Growing up
As a child, she dreamt of growing up to be a famous singer but that wasn’t what fate had in store for Gloria Hunniford, as she tells Editor Siobhan Wykes
Still a regular presenter of Loose Women and Rip Off Britain, Gloria Hunniford, now 80, is reflecting on her life from her Kent home.
‘I hated the name Gloria when I was young,’ she laments. ‘ Why would you call a child Gloria? Imagine being two years old and someone shouting at you, “Gloria, come in now”. I hated it!’
Then she smiles. The much-loved star’s life began, as her accent attests, on the Portadown Road, in Northern Ireland, ‘upstairs in the front bedroom to be precise’, she adds.
It was right on the edge of the countryside – a lovely ‘comforting home’ in a small market town. Her mother, May, was a baker and her father, Charlie, a part-time magician. Watching her father perform sparked Gloria’s own love of entertaining.
‘Imagine a concert or a party where you would have singers and dancers and my dad performing magic – it was fascinating,’ she recalls. ‘From about the age of four, I would stand watching people from the sides and see them being introduced on the stage.’
By the age of seven, Gloria was standing on stage herself. Her first song was a Doris Day hit, Powder Your Face with Sunshine. Years later, she would meet her heroine in person – but more of that later.
‘Soon I was singing in churches, schools and concerts across Ireland, sometimes five nights a week, she recalls. ‘ When I was about 10, I remember making £8 in one week. I got inspiration for my stage outfits by watching Come Dancing on our neighbour’s television, and my Auntie Myrtle expertly made copies of the things I liked for me.’
Gloria continued to sing and years later, aged 24, she hit Number 7 in the charts with Are You Ready for Love?, originally a hit for Lulu. ‘She’s well able to hold the tune,’ her friend, the famous Irish singer Daniel O’Donnell will tell you to this day. But before that – aged just 17 – she immigrated to Canada on a £10 passage, where her great uncle Jim was living.
‘He met me at Montreal and drove me to Kingston, Ontario, where he lived. They had 15 radio stations and 10 television stations and slowly but surely I started to sing on TV. It was huge for me. On top of that, I was given my own radio station. It was pinned on singing Irish songs. I knew a few but I quickly learned them all!’
At 21, Gloria returned to Northern Ireland for a visit, always meaning to return to Canada, but her dad handed
her a job application for a production assistant on Ulster Radio. Unsurprisingly, she got the role.
‘It was all live television back then. There were no recordings and the job meant I was sitting behind the scenes with a producer.
I learnt quickly!’
She also fell in love with a camera man – Don Keating, her first husband and the father of her three children, Paul, Michael and Caron. ‘I wanted to introduce Don to my parents,’ recalls Gloria. ‘It was then that I had to tell them he was a Catholic. I can see my father’s face to this day, being a Northern Irish Protestant – it was a bit of a shock…’
‘He said “if you marry this man, I cannot and will not go the wedding and nor will your mother”. It was the saddest day of my mother’s life but, back then, you did as the father said.’
But after the couple married, Gloria, just 21, recalls, ‘ he welcomed Don into the family. He never held a grudge and nor did I.’
Their first child, Caron, was born in 1962, followed by Paul a year later, and finally Michael in 1970, and Gloria combined being a mum with working and singing at night.
Today, she has boxes of photos and albums to remind her of the past, including the launch of her hit record.
‘I had never planned on being a broadcaster,’ she explains. ‘ Whatever level it was at,
I was going to be a singer.’
That all changed when she went into BBC Radio Belfast to go to a promotion interview for Are You Ready.
That night, the producer Dan Gilbert, called her up and asked if she had ever thought about being a broadcaster.
‘He said I wasn’t short of a word or two,’ she laughs. Within days, the young mum who wanted to be a singer had been given her own radio talk show…