A GIGGLE, A WIGGLE... OH, WHAT A CARRY-ON !

She was the 4ft 10in pocket bombshell who married three times, slept with two Krays and seduced a nation. As she dies at 83 after battling Alzheimer’s, revel in the riotous — and saucy — life of Barbara Windsor

National treasure Dame Barbara Windsor died on thursday night, aged 83. this was long-expected, but it is still a shock — she was indestructible showbiz royalty. as Joan Collins rightly says: ‘Showbusiness has lost a legend.’

Her final years were clouded by alzheimer’s disease, which first became apparent in 2014 when she could no longer learn her lines — and she’d always been what is called in the profession ‘a quick study’.

through sheer persistence, Babs managed to keep playing Peggy Mitchell in East-Enders for a further two years. once she could no longer perform, she channelled her energy into the alzheimer’s Society. in an open letter to the Government, she wrote: ‘My heart goes out to the many, many people who are really struggling to get the care they so desperately need.’

Sadly, her condition worsened during lockdown, and she’d been in a care home in london since august.

But let’s remember Babs in her prime, the irrepressible 4ft 10in larger-than-life personality of whom Benny Hill announced: ‘You’ve got to see these t*ts. they’re fantastic!’

She was a tabloid Press dream, her life and career, as she said herself, ‘a cross between a Carry on and a Joe orton play’.

there were five abortions. She associated with gangsters. attendees at her parties included bank robbers and killers, with names such as limehouse Willy and Big Scotch Pat.

She showed signs of nymphomania in her teens, when she admits she became ‘a right little goer, putting it about freely’. By the year 2000 she was able to look back at ‘God knows how many partners over more than 40 years’.

the catalogue included Charlie and Reggie Kray (‘i had no regrets’), George Best (‘it was a great night’) and veteran Carry on star Sid James, a relationship that now seems, in retrospect, controlling and coercive, barely consensual. ‘i thought he just wanted to give me one. Wallop!’ Babs joked grimly.

Until she married Scott Mitchell, 26 years her junior, in april 2000, when she was 63, Babs had appalling taste in men — always going after sorts who were a combination of machismo and sentiment, and who would drink a bit and get into fights. OnE

such, thomas Powell, had his face slashed, ‘ which would make it difficult to play the harmonica’, Babs commented sympathetically. in 1964, she married a hoodlum called Ronnie Knight, who drove a Ford Zephyr. ‘We went at it frantically,’ explained Babs. Ronnie had no respect for the law and was in and out of prison and the courts, accused of murder, for which he was acquitted, and arson.

Eventually, still pursued by the police, he took refuge in Spain. Babs was always trying to secure bail and furnish alibis.

Every time she answered the door, the old Bill thundered up the stairs with sniffer dogs.

a psychologist would argue that when it came to partners, Babs, who was born in 1937 in Shoreditch, East london, was trying to find and replicate her estranged father, John Deeks. He was a surly and charismatic ex-soldier, who found it difficult to settle down after the war. He and Babs’s mother, Rose, clashed openly. Rose, a dressmaker who was fond of running up flashy clothes, was herself prickly, unpredictable, critical, easily bored — so the atmosphere at home was tense and violent.

Babs’s parents eventually divorced, and they took out their frustrations on their only child. if he saw her in the street, Babs’s father cut her dead. ‘ Most nights i’d cry myself to sleep,’ she recalled. ‘ i was so frightened and miserable.’

Her parents’ temperamental restlessness was something Babs inherited. She was highly intelligent, quick and shrewd.

She took her Eleven-Plus exam a year early and ‘ went on to achieve the highest marks in north london’.

at our lady’s Convent in Stamford Hill, Babs was always top of the form, unless she decided to be naughty. Each weekend she attended dance schools in Stoke newington and was never to know what stage-fright meant, as ‘confidence oozed out of me’.

Permission was reluctantly granted for her to appear in pantomime at Golders Green Hippo drome, of which she said: ‘i thought showbiz was waiting for me.’

it was. though Babs worked briefly in a shoe shop, the theatre had claimed her. She left school without qualifications and was hired to play juveniles on a tour to Coventry and Bournemouth.

Being 4ft 10in in her socks, her secret of employment was that for -years she never looked older than 12 — indeed, at 56 she was still bouncing about as aladdin.

Plus, with puberty came her breasts. ‘From the word go,’ she said, ‘i had blokes giving me the eye and chatting me up.’

She found this enormously flattering — it was attention.

Despite her physical assets, her blonde bubbliness and her cheeky and infectious laugh, there was always something more to a Barbara Windsor performance — a self- mockery that would eventually achieve for her the iconic and indisputable status of national treasure, a light entertainment version of Judi Dench, her fellow dame.

as Kenneth Williams, a hard person to please, wrote in his diary in 1964: ‘She is a charming little girl . . . immensely likeable, vulnerable and funny. totally adorable.’

Babs was also always the very opposite of insipid — she never looked bruised and puffy, like, say, Diana Dors. indeed, Williams liked Babs so much that when she and Ronnie went on their honeymoon to Madeira, he insisted on going with them. He also took his mother and sister.

as well as her acting, Babs was a nightclub singer with Danny la Rue and Ronnie Corbett, who, along with a couple of lecherous dwarves in the cast, drove her mad because their ‘heads were level with my chest’.

She was recruited by Joan littlewood — ‘who could be a right cow!’ — to appear in lionel Bart musicals at the theatre Royal Stratford East. She also made a