Some Sunny Day

Howard Baker began as a cornet and trumpet player, and found that he got so much work in the early twenties that he had to farm some of it out, so he set up an agency to supply bands to this greedy market. On a really busy night there could be anything up to a couple of dozen Howard Baker bands—in addition to the one he ran himself—keeping his name before the foxtrotting couples. Some of his bands went quite far afield, but since he was based in Ilford, his greatest fame was in the London area and the Thames-side Essex towns; as provider of the music for a function in Poplar, he was the obvious choice.

This meant that he and I were working the same patch. The clubs I worked at regularly, except for the ones on the Woolwich side of the river, lay within an area drawn between, say, Dagenham and Finsbury Park. Since I had some minor local fame in those parts, it’s quite possible that Howard Baker wasn’t unaware of me before the evening when he actually made a point of listening to me.

Poplar Baths doesn’t sound a particularly promising place for furthering a career—it was a bath house that was used for concerts and events in the winter months. I was booked to appear there in the cabaret spot at some social gathering or other, and the dance music was being provided by Howard Baker. Considering how important the occasion turned out to be, it seems awful to say now that I can’t remember who arranged it, but somebody had persuaded him to hear my act, so that while I was working I was doing a kind of audition. I knew in advance, because I remember being in tears over the fact that this was my big chance and I’d only gone and caught the most dreadful cold. And my colds really were distressing—still are, as a matter of fact—because that bout of diphtheric croup seemed to have left my bronchial tubes with a permanent coat of rust on them; at least, that’s what it feels like whenever I catch a cold. But I told myself that I’d got to go, and do my best. I suppose it’s adrenalin that sees you through situations like that, because cold or no cold, he seemed satisfied.

The microphone was another unexpected problem. Microphones weren’t in general use then, and this was the first time I’d ever had to work with one. I can see it now: I walked on to the stage and there was this thing, and at first I stood well back from it. It was then that I realized that if I were to use a microphone, I was going to have to start learning an entirely different technique. I had to find out how to employ it as an instrument, and make it work for me. I can’t have adapted myself too badly that night, for I went down well with the audience and Howard Baker took me on as vocalist with the band!

That brought about several changes right away, not the least of which was that I was now worth ten shillings an appearance. There was a great deal of learning and unlearning to be done. As a child performer—almost a novelty—I had literally acted out my songs dramatically (because I was sometimes billed as a ‘descriptive child vocalist’ I often did the full ‘Shepherd of the Hills’ gesticulating bit) and I had to unlearn all that. I was part of a band, and apart from the new experience of having to blend my voice with a whole lot of other instruments, it meant that while I was singing I had to stand still. Holding the microphone with one hand was a big help in that; but there was another convention of the period which made it easier than it might have been. You can imagine that a band playing all the popular tunes of the day was constantly adding new stuff to its book. With my dreadful slowness at learning an unfamiliar lyric, that would have been agony for me. But strangely enough, nobody minded seeing a vocalist standing there clutching a song sheet in those days, which not only helped me over the words problem but gave me something to do with my hands. When I wasn’t singing, of course, I had to sit or stand politely to one side.

It was the microphone itself, however, that was the revelation. I’d sung in some big places without one—none of our cinema gigs with the juvenile troupe, for instance, had ever involved a microphone—and had developed a pretty piercing sort of delivery. I learned very quickly to lower my volume, but I found out at the same time that that also meant lowering the pitch: as I reduced the pressure on my voice, so it simply dropped into a lower key. I was suddenly faced with a whole set of new keys to deal with.

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 for songs he thought might suit me, he’d keep an eye on the music they wrote or bought in from the songwriters doing the rounds and would play what he deemed the best or most appropriate over on the piano for me, and generally offered encouragement and advice—he was a talented singer and composer himself. Naturally there was a Denmark Street grapevine, and through this Wally came to know that a very promising young bandleader named Joe Loss was looking for a girl singer for some radio broadcasts he’d got coming up. Wally suggested that I should try to get an audition, and in fact persuaded Joe to come over to the office. Wally played for me and I sang for Joe. To my delight Joe, with no hesitation, said, ‘Yes. Fine,’ and that was it. I hadn’t had time to get worked up or nervous about it, but there I was, at one jump, lined up to do my first broadcast. To the generation brought up on records and television, the chance of a live broadcast on sound only, at a time when there were still plenty of people who didn’t have a radio at all, can hardly appear to be anything to get excited about. But in 1935 wireless listening was growing in popularity and to get on the radio was the biggest single opportunity that could come the way of a new artist. You first proved yourself in broadcasting, and then, if you were lucky, you made your records.

