Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  In 1931, just as he was about to sign a lucrative contract with Sidney Bernstein, who wanted him to manage his Granada cinemas, van Damm was introduced to a sixty-nine-year-old widow named Laura Henderson, the new owner of a small Soho theatre, the Windmill. It’s hard to say now who fell harder for whom. Certainly Mrs Henderson, whose first show Inquest! had lost her a great deal of money, was badly in need of someone like Vivian. But something in her must have spoken to him too. After all, she was offering him a salary of just eight pounds a week to take care of her theatre; Sidney Bernstein had agreed to pay him ten times that. Perhaps it was her pluck he admired. When, at the end of a difficult first year, van Damm wondered aloud if they shouldn’t simply cut their losses and close the Windmill, Mrs Henderson told him that he had ‘no courage’.†

  Vivian van Damm’s solution to the Windmill’s financial problems was, famously, for it to stage a continuous variety show every day from 2.30 p.m. until 11 p.m.; each of the four daily performances would last two hours. When this failed to increase the theatre’s pitiful takings he added nude women to the mix, something the Lord Chamberlain’s office allowed provided they did not move. (The London Evening Star ran a reader competition to find a name for the new show, which was won by Mr Arnold Kite of Ellen Street, E1, for Revudeville.) So the girls stood there like classical statues in strange tableaux, their limbs posed for up to twelve minutes at a time. This rule was broken only once, when a V1 exploded fifty yards from the theatre (the Windmill remained open throughout the Blitz, the only West End venue to do so – hence the title of Sheila’s memoir): ‘After the shattering crash had subsided, the nude in the Spanish tableau, wearing nothing but a large hat, slowly, very slowly, raised a hand and thumbed her nose upwards, in the direction from which the bomb had come.’*

  Sheila at the Windmill

  (Getty Images.)

  Sheila loved the Windmill. ‘It wasn’t just the glamour and the glitter that drew me, but the strange, homelike atmosphere behind the stage. To me, it was another home – another family, with the same head . . . When I was not at school, I haunted the place.’* She began working there at sixteen, a few months before the outbreak of war. Like Nancy, she found that the fighting opened more doors than it closed. As the men began to disappear, opportunities increased. Within months she had been promoted first to assistant stage manager, then to head of publicity. When the Blitz began she moved into the theatre full time. She and her father slept, like the rest of the staff, on mattresses on the floor. This was clearly the practical thing to do, but it was also a matter of solidarity, for to read about the Windmill in wartime is to marvel at the courage and good humour at those who worked there. Gas-mask drills were held in the stalls; tin helmets hung on the back of dressing-room doors; many of the dancers became ARP wardens. Should the theatre receive a direct hit, it was agreed that the show would simply move to the Comedy Theatre near by. One girl, having left the theatre at night, was so badly injured by shrapnel it was thought she would not dance again. Three months later, however, she was back, worrying like all the other girls about whether her costume would survive the rigours of the show – it was vital that girls did not get carried away and burst out of their outfits; thanks to clothes rationing, they were now impossible to replace.

  On Sundays the cast gave free shows for servicemen at stations, camps and gun-sites. The theatre itself became a favourite haunt for servicemen on leave. As Sheila put it, ‘Revudeville fortified London in a way which sandbags and gun-sites could not.’ She was determined to be a part of this morale boost, and doggedly remained at the Windmill until 1942 when, having been conscripted into the WAAF, she was posted to Weeton, near Blackpool, for a ten-week driving course, and thence to Fighter Command in Stanmore. She spent the rest of the war whizzing through an empty London, driving officers ‘from one party to another’.

  In 1946 she handed in her stripes – she had been promoted to corporal shortly after VE Day – and returned to the theatre only to find her father had replaced her as publicity manager. It seems she had no complaint about this – the new man was, she thought, much better at the job than she’d been – but having been so long away from Vivian she now found herself unable to remain silent when she disagreed with him. ‘The first time I did it, he was too dazed to speak,’ she wrote in her autobiography No Excuses. ‘The second time he told me to shut up. The third time he told me to get out, and I landed in Shaftesbury Avenue with a resounding thud.’ She was still brushing herself down when he sent for her again. ‘I’m thinking of starting an air charter company,’ Vivian said, so casually he might have been talking about mowing the lawn. ‘Go and learn to fly.’

