Carry on upwards
ROOTS Babs as young girl with parents
CUTE Barbara aged 18 months
KICK OFF Practising for panto in 1955
Barbara Windsor was a wartime evacuee when she first slipped into a pair of dancing shoes. But before she ever took to the stage, she had already seen plenty of drama.
Born Barbara Ann Deeks on August 6, 1937, to a bus conductor and a dressmaker in London’s East End, she was as salt-of-the-earth as Peggy Mitchell.
Just two when the Second World War broke out and five when her dad marched off to fight, Barbara’s mum Rose kept her at home until, as she once said, “my friend Margaret was hit by shrapnel and killed”.
So, aged six, she was put on an evacuee train at Euston. Her mother warned: “Don’t go off with any strange men.” That
train took young Babs to the home of British entertainment: Blackpool.
It did not start well. In the first home she went to, the man there would sneak into her room to try to abuse her.
She was taken in by a schoolfriend’s mother, Florence North, and somewhat reluctantly went to a local dance school.
To everyone’s surprise, she took to performing “like a duck to water”.
Once back in London it became her passion, with her mum scraping together the money to send her to a weekly class.
Her performing went from strength to strength. At 12, a talent agent got an audition for panto, in Wimbledon.
She said: “On stage I felt special and wanted.” She won a place at another stage school, where snobby gi r ls would titter and snigger about her working class roots.
She stood up for herself, once showering them with theatrical face powder.
But at home life was harder. Her parents’ relationship was volatile.
Her mother, who hated her roots and sent Barbara for elocution lessons, was forever snapping at her “happy-go-lucky” cockney dad John, annoyed he didn’t share her social ambition.
It came to a head when Barbara was 15 and she had to testify in court that she’d seen her dad hit her mother. She was estranged from her dad for 30 years.
Babs got her big break touring in the
I don’t think her right boob is going to corrupt the nation
with the show Love From Judy, before a small part as a feral schoolgirl in 1954’s The Belles of St Trinian’s.
At the age of 20 she was working in a nightly revue at London club Winston’s, where she became, in her own words, “a right little goer”.
At the time of the coronation in 1953, the future Queen of the Vic copied the new Queen of England and changed her surname to Windsor.
She learned her trade with Joan Littlewood’s acclaimed Theatre Workshop, appearing on stage in comedy Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be.
She later won a BAFTA Best Actress nomination for Littlewood’s kitchen sink film Sparrows Can’t Sing. Her actor friend Ronnie Fraser changed her life by taking her for dinner with Carry On bosses when they “happened to be looking for a busty blonde”.
Barbara would star in nine Carry On movies, from 1964’s Carry On Spying to Carry On Dick in 1974, never being paid more than £4,000.
The most iconic moment was in Carry On Camping, when her bikini top accidentally flies from her bust during an exercise class, slapping Kenneth Williams in the face.
Filming was less fun than it looked, Dame Barbara later recalled.
She said: “We made all those films in the winter. They got a field in the back so they didn’t have to pay Pinechorus wood Studios. They painted the ground green. They put leaves on the trees.”
Kenneth Williams once said Babs had complained at the time: “My breasts are all goose pimples!”
The bikini top was whisked off by a fishing rod.
On the first attempt she was knocked down in the mud, and on the second her top flew off far too fast.
Babs recalled the censor John Trevelyan not being as uptight about the scene as the filmmakers had feared, saying he ruled: “I don’t think Miss
TUDOR TITTERS Sid James & Peter Gilmore in Carry On Henry in 1971
Windsor’s right boob is going to corrupt the nation, I’ll pass it.”
Babs won over the notoriously prickly Kenneth Williams on the first day of filming Carry On Spying.
Williams even once jokingly asked her to marry him but added the warning: “Mind you, there’d be no sex!”
She did have a dalliance with a Carry On co-star though, eventually giving in to Sid James’ earthy charm.
Her favourite film of the series was Carry On Henry, set in the court of Henry VIII, because she loved period pieces and “got to wear one of these
wonderful frocks”. The same gowns had been used for serious Henry VIII film Anne of a Thousand Days.
Long before acting with her on EastEnders, she worked with Wendy Richard in Carry On Girls.
“She was Miss Eider Down and was Miss Easy Rider,” said Barbara.
For the little evacuee, there was only one regret about her early career: that she never was as “posh and sophisticated” as her mother had wanted.
But if she had been, we’d never have had her as EastEnders’ Peggy Mitchell.
And wouldn’t that have been a sad way to Carry On?
FILM CENSOR ON CARRY ON CAMPING BIKINI SCENE