I suppose I was young enough not to be consciously bothered by it all, for I didn’t seem to have any real difficulty in adapting myself to the needs of band singing. I’m sure there must have been some awkward moments, because having adjusted my approach to compensate for the microphone, I would still run into venues where there wasn’t one. In fact, with Howard Baker at the old Holborn Restaurant one night, I actually used a megaphone, which was a bit of a giggle, since I’d only ever seen one in a film—probably wielded by Rudy Vallée, an American singer and bandleader I loved. Using a megaphone is a very strange sensation, because while you’re having to sing your sentimental words, you know all the time that you look more like a rowing coach than a singer. It was all good training, and I’m especially glad that I had to discover for myself so early on what a microphone could do. For many years people complemented me on the way I used a microphone and I’m sure it’s because of what I learned back then.
As far as the public and the press were concerned, I wasn’t a singer though, I was a crooner. Anybody who sang with a dance band in the thirties was a crooner (soon they would even invent the word ‘croonette’, for there was no such thing as unisex in those days) and when I came to qualify for my first press cutting, towards the end of 1934, it was headed, with a great flourish, ‘STAR IN THE EAST—East Ham’s Latest Contribution to Crooning’. The crooner’s status was rather ambiguous, because while it was clear that no band could afford to be without one of each gender, band singers as a whole were treated very condescendingly by most of the press. ‘To many people “crooning” has become an insidious word relative to immediate action in switching off the wireless, walking out of the cinema or smashing up the gramophone,’ the East Ham Echo said at one point in the piece about me. Admittedly it found me ‘not guilty’ of whatever it was that people found so objectionable about crooners, but the fact that the remark was there at all, in an otherwise complimentary article, suggests that the poor crooner was the current whipping boy or girl and was probably held responsible for the country going to the dogs.
I’d been singing with Howard Baker’s various bands for close on two years when that piece appeared, and he’d kept me very busy indeed. I still did the occasional solo date, but I was getting most of my work from him. He had enough bands out at any given time for it to be possible sometimes to do more than one appearance for him in the course of an evening, and I would get ten shillings for each.
With work coming in at that rate it made sense to have a telephone put in the house, which was a big thing in those days. It was one of those old-fashioned telephones with two parts, one for your ear and one to speak into. It had the dial on the base and it was black. When you picked up the phone to make a call, you spoke directly to the operator and gave them your number. Ours started with Grosvenor and then a fourdigit number. Having a phone was very exciting, and for some reason we had it in the front parlour, by the fireplace. (Actually, that wasn’t such a bad idea, now I come to think of it. Next to the bathroom, if you had one—we didn’t—the coldest place in an English house in those days was the hall, yet the telephone was always stuck out there among the hats and coats.) It was decidedly a necessity and not a luxury, for Howard would often call me at very short notice to go and sing with one of his bands somewhere, and soon I couldn’t have got along without it. Grangewood 380-something, the number was, and it’s sad to think that those pretty exchange names have gone now, and been replaced with these long numbers which are impossible to remember.
So it was that I got a call which gave me a week and a half with Billy Cotton and, with it, my first taste of the big time. A one-time amateur footballer for Brentford FC, Cotton became a well-known bandleader in the 1920s and went on to be a television personality in the 1950s. Back in the thirties Howard Baker had some kind of business tie-up with Billy Cotton on the agency side, and I believe that some of the members of the Baker bands would occasionally ‘move up’ into Billy Cotton’s band. I got the impression that Billy Cotton had never been terribly keen on girl vocalists, but I suppose he thought he’d try one again, and he’d heard about me through Howard Baker, so I went to some bleak audition room and sang for him. He used the customary formula ‘I’ll let you know’, and I went home not really expecting to hear any more about it. But he phoned, and said would I go to Manchester—just like that—and he’d give me five pounds for the week.
In the 1930s there was always some magic about the figure of five pounds. If you ever heard an adult say of another, ‘He’s getting five pounds a week,’ you knew that this person had made it. But more important than that, it looked like a big step up in my career. Mum had to come with me, of course, since I was only sixteen going on seventeen—as the song says —and that meant she had to flap round and organize someone to look after Dad at short notice. I played a week of Mecca ballrooms in the Manchester area, and the most memorable thing about the whole trip was not singing with the band but the awful place where we had digs. My only other experience of staying away from home on a job had been those two nights of candles and syrup of figs at Leighton Buzzard. This was worse—a tiny room, with one bed in it, which my mother and I shared. When we came home from the show each night there was an awful greasy supper of fish and chips or sausages waiting for us, and a great roaring coal fire halfway up the chimney, making the room so hot you could hardly breathe. If they didn’t manage to poison us there was always a strong chance we’d choke to death; they seemed determined to get us one way or the other.
The following week Billy Cotton took me on to Sheffield, where the band had a week’s engagement at a theatre, but this time I only lasted three days. I’ve never been absolutely certain what went wrong. It certainly wasn’t what or how I sang, because I seemed to be very well received. I think the trouble arose because he would announce me as a little girl he’d more or less discovered, who was getting her first chance, and then I would come out full of the bounce and confidence and technique of many years’ experience. He used to get furious: ‘You’re supposed to be an amateur,’ he’d say, ‘not a seasoned professional!’ I’d come back at him: ‘I can’t help that; I can’t undo everything I’ve taught myself. I’ve been doing it for nearly ten years.’ That may have been the reason, although I also got the impression that he just didn’t want to be bothered with having a young girl in among his hard-bitten musicians—the Billy Cotton Band of those days was always a pretty wild bunch. Anyway, he sent me home in the middle of the week. Though he did have the grace to say a few years later that it was the worst day’s work he’d ever done.
So it was back to Howard Baker. I don’t think I felt too badly about it. The digs in Manchester had been ghastly, and I’d learned that theatre dressing rooms could be considerably more squalid than the modest but adequate accommodation in the clubs. But going out with a nationally known band, appearing before large audiences to whom I was a total stranger, had been good experience for me. I’d always taken everything a step at a time, and if this particular step hadn’t led very far, well, that was to be expected once in a while.
The next step I tried to take didn’t lead anywhere at all. I was working in some club in East London, and a couple of boys who had an act said to my mother, ‘Why don’t you take this girl up to the BBC?’ We didn’t do anything about it right away, but eventually we wrote to them for an audition. The result was that I went along and sang for Henry Hall, who was doing very well in charge of the BBC Dance Orchestra—Hall was the bandleader who recorded the delightful ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ with the BBC Dance Orchestra in 1932. He turned me down. Many years later he used to say that it was because my voice was not one that would have blended with his music. Whatever it was, he considered me unsuitable. I must have been disappointed, but no matter, there was another step in the offing, and when I eventually took it, it was to have far greater consequences.
All these years I’d been going to the music publishers, shopping for new songs. The people in all the publishers’ offices knew me and were kind to me, but the closest, kindest friend of the lot was Walter ‘Wally’ Ridley. He later became a producer for EMI Records, but in those days he worked on the ‘exploitation’ side of the music publishing house of Peter Maurice in Denmark Street. An exploitationist would try to match the right song with the right artiste, and Wally always kept his eyes and ears open