This was just the start of an extraordinary sequence of events in my life at this stage. For, in the very same week that I successfully auditioned for Joe Loss, there was a further rustling of the Denmark Street grapevine, this time to the effect that band leader Charlie Kunz was auditioning for a girl singer to do some broadcasting with his Casani Club Orchestra. Wally suggested that I should try for that as well, which might have seemed unnecessary, since Joe Loss had said he’d use me. But at that time Charlie Kunz was the really big name; Joe was coming up very fast, and already had the band at the Astoria, Charing Cross Road. (The Astoria was a wonderful venue, incidentally: it was built on the site of an old pickle factory in 1893 by Edward Albert Stone, who built the four other Astorias across London (in Brixton, Streatham, Finsbury Park and the Old Kent Road). It opened as a cinema in 1927 but by the 1930s it had become a popular theatre and live music venue. That was Joe Loss’s stomping ground.) Charlie Kunz, on the other hand, was far more established, he was tremendously popular and he was making records. Anybody who became associated with that band stood a good chance of going really far.

People later made out that someone connected with Charlie Kunz heard me broadcasting with Joe Loss, and that I was snapped up for the Casani Club broadcasts. The truth is rather less romantic: I went down to the Casani Club at Imperial House in Regent Street and did an orthodox audition for Charlie and the owner, Santos Casani. Santos, by the way, had been an international ballroom-dancing champion, a specialist in the once wicked tango, before he started his nightclub. That famous newsreel clip of a couple dancing the Charleston on the roof of a London taxi was a stunt fixed up by Santos Casani. He’d also been a very young pilot in the First World War.

Neither Santos nor Charlie had heard me before, as I hadn’t done a broadcast by then; so it wasn’t by any means a walkover or a foregone conclusion. It was between me and several other girls, and I didn’t think I was really sophisticated enough for them. Eventually the choice was narrowed down to me and one other girl, and after what seemed like a good deal of debate and consultation, they picked me. I could hardly believe it—within the space of a week I’d auditioned for, and been accepted by, two very important bandleaders to do the one thing that every young singer would give her eye teeth for: to sing on the radio.

If it was a matter for a small glow of pride, it was also a matter for plenty of tact, for while there was no question of Joe Loss taking me on permanently, I had given him a verbal undertaking to do three broadcasts with him. One of the conditions of working with Charlie Kunz, however, was that I shouldn’t broadcast with anyone else. But Charlie was wonderful about it—as he was about everything else—and he let me keep my word to Joe. So by the time I came to be first heard over the air, in August 1935, although it was with Joe Loss’s band, I was actually signed to Charlie Kunz.

If I can remember the colour of the lilac bows on the dress I wore the first time I sang on stage, and if I can remember unpacking new plimsolls at Auntie Maggie’s, I ought to recall a good deal more clearly than I do the sensation of being on that historic first broadcast. But I don’t, and I think the reason must be that once I got started I broadcasted very frequently, and all the recollections have gelled into one picture of microphone, red light, song sheet, instruments and studio clock. I’m not trying to suggest that I quickly became blasé, for although I always tried to regard singing simply as my job, I don’t think I ever treated it casually. The thing is that even I was surprised by the amount of radio work I did within weeks of beginning. I have a cutting headed, in my own gawky block capitals in the scrapbook I kept, ‘East Ham Ecko’—I told you I couldn’t spell—‘Sept. 13th 1935’ that states that I’d made seven broadcasts already. Even more amazing—though I really cannot recall giving it much of a thought at the time—is that in those few weeks I was given the opportunity to reach not just a national audience but an international one, as I’d also done an Empire broadcast by then—the Empire Service being the forerunner of the World Service. With the help of this medium, through the huge clumsy microphone, I had been lifted out of East Ham and East London and given the key to the world. Or so it seemed to me. In one single month, my career had made more progress than it had in the whole previous decade, and—although I didn’t really know it then, perhaps—the points had been set for the way it was to continue for some years to come.

