Tribute to June Marlow

The Barbican of her childhood was a colourful place, home to a tightly-knit, poor but proud community that echoed with noise and music from numerous pubs, replete with the sights and smells of the fish market and quay.

“Won’t you come into our kitchen/living/bathroom?” Perhaps a comfortable home for a sea captain when newly built in the late 1700s, by the time Jean Moulder (who became June Marlow) arrived in 1931, 44 New Street was a tenement house containing a fluctuating number of people and families according to the number of births, deaths and marriages as they occurred. The 1939 Register recorded 20 occupants.

Jean’s maternal grandparents, John 'Jack' and Blanche Kitt, née Brimacombe, moved to New Street following the birth of their first child, Florence, in 1909. Their three rooms on the first floor would eventually house seven children and beyond. Jack was a carriage cleaner for the Great Western Railway, while Blanche worked between her many pregnancies as a shop cleaner at Dingles, a laundress and a bottle washer.

A modest but dignified home, kept spotlessly clean and with original features lovingly preserved, the Kitts lived by routine; “that’s what you’ve gotta ‘ev to keep things clean an’ proper”. They ate the same meals each week, dinners of homemade pasties, pies and the evocatively named suet puddings, ‘babies ‘eads’, were punctuated by fresh fish gifted by the fisher-folk of the Barbican to families without a fisherman in their own. Washday, every Monday, was an all-day, rubber-booted ritual of scrubbing and boiling, blueing and starching in the courtyard’s washhouse. Blanche’s social life was a weekly trip to The Crown & Anchor for a glass of ale and leaning from her kitchen window for a good yarn with passersby coming up the steep stone steps from Pin Lane. Hushed reports of pregnancies and deaths or even outrageous tales of murder “down the quay”!

In 1930, Florence married Christopher Moulder, a Co-op bakery worker and they took a room on the top floor of number 44. Both loved ballroom dancing, entering and winning competitions with Florence having sewn her own dresses for the occasion. It was in their room that the first of their two children, Jean, was born.

With her father working nights, Jean spent time with her grandmother, forming a steadfast bond and assimilating the distinctive dialect of her forebears. Jean’s bond with her grandmother, or 'Gramma', whom she described as “cap’n of the ship”, became vital when, in 1937, her mother disappeared without explanation. Sensing it would be difficult for Blanche to talk about, six-year-old Jean didn’t ask.

It was decided she would be taken by her paternal grandmother, Nellie, to stay in London temporarily. While it was lovely to live in a proper house with a garden, Jean was glad to return home to New Street and find her father waiting for her, having imagined he too might have disappeared in search of Florence. They would remain with the Kitts, Jean sharing a double bed with two aunties. With many aunts and uncles to amuse or amuse her, time was spent playing cards for pennies or being taught Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby numbers, singing along lustily to Sunday morning hymns on the radio or playing out on the cobbles with the other children of New Street. Marbles, wooden tops and hopscotch or perilously taking turns swinging from a fisherman’s rope hung from the iron lamppost over the steps from Pin Lane. Any children attempting to join from the other, narrower end of New Street would be told to “Get off down yer awn end!”

Jean’s singing talent was evident from her schooldays at St Andrews Primary, where encouraging teachers cast her as Mary, singing 'Sleep Holy Babe' in the nativity two years in a row (the third year she sang behind the ‘new’ Mary), and at ballet Jean was not fazed to be placed in front of the others, not as a principal dancer but to sing.

After school one day, Blanche greeted Jean, “Go en tak a luk in m’bedroom, m’ansum”, wherein she discovered a shiny black upright piano. Overjoyed, Jean threw her arms around Blanche’s ample “Demshure pear shape” frame and kissed her, eliciting a gruff response and an opportunity:

Aged 27, Florence had developed septicaemia following an abortion, a leading cause of maternal death in the 1930s.

During World War II, the family kept the children home rather than have them evacuated. Jack cleared the under-stairs cupboard on the ground floor of number 44, lined the walls with clean sacks and covered the floor with matting, a make-shift air-raid shelter, though given enough warning, the residents would scurry down the narrow street to boat houses or other designated shelters. An incendiary bomb did land on an attic window ledge of the house but was ‘easily dealt with’.

