The Stage

Simon Blumenfeld

Published Thursday 5 August 2004 at 10:40

There were some odd things about the Beverley Sisters. To start with, they were all born on the same day, May 5. For another, they were simultaneously discovered by accident marching in a school crocodile to lessons in a remote Northamptonshire village. They were an attractive trio in their school uniforms, elder sister Joy and the twins, Babs and Teddie, evacuees from the London Blitz. By a quirk of circumstances, a commercial photographer looking for bonny children for a cocoa film advert, spotted them. For Jock Ware, they were a gift from heaven.

Ware arranged to photograph them. During his sessions in a hired studio, they started harmonising popular songs while waiting, a hobby of theirs in spare moments. Ware was entranced by their impromptu performance. He mailed off pictures of the girls, with a description of their talents, to a friend of his in London, one Cecil Madden.

Chance surfacing again, it transpired that Madden was not just anyone. He was second in command at the BBC headquarters at Alexandra Palace. Madden wrote back inviting the girls for an interview. He discovered they had enormous potential. When they left school and came home to London in 1949, he gave them their first radio spot. It triggered off an avalanche of future engagements.

Around this time, I was nursing a record column in a small showbiz paper. I received a letter from an aggrieved 18-year-old reader. No punches pulled, it started off something like: “My name is Joy Beverley. With twin sisters Babs and Teddie, we are the Beverley Sisters. We are British. Born and bred in north London. You are always writing in your column about American singing sister acts. What about us? We are as good as any of them. To prove it, I enclose a small demo disc we wrote and performed ourselves. Give it a spin, yours hopefully, the Beverley Sisters.”

Who could resist such chutzpah? Naturally I played the little demo disc and wrote about it enthusiastically in my column. Obviously, this tiny tribute in a small weekly paper had little effect on the tidal wave of success that would sweep the girls to eminence as a top British singing sisters act.

Before they were in the business for a year, they were top billing everywhere, onstage as well as radio and records. Seeking new worlds to conquer, they decided to chance their luck in America. Their visit, the first of seven, lasted more than 18 months. Val Parnell was there and brought them back to London to share honours with Danny Kay at the Palladium. They made more appearances there than any other British family act.

The family enjoyed working for charity. One favourite cause they championed was the Not Forgotten Association annual party for disabled ex-service personnel, held in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, loaned for these occasions by the Queen. For the past 40 years or so, the entertainment was staged in a large marquee in the Queen’s backyard, by Anne Shelton. She adored the Beverley’s act. When the original girls began a daughter act, the Little Foxes, which enchanted the service audience, Shelton began to dream. She would stage a combined Beverley family show for the boys. With Shelton’s illness suddenly becoming very serious, it never happened.

Maybe not for her but it did for showman Peter Stringfellow - he actually managed to present the entire Beverley family in his theatre. But for one night only and never again.