Prue, ‘the new Mary Berry’
Forget stripping off at an orgy, an affair with a married man and a bad LSD trip — Prue Leith, tipped to be the new Bake Off host, has much in common with St Mary
BOTH are doyennes of the cookery world. They are glamorous grandmothers with legions of fans, a penchant for Victoria sponge and have the culinary world at their feet.
no wonder, then, that after it was revealed that cookery writer and former restaurateur Prue Leith was being lined up as a replacement for great British Bake Off stalwart Mary Berry, who has bowed out of the show’s relaunch on Channel 4 later this year, the two were described as ‘like-for-like’.
Indeed, in many ways, Prue, 76, and Mary, 81, are from the same mould. They’ve had decades-long careers in the kitchen, highprofile TV careers (Prue recently stepped down after ten years as a judge on BBC2’s great British Menu) and penned several successful cookbooks.
‘Both are from similar backgrounds, so hopefully viewers will give Prue a chance to win them over,’ a Bake Off source said. ‘In cookery circles, she’s practically royalty.’
Prue herself said she’s not yet signed a contract to join the show — she revealed there are two people in the running — but confessed that Bake Off is her ‘dream job’.
‘I’ve had two auditions with them and lots of meetings, so I think I’m close.’
But well-placed insiders said they would be ‘shocked’ if she did not get the job after Paul Hollywood — the only member of Bake Off’s original line-up of presenters to stay with the show after Channel 4 snatched it from the BBC — gave her his blessing.
‘She is Paul’s favourite. He really respects her,’ a source said.
But, looking more closely, are Mary and Prue really as similar as they first appear?
From her unashamed ambition and outspoken views to a long affair with a married man, Prue is certainly no prude — and far more colourful than the saintly Mary.
Here’s how the two women match up …
TOUGH BEGINNINGS
MARY, daughter of a town surveyor and a housewife, spent her childhood in Bath, where she grew up a tomboy, building dens and lighting fires.
She attended Bath High School, describing her academic skills as ‘ hopeless’ — except in domestic science, where she impressed teachers with her treacle sponge pudding.
But aged 13, Mary contracted polio and had to spend three months in hospital. Forced to endure day and night in a glass isolation room, separated from her parents and two brothers, she says the experience ‘toughened her up’ — though it left her with a permanently weak left hand.
Prue spent her formative years in Johannesburg, South Africa, where her father worked for a company making dynamite for mines. She, too, came from a happy family and had two brothers, but tragedy struck when her father died when she was just 21.
Her mother, Margaret, was a famous actress, flamboyant and glamorous, who used to turn up at the school gates in high heels and full make-up. Prue admits she was ‘ incredibly ashamed’ of her, berating her for not being like the other, ordinary mothers.
From age five, she attended St Mary’s Waverley in Johannesburg, an Anglican school run by nuns. It was, she says, ‘extremely strict’ — and left her desperate to spend her teenage years in liberal Europe.
FRENCH FANCIES
AGED 18, and by then passionate about cooking, Mary did a two-year course at Bath College of domestic Science, then got a job at the Electricity Board, where she’d travel to customers’ homes and teach them how to use their ovens by baking cakes.
Her parents forbade her to leave home until she was 21, when she got a job at the dutch dairy Bureau in London, developing recipes using butter and cheese — and promptly persuaded her manager to fund a course at Le Cordon Bleu cookery school in Paris.
The chic continental stay she’d imagined didn’t quite go to plan, though, as she revealed recently.
‘I hadn’t been away from home before, and I remember staying with a family who had ten children,’ she said. ‘ Our first meal was horse meat. I’d just left my pony in England and I cried all the way through.’
Just a few years later, in 1960, Prue, aged 20, also found herself in France. She had persuaded her father to send her to Paris to learn the language, and got a job as an au pair.
It was watching the mistress of the household cook, using the freshest Parisian ingredients, that inspired her love of food.
‘Ironically,’ she says, ‘ instead of getting a taste for Baudelaire and Bonaparte, I fell for boeuf bourguignon and Burgundy.’
