Corrie by Sea
WHEN Pat Phoenix, the actress who played Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, opened a brand new housing development just outside Penzance in March h 1966, she did far more than merely y cut the ribbon and mutter a few w choice words – she bought the show w home herself.
‘She had been holidaying in Cornwall for years and got on well with the people here,’ says present owner r and Corrie fan Alison Vernon, 48, who has the house on the market for £350,000 with Purple Bricks. ‘This house suited her down to the ground because it’s quiet and private, yet close to the villages of Paul and Mousehole, which she loved.’
It is little wonder that Pat needed a bolthole, because the years between 1966 and 1970 – when she owned the house – were her heyday in the soap.
Her character, Elsie – the blousy, beautiful tart with a heart that you mess with at your peril – was at the epicentre of the major plotlines. When in 1967 a goods train derailed on Viaduct Street, Elsie was feared dead. But, phew, she turned up unharmed.
Later that year her marriage to an American army sergeant, Steve, was on the cover of every telly-celebrity gossip magazine in the country. When Steve was murdered in 1968, Elsie was, temporarily, a broken woman. However, she was over her grief by 1970, when she married Alan Howard amid similar fanfare.
To counter the stress of filming these heartbreaking storylines, Pat repeatedly came down to her house in Newlyn in Cornwall, from where she would visit villages such as Lamorna.
‘She was completely natural and unaffected – a lovely woman,’ says neighbour Ann Tucker, 77. ‘I remember her judging the fancy-dress day at Lamorna and later we had a drink in the Lamorna Wink. It was she who recommended a vodka and lime to me, which I’d never drunk before. I loved it.’
Pat’s companions on her Cornwall breaks were her cousin Ivy and Ivy’s husband Cyril, and Pat’s lover cum business manager and minder, Bill Nadin. Bill and Cyril would go off fishing while Pat would drag Ivy off for long, windswept walks.
The extraordinary thing about the Cornwall house is its ordinariness – you will search in vain for a hint of Elsie-style glitz. In the mid- 1960s, it would have been a smallish, three-bedroom detached house. ‘It is a place where Pat could fit in easily with the neighbours,’ says Alison, a school secretary who now lives in the house with husband, Paul, 50, and sons, Alfie, 15, and Sam, 21. ‘She’d also have been attracted to our lovely views towards St Michael’s Mount.’
Over the years, the house has been extended to double its original size. There is a large lounge and study on the ground floor, together with an open-plan kitchen/ diner and a conservatory. Upstairs, there are three double bedrooms, including a master bedroom with an en suite. Outside, a decking area has steps leading down to a neat lawned garden.
T HE Vernons have owned the house since 2002 and are moving because Paul, a paramedic winchman with the Coastguard, has been transferred to Lee on Solent. Pat left Corrie in 1973, rejoined in 1976 and walked away for good in 1984. Her life continued to be full of drama. Her marriage to the alcoholic actor Alan Browning, who played on- screen husband Alan Howard in Corrie, ended with his death from liver disease in 1979. She then rekindled an old relationship with Tony Booth, the father-in-law of Tony Blair.
In 1986 she appeared in a television play, Hidden Talents, playing a woman dying of cancer, and in the March of the same year she collapsed. A 60-a-day smoker, she was dying of the same disease.
At about this time, Pat decided to make one last trip to her beloved Cornwall and phoned the manager at Penzance’s Nirvana spa, Audrey Laity, to book a swim in their pool.
‘When she came out, I offered her a cup of tea but she said she’d far prefer a gin and tonic,’ says Audrey, 85. ‘ She wanted to pay for the swim but I wouldn’t hear of it. So she sent me a signed photo and a lovely note. Then a few months later it’s on the news – she had died with Tony Booth at her bedside. It was very sad.’