Mary Berry

by A. S. Dagnell

  But while Mary appeared to be on the up at school, her idyllic childhood was about to be brought to an abrupt halt, albeit temporarily. Soon after she celebrated her 13th birthday she contracted polio. At the time vaccination against the disease was non-existent. It wasn’t until the American medical researcher Dr Jonas Salk developed a vaccination some five years later in 1952 that children were routinely injected to prevent the disease. And as a result, 13-year-old Mary faced the prospect of being paralysed for life by the viral infection. The disease can also cause meningitis and inflammation of the brain. It was a desperate situation. But as she lay limp and lifeless in bed, Mary’s parents at first thought it was another attempt for her to duck out of her school work. It was only when she had been unable to leave her bed for days on end because she had lost the use of her muscles that they realised something was very seriously wrong. They rushed Mary to hospital, where the doctors quickly diagnosed her condition as polio. Even today, there is no cure for polio. But because treatment for the disease was so limited during the 1940s, they had very few options but to keep her in hospital. The whole process very quickly turned into a harrowing experience for Mary – not least because she wasn’t told what was going on. ‘I was sent to the isolation hospital in Bath,’ says Mary. ‘I was put in a room with glass sides, and so my mother could not touch me. And that is very hard. I could see her face there and I had no idea what I had got wrong with me. I didn’t know. And nobody told me. That was what was so odd.’ Mary even had to be fed through a cup with a spout because she was so weak that she couldn’t sit up in bed.

  She was kept in isolation for a month – a long time by anyone’s standards, particularly for such a young girl. At that point she was then moved to a nearby orthopaedic hospital for a further two months.

  To help cheer her up, and perhaps out of guilt for not taking her illness seriously in the first place, Mary’s father made a grand gesture. At great expense he decided to buy her a pony … and then brought it to the hospital for her to pet.

  At the time, TB was also widespread. To treat the disease, patients were meant to get fresh air, so many hospital wards were designed so they were able to have their windows fully opened on one side. As she was recovering in the hospital’s solarium, Mary noticed her dad approaching the window before he surprised her in the most extraordinary way.

  ‘I remember my father brought my pony – can you imagine it now? Brought my pony to the hospital, walked it there, about three miles he walked with my pony so I could see it. When I was transferred to an orthopaedic hospital, Dad brought my beloved pony to the solarium so I could stroke him.’

  Less than one per cent of polio patients are left with paralysis. However, while Mary made a full recovery, the left side of her body was a lot weaker than it had been before she had the condition.

  ‘When I came home I just had this weak left side and I had my arm in a brace that held it above the head,’ she recalls. ‘But I recovered remarkably [though] my left hand is a bit sort of smaller and misshapen.’ It affects her to this day, so that if you watch closely when Mary appears on the Great British Bake Off, you’ll notice that her use of her left hand is limited and she often keeps it out of the direct view of the camera.

  ‘When I’m doing television people think that I’ve got arthritis and they send me all sorts of cures,’ she says. ‘But it’s not a real disadvantage; I manage well.’

  She even admits that there are some advantages.

  ‘My left hand is still a bit crumpled, but it doesn’t make any difference. It just means I don’t have to darn socks,’ she said in one interview.

  Gradually Mary fought her way back to health and in recent years has lent her support to End Polio Now, the Rotary-inspired charity that aims to eradicate the disease from the Earth. In 2011, she gave a talk to the Rotary Club of Glastonbury and Street, where all the proceeds went to the charity, speaking about how she believed it was such a good cause after everything she had been through with the disease.

  After Mary recovered from polio she returned to school to complete her exams. Despite her new-found passion for Domestic Science, overall her grades were not good. And her school headmistress, Miss Blackburn, was less than complimentary during a meeting to discuss her future, and dismissed any future career prospects.

  ‘When I left school mum and dad had to go to Miss Blackburn [and ask], you know, what career is she going to have?’ says Mary. ‘And Miss Blackburn said, “There is very little she could do; she could possibly look after children.” And I remember dad saying, “Well, I pity the children!”’

  In fact, years later in an interview with The Lady, Mary would say that Miss Blackburn’s comments were the ‘nastiest thing’ anyone had ever said to her. ‘When I was at school my headmistress said, “There really isn’t any career that I can recommend for you. You haven’t passed enough exams to do anything.” That was a terrible thing to hear,’ she said. Looking back on her life, Mary admits that she would have approached her studies with a bit more focus if she had her time again. Asked in an interview with the World of Books website what advice she would give to her 16-year-old self, she replied: ‘Choose a vocation that you enjoy and put your all into it. Get all the experience you can and work hard – you will feel good about yourself and the rewards will come.’ During the course of the meeting, though, Miss Blackburn suggested one other alternative to childcare – and that was cooking. With less-than-average grades in all her other exams, Mary realised that it was the one thing she excelled at. Not only that, it was developing into her passion; something she enjoyed outside the classroom, too. Mary agreed that cooking was the best option for her future. But she admitted that there was one other ‘glamorous’ job she had always wistfully dreamed of. ‘I wasn’t good enough for anything else really, and I didn’t have an interest in anything else,’ she said in an interview with the Financial Times. ‘In those days you used to have a dream of being an air hostess – that was the glamorous job – but university wasn’t really thought of unless you were terribly brainy.’

