Daphne Shadwell Page 1 COPYRIGHT: No use may be made of any interview material without the permission of the BECTU History Project (http://www.historyproject.org.uk/). Copyright of interview material is vested in the BECTU History Project (formerly the ACTT History Project) and the right to publish some excerpts may not be allowed. CITATION: Women’s Work in British Film and Television, Daphne Shadwell, http://bufvc.ac.uk/bectu/oral-histories/bectu-oh [date accessed] By accessing this transcript, I confirm that I am a student or staff member at a UK Higher Education Institution or member of the BUFVC and agree that this material will be used solely for educational, research, scholarly and non-commercial purposes only. I understand that the transcript may be reproduced in part for these purposes under the Fair Dealing provisions of the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. 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Daphne Shadwell Page 2 BECTU History Project Interview no: 194 Interviewee: Daphne Shadwell [with John P Hamilton] Interviewer: Roy Fowler Duration: 07:14:25 [Side 1 Tape 1] The copyright of the following recording is vested in the ACTT History Project. The date is 1st May 1991 and we’re at the flat of John and Daphne Shadwell in Paddington and Roberto Champredanc [ph], this is your life! [laughter] Daphne Shadwell, long time radio and television practitioner. Daphne, starting at the beginning – when, where? DS: Well, when I was born, I was born in Wandsworth Women’s Hospital in December 1927, which was the only time in my life I’ve been really, really early. I was born in Wandsworth because my father, who was Charles Shadwell… John P Hamilton: You were born in Waterloo, Daphs, the York Lying-in Hospital, the York Road Lying-in Hospital, Waterloo. You were living in Wandsworth. DS: Shall I start again? No, no, no, we can’t keep doing that. DS: No, John P will put me right. JPH: Your parents were living in Wandsworth. DS: Oh yes, yes. Because my father was Charles Shadwell, a musician, a musical director. He was MD Musical Director at the Putney Hippodrome at that time, so that’s why I was born in that area. But shortly after that, I think he was – I don’t know whether Daphne Shadwell Page 3 he was sacked or it was preference, I have no idea – he went to Brighton as Musical Director at the Brighton Hippodrome and that’s why I have a very fleeting memory of a long street with the sea at the end of it. I’ve never known why, until it was years later I found out that we moved to Brighton and lived there for a little while. And then we moved to… we moved to… I can’t remember, was it the other way round? We started in… yes, he was at the Putney Hippodrome and got then… went to Brighton, and he was MD there and Brighton was part of the Stoll Moss empire, which included the Palladium. And in the early thirties, during the bad times, the recession or whatever, they had depression, they closed the Palladium, it must have been one of the few times that the Palladium was closed and the MD there, the Musical Director there was senior, he was the Senior House Musical Director, so – they were very, very sorry and very nice to my father – but they fired him, so that the Palladium MD went to Brighton. But it was of course like good comes out of bad, it worked for him because he got a job as Musical Director at the Coventry Hippodrome, so we moved to Coventry. That’s where I started school, in Coventry, St Joseph’s, Coventry, in the infants there. And it was good for my father because through Birmingham BBC they started doing broadcasts from the theatre of the Coventry Hippodrome orchestra, MD’d by my father and he became quite well known. In fact, John P, you remember that don’t you? JPH: I do. Yes, I remember listening to the orchestras and [incomp – 0:03:07]. DS: Yes, on the radio. JPH: It must have been about 1931/32. DS: So he started becoming quite a name. So I started school there. But the best part was really that we were allowed, my sisters – I have three sisters; my eldest sister Joan Winters went, she was older than us so she was really rather away from us, but the three of us, Sheila [ph], Hazel and I, were allowed every Friday, because we didn’t have to get up for school the next morning, it was the end of the week, we were allowed to go first house to the Coventry Hippodrome every week, and it was a wondrous time in our life, we loved it. We didn’t sort of get into theatre, but it was, well, all the music hall stuff and we became terribly blasé, knew all the jokes. And either would say, oh isn’t he terrible, or isn’t that terrible, what a dreadful singer. I mean at the age of nothing. But the great treat was, Daphne Shadwell Page 4 when the show was finished we would go down into the pit under the stage where all the musicians were with my father, with all of them having a beer, say ‘Goodnight, God bless you daddy’, and were taken home. But that was really the initiation to the theatre. What are the acts that you remember, Daphne? DS: Oh, I remember Sandy Powell, I remember Billy Russell who drove us mad because, as a child I didn’t take in the jokes really, but he used to just stand there. The working man’s comedian, he was. And I remember, he always had a pipe and he struck a match and he would just go to light the pipe and he’d go into a joke, and as a child I thought, well we all did, Hazel was the same, we thought we’d go mad because he never lit this pipe, and we became obsessed with this wretched man, every time they said Billy Russell was on we said, don’t really want to see him, can we go and have an ice-cream or something, please, when he was on. Oh, lots of… oh, it was the juggling, the dancing things I liked, the dancing acts, all the duos and goodness knows what, pantos we saw. But I became more enchanted with theatre because Joan, my eldest sister, became involved with the Coventry amateur dramatics, the Coventry Operatic Society, and they had shows at the Coventry Hippodrome and she had leading parts; she was very pretty and very talented. And I was enchanted, I thought it was wonderful and we used to be taken to – that was really the only other theatre that I saw, the Coventry Dramatic Society. So that aroused my interest and from then on really all I ever wanted to do was go on the stage and be a dancer, singer, and used to put on either Joan’s costumes or my mother’s clothes and work out routines in front of the mirror and sing all these songs. I believe my parents were highly amused, then I used to come down and do these pieces for them. Then, because of the broadcasting, the… [0:05:38] Let me ask a question, if I may, looking back with adult eyes to those headline acts of your childhood, would they get away with it now do you think? It was an age of great innocence, I think, in terms of material and performance of the talent, do you think? DS: Yes, it was, it was. I’m sure they wouldn’t stand up now, I’m sure they wouldn’t. I don’t think Sir Harry Lauder would have lasted five minutes. Daphne Shadwell Page 5 DS: No, you’re right, that sort of act. But as a child, of course, we weren’t so keen on those sort of straight acts, you know, I wasn’t so keen. Who was that marvellous man with the…? Clarkson Rose, I remember, as being wonderful and his group. I’ll always remember Clarkson Rose, Twinkle. And the man with the car, the exploding car. Harry Tate? DS: Harry Tate. Harry Tate Junior it was then, of course. I remember him being marvellous and ever so funny. But really, looking back, no, a lot of the acts were really dreadful. And we, of course when we got so blasé we used to send them up terribly, in later years we used to stand doing, you know, and all this, I can see now the drapes, the stage was always draped, I used to love it, with all those marvellous drapes, all the looped back drapes, you know, swagged drapes right up to the back of the stage and the lighting from the side with the piano and the singer, always the ladies had their long handkerchiefs leaning in the crook of the piano and coming forward and ‘ooooohhh’.