Judy Percival
Tiller Girl who toured India and Burma with Ensa during the war while looking for her husband
LADY PERCIVAL, always known as Judy, who has died aged 100, was a talented ballet dancer who in 1945 signed up to dance with an Ensa group in the jungles of Burma to search for her husband (Sir) Ian Percival, the future Tory MP, whom she had not seen for three years; she duly found him, brought him home and went on to live a long life partly devoted to politics.
She was born Madeline Buckingham Cooke on May 23 1921, to Albert, a farmer, and his wife, Norah, née Buckingham, in Stone-in-oxney, Kent. She attended Rye Collegiate School, but discovered ballet at a young age and moved to a residential dance school in Hastings, where she won all the cups.
In 1939 she was offered a place at Sadler’s Wells, but could not afford to take it up and instead joined the Tiller Girls in pantomime at the Coliseum before starting in revue at the Garrick.
Free tickets were plentiful, as the phoney war had ended and the bombs had started raining on London. One such ticket fell into the hands of a Cambridge student, Ian Percival, who met her at the stage door and swept her off her feet by whisking her away to Lyons Corner House for poached eggs and a cup of coffee.
For the next two years she danced wherever work was available in the West End – including briefly at the Windmill, where modesty prevailed – and with the Entertainments National Service Association (Ensa) across the country.
At the end of 1941, when London became safer, she was in panto again, Jack and the Beanstalk at the Coliseum. It ran until St Valentine’s Day 1942, when she was given the day off to marry Ian, who had been commissioned into the Royal East Kent Regiment, the Buffs. Within weeks her husband had been sent to North Africa, where he served at El Alamein, and from there to the Middle East, India and Burma.
Judy continued to dance with Ensa, and at times the American Red Cross, otherwise driving trucks and ambulances with the Women’s Voluntary Service.
In 1944 she had a close shave when one of the early V-1s to hit London exploded outside her flat. She was convinced that throwing open the windows when she heard the “doodlebug” had protected her from blasted fragments of glass.
Later that year she resolved to find her missing husband, whom she knew had reached India because he had visited her sister, whose husband was Commissioner for the Port of Bombay.
Hearing that an Ensa troupe was being formed under the actor Jack Hawkins to entertain the “Forgotten Army” in India and Burma, she joined up. In early 1945 they sailed from Liverpool in the Dutch ship Johan van Oldenbarnevelt with 3,000 RAF personnel.
The troupe flew from Bombay to Calcutta and began performing there and elsewhere, once on the lift on an aircraft carrier. An American convoy was then formed, to which were added four 15cwt trucks carrying the Ensa kit – including a stage and a piano – for the journey into Burma.
There they began performing. “Doris who sang, Raiph who played the piano, a drummer and a conjuror – and I who danced,” Judy Percival wrote in a private memoir. Their theatres were clearings in the jungle, lit by the lights of their truck.
The conditions were invariably awful, Judy recalling the never-ending monsoon and being almost within earshot of the enemy. After three months there was still no sign of her husband, but the troupe came to a field hospital, where she saw Buffs cap badges. Enquiring of one man whether he knew Captain Percival, she learnt that he had been promoted to major – and was well – but not there.
More weeks passed, then she received word to go to Calcutta. She took a train from Ranchi, and en route in the middle of the night she had to change trains and wait two hours at a station, where she met a train full of men who turned out to be Wingate’s Chindits. She would later say that she had never met a finer group of men – or felt safer.
At Calcutta her husband was waiting on the platform, a shadow of his former self, having lost 3st. Judy Percival was disappointed that she was “filthy and hot – not at all as I had hoped I would look for this, our first meeting for three years.”
At war’s end they travelled home together from Bombay in a converted cruise liner, Monarch of Bermuda. The men were at one end, and the (few) women at the other. They would meet in the middle and talk, and at one such get-together agreed that Ian would return to Cambridge, then become a barrister and if possible enter politics.
After the birth of her first child in 1946 Judy Percival never worked professionally again, though she had no regrets. Her husband did enjoy successful careers in politics and the law, serving as Conservative MP for Southport from 1959 to 1987, and becoming Solicitor-general in Margaret Thatcher’s first government, from 1979 to 1983.
Judy Percival made a vital contribution to her husband’s success. Her forte was in canvassing and she would work the streets of the constituency tirelessly on foot. She was clever with her hands and made many items which sold for a handsome return at constituency fundraisers.
In 1960 she became a volunteer with the Barts Guild, pushing a trolley around the wards at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. She ran the guild’s flower shop and in 2000 was elected a vice-president.
Flowers were also to play a part in her friendship with Margaret Thatcher, which had started in the 1950s. When Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister, Judy Percival would pick primroses for her husband to take to No 10. Each year she would receive a thank-you note.
Ian Percival died in 1998, and Judy is survived by their son; their daughter predeceased her in 2010.