Gracie Fields

GRACIE FIELDS - Rochdale’s “Our Gracie”

By Margaret Brecknell

One of Lancashire’s most famous daughters, Dame Gracie Fields, was born 125 years ago this month. “Our Gracie”, as she was affectionately known, was born in the humblest of surroundings, but rose to become one of the highest paid film stars in the world in the years leading up to World War II.

Christened Grace Stansfield, she was born in Rochdale on 9th January 1898. In early childhood, Gracie lived with the rest of her family above her grandmother’s fish and chip shop in the town. There was not much space and Gracie was compelled to share a bed with her two younger sisters. She later described her childhood home as the “tiniest, smelliest, dingiest little fish shop in the North of England”.

At the age of just seven, she entered her first talent competition. Her mother, Jenny, was herself an enthusiastic amateur singer and she encouraged all four of her children to go on the stage. However, the story goes that a music hall singer named Lily Turner, who was lodging nearby, heard young Gracie sing and it was she who encouraged her to enter the competition. The budding child star won the first prize of ten shillings and sixpence in the contest held at Rochdale’s now long-gone Old Circus and Hippodrome Theatre.

Thereafter Gracie became a regular performer at local charity concerts under the billing of “Rochdale’s Clever Little Girl Vocalist”. Through one of Lily Turner’s showbiz contacts, Gracie auditioned successfully, in 1908, for a new touring dance troupe called “Clara Coverdale’s Nine Dainty Dots” and at just ten years of age left home for the first time to tour all over the country. Over the following four years she spent most of her time touring with various juvenile dance troupes and was often not even able to make it back home to Rochdale for Christmas.

Gracie’s first big break came when, in 1915, she signed a professional contract with a Manchester theatrical agent and soon afterwards was offered a prominent role in a touring musical revue called Yes I Think So. One of her fellow cast

Above: Gracie Fields statue in front of Rochdale Town Hall

members was a comedian named Archie Pitt. Gracie was unimpressed with his act, describing it in her later autobiography as “rubbish”, but she was persuaded by Pitt to join the cast of a new show which he himself was writing and producing.

It’s A Bargain opened at Manchester’s Tivoli Theatre in March 1916, before commencing a tour that lasted two and a half years. By the end of the run Gracie was the show’s leading lady and her two sisters, Betty and Edith, were also cast members. Gracie’s two sisters, along with her brother Tommy, all enjoyed successful stage careers of their own.

Archie Pitt’s next production, Mr Tower of London, opened in the theatrical backwater of Long Eaton, Derbyshire, in October 1918. The first performance did not go entirely according to plan and received a lukewarm reception. Despite this inauspicious start, the show enjoyed a phenomenal run of seven years, playing at provincial theatres up and down the land, with Gracie, playing the role of Sally Perkins, very much the star of her show.

In April 1923, Gracie and Archie Pitt were married at Wandsworth Register Office in London. The 41-year-old Pitt was Gracie’s senior by 16 years and the marriage appears to have been unhappy from the start, motivated more by a desire on both sides to keep their professional relationship together than because of any real affection for each other. “It wasn’t happy”, Gracie recalled in later life, adding that “I couldn’t tell you what it was, it was a black, black existence for me.”

Archie Pitt did, however, play a significant part in Gracie’s rise to stardom. In July 1923, Gracie made her West End debut when Mr Tower of London opened at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square. She received rave reviews and made her solo London debut at the Coliseum later that same year. Gracie went on to make her first Royal Variety Show appearance at the same theatre in 1928, one of a dozen appearances she made at the prestigious annual entertainment event that spanned her entire career.

The then Queen Consort, Queen Mary, is reported to have found Gracie’s comic songs “vulgar”, but this royal view does not reflect the taste of many of her subjects, for whom Gracie could do no wrong. By the time of her first Royal Variety appearance, Gracie had become a major recording star. She had released her first record on the HMV label in 1923, the first of several hundred over the course of her long career. Her early records usually followed the same format, with a comedy number on the “A” side and a more slightly more serious or sentimental song on the flip side.

