Ken always said we’d wed.. in the end we had two days
New book tells of couple’s romance
He was a wonderful person to spend your life with
some part in the fact they didn’t get married until his dying days.
She explains: “It’s possible he made a promise perhaps he shouldn’t have. It’s quite possible he said, while she was dying, ‘I’ll never get married’.
“And in the back of my mind there was always this slight guilt that at the time he was engaged and I was seeing him as well.”
Ken, however, had always doted on Lady Anne. She says: “He was a romantic person. I got wonderful cards. He used to leave messages around for me to find. He was a bit of a tease as well. He got a rubber spider once and put it on the back of my shoulder because I hate spiders. But most of the time at home he was quite serious. Comedy is serious work.”
The couple wanted children and had fertility treatment in the 1980s but were never able to conceive.
However, Lady Anne believes she still had a glimpse of what a good father her husband would have been thanks to his ventriloquist dummy
Dicky Mint. Ken doted on Dicky – and on the road would take him inside the hotel instead of leaving him in the car.
She says: “Dicky Mint was very precious. We just used to joke, ‘He’s your lad’. Being a woman, I’d have liked a child but it wasn’t absolutely all-consuming when it didn’t happen.”
Ken’s kind heart did, however, touch others. So many, that Lady Anne says his funeral at Liverpool Cathedral was like a “state occasion”. She adds: “The funeral procession was a six-mile journey and the whole route was full of people waving. It was incredible.
“I only cried once – that was when they played his recording of Absent Friends, which he used to sing at the end of every show we did.”
Now, Lady Anne is determined to ensure her husband’s legacy lasts.
She’s been working on several projects to be named in his honour, and is about to release a book about their life together. Lady Anne is also planning a documentary and an exhibition after sorting through his memorabilia and notebooks.
She says: “He’d made me promise to burn them but I just couldn’t.” And while Lady Anne may have Ken’s props and stage outfits, it’s his presence that stays with her the most. She says: “I talk to him every day. I tell him what I’m doing. If I could say something to Ken today, I’d say, I hope everything I’m doing in your name, for your legacy, is right and will carry on when I’m gone.
“He was a wonderful person to spend your life with.
“I’m not sure I thanked him enough... but I do now.”
The Squire of Knotty Ash… and his Lady – An intimate biography of Sir Ken Dodd by Tony Nicholson with Anne, Lady Dodd, is published by Great Northern Books, April 1. RRP £17.99.
LADY ANNE DODD ON HER MARRIAGE TO COMIC