THE LAST PICTURE
well-received film with James Booth, directed by Littlewood and written by Stephen Lewis, later of On The Buses fame, called Sparrows Can’t Sing.
It was released in 1963 and Babs was complimented on her performance by none other than Paul Newman. The
success of Bart’s Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, which transferred to the West end for a long run in 1960, was followed, five years later, by the disaster of the Robin hood epic, Twang!!
‘We’ve done our best. It’s not our fault the show’s a mess,’ Babs yelled defiantly at the departing, booing audience.
She was playing Delphina, a ‘Cockney nymphomaniac’ according to a surviving programme note. As she explained to me much later: ‘Lionel was out of his skull on drugs, pinning new lyrics on the scenery and giving Joan and the rest of us rewrites that made little sense. Ronnie Corbett went to the toilet. When he came back his big song had been cut.’
Babs was rescued by the Carry On franchise in which, stripped to her corsets or naked in the bath covered with soap bubbles, she played schoolgirl minxes, courtesans and provocative nurses with names including Daphne honeybutt, Goldie Locks, hope Springs and Lady Bristol.
The innuendo-laden dialogue was a peach, such as: ‘ I’ve never had it.’ ‘What?’ ‘A White Christmas.’ Wiggling along the ward in Carry On Doctor in 1967, Babs sent the patients’ blood pressure rocketing. even Frankie howerd’s thermometer exploded.
In Carry On Camping, filmed two years later in a freezing muddy meadow at Pinewood, her bra flew off and hit Kenneth Williams full in the face. ‘I don’t think Miss Windsor’s right nipple is going to corrupt the nation,’ commented the censor in the enlightened 1960s.
Sid James’s famous leer, ‘Cor blimey!’ however, barely concealed his genuine and suffocating passion. Twentyfour years Babs’s senior, and married, his pestering was lecherous and creepy. ‘It was terrible. It was hell,’ Babs admitted after his death.
He SHOWERED her with expensive, unwanted gifts, trinkets, flowers — he groomed her into having sex in a hotel room. ‘I just wanted to get it over with,’ she said, innocently hoping Sid would then go away.
When Babs attempted to reject him, Sid wept and made jealous scenes, threatening that if she didn’t comply, ‘I’ll be dead within a year’.
he never did get over her. he started drinking whisky heavily and died on stage in Sunderland in April 1976.
It wasn’t until 1985, when she discovered that Ronnie Knight was on the Costas with a floozie, that Babs divorced him.
his successor, Stephen hollings, a chef, doesn’t sound as if he was vastly better.
Babs lost £922,000 in a pub venture of his in Amersham, Bucks, as she was the signatory and guarantor for mortgages and overdrafts. To try to pay off the crippling debts she made many cameo appearances — Dad’s Army, Saucy Nancy in Worzel Gummidge, a Ken Russell film, Shakespeare in Chichester, and a sex-mad landlady in Joe Orton’s entertaining Mr Sloane.
There were lots of pantomimes up and down the country, with Keith harris and Orville, Cannon and Ball, John Inman and Gyles Brandreth, with whom she collaborated on The Book Of Boobs — not what you’re thinking: it was a compendium of funny misprints.
I spent a week with Babs myself, in 2010, when she made what was to be her final stage appearance, in the lavish Dick Whittington in Bristol.
She was generous with the drinks backstage. ‘Proper champagne from me. I’m not like Cilla.’
In her hotel suite was a foot spa and boxes of
salt and vinegar crisps. She told me that printing and posting her Christmas cards cost approximately £5,000 each year. It was important to her that she could splash out like this — she was terrified that she’d end up in poverty like Joan Sims and Charles Hawtrey, who couldn’t afford the stamps to reply to fan mail.
Hollings, whom Babs divorced in 1995, thanked his wife for her loyalty, grit and dedication by telling the Press about her ‘saggy boobs, straggly clumps of grey hair and no eyelashes’.
It was in this exhausted yet indefatigable fashion that, between 1994 and 2016, with a few years off in the middle, she played the role of Peggy Mitchell in EastEnders — for which she won the 1999 British Soap Award for Best Actress. At last Babs was cast as a woman closer to her own real age. The domineering landlady of the Queen Vic, mother of the thuggish Grant and Phil, was also a portrait of her mother — and of her own Cockney relatives, though in the documentary Who Do You Think You Are? it was revealed that Babs’s ancestors actually came from Ireland and Suffolk, and there were links with the artist John Constable.
It was a career of immense heights, culminating in 2016 with her being made, as a vociferous Tory supporter, a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. When, at her investiture, Babs asked the Queen if she watched EastEnders, she received the diplomatic answer: ‘It comes on at the wrong time for me.’
Of course, there were many corresponding lows, such as dealing with Gareth Hunt’s exploding haemorrhoids in Southampton,
fighting with Bernard Bresslaw over billing in Blackpool, and switching on the Christmas lights in rainy Milton Keynes.
For his part, John Deeks, in addition to whatever other resentments he harboured, never forgave his daughter for changing her stage name to Windsor.
When Babs, desperate for a reconciliation, tracked him down in later life and gave him some presents, he flung them on the floor.
Her mother, Rose, also remained unappeased. ‘Oh Babs, I wish I’d never taken you away from the convent,’ she said. Her ambition was that Babs should have become a foreign language telephonist.
Charles Hawtrey was another one immune to Babs’s magic. He refused to put his arm around her for a Press photograph at the Dorchester, reeling away and crying: ‘No thank you. Find me a gentleman instead!’
But for most of us, Dame Barbara Windsor was, and will remain, a life force. She always rose above adversity. She was bold. Despite the cruelty of Alzheimer’s, she was never frail. Even after being diagnosed and no longer able to perform, she channelled her energy into charity work, visiting Boris Johnson at Number 10 on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Society.
The Prime Minister was just one of many to pay tribute to her, saying: ‘She cheered the world up with her own British brand of harmless sauciness and innocent scandal.’
But the most succinct comment came from comedian Matt Lucas: ‘The whole country is mourning today.’