One of her most famous songs, Sally, became the theme for Gracie’s first film, Sally In Our Alley, which

Above: Queue at Lyceum Theatre for a Gracie Fields film, taken for British Empire Films

was released in 1931. Advertised with the tagline, “Britain’s greatest stage comedienne comes to the screen”, the romantic comedy proved to be a major box office hit and several more equally popular films followed. Her 1936 film, Queen of Hearts, is notable for being directed by her future husband, Monty Banks, an ItalianAmerican film director. By this time Gracie was already estranged from Archie Pitt and the two eventually divorced in 1939.

Released shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Shipyard Sally proved to be Gracie’s last British-made film. Towards the end of production in the spring of 1939, Gracie fainted on set and was admitted to the Royal Chelsea Women’s Hospital. The public was told only that she was seriously ill. In fact, she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer and was given only a 50% chance of survival if she successfully underwent a hysterectomy operation.

She remained in hospital for over a month, during which time she received thousands of messages from devoted fans and was even sent flowers by her former critic, Queen Mary. Monty Banks remained devotedly by her side and following her release from hospital the couple travelled to the Italian island of Capri, where Gracie owned a villa, so that she could recuperate.

Gracie was a much-loved public figure, who was renowned for her charitable work. Despite still being far from well, she began touring France in late 1939 with Monty in tow, determined to entertain the British troops who had signed up to serve in World War II. She even added a new ending to her most popular song, The Biggest Aspidistra in the World, declaring that, “They’re going to string old Hitler from the very highest bow of the biggest aspidistra in the world”. This so irked the German hierarchy that two days after performing the song at a concert in Arras, the Luftwaffe bombed the hotel where she and Monty had been staying. Yet, her popular image was severely dented during the war, simply, it seems, because of her choice of second husband.

In March 1940, Gracie married Monty Banks in the Californian city of Santa Monica. Only a matter of months later, Italy joined the war on the side of Germany. Monty, who had been born in Italy and remained an Italian citizen, was declared an “enemy alien”. He and Gracie were advised to leave England, or risk being sent to an internment camp, and so the couple fled to North America. Gracie was severely criticised back home for fleeing her country when it needed her most, but, in fact, she continued to support the war effort from afar and raised the then colossal sum of £250,000 from American supporters for wartime charities in the UK. Later in the war, she returned to the UK and embarked on an exhausting tour of the nation’s factories, shipyards and munition works.

She did receive some financial benefit from her enforced exile in the States. With a string of box office hits under her belt, Gracie was offered a record fee of £200,000 by Twentieth Century Fox Studios to make four films. These were more serious in content than her previous cinema releases. The last of the four, Paris Underground, was based on the reallife exploits of a French resistance worker called Etta Shiber and proved to be Gracie’s last appearance on the silver screen.

After the war, Gracie and Monty returned to their villa in Capri. She was unsure, initially, of the reception she would receive from the British public, but, in 1947, made a triumphant return to the London Palladium. A series of concerts for BBC radio, broadcast from venues all round the country, followed soon after, and all seemed set for a happy future. Tragedy

struck, however, in early 1950 when Monty died in Gracie’s arms, aged just 52, as they journeyed home to Italy on board the Orient Express.

She married again two years later. Her third husband was Boris Alperovici, a long-time Capri resident of Eastern European descent who was an inventor of some note and not “a humble odd-job man”, as he was labelled by some in the British media. For the next three decades Gracie continued to perform around the world, making a memorable final appearance at the London Palladium in November 1978 during the climax of that year’s Royal Variety Performance.

Gracie never performed publicly in Britain again. She is believed to have made a private appearance on board the Royal Yacht Britannia in Naples Bay the following summer.

Soon afterwards, she contracted pneumonia and died in September 1979, aged 81, at her home in Capri. She was laid to rest on the Italian island following a simple funeral service, but her passing was also marked in her hometown of Rochdale. A congregation of 500, including many celebrities, attended a service at the church where Gracie had been christened.

Gracie Fields has never been forgotten in her hometown. In 2016, a statue was unveiled outside Rochdale’s Town Hall, a fitting memorial to the star who had started her days above a humble chip shop in the town. 

Above: Gracie at her at home in Capri Photo by: Allan Warren/CC BY-SA 3.0 Top: Gracie Fields star on Hollywood Walk of Fame