I don’t know whether it was cheek, candour or lack of being able to see where my proper future lay, but I seem to have told the writer of that Echo article that what I really wanted to do was to go into films. It was true. I had actually worked in a film studio even before I did my first broadcast with Joe Loss. Trivia fans might like to look out for a 1935 film called A Fire has been Arranged, starring Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen—the famed comedy duo—and actor Alastair Sim, and provided you don’t blink at the crucial moment you might spot me in a crowd scene. It all came about because another act appearing with me at a club in Woolwich one night said they did some occasional film extra work, and why didn’t I try it—it might be a way of getting my nose into something new. I was given the address of an agent and not long afterwards I went along and put my name on the books. When they asked me what I could do, I said I was a singer.

‘What else? Can you ride a horse?’

‘Yes.’ (I couldn’t.)

‘Can you play tennis?’

‘Yes.’ (I was a lousy, if keen, tennis player.)

I said yes to everything, because I was convinced they’d never send for me. And of course they did, and I had to go to Twickenham, not, as it happened, to ride horses and play tennis and sing, but to wander about those terrible front sets at the very generous rate of one pound a day. For this infinitesimal part I made myself a whole outfit in grey flannel, including a big cape with a red lining, and a little grey hat. When the film came to the local cinema I just had to go and see it, and Mum came with me. I caught a glimpse of myself wandering by in a street scene, and that was it—my first and only piece of film extra work, but it had been enough, obviously, to whet my appetite. That I got the chance later to star in three films had nothing to do with that little episode, but arose out of my real career as a singer.

This crowd work led, indirectly, to another strange little episode. At the top end of Charing Cross Road there was an Express Dairy Tea Room, where I used to go after I’d been the rounds of the publishers’ offices. It was used a lot by theatrical and musical pros, and I was sitting over a cup of coffee there one day when a tall, thin young man struck up a conversation with me. It emerged that he was out of work, and on the strength of my recent experience in the Flanagan and Allen film, I told him he ought to try the agencies to see if there was anything going as a film extra. He thanked me and said he would. It turned out years later that I’d been talking to Cardew Robinson, the comedian and actor who became famous as ‘Cardew the Cad’. (Many years later he was in Carry On Up the Khyber and Last of the Summer Wine.)

I appeared briefly in one other film during this time. It was in the great days of the ‘short’, a film of anything between five and fifteen minutes, which formed part of that buffer between the second feature and the big picture. The newsreel, the Disney cartoon, the travel film, the interval with the icecreams and, in big cinemas, the organist who rose out of the floor—some, or all of these, would give the audience a chance to go to the loo and find their seats again before Clark Gable or Errol Flynn captivated them for the next hour and a half. One of a series of six ‘British Lion Varieties’—the type of short that went into that slot—was by the Joe Loss band, and I sang one of the numbers, ‘Love is Like a Cigarette’. I was hardly a film star, but it was an improvement on a fleeting glimpse of me in a crowd scene.

For a time I was destined to be heard rather than seen. Although I did all the Casani Club radio work with Charlie Kunz, I was never one of the regular artists at the club itself. From my point of view this was a very good arrangement, because it meant that I got the cream of the work without having to cope with those gruelling club hours, which force entertainers to become nocturnal animals and live their lives upside down, so to speak. I would do Saturday-night broadcasts with Charlie, and all his overseas programmes. Not only that: being the kind and considerate man that he was, he also used to take me on his Sunday concerts—not because he needed anyone to help him with his act, for he was enormously popular, but just to give me an extra few quid and a little more exposure and experience.

In my dress and mannerisms I must have been completely unsophisticated still, but musically he respected me, and from the start he gave me complete freedom of choice over what I sang. By that I mean he never pressed songs on me or insisted that I sang any particular number, which really was a lot of rope to give a girl of eighteen. Obviously he had to approve my choices, but that was the only control he imposed. I would go round the Denmark Street publishers, as I had been doing for years, and make my own selection from what was offered me. Then, no matter what publisher it had come from, Wally Ridley, in his helpful encouraging way, would find the key for me and rehearse me in it. Since, as I said before, for radio work and even for some work in front of live audiences, it was the done thing to have the song sheet in front of you, I had none of the old nightmare of learning new songs, and could concentrate on presenting them properly. It also meant that we didn’t have to prepare too far ahead, and very often one week’s find would be in the following week’s broadcast. Once Charlie had approved my choice, it would be given to one of his music arrangers, usually Art Strauss, and that would be it. If you could assure the publishers in advance that you would be able to sing the song over the air not fewer than three times, they would often undertake to pay for the arrangement themselves.