Our wedding was sad but so beautiful... and two days later he died
Lady Anne on waiting 40 years to marry Ken Dodd, their battle to have children, and how she knows he’d have made a brilliant father
GAZING down at her wedding ring, a lifetime of memories flashed before Lady Anne Dodd’s eyes. She had finally married the comedy legend Sir Ken Dodd, the man she had loved for 40 years. But it was a bitter-sweet moment because she knew he was desperately ill and their remaining time together would be short. Two days later he passed away.
Now, three years on, her love for her Ken remains as clear as the inscription on her wedding ring, which she bought herself, four decades earlier. And for the first time, she is ready to open up about her life with the national treasure.
“My wedding ring is his signet ring because it never occurred to me to nip out and get rings when we got married,” she explains.
“I actually gave it to him in 1981 or 1982 and it was inscribed with a song he was doing at the time, called Hold My Hand, and it’s got ‘I love you’ on it as well. So it’s actually very appropriate.”
She is speaking from her Liverpool home, the Knotty Ash house where Ken was born, where they married and where he died aged 90 from a chest infection.
Recalling the day she became Lady Anne, she says: “It was very difficult because he was very poorly. When he was in hospital he’d been saying, ‘Look, when I come home, we must get married. We will do it in the church when I’m better.’ But, of course, he didn’t get better, so it had to be hastened.”
Lady Anne, now in her late 70s, adds: “I put on a nice jumper and a nice little scarf but the state he was in, you can’t really dress it up. It didn’t occur to me to decorate the room. It was just about us.
“It was really sad, but it was also beautiful. It was lovely to hear him say his vows and me say mine. Proper vows, not short form.
“He did his vows in the loudest voice we’d heard in weeks – really clear and firm. Afterwards he had a drop of Champagne. He loved a drop of rosé, so we got the special rosé out.”
She adds: “He said it was ‘typical’ when I said I hadn’t got rings. I said, ‘Oh God, I can’t get anything right!’ and we laughed. We knew each other so well.Then he took off his signet ring and put it on my finger.”
The poignant ceremony fulfilled a longstanding undertaking. “It was honouring a promise made years before,” Lady Anne recalls. “He’d said, ‘Oh, we will get married, we will, we will’. And I think it obviously struck him – I think I better had!
“You always think you’ve got more time, don’t you? He wasn’t anyone who liked to talk about death. But I think there’s a certain point a person knows they’re not very well. And I believe, by the way he said his vows, he was pleased to have done it.”
Sir Ken met fellow Northerner and lawyer’s daughter Anne in 1961 when she was a Bluebell Girl dancing in one of his shows. She was just 20 years old. Ken was 34 and engaged to his long-term fiancée and business partner,Anita Boutin. However, this was the Swingin’ Sixties, and until he’d said vows to Anita, Sir Ken was apparently happy to have plenty of “friends”. Lady Anne recalls: “We just kept in touch and I’d see him fairly frequently. We were sort of courting but he was very, very busy and engaged to somebody. “Long telephone calls were the interesting part. We might be on the phone for an hour. The time just went because we were enjoying ourselves.
“I knew I didn’t want another boyfriend. I was quite happy being in the background and enjoying his company whenever we did get together.”
BUT in 1977, Anita died aged 45, from a brain tumour. The following year Ken and Anne started dating officially. But she believes his heartbreak over Anita may have played some part in the fact that they didn’t get married until many years later.
Anne explains: “It’s possible that he made a promise perhaps he shouldn’t have. It’s quite possible he said, while she was dying, ‘I’ll never get married’.
“And in the back of my mind there was always this slight guilt that at the time he was engaged and I was seeing him as well.”
But Ken had always doted on Anne and would let her know just how cherished she was. She says: “He was a romantic person. I got wonderful cards. He used to leave messages around for me to find, like, ‘I know you work very hard. I appreciate what you do’.”
She adds: “He was a bit of a tease as well. He got a rubber spider once and put it on my shoulder because I hate spiders. But most of
the time at home he was Comedy is serious work.”
The couple wanted to have children together and underwent fertility treatment in the 1980s. Unfortunately, they were never able to conceive, but Anne believes she still had a glimpse of what a good father her late husband would have been – thanks to his trusty ventriloquist dummy, Dicky Mint.
Ken doted on Dicky, and when they were on the road he would always take him inside the hotel rather than leave him in the car. She says: “Dicky Mint was very precious.We just used to joke, ‘He’s your lad’.
“I’d have liked a child but it wasn’t absolutely all consuming when it didn’t happen. But I think it would have been nice. He’d have made a good father.”
Ken’s kind heart did, however, touch others. So many that Lady Anne says his quite serious. funeral at Liverpool
“state occasion”.
“The funeral procession was a six-mile journey and the whole route was full of people waving. It was absolutely incredible,” she remembers.
“At first I didn’t think it was right for me to wave back, but then I thought, ‘Well, they mean well’ – so I started doing a little wave.”
The 3,000-strong congregation and beautiful service helped Lady Anne through the day, although it didn’t seem entirely real.
“I felt like I was there, but I was hovering out of myself,” she says. “I only cried once – that was when they played his recording of Absent Friends, which he used to sing at the end of every show we did.
“But other than that I appreciated all the beauty of the service. I wish he could have been there to see it. But you don’t know that
Cathedral was like a he’s not watching.” Now, Lady Anne is determined to ensure that the comedy legend, renowned for his tickling stick and Diddymen characters, has a legacy that lasts. She’s been working on several projects to be named in his honour and is about to release a new book about their life together.
She’s also planning a documentary and an exhibition, after sorting through his memorabilia, including his old notebooks.
“He’d made me promise to burn them but I just couldn’t,” she admits. “I’ve been reading them. He had so many ideas. I don’t think I knew how clever he was.”
Dicky Mint, meanwhile, is in his special case in the attic. “There was a time where I
thought, should he go in the casket with Ken?” she smiles. “But I decided against it because I thought, he’s part of Ken and he lives on, as it were.
“No instructions were left but I knew where Ken’s parents were buried and the funeral directors found that the plot was what they call a “four”.
“That’s what made me think he would want to be buried with them and, as there’s another slot, I expect eventually – a while off yet I hope – I would like to join him.”
Lady Anne still feels his presence. She says: “I talk to him every day. I tell him what I’m doing. If you’ve been together with somebody a long time, you always think ‘What would they say?’, ‘What would they do?’
“If I could say something to Ken today, I’d say, I hope everything I’m doing in your name, for your legacy, is right and will carry on when I’m gone.”
Her voice cracking, Lady Anne half smiles as her eyes well up with tears. “He was a wonderful person to spend your life with,” she says. “I’m not sure I thanked him enough...but I do now.”
LEOPARDS, LAUGHS AND LUCKY ESCAPES – ON THE ROAD WITH SIR KEN DODD IN TOMORROW’S DAILY EXPRESS