Eldest of Beverley Sisters singing trio

1924-2015

JOY Beverley, who has died at the age of 91, was the eldest of the Beverley Sisters, a singing trio that found fame in the prerock’n’roll era with novelty songs such as I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and Little Drummer Boy.

The women, Joy and her younger twin sisters Teddie and Babs, were famous for the identical clothes in which they always performed and their carefully rollered blonde hair-dos. Millions grew up with their close-harmony renditions of songs including How Much is That Doggie in the Window?

For more than a decade they broke box-office records as the highest paid female entertainers in the UK; they became the first British girl group to break into the US Top 10 and entered the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the world’s longest surviving vocal group without a change in line-up.

In later life the sisters were sometimes described as the Spice Girls of their day, and the parallels were not just musical. When, in July 1958, Joy married the Wolverhampton Wanderers star and England captain Billy Wright, it caused almost as much hysteria as the nuptials of Posh and Becks.

At the time the Beverley Sisters were reportedly earning £1 000 a week. Wright, by contrast, was never paid more than £24 a week by Wolverhampton Wanderers. As Joy recalled, the life of a footballer’s wife in the 1950s was very different from what it became: “We were boringly well behaved, and loyal.” ’SPICE GIRL’: Joy Beverley also married a football star

Like the Spice Girls, too, the Beverley Sisters sometimes gingered up their performances with more risqué fare. Songs with titles such as We Like To Do Things Like That; It’s Illegal, It’s Immoral, Or It Makes You Fat, and British pop’s first covert paean to contraception, We Have To Be So Careful All The Time (which was banned by the BBC), helped to maintain their appeal into the 1960s.

Although Joy and her sisters went into unofficial retirement in favour of full-time motherhood in the late 1960s, they returned to performing when their children had grown up. In the 1980s they emerged as icons on the gay cabaret scene.

In later life the sisters lived in three near-identical next-door houses in North London.

Joy Beverley is survived by her two daughters by Billy Wright, and by a son from a brief earlier marriage to Roger Carocari, an American musician. — © The Daily Telegraph, London