She also later fell in with the city’s bohemian circle, once finding herself at an orgy where, in order not to look conspicuous, she duly stripped off.
‘I was amazed at the variety of models on offer,’ she recounted in her memoir Relish: My Life on a Plate. ‘I was torn between wanting to look, and not wanting to be seen looking.’ She adds that she was too embarrassed to join in.
PARALLEL PATHS
On her return to Britain, Mary became a recipe-tester for a PR company and started writing her first book. In 1966, she became food editor of Housewife magazine, the bible of well to-do ladies.
Ever- so- quietly, she began making a name for herself.
Prue, meanwhile, was rather more dynamic in kick- starting her career. She joined a firm of London solicitors as their cook, and soon afterwards started a business supplying posh lunches to well-heeled clients (among them Princess Margaret).
This would later become Leith’s good Food — a hugely successful party and event caterer.
not content with running one business, Prue set about founding her own restaurant, Leith’s in London’s notting Hill, in 1969. She was not yet 30 but had already acquired a reputation as someone who liked getting her own way.
What she lacked in experience she made up for in confidence.
She later admitted she wasn’t very good at running a restaurant, but the appalling London food scene at the time — awash with frozen, tinned meals — made her fresh approach an instant success.
REBELLIOUS YOUTH
THE closest Mary has ever come to drugs was a brief encounter with a hemp loaf on the 2013 series of The great British Bake Off.
Prue’s adolescent attitude to stimulants was far more cavalier.
during her time living in a London bedsit, Prue acquired rock ’n’ roll lodgers in the shape of Sixties band The Hollies — and admitted to hiding their stash of marijuana in her herb pots and smoking joints in bed on lazy afternoons.
Prue even tried LSD, describing the experience as ‘a nightmare of terror and hallucination’.
‘The walls seemed to breathe in and out and the air became visible and moving, like a 3d fabric,’ she wrote in her 2012 autobiography,
relish. ‘My arms melted, the flesh dripping off the bones.’
A FAMILY AFFAIR
MARY, ever conventional, took some time out of her fledgling career to settle down, get married and start a family. She was introduced to antiquarian bookseller Paul Hunnings by her elder brother, and the pair married in 1966.
It wasn’t, she has admitted, love at first sight. ‘I grew into it,’ she once said. ‘I wasn’t sure to begin with. I definitely love him more (today) than on our wedding day.’
She and Paul have now been married for 50 years.
they had three children, thomas, Annabel and William. William died tragically in a car accident at the age of 19, when a student in Bristol.
Prue’s love life was far racier. She has revealed that from the age of 21, she had a secret affair with a married man, South African writer rayne Kruger, who was 18 years her senior. He, along with his wife, was a close friend of her mother’s. She eventually married rayne in 1974, but only after he was spurred into leaving his wife of 25 years when Prue dumped him and started seeing another man, a wealthy customer from her restaurant, known only as ‘Jake’.
Prue and rayne — who had a son, Daniel, and adopted a daughter, Li- Da, from Cambodia — were together until rayne’s death at the age of 80 in 2002. Prue spoke about her 13-year affair with rayne when he was still married at a literary festival two years ago.
‘I’m not saying I am proud of the fact, but it did help my business,’ she said. ‘He went home at night, so I could work every hour that God gave. By the time I married and had my children, I had the business under my belt. ’
LATE-LIFE LOVERS
NO, not Mary. She and Paul have been happily married for five decades, though she does admit to having had a few ‘nice chaps’ on the go before they were introduced. ‘I went into marriage knowing I wouldn’t dare not be with the same person for all my life,’ she said in an interview in 2013. ‘It was for ever, whatever happened.’
things turned out rather differently for Prue.
Devastated after her husband’s death, she swore off men — until, in 2009, she revealed she had fallen for her long-time friend, businessman and pianist Sir ernest Hall, who is ten years her senior.
