Zoe Gail
Musical star who switched on the lights of Piccadilly after the war in top hat, white tie and tails
ZOE GAIL, who has died in Las Vegas on her 100th birthday, was the South African-born musical comedy star chosen to switch on the lights of London’s West End on April 2 1949, almost 10 years after they were turned off on the outbreak of the Second World War.
Standing in a spotlight on the balcony of the Criterion Restaurant at Piccadilly Circus, dressed in top hat, white tie and tails, she sang her hit number I’m Going to Get Lit Up When the Lights Go Up in London. Then, saying: “Abracadabra, hey presto”, she flicked a switch. The Bovril sign came on first and then the rest as she tossed her hat into the crowd of 10,000 below and opened a jeroboam of champagne.
But Zoe had not won universal admiration when she first sang the song in Strike a New Note at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1943. JB Priestley disapproved of her “strange, hermaphroditic garb” (men’s evening dress), and denounced the spectacle of young and beautiful women appearing on stage vowing to get “pickled and positively pie-eyed” when the blackout ended.
The BBC was unsure whether it should be broadcast. Then Winston Churchill came backstage after seeing the show, and promised her: “When we’ve won the war you can turn the lights in London back on.”
Although he was out of office from 1945, his promise was fulfilled when in 1949 London finally lifted restrictions on electric lighting for outdoor advertising.
On being asked about the song, which he had written after three weeks in uniform in 1940, Zoe’s husband, Hubert Gregg, said: “Mr Priestley apparently wishes I’d written a song called ‘I’m Going to Get Down to Some Real Postwar Reconstruction on Armistice Night.’”
The song remained associated with Zoe Gail ever afterwards. But the impresario Val Parnell once cut her pay cheque by 25 per cent when she was persuaded to sing it in a nightclub.
She was born Zoë Margaret Stapleton on her father’s farm at Fish Hoek in South Africa on February 20 1920. Encouraged by her mother, who had been in a group called The Golden Girls, Zoe made her debut dancing between screenings in a Johannesburg cinema. At 18 she travelled to London with her mother.
A striking beauty with long red tresses, she was asked to sing I’m a Fallen Angel and Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries between scene changes in the revue New Faces at the Comedy Theatre; she made such a mark that the management immediately increased her salary by 60 per cent.
In 1942 she went on to appear with Flanagan and Allen in Black Vanities (Victoria Palace), then Sky High at the Phoenix with Hermione Gingold and Hermione Baddeley, before going into Cole Porter’s Let’s Face It (Hippodrome), a production hailed by the Telegraph’s WA Darlington as “a thundering good evening’s entertainment”.
Continuing on her upward path, she was in Happy and Glorious at the London Palladium in 1943. Later highlights included Helzapoppin’, and Cinderella (Darlington found her “a lively Dandini”). She featured in Puss in Boots, though a mistake in the dictation of a Telegraph notice said she made an impressive “sea lion” instead of a feline.
In 1948 Zoe Gail played a nightclub singer in the notoriously brutal film No Orchids for Miss Blandish, wearing a diaphanous dress as she belted out a suggestive What Shall I Do with This Mamma? When an intruder climbed into her bedroom window she threatened him with a broken bottle before getting into bed with him.
Zoe Gail and Hubert Gregg, who also wrote Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner, had a daughter, Stacey, who was later in Aladdin at the Palladium and the soap opera Crossroads. But the marriage ended after five years, and she next married Bert Bernard, who had been an Ugly Sister in Cinderella.
The newly-weds were on honeymoon when they had a car crash in France, in which Zoe Gail’s leg was smashed from knee to ankle. Doctors warned that she might never walk again. But 20 months later, in November 1952, she received a standing ovation on stage at the Royal Variety Performance, the first of the queen’s reign, singing Burlington Bertie in the style of the celebrated male impersonator Ella Shields.
Zoe Gail then did nightclub work, appeared on television on What’s My Line? and took part in a radio show with Tony Hancock. In 1958 the family moved to Las Vegas, where she was with Bob Hope in cabaret, but the marriage collapsed.
In her later years she ran a hotel jewellery shop before starting to rent and buy houses in Las Vegas. After she took a young partner, however, the property business collapsed, leaving her penniless and sharing a room in an old people’s home.
Nevertheless in her nineties Zoe Gail would always be carefully groomed for visitors, still maintaining that the night she switched on the lights in Piccadilly was the greatest moment of her life.