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Fabulous Fanny Cradock

TV's Outrageous Queen of Cuisine

The History Press

Beginnings

FROM BILLIARD TABLE TO BALLET

Fanny Cradock's loosely tethered childhood was defined by her change of ownership at the age of one. It was a story she retold a thousand times – in private, in public and in print – like a pop star regurgitating her first hit song. The most vivid rendition featured in Fanny's autobiography, Something's Burning:

I was a year old when Mother took me to see Gran on her birthday. We reached Apthorp at 11 a.m., the hour at which Gran trailed from bedroom to boudoir wrapped in a huge Turkish towel, cleaning her teeth with a dry toothbrush. Mother dumped me on the billiard table (why, we do not know) and, running upstairs to Gran, promptly forgot my existence.

'She was such a mixture of being an absolute slut, wandering round in grubby trousers, and then being very grand.'

Alison Leach, Personal Assistant

Some time later – and it must have been a considerable time, for Gran never dressed in a hurry – the two ladies descended the staircase and heard my hideous yells. Gran traced me and whipped me off the billiards table into her arms. 'Bijou,' she said furiously, 'you are not fit to have a child.' 'I brought her to you for a birthday present,' said Mum defensively. She had forgotten any more appropriate offering. Gran replied grimly, 'Thank you, I accept her.' Thus was my future determined. I stayed with Gran until I was sent off to school when I was ten.

Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey (Fanny was a later acquisition) settled in at Apthorp, the imposing house in Leytonstone, east London, where she had been born on 26 February 1909, while her eighteen-year-old mother concentrated on her primary maternal purpose: producing a son and heir. Charles, a child she did care for in her own distracted way, was born in 1911.

Fanny, a 'bloody awful little girl' by her own admission, adapted without demur to the generation gap. Her grandparents took vague responsibility for her early education and her parents, who lived only a few miles away, were occasional visitors. In Fanny's eyes her grandmother, Emily Frances Hancock, vied with Johnnie for top billing as the most important figure in her life. She described her as 'the symbol of all that is cultivated and gracious, gentle and loving'. Both Fanny and she preferred an intelligent sinner to a foolish saint (of impeccable lineage of course).

'She made me translate a paragraph of The Times leader every morning into both French and German,' Fanny remembered. 'A delightful old Austrian was engaged to teach me the rudiments of violin-playing on a tiny fiddle when I was only five; he had a huge spade beard and smelled of garlic. My ballet training began with a curious old girl whose hair looked like a whipped cream walnut; she had a slight tic and throughout my bar-work sessions wore a hat which looked like a well-stocked aviary.'

Fanny's grandmother introduced her to colour-themed cookery, as well as the self-sufficient joys of bottling, potting, pickling and preserving. Her grandfather, Charles, who had been a surgeon-major in the Indian Army before returning to England in 1900, inadvertently fostered her love of cigars – she was rewarded with a weekly puff after filling his pipe – and an early appreciation of the grape. 'My wine was pale pink at five, deep pink by eight and often straight from the bottle by the time I went to school.'

'My wine was pale pink at five, deep pink by eight and often straight from the bottle by the time I went to school.'

SPOOKS AND SCHOOL

Fanny Cradock might have been more resentful of a chum-free early childhood if she hadn't discovered a psychic sensibility. It was largely a private world but one of PlayStation normality to her, until, that was, adults began to shriek in disapproval. She claimed to have a hotline to the court of Louis XIV of France and played levitation games with her brother Charles. 'If I had been handled differently,' she wrote, 'I would have continued to accept without question that what happened to me did not happen to everyone else and would have thought no more about it. But instead, when it came out later on and became a matter for the "gravest concern", I grew up to regard it as something shameful like bedwetting and I developed the most painful complex about it.'

Fanny's spiritual guilt multiplied when she was bundled off to a 'distinguished' boarding school, the Downs, at the age of ten. 'I learned nothing, forgot all I knew and hourly hoped to die,' she recalled. A chance meeting with a fellow ex-pupil just before the Second World War brought the bitterness flooding back. 'Socking and being socked with mud from lacrosse sticks in a slippery field with a biting north wind howling up knee-length gym tunics. ... Lesbian ties and lesbian matrons who wrenched those ties straight and only favoured little girls with pink cheeks and golden curls.' After five years of misery, Fanny was caught holding a séance in the school library. Further investigation revealed documents in her locker relating to past lives. She stirred the pot a little more urgently:

About the same time I expressed my views with some force on the subject of unmarried women who chose child bullying as a career because no man would marry them and give them normal lives. It was also bad timing, which is inexcusable, that I chose this moment to resign publicly from the school's Girl Guide patrol for the – to me – perfectly valid reason that it was a bad thing for girls to dress up in uniforms and play soldiers.