  Sheila learned to fly. She didn’t want to; she longed only to work at the Windmill. But pride dictated that she had no choice but to do otherwise. And if she was going to do this she would do it well. Her instructor was the formidable Joan Hughes,* the youngest of the first eight women to join the Air Transport Auxiliary in 1940. Eleven hours by Joan’s side and Sheila was able to land her Hornet Moth alone.

  Sheila with Joan Hughes

  (Daily Graphic.)

  Vivian duly bought himself a plane, but his charter business died before it was born; Sheila joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve instead, where she learnt acrobatics and formation flying. She hoped for a commission, but this was futile: in the late Forties there was no place for a woman in civil aviation. What to do? In No Excuses she tells the reader that around this time she nearly got married: ‘Only one thing stopped me – he went off and married someone else.’ This seems unlikely: no one who knew Sheila van Damm was ever in any doubt about her sexuality. But there was a new relationship on the horizon – with cars. In September 1950 her father’s personal pilot, Zita Irwin, told her that Vivian had entered Sheila and her sister Nona in the Daily Express rally, the first such race in Britain since the war. Sheila was astonished. Her father had written her off – entirely without justification – as a poor pilot, so why would he suddenly put so much faith in her driving skills?

  She did not tell the family dictator that she disliked the idea of driving a car with the words ‘Windmill Girl’ painted on its side. Nor did she express her desire to be known as a competitor in her own right, rather than as the daughter of the more famous Vivian. She simply got on with the job. The rally involved driving a thousand miles in forty-eight hours, a feat she would pull off with the help of what she chirpily called ‘wakey-wakey pills’ (in the days before dope tests, amphetamines were used widely and unabashedly). Sheila would be part of the Rootes team, in a Sunbeam Talbot. In theory, all she had to do was follow George Hartwell, her fellow team member, which is pretty much what she did, a gold St Christopher in her pocket for luck. But if Sheila did not expect to do well in the rally – she hoped only to finish – her father’s expectations were even lower. On a rest break she rang him from her hotel; when she told him she was in bed, he asked, ‘Which hospital?’

  It came as a surprise to both of them, then, when she learned that she and Nona had come third in the women’s competition. Even more startling, Rootes wanted to know if she was interested in competing in further rallies. Her father was delighted by this: her first drive had brought the Windmill a ton of publicity. Sheila, though, was more ambivalent – or at least, that was the impression she was careful to give. In No Excuses she describes her subsequent invitation to join Elsie ‘Bill’ Wisdom’s team as third driver of a Hillman Minx in the 1951 Monte Carlo Rally only as rather ‘lucky’ (they came fifth in the coupe des dames), and even at the height of her career she tended to downplay her talent. In part, this was another way of pleasing her father, who worried she would get ‘exaggerated ideas’ about herself. But it was also a smokescreen, lest the men start regarding her as a threat. Any remark that came within a mile of what we would regard as a feminist statement had always to be undercut with studied deprecation. Women, she notes in No Excuses, have more stamina than men. On the other hand, ‘men do most things better than women. I think it i
s a good thing they do, although it would do them no harm to be beaten once in a while . . . meanwhile the rally girls have done a lot to destroy the regrettable idea that all women are bad drivers (which is not half so regrettable as the idea that all men are good).’ Unpick this, and you’ll notice that it is not what it seems.

  But such tactics could not entirely camouflage her competitive spirit: she won too often for that. Her first major success was the 1952 Motor Cycling Club Rally, when she bagged the ladies’ prize in a Sunbeam Talbot. At the 1953 Monte Carlo Rally she was unsuccessful – too many punctures – but nevertheless she entered the record books when she outpaced her team mate Stirling Moss to set a class record for 2–3litre cars, driving the prototype Sunbeam Alpine sports car at an average of 120 mph at Jabbeke in Belgium (‘The Fastest Woman in Europe,’ said the newspaper headlines). At the 1953 Alpine Rally she and her co-driver Anne Hall won the coupe des dames and a coupe des alpes (for finishing the event without time penalties). In 1954 she and Hall won a coupe des dames at the Tulip rally in Holland, a performance that also saw her winning the climactic ten-lap race around the Zandvoort circuit; she finished seven and a half seconds ahead of the second-placed driver, a man. A further ladies’ prize in the 1954 Viking rally in Norway meant that she and Hall clinched the Ladies’ European Championship, a feat they repeated in 1955 when they began the season by winning – at last – a coupe des dames at Monte Carlo.