‘ Nature or Cupid, or maybe hormone replacement therapy, or the combination of sun, wine and music took a hand, and it was all exactly as I remembered the last time I’d fallen in love, and that was with my husband of 30-odd years,’ she wrote in the Mail.
the couple were together for four years before separating in 2012.
two years later, Prue met John Playfair, a clothes designer who is six years her junior, at a dinner party — and last October they married in a ‘no fuss’ ceremony at a register office in edinburgh.
HOME SWEET HOME
SINCE the late eighties, Mary and Paul have lived in a £2 million Grade II-listed Queen Anne House in leafy Buckinghamshire.
the property, complete with cavernous kitchen and four- oven Aga, has a three-acre garden with 350 different species of roses, a glasshouse and an Italianate garden from which she can see Windsor Castle.
until recently, the family also owned an £800,000 holiday cottage in Salcombe, Devon, which they sold in 2015 to buy somewhere nearer to the beach.
Prue lives in equally bucolic surroundings. She moved from London to the Cotswolds in 1976 and lives in a £1.9 million house. But her domestic arrangements are less traditional.
She and her new husband John lived just a mile apart when they met — and have continued to do so, praising separate homes as the secret to a happy marriage.
‘He’s got a lot of stuff and I’m rather anally neat and tidy, and I don’t want all that stuff in my house,’ she said recently. ‘He does all his ironing there and he keeps all his gear there.
‘And I tell you what, it’s the ideal thing. What you want — and what I get — is him without the clobber and without the responsibility of looking after his laundry or sewing on his buttons.’
COMPETING EMPIRES
Over the years, Mary Berry has cooked up a fortune in excess of £ 20 million — thought to be substantially more than Prue.
Mary’s 70-plus cookery books have sold more than six million copies, have brought in £ 2.5 million in the past decade, and her eight years at the helm of Bake Off netted her between £200,000 and £500,000 per series.
Mary Berry & Daughter, the condiments company she runs with Annabel, recorded sales in excess of £5 million before it was sold for £2.55 million in 2014.
Prue built up her catering company to secure some of the country’s most lucrative food contracts, including the Orient express, and in 1975 founded Leiths School of Food and Wine, a training academy for prospective chefs.
When she sold her businesses in 1993, they had a combined turnover of £15 million.
Her ten-year contract as a judge on Great British Menu is thought to have earned her around £2 million, in addition to £1 million from sales of her 12 cookbooks and seven novels.
LOOKING THE PART
WITH her flawless make-up, fake tan, false eyelashes and fabulous taste in clothes, Mary has become something of a fashion icon for the older generation.
So coveted is her wardrobe that several of her High Street choices — that floral bomber jacket from Zara and the stork- patterned jumper from Marks & Spencer — sold out within an hour of her wearing them on tv.
Her influence was even credited with boosting Zara’s profits by 27 per cent in 2012.
Prue has no such hold over the fashion world, but she’s no wallflower when it comes her appearance.
Known for her flamboyant jackets, bold scarves and statement necklaces, she’s a regular shopper at M& S and Asda, as well as Beatrice von tresckow, a trendy boutique in Cheltenham.
As for make-up, she prefers to keep things natural, with moisturiser and a slick of mascara.
While Mary has come to embrace her style icon status, Prue says: ‘I’d love to look incredibly glamorous, but I am a wholesome, comforting nanny type.’
PERSONAL BRAND
MARY’S fans can equip themselves with all manner of branded merchandise, from upmarket kitchen products (which have made her over £1 million at Lakeland and John Lewis) to the Mary Berry Bakes phone app, which features 70 of her recipes, for £3.99.
For those who want to get a little closer to the woman herself, she makes frequent public appearances, including four upcoming book signings and literary festivals.
Prue’s name doesn’t have quite the same selling power — yet. But customers at her cookery school still shell out £22 for an apron or £155 on a set of branded knives.
GONGS GALORE
Prue’S accolades are not to be sniffed at: she was appointed a CBE in 2010 and holds 11 honarary degrees from UK universities, as well as a Businesswoman Of the year award from 1990.
Mary, too, has been made a CBE (two years later, in 2012) and holds the freedom to the cities of Bath and London. She’s won the popular vote, too — named Best Judge at the National tv Awards last month for her stellar stint on Bake Off.