maybe, come to think of it, because of—the happy times I had with my dad, I practically cornered the market in ‘daddy’ numbers: ‘Dream Daddy’; ‘I’ve Got a Real Daddy Now’; and a genuine 22-carat tear-jerker called ‘What is a Mammy, Daddy?’ I sang that at a competition once:
What is a mammy, daddy?
Everyone’s got one but me,
Is she the lady what lives next door
Who cooks our dinner and sweeps up the floor?
I’ve got no mammy to put me to bed
And tell me to go out to play.
Daddy I’ll be such a very good girl,
If you’ll bring me a mammy some day.
Everybody was in tears, and there was tremendous applause, but I didn’t win. When the results were announced, the audience kept shouting out, ‘What about the little girl in the red dress?’ and, in the end, I got a consolation prize. This particular competition took place not far from home in Poplar, East London, and it was one of a whole series run at various cinemas in London by Nat Travers, a local cockney comedian. Afterwards he came round to me and my mum and said, ‘Sorry about that, ducks, but come to Tottenham Court Road next week. I’ve got another competition on there and you’ll be all right.’ But my mother was furious and wouldn’t let me go in for any more of his contests.
Remembering a song, once I’ve learned it, has never been a problem for me, and I could still probably sing you an hour and a half’s worth straight off without repeating myself. I’ve always been able to decide quickly how to sing a song—how to phrase it, what to emphasize. But I had enormous difficulty in learning the words in the first place. I would sit on the floor at home for hours on end, going over them again and again, while my mother doggedly picked out the tune on the piano. Often there’d be tears, and even when I’d finally managed to get a song into my head and came to sing it in public for the first time I’d be petrified in case I forgot the words. Ever so many times I wished I could give the whole thing up, just for this one reason.
Finding material was comparatively easy. The writing and publishing and selling of popular songs was a business then just as it is now, but it was a different kind of business. Live public performances were what counted, not the plugging of records, and anybody who was known to appear regularly in front of an audience could count on being welcome at the various music publishers’ offices, which were then nearly all in Denmark Street, just off Charing Cross Road, the British ‘Tin Pan Alley’. This was where all the music publishers were based, and if they knew you could put a song over, they were often willing to give you copies. So, from quite an early age, I was a familiar little figure up there—something which was to stand me in good stead later when I started broadcasting.
That ‘descriptive child vocalist’ billing was no mere gimmick. Even when I was very small I had an unusual voice, loud, penetrating, and rather low in pitch for my age; most songs had to be transposed from their original key into something more suitable. When I became better known, the publishers would usually do that themselves, but at first I always had to go to someone outside. We found a Mr Winterbottom, who would do you a ‘right-hand part’ for sixpence a copy; if you wanted a left-hand as well it came to one-and-six, but we just used to have the top line done because most of the club pianists were so experienced at this kind of work—which was more than a cut above the ‘you-whistle-it-and-I’ll-follow-you’ school—that was all they needed.
You’d merely hand your music over and they would improvise a bass part on the spot. One or two were actually publishers’ pianists by day—the men whose job was to demonstrate songs to prospective professional customers. (All that has gone now, but forty and fifty years ago that was the accepted way of selling a performer a new number, and those pianists could transpose anything into any key, at sight.) Every now and again you would come across a club pianist who wasn’t much good, but they must have been in a minority, because I can’t recall any great musical disasters.
One minor catastrophe was not the pianist’s fault but mine. Without being a typical ‘stage mother’, my mum always took a very close interest in every aspect of my singing, and my programme for any given appearance was usually the result of a kind of joint decision. We didn’t disagree often, but there was one night when I very much wanted to do one song, and she thought I ought to do another. I must have been a stubborn child, for in the end I won, and it was decided I would sing the one I wanted. I gave the pianist the music for it, but the moment he’d rattled through an introduction (and I must say club pianists’ introductions could sound pretty much alike), I immediately began singing the other one. For a few disorganized bars the two numbers tangled with each other; we both stopped and started, like two people trying to pass one another but always ending up in each other’s way. We did the only thing we could do, and began again from the top. Audiences don’t dislike this sort of thing as much as some artists believe; as long as it doesn’t happen too often, there’s something strangely reassuring about seeing somebody else make a mistake.
That much I accept, and could accept even then. What I couldn’t take were the efforts of some well-meaning entertainments secretaries who would see my deadpan little face and urge me to ‘Smile, dear—smile’. I’d come back at them with, ‘I’m