Our final featured comedic artiste from the 1930’s is Gracie Fields. She was an English actress, singer, comedian and star of cinema and music hall who was one of the top ten film stars in Britain during the 1930s and the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. She was known affectionately as Our Gracie and the Lancashire Lass and for never losing her strong, native Lancashire accent.
Fields made her first stage appearance as a child, in 1905, joining children’s repertory theatre groups such as “Haley’s Garden of Girls” and the “Nine Dainty Dots”. Her two sisters, Edith Fields and Betty Fields, and brother, Tommy Fields, all went on to appear on stage, but Gracie was the most successful. Her professional debut in variety took place at the Rochdale Hippodrome theatre in 1910, and she soon gave up her job in the local cotton mill, where she was a half-timer, spending half a week in the mill and the other half at school. The Burnley newspaper described her as “The Girl with the Double Voice”.
Fields came to major public notice in Mr Tower of London, a show staged in London’s West End. Her career accelerated from this point, with dramatic performances and the beginning of a recording career on HMV. Fields’ most famous song, “Sally”, which became her theme, was worked into the title of her first film, Sally in Our Alley (1931), a major box office hit. She went on to make a number of films, initially in Britain and later in the United States (when she was paid a record fee of £200,000 for four films).
The final few lines of the song “Sally”, which Fields sang at every performance from 1931 onwards, were written by her husband’s mistress, Annie Lipman. Fields claimed in later life that she wanted to “Drown blasted Sally with Walter with the aspidistra on top!”, a reference to two other of her well-known songs, “Walter, Walter”, and “The Biggest Aspidistra in the World”.
After the war, Fields continued her career less actively. She began performing in Britain again in 1948, headlining the London Palladium over Ella Fitzgerald who was also on the bill. The BBC gave her her own radio show in 1947, dubbed Our Gracie’s Working Party, in which 12 towns were visited by Fields. It featured a live show of music and entertainment broadcast weekly, compered by Fields, who also performed, with local talents also on the bill. The tour commenced in Gracie’s hometown of Rochdale.