She was expelled, then given a term's stay of execution when her parents mollified the headmistress. She was catapulted into adulthood at the age of fifteen.

FANNY'S FATHER

Tons of Money was the 1920s farce that made Archibald Thomas Pechey and indirectly dumped him, eight years later, in the quick sands of bankruptcy. The trouble, as it had been throughout his married life, was a wilful wife who drained both his finances and emotions, and a gambler's double-or-quits mentality.

Fanny's father was a typical public-school-educated product of his time: polite, modest and understated. Less typically, he had a song (or at least a lyric) in his heart, and was part-credited for the words of 'A Bachelor Gay', one of the best-known tunes from the 1917 hit musical The Maid of the Mountains. He had turned his back on the corn merchants' business in 1910, the year after Fanny was born, and began writing verses for The Winning Post, a publication devoted to society gossip and horse-racing, and in particular horses owned by its charismatic editor-proprietor. Bob Sievier gambled his way from fortune to famine and back again, paying a world-record 10,000 guineas for the multi-Classic-winning Sceptre in 1901 and following Pechey into the bankruptcy courts in the 1930s.

Under the pen name Valentine, Fanny's father addressed such pressing topics as mixed bathing, a school for kissing and the perils of kilt-wearing. In 1913 he popped up as the briefly famous Jester of the London Mail, touring England's seaside hot spots to offer 2 guineas to anyone who could successfully identify him as the Jester. Two years later he joined forces with Will Evans to write Tons of Money (comic chaos ensues when Aubrey Henry Maitland Allington, a heavily indebted inventor, inherits a fortune). Several years of painful rejection followed before it was taken on by producers Tom Walls and Leslie Henson, who were alerted to the script's potential by a chuckling office boy. Tons of Money opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in April 1922, and graduated to the Aldwych later in the year, establishing both the acting team (led by ralph Lynn) and the appetite for farce that sustained Ben Travers through nine sell-out productions. Tons of Money finally closed, 737 curtain-calls later, in February 1924 (it was revived by Alan Ayckbourn in the 1980s).

Archibald Pechey saw debts of £2,000 wiped out at a stroke. In 1922 alone he made an estimated £7,000 from the play (equivalent to more than £200,000 today), and he embarked on a peripatetic lifestyle befitting his new wealth. As if trying to keep one address ahead of the taxman, Fanny's family moved from Herne Bay in Kent to Swanage, to Bournemouth and finally to Wroxham in Norfolk. Fanny's mother persuaded her husband – Archibald preferred home comforts – that winters in Nice were preferable to Norfolk. They stayed in the best hotels, headed for the casinos at night, and squandered a fortune. Warnings from the Inland revenue went unheeded and Fanny's father was finally hauled before Norwich bankruptcy court in 1930, owing more than £3,500. He cited the 'drain imposed on him in helping relatives' and admitted: 'Tons of Money changed my position once and I have been waiting for it to happen again.'

The film rights for Tons of Money were sold soon afterwards and another Valentine play, Compromising Daphne, was also adapted as an early talkie. However, disgruntled creditors – he owed a furniture company about £20,000 in current terms – had still not been appeased by the outbreak of the Second World War. All too predictably, Fanny's parents split up, though her father's devotion survived. After the war, he settled in Somerset and established a contented routine of prolific novel-writing in winter and butterfly-hunting in summer (he accumulated more than 6,000 specimens). The gentle romances were penned by Valentine, the crime-busting exploits of Daphne Wrayne and her Adjusters appeared under the pseudonym Mark Cross. His hundredth novel, and forty-sixth in the Adjuster series, was published just before he died in 1961.

FANNY'S MOTHER

Long after Fanny's mother had died, Johnnie Cradock was asked by the Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee-Potter whether personality traits had been passed down:

'Oh she's just as mad,' he said reflectively.

'Like Mum?' blazed Fanny. 'Why she was round the twist.'

'Yes,' confirmed her husband. 'Just as mad.'

Mother and daughter both spoke in an intimidating growl – they were frequently mistaken for one another on the phone – but, to Fanny's mind anyway, the similarities ended there. The quaintly named Bijou ('like some damned Pekinese,' she complained) was as indolent and work-shy as Fanny was driven and industrious. 'Her singing voice was exceptional and she was the Invisible Voice in D.W. Griffiths' epic film Intolerance,' Fanny wrote. 'Offers for stage and films poured in, yet nothing tempted her away from her way of life. Anything that involved getting up at the same time every morning was impossible and unacceptable.'

'Daddy wanted peace and quiet and dickens and entomology and watercolours. Mum wanted parties.'