  It wasn’t only rallying at which Sheila excelled. She was a capable road racer too, and in 1956 partnered the Le Mans driver Peter Harper at the wheel of a Sunbeam Rapier for the Mille Miglia in Italy, the most dangerous motor race in the world. (An endurance test of one thousand miles, it was finally banned in 1957 after a crash killed the Spanish driver Alfonso de Portago, his navigator Edmund Nelson and nine spectators, five of whom were children.) The going was extremely tough: in the Futa Pass they dealt with driving rain, wind, flooded roads and icy surfaces; conditions were so perilous Stirling Moss and his car slid down a mountainside, their progress to a drop of three hundred feet impeded only by a lone tree. But she completed the race all the same, and thus maintained her record of finishing every event she started. She and Harper also won their class, having somehow managed to average 66.37 mph.

  Monte Carlo, 1952

  (H. R. Clayton.)

  Rally cars were far heavier then than now, and their brakes and tyres much less efficient. Road surfaces were often poor. Sheila must have been very strong. And brave. Not for nothing did bloodthirsty crowds gather at the worst bends during races like the Alpine Rally. But she was not without fear. During her pilot training at White Waltham she had seen a man whose head had been shaved after he had suffered a serious head injury, and his alabaster skull came back to haunt her before every race. Nor could she ignore the headlines. In 1955 eighty-five spectators and a driver, Pierre Levegh, were killed at Le Mans following a catastrophic accident; the spectators were killed mostly by fire, but some were decapitated by flying debris. The risks were huge. The more she raced, the more she felt she was tempting fate. Once she had proved herself, it wasn’t her competitive spirit that kept her going so much as her conviction that there was something liberating about the camaraderie of the road. This was what pulled her on, in spite of the risks, for in what other realm would a man like Stirling Moss offer to wash a girl’s ‘smalls’? She relished the good-luck telegrams that flooded in before every race, and came from as many male colleagues as female; she adored the cheering and the fan mail; and she took pride in her unique status. ‘On a rally, you have to forget the eye-black and lipstick,’ she wrote. ‘But if the going is reasonably good, I like to arrive at the end looking as fresh as I can.’

  In 1955, though, she decided to retire. Her father, now in his sixties, was unwell; there was the question of the Windmill. She would clearly be taking over from him at some point in the not-too-distant future and the staff, she felt, would never treat her as the boss so long as she was always jumping in and out of motor cars. The people at Rootes, however, begged her to enter the 1956 Monte Carlo Rally, and she agreed out of ‘friendship’. This race was not to be among her successes. Even before it began she was convinced she was about to run out of luck: ‘I had a premonition . . . There had been a lot of hoo-ha in the Press about this being my Swan Song, and for the first time in my life I was really superstitious.’ Worse, she discovered that she had somehow contrived to lose the St Christopher, a present from Joan Hughes, that she had sewn inside her jacket pocket two years before. In the end she was not even among the top ninety drivers. Sheila blamed herself for this – faced with thick fog on the Col du Granier, she had driven far too cautiously – but she had no regrets. ‘I was sure that I had finished what would prove to be the best five years of my life,’ she wrote later. ‘But it was lovely to wake up in the morning and find I had nothing to worry about.’

