Helen Clare
Singer on BBC radio who kept up listeners’ morale in wartime
HELEN CLARE, who has died aged 101, was one of the earliest singing stars of television and a Forces favourite during the Second World War.
A former “child wonder” who had toured Australian concert halls during the 1920s, by 1936 she had joined Jack Jackson and his orchestra at the Dorchester Hotel in London. She sang for diplomats, members of the Royal family and celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich, and her performances were frequently broadcast on BBC radio.
On the outbreak of war she joined the BBC Variety Company as a full-time singer. Evacuated to Bristol, Helen Clare kept up morale with scores of radio broadcasts and special concert performances for troops and factory workers. “At that time we were doing the lot,” she later recalled: “acting, singing and dancing around the clock until the stars from London shows began to trickle down to us.”
After 1941 Helen Clare became a freelance singer and went on tour to variety theatres across the country, as well as performing in concerts for the troops with Tommy Trinder. Her most popular radio programmes included Workers’ Playtime, Calling Gibraltar, which took requests from soldiers, and It’s All Yours (1942-44), on which she was both singer and presenter, reading out messages and performing songs submitted by children whose relatives were in the Allied forces.
The last programme featured the singing debut of a young Petula Clark – “this tiny little thing”, as Helen Clare put it, who had come to the studio at the request of her serviceman uncle.
All the while Helen Clare and her colleagues had to juggle recording commitments during some of the most intense bombing of the war. She was caught up in various air raids, and on one occasion narrowly escaped being strafed by a Messerschmitt 109.
On another occasion she left the air raid shelter in search of alcohol to fortify a distressed neighbour, only for the pub’s ceiling to cave in as she walked through the door. All was not lost, however, since, she recalled, “we managed to get a bottle of rum to take back.”
She was born Helen Harrison in Bradford on November 29 1916, and
moved to Australia with her family at the age of four. They settled in Burswood, a suburb of Perth, and Helen began singing in cinemas, often dressed to resemble another infant prodigy, Baby Peggy. Before long she was appearing in pantomimes in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney and performing a duet from Faust with Dame Nellie Melba.
The onset of the Great Depression saw the family return to Bradford, to the suburb of Shipley. After leaving school Helen got a job as a costing clerk at a raincoat factory, while singing in clubs by night. She made her first broadcast on BBC North in 1934 and was soon taking bookings from Radios Normandie, Lyon and Luxembourg.
Television followed, with an appearance on Cabaret Cartoons and a broadcast from Alexandra Palace of her performing with Jack Jackson. But it was the Dorchester Hotel, boasting a private room for a sound engineer and a hydraulic-powered stage that rose dramatically out of the floor, which was, as she recalled, “the place to be”.
In 1946 she married Frederick Riddle, a viola player whom she had met while he was playing in the BBC Salon Orchestra at BBC Bristol during the war. She continued to perform and take part in broadcasts until the 1960s, when a mild heart attack forced her to curtail her professional career.
Nevertheless, she gave singing lessons for another three decades and remained an active member of the Wallington Operatic Society in Surrey until the age of 90.
Frederick Riddle died in 1995. Their daughter Elizabeth survives her.
Helen Clare, born November 29 1916, died September 15 2018