  By this point her parents were pleased when Mary came up with a plan to take a catering course at Bath College of Home Economics. Although Alleyne would have preferred her to have got a professional qualification, he realised it was better for his daughter to focus on something she enjoyed. It was a formative experience, and one that Mary treasures all these years later, particularly when remembering the members of staff who opened up the world of cookery for this budding Home Ec. student, not least a Mrs Viley, who, Mary says, ‘taught me lots of the basics’. It’s important to continue learning and absorbing information from your peers and experts, Mary believes: ‘But I’ve learnt from lots of chefs and cooks I’ve worked with. Michelle Roux Jr and Raymond Blanc, in particular, have both been influential in passing me new ideas. You never stop learning, really.’ And she told the Scotsman about another of her inspirations: ‘I’d love to have met the late Elizabeth David, just because she’s the greatest ever food writer.’

  She graduated with good grades after a year and whiled away the following summer in her bedroom perusing cookbooks and recipes by her favourite authors, who included Katie Stewart and Margaret and Jane Grigson, all regulars in the national press.

  French influences were becoming fashionable in the late 1940s. Mary’s imagination was filled with the possibilities suggested by croque-monsieurs, garlicky-buttery snails and truffle sauces. This ignited a desire in Mary to travel across the Channel and find out first-hand what all the fuss was about. After researching the options, Mary came across a three-month culinary course in the south of France. She was sold. But there was one problem – and that was her parents. At the time, Mary wasn’t even allowed to travel to London by herself, so the prospect of travelling across the English Channel and through France was something neither of her parents were particularly keen to entertain. But, after much persuasion from Mary, they relented and her father paid for her to enrol in the Domestic Science College in Pau in
the Basse-Pyrénées. Like Bath High, it was an all-girls school, but one where none of Mary’s fellow students spoke any English.

  However, there were other, less obvious differences to contend with.

  ‘My French was very poor and I had to stay in a family with ten children, and the first thing, when I got there, for our supper … we had horse meat,’ recalls Mary. ‘And I had left my pony, and I can remember sobbing all the way through having to eat horse meat. Because all I could think of was what I had left at home, my pony, through the time I was at school. I was pretty homesick. I had never been away from home at all and I was very pleased to get back again.’

  Despite the initial culture shock, aged 17, Mary still wanted to give France another shot and enrolled at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cookery school in Paris. But even attending the famous academy, where the likes of Rachel Khoo, Simone Beck, Giada De Laurentiis, Aida Mollenkamp and even the American pop star Kelis, have since learnt to become master chefs, couldn’t impress Mary.

  ‘It looked good on my CV, but it wasn’t up to much in those days,’ she told the Daily Telegraph. ‘It was full of posh Americans picking up a few dishes to pass on to their cooks.’ After struggling with her studies at school for almost all of her teenage years, suddenly Mary was finding it all a bit of a doddle. The exams at Le Cordon Bleu, Mary told the Daily Mail, were also ‘dead easy’, and she passed with flying colours.

  She returned to Britain aged 20. And while she may not have learnt a huge amount from her time in France, she finally felt in command of the expert knowledge necessary to start climbing the ladder in the world of catering. She was desperate to move to London, but her parents banned her from doing so until she had turned 21. Even though she had lived in France for the best part of three years by herself, it was still considered a big deal to leave the family home for the capital. She admits that her relationship with her parents was somewhat different from what she later had with her own three children. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go to London until I was 21,’ Mary recalls. ‘We don’t have control over our children nowadays like this! You know, Mum and Dad said you [didn’t] go and that was that.’

  So instead she started hunting for work back home in Bath. Eventually, after a number of job applications, she was taken on by the Electricity Board. In those days if you bought an electric cooker you could ask for a home visit from someone who would show you how it worked. And that’s where Mary came in. ‘I was a home-service adviser – if you bought an oven, I’d bake with you to check it was working properly,’ she said in an interview with the Daily Mail.

  The ovens Mary was demonstrating were new and exciting technology for their time. Ovens themselves were nothing new, of course. But electricity made the whole process cleaner, and it was easier to regulate temperature than it had been with the older models.

  Ancient people had cooked on open fires, adding simple masonry structures to hold the food over them. Simple ovens began to appear in places such as ancient Greece to allow for cooking bread and other baked goods, and by the Middle Ages brick and mortar hearths were being built, with food usually cooked in metal cauldrons hung over the fire.

  By the 1700s, inventors had begun making improvements to the stoves, mainly to contain the smoke produced by the burning wood. The fire was contained in a chamber, with holes on top for flat-bottomed cooking pans to be placed in. Around 1728, cast-iron ovens began to be made in real quantity – although they would still not have been found in the average home. Over the next century the designs evolved, offering models where the heating level of each pot could be regulated individually, as well as chimneys and flue pipes.