Fanny's father, though already engaged to another, was no sooner introduced than smitten. He despatched a terse telegram from Henley post office to his fiancée which read: 'Engagement off – letter follows'. Archibald and Bijou married in 1908 and Fanny was born the following year, christened Phyllis in deference to the fact that her parents had met at Phyllis Court in Henley. It soon became clear that the marriage was a loose alliance. Fanny later wrote wryly: 'The pair of them were diametrically opposed on almost every subject except Mother, whom they both adored.' She added: 'Mother inspired him, believed in him, reviled him and gave him all his best plots, as well as every headache he ever knew. He adored her, and she drove him distracted.'

Bijou was the soul of extravagance, champion of the snap purchase, and hopelessly addicted to sales. 'She once trundled up the drive towing a vast iron lawn roller which, she explained defensively, she had been forced to buy in order to obtain the dozen rose bushes which made up the Lot.' While her ideal start to the day was an 11 o'clock breakfast of a dozen oysters and half a pint of champagne, she resented every piece of toilet paper used by other members of the family.

Fanny's mother was an inadvertent aide to her husband's plays and lyrics, an effortless supplier of malapropisms. The Receiver in Bankruptcy became the Official Retriever; politician Anthony Eden's duodenal ulcer was translated as an eau-de-nil ulcer.

Archibald Pechey dubbed her, among other things, the 'oakegger moth'. The female of the species, it is said, can, when feeling amorous, call on a natural radar system which summons males from 300 miles away. 'She was totally fantastic, totally inconsequential and illogical,' Fanny told the Observer in 1968, 'with no more idea of raising kids than a bull's foot.'

Bijou, sixteen years younger than Archibald Pechey, was comfortably the senior partner in her second marriage, to a Berkshire estate agent. She died in 1949, though for months afterwards Fanny set a dinner place for her at the Cradock home in South Kensington.

FANNY'S BROTHER

If Fanny Cradock had an amoral streak, her brother Charles was positively anarchic, playing the part of misfit with greater success than any of the other roles into which he tumbled in adulthood. Fanny preferred to carry an untainted image of Charles as he was in early childhood. 'I remember him when he was five and quite ravishing. In my picture he wore a scarlet coat, bestrode an ancient mare and was borne like a baby Roman emperor, with his trophies (dead rabbits) slung from a stirrup and smothered in flies.'

The beautiful boy turned into a wayward youth – he was expelled from Cheltenham College after attending the school for only a year – and a feckless soldier. He was slung out of the royal Berkshire regiment in 1942, court-martialled and cashiered for trying to pay prostitutes with dud cheques. At various times he worked as an actor, rag-and-bone merchant and publican (a job for which his drink reliance made him madly unsuitable).

He was a serial sponger – Fanny's father told her in a post-war letter that despite Charles's suicide threats he would not 'lend' another penny – and was apt to phone his sister out of the blue, pleading for shelter after a midnight bunk from rented accommodation. For all that, there was a bond between Fanny (or Phatti as Charles affectionately knew her) and her brother. They shared the grimmest of times in the 1930s when they came to appreciate the subtle difference between bread and pepper and plain bread.

Charles, more commonly known as John after the war, flitted in and out of Fanny's life. Ever charming, plausible and perpetually broke, his greatest talent was for answering crisis calls. He stepped in at the last minute to produce and direct Fanny and Johnnie in their most prestigious cooking show, at the royal Albert Hall in December 1956, and a month later supervised the couple as they gave Something's Burning its test run at the Arts Theatre. Fanny recalled the television rehearsal for the Albert Hall show: "'Lights," roared Charles. "Quiet everybody please ..." We looked at each other. "Bread and pepper," he said suddenly, and for a moment neither of us could speak.'

The concord never lasted for long, and Christopher Chapman, Fanny's son by her second husband, recalls a slightly surreal experience in the early sixties. 'I never ever spoke to him. I only once saw him in my life when I was going round the Ideal Home Exhibition with my mother and in the garden. She suddenly grabbed my elbow and said, "We're getting out of here quick. Look, there's your wicked uncle John." And she turned me round and marched me out.'

Alison Leach, Fanny's personal assistant, brought about a brief reunion in 1966, when Fanny still faced an uncertain prognosis after being operated on for bowel cancer:

I remember saying, 'Do you feel you'd really like to see your brother, who you're very fond of but who you've written out of your life.' She said, 'How extraordinary, I'd not thought of that. I don't know how to find him.' Somehow or other I found where his bank account was. The very next day he came rushing down to see her and they established this very warm relationship for two or three years.

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Excerpted from Fabulous Fanny Cradock by Clive Ellis. Copyright © 2011 Clive Ellis. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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