  Naturally, no sooner had Sheila’s driving career come to an end than her father miraculously recovered. This was entirely predictable – but she stubbornly shadowed him all the same, finally taking her first rehearsal in 1957. Her judgement, though, had been correct: his health could not last, and in December 1960 he died. His devoted daughter withheld this news from the newspapers until five minutes before the Windmill’s final curtain call. Inside the theatre she pinned up a note. ‘I am with you all here today,’ it said. ‘The show must go on exactly as usual. No one is to behave differently in any way. This was VD’s last wish. There must be no mourning. You can show your love and respect in the way which would have made him happy: go out on that stage, and give it all you have got.’ In her theatre diary she wrote: ‘December 14. Father died in the clinic this evening after weeks of hell. God bless him. He is now at peace.’ Her loss was hard to believe. She kept imagining she had made some kind of mistake. ‘He’ll walk in the door. Or I’ll hear his voice. Or I’ll suddenly meet him in one of the corridors. Then I snapped back to reality. To face facts. To push on.’ Two days later she was calm enough to set about improving Revudeville. ‘This is the first speeded-up show,’ she wrote in the diary. ‘Three good acts, including Ray Allen. Comic very good.’ Even in the depths of her grief, she could feel it turning inside. Ambition. At last, she was the Windmill’s manager.

  So, Nancy loved Jonnie, Sheila loved Jonnie, Jonnie loved them both and they all three, in their different ways, loved Nick and Tom. Is this right? I think so, though I’m mindful that two people can gaze on the same photograph and each see completely different things. On Nancy and Joan’s side, everyone will tell you that Sheila was just a sympathetic friend. But talk to Sheila’s people and they are quite certain that it was Sheila and Joan who were the couple, and Nancy the interloper. Not that they felt protective of the relationship. Sheila, it was generally agreed, had awful taste in women, and Joan was just the latest manifestation of this. Sheila didn’t suffer fools, but Joan was absolutely terrifying. Sometimes Sheila would bring Joan home to her parents’ house in Angmering, Sussex, for the weekend. On other occasions, she would bring Joan and Nancy. On Saturday mornings these working girls were not to be woken up early. Whispering was the order of the day: they were entitled to lie in. What did Sheila’s mother feel about all this? It wasn’t easy, having a daughter like Sheila, not in the Fifties. On the other hand, this was a theatrical family. Everyone was accepted, everyone was welcome.

  Sheila and Joan

  (Dick Laurie collection.)

  But these relationships were about more than physical attraction. The three women formed a mutual support system. By the time the Fifties ended they were each at the height of their careers, and though they loved their work – they lived for it – the pressures were mounting. Joan had to feed the ravenous maw of SHE. Nancy was on the radio and the television, and was shortly to join the News of the World as a columnist.* Sheila was running a theatre that was by now in serious financial trouble (with the advent of the strip club, the Windmill had begun to seem unfashionably respectable).

  Nancy was a
lso increasingly concerned for her reputation. Was her sleight of hand about to be revealed? Would someone voice what had been hitherto unspoken? It was possible. The era of the Fleet Street sex scandal was beginning; Christine Keeler would soon be, for her sins, a household name. Nancy heard talk, some of it spiteful, and it rocked her faith in her public image sufficiently to provoke her into wearing a frock more regularly.† Her friends found this terribly sad. ‘It was like a bad female impersonation,’ said Tony Warren, the creator of Coronation Street and a particularly close pal. ‘It was eerie.’ At an awards ceremony, he recalled, his mother was moved to advise an awkward-looking Nancy that it was ‘okay to put her bag down’. It is impossible not to notice that one of the first features she produced for the News of the World saw her registering with the Golden Key Marriage Bureau. She also, according to Rose Collis, began to toy seriously with the idea of making a ‘lavender’ marriage (Gilbert Harding died from an asthma attack in 1960, but there were, Nancy thought, several other men who would oblige).

  At home, the women could be themselves. Drink, gossip, listen to records. Sheila was happy to act as ‘mission control’ and take care of the children if Joan was working late or Nancy was abroad.* But crucially, they weren’t afraid to criticise one another – or at least, Joan wasn’t. When Nancy embarked on her second volume of autobiography, A Funny Thing Happened, Joan told her she would have to re-write at least the first thirty thousand words. It was Joan, too, who in 1961 persuaded Sheila that to close the Windmill would be an admission of defeat: ‘For two solid hours she tore into me. She told me that I was gutless; that I hadn’t any fight. She went on and on and on . . . How had I won the Monte Carlo Rally? How had I won the Tulip Rally? Was I really so spineless?’ It was a pep talk that saved her, or so Sheila later insisted, from a ‘nervous breakdown’. The next morning she scrapped the first house, sacked twelve girls and asked her executive staff to take a pay cut. For the time being, the show would go on.