Blanche permitted Jean to sing with local concert parties that formed to entertain troops in the city’s YMCAs, NAAFI clubs and barracks, providing she was chaperoned to and from home. In 1941, following the devastating Plymouth Blitz, it was announced there would be a summer of dancing on the Hoe, backed by a band of professional musicians serving in the forces. Jean recounted:

Remarkably, this formative experience was captured by a photographer and two photos exist of 10-year-old Jean singing with the band.

Some weeks later, a messenger from Nancy Astor’s household arrived at New Street and asked Blanche if she might allow Jean to meet Lady Astor at her Elliot Terrace house to discuss Jean’s singing. Blanche wasn’t especially thrilled by the invitation. Barbican folk were staunch labour supporters and Jean had heard Blanche remark at the mention of Lady Astor’s name, “Aw ‘er, she buys ‘er votes with blankets”, referring to the handouts given to the poor at election time. Nevertheless, she allowed Jean to go, sending her off in her usual forthright manner, “Go on then, you know which ‘ouse it is dawn’t ‘ee? An’ mind yer manners.” Jean recalled the visit like something from a Hollywood musical:

Jean duly went to meet Vivian Ellis at the Palace Theatre, who arranged for her to sing (on a microphone offstage due to licensing laws prohibiting children from appearing onstage) at a Sunday night concert but he felt she was too young for serious vocal training. Soon, though, the Palace would be the setting for a successful audition for Carroll Levis’ 'Discoveries' that lead to her first BBC radio broadcast aged 13 from Bond Street’s Aeolian Hall. Jean made the train journey to London alone and dedicated the song, 'I’m Sending My Blessings' to her father, who was then serving with the army in France. Proudly handing her 15 guinea fee to Blanche, “Lovely, m’ansum, that’ll be a gabardine mac for school fer ‘ee an’ one fer yer bruther” Jean knew singing would be her compensation for poor beginnings and her way of contributing to the family.

Still at school, Jean was offered an evening job singing at the local ballroom with the resident band and not long after turning 18, Jean was performing at the Aeolian Hall again, having successfully auditioned for Hughie Green’s 'Opportunity Knocks', then a radio show.

The same year, back at the Embassy Ballroom in Milehouse, Jean was invited to join comedy band, 'Eddie Mendoza and his Spivs' for their upcoming tour, an opportunity that moved her away from Plymouth for a time. On being introduced to their bass player, Pete Van Dike, Jean reflected, “Our eyes met before the introduction, he had looked down from the Embassy stage the last time they played in a way I had not been used to…” It wouldn’t be long before Jean and Pete were married and expecting the first of their five children - a partnership that launched another musical legacy in Plymouth.

Christopher remarried and Blanche eventually left New Street for a council flat, Jack having died in the winter of 1941 from melancholia, never truly recovering from Florence’s death and the stress of looking after the family during the war.

Over seven decades, Jean sustained a career as a singer and actress, making thousands of radio and TV appearances, singing at the London Palladium, the Royal Albert Hall and at a Royal Command performance with 'The Stargazers', duetting with or appearing alongside storied musicians and performers like Matt Monro, Rosemary Clooney and Brenda Lee. Her final screen credit at the age of 88 was opposite Martin Clunes in 'Doc Martin'.

When approached about the Elizabethan House, Jean confessed to being somewhat afraid of it as a child, it seemed a ‘spooky’ place but the role couldn’t have been more fitting for her nor she more perfect for the role - a warm voice imbued with the wisdom of a long life, a survivor like the house itself, and like the stories of its many residents Jean’s own was burnished with success and touched by sorrow. Born just a few houses along, you couldn’t hope to find a more authentic Barbican voice, m‘ansum.

Many thanks to Lauren Vandike who compiled this article on behalf of the family from the original writing of June Marlow.

Header image: June Marlow by Dom Moore, 2011 | Singing with an Armed Forces band on Plymouth Hoe, 1941