  Coal- and kerosene-powered ovens were also introduced, but gas ovens were what really took off commercially. A British inventor called James Sharp patented a gas oven in 1826. It was the first semi-successful gas oven to hit the market, and by the 1920s most households had a gas oven with both top burners and interior ovens. In 1922, the Aga cooker, which would later play a huge part in Mary’s life, was invented by Swedish Nobel Laureate Gustaf Dalén. Early electric ovens had been available from the 1890s, and one was even held up as a beacon of technological progress at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The first electric oven for use in homes was made in 1891 by the Carpenter Electric Heating Manufacturing Company in Minnesota, in the US Midwest.

  However, the spread of electric oven technology was hindered by problems with the distribution of electricity. Elecricity had been used for communications from the late 1830s onwards, but that use only depended on the low power output of electric batteries. Scientists were struggling to scale up their laboratory discoveries to the extent required for more widespread use, and the initial investment needed to set up an electricity network was daunting, particularly when steam, gas and coal already provided satisfactory ways to produce power, light and heat.

  But when Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison simultaneously invented the light bulb, it was suddenly easier to see a practical use for mains electricity. The UK’s first such project came in 1881, when the streets of Godalming in Surrey were lit electrically using water power in a public test of the new technology. More and more schemes were rolled out around the country, usually set up by private companies or local authorities that had been granted statutory authority to put cables and pylons on other people’s land or lay cables in the street by Acts of Parliament. By 1925, it was clear that a more efficient, national system would be a boon, and the Electricity (Supply) Act 1919 created the National Grid transmission system, linking the biggest and most efficient power stations to transfer energy around the country.

  In 1936, 80 per cent of the available supply was used in industry, with 12,000 domestic homes connected to the network. Many people in rural areas objected to the building of pylons to distribute the electricity. But gradually, people were attracted by the idea of a modern, clean energy supply. By 1944, two out of three homes had electricity – the number had doubled in ten years. Having an electric oven in your home became a realistic aspiration.

  While today’s electric ovens come with many features including self-cleaning modes, automatic interior lighting and digital controls, the ovens Mary would have been demonstrating were much simpler affairs. But as the fifties got going, the design-conscious middle classes clamoured for ovens in bright colours with curved edges, and Britain’s kitchens started to look ever more stylish.

  And so Mary drove around Bath – the ‘catchment area’ to which she was limited to working by her parents – in the little Ford Popular the firm provided. She took with her the ingredients of a Victoria sponge, the recipe for which she already knew off by heart. To test whether an oven was working properly she would use it to whip up one of these cakes. If the cake rose properly and tasted good, she would know that the oven was in perfect working order. It was a routine that lived with Mary for years, and she later admitted that on TV shows she would often cook up the exact same cake to check that the studio’s oven was functioning correctly before filming began.

  Mary was finally working, and it involved cooking, but she still yearned for the bright lights of the Big Smoke. Bath, she believed, was too limiting and didn’t offer her enough opportunities. ‘It was fun, but I wanted to work up in London and share a flat with other girls,’ said Mary.

  However, that opportunity would present itself to Mary sooner than she thought. This was to be the start of a brilliant career that no one – not even her parents – could have anticipated.

  CHAPTER 3

  COOKING ON GAS

  By the age of 22 Mary appeared to be on the brink of a big career break. Despite having struggled to find her feet with her studies, once she began to focus on her talents by working with food and people, her professional life started going swimmingly. And while she was based in Bath, she was keeping a beady eye out for any opportunities that presented themselves in London. It wasn’t long before she spotted something that took her fancy – she saw an advert for a job as a cookery demonstrator for the Dutch
Dairy Bureau. Mary wasted no time in applying. What more could she want? This was a job that would offer her the chance to cook for a living. Within days she was summoned for a meeting with a gentleman who was taken by Mary’s passion for cooking and enthusiasm for good food. The interview went well and Mary was immediately offered the job. It seemed too good to be true – especially after she learnt that the salary was £1,000 a year, a large amount of money for a 22-year-old by anyone’s standards back then. When she broke the news to her father Alleyne, he was dumbstruck. He couldn’t believe her luck, especially after all her trials and tribulations at school – he’d assumed that perhaps Mary wouldn’t find her feet in her career for years. So convinced was he that the offer from the Dutch Dairy Bureau wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, he insisted on travelling from Bath to London to interview the firm himself to check that she wasn’t lying and that the offer was genuine.

  ‘That was my very first job after working for the Electricity Board in Bath, and I went to see this [gentleman] and he gave me the job and told me I would have a thousand a year,’ Mary told Desert Island Discs. ‘And I went back home, and my father looked at me, and he was on the next train the next day to see him. Anyway, he went and realised that it was all authentic.’

  Alleyne returned home to Bath beaming with pride about his daughter’s new-found success. Mary couldn’t believe her luck either – she was astounded that she was finally going to be paid to carry out what she still regarded as a hobby. Every day Mary was expected to cook up milk-based recipes for the Dutch Dairy Bureau’s numerous London-based clients. And at the end of each day, she could even take any leftovers home for her flatmates. It’s fair to say that she excelled at the job. Mary was very hard-working for the Dutch Dairy Bureau – always on time for work, loved by bosses and given glowing appraisals.