I was born on October 24, 1946 at Number 9, Stanway Road, Coney Hill, Gloucester, not far from the lunatic asylum. I lived at that address permanently until I was four years old and spent a lot of time there later during school holidays because both of my parents were at work. I have very early memories (two or three years old?) of a nightmare of neon animals crawling over me and eating me as I slept up in the attic. I also remember the taste of the free welfare orange juice at the clinic next to St Oswald’s church.

I was born in a large and sturdy red-brick 1930s council house which my Irish immigrant father had worked on as a builder’s labourer. When I was born, he had not found a house of his own and we lived with my mother’s family for my first four years on earth. As well as my mother’s parents, Sam and Fanny-Harriet King, there were numerous of my mother’s siblings (there were about eight or nine altogether, but some had married and moved on). Evelyn was the youngest – about 13 years younger than my mother. Evelyn referred to herself as an afterthought or accident. Rose was the next one up from Evelyn.

My memories of my life at 9, Stanway Road are as of a movie directed by Terence Davies.

The Beginnings of a Cineaste

Evelyn and Rose saw it as their mission in life to educate me in the matter of cinema and popular music. Here is a list of the films I remember seeing with them in the years 1950 to 1955:

Singin’ in the Rain (I was five-years-old when I saw this at the cinema in 1952.)

Trouble in Store (1953)

The Road to Bali (1952)

A Star is Born (1954)

The Quiet Man (1952)

Calamity Jane (1953)

Moulin Rouge (1952)

Son of Paleface (1952)

Ivanhoe (1952)

The Robe (1953)

Quo Vadis (1951)

The Ten Commandments (1956)

The Crimson Pirate ( 1952. I saw this again in 1985 at a hotel in Jehu Beach, Bombay.)

Jack and the Beanstalk (Abbott and Costello 1952)

Brigadoon (1954)

Where’s Charley? (1952)

April in Paris (1952)

Androcles and the Lion (1952)

An American in Paris (1951)

Hans Christian Andersen (1952)

Dangerous when Wet ( 1953. This child was traumatised when Esther Williams disappeared under the water and did not come back up again.)

Abbott and Costello meet Captain Kidd (1952)

Robin Hood (1952)

Rob Roy (1953)

The Sword and the Rose (1953)

Cinderella (1950)

Cage of Gold (1950)

Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951)

Treasure Island (1950)

The Band Wagon (1953)

The Black Shield of Falworth (1954)

I remember being somewhat puzzled by A Star Is Born. Why was James Mason walking into the sea and not coming back? My experience of the seaside was limited to Weston-super-Mare where the tide never came in and the beach was always muddy. Did James Mason get sucked down into the mud? Heavy stuff for an eight-year-old.

Portrait of the writer as a young maggot.

Introduction to Music

Rose and Evelyn were huge fans of Ruby Murray. They insisted on imposing their taste on me when I was a defenceless eight-year-old. They dragged the poor child around the country to see Ruby Murray, David Whitfield, Dickie Valentine and Cavan O’Connor.

Evelyn had some records in her collection which interested this child more than Ruby Murray or David Whitfield. There was Elvis’s first UK single, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, on a blue-label HMV 78. There was ‘Tutti Frutti’ by Little Richard, which I found pleasingly wild and anarchic. Even more surprising than this, Evelyn had actually bought Charlie Gracie’s ‘Wanderin’ Eyes’. I followed Gracie’s lengthy rock-a-billy career up to his death in 2022 at the age of 86. He was performing almost to the day Covid got him and on the way he influenced many such as George Harrison and Graham Nash. Evelyn also owned the only Cliff Richard record I ever liked, ‘Move It’.

Ruby Murray

Even as an eight-year-old, I had an instant antipathy to Ruby Murray’s music. My extensive life experience at that point indicated to me that she was not a comfortable performer. Mary Margaret O’Hara avant la letter. The eight-year-old sophisticate found her voice feeble and her songs trite. It seemed to be a great psychological effort to her to perform. She seemed painfully shy and nervous and unsure of herself.

Stage Fright

Watching documentaries about her today, I am surprised by how strong and clear her voice is and that she has a sense of humour and is quite an articulate speaker. Nonetheless, I think my eight-year-old instincts were sound. Like many insecure performers, and many who achieved some measure of attention as child performers, she turned to alcohol as a crutch. Ruby died of liver cancer at the age of 61. Many performers suffered from stage fright and their coping mechanisms worsened their problems: Judy Garland, Don Gibson, Adele, Barbra Streisand, Ozzy Osbourne, Stephen Fry, Donald Fagen.

Ruby Murray first appeared on television when she was 12. Even before that, she was getting public attention. She entered a public speaking contest run by Eglinton Young Farmers Club, Derry in March 1947 and won a special prize for the youngest competitor under 18. She received a wonderful reception for a performance at the Ballymena Variety Theatre in February 1948 and then toured Ireland. She replaced Joan Regan (I saw Joan Regan live as well) as the resident singer on the TV series Quite Contrary.

The TV series led to a recording contract with Columbia. her first single, “Heartbeat”, reached No. 3 in the UK Singles Chart in December 1954. “Softly, Softly”, her second single, reached number one in early 1955.

Annus Mirabilis

In1955, readers of the NME (New Musical Express) voted her Britain’s favourite female vocalist (she received over 1,000 votes more than her nearest rival Alma Cogan), Bernard Delfont signed her to co-star with Norman Wisdom at the London Palladium in the revue Painting the Town, and she appeared in the Royal Variety Show.

She scored ten hits in the UK Singles Chart between 1954 and 1959. She also made pop chart history in March 1955 by having five hits in the Top Twenty in a single week. Taylor Swift broke that record in 2022.

In 1956, she was heard on screen singing “You Are My First Love” in It’s Great to be Young, had an acting role as a chambermaid in the Frankie Howerd comedy A Touch of the Sun, and made the first of two successful tours of the United States.

Looking Back

I had never heard of Duke Special until the estimable Substacker Mathew Lyons brought him to my attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Special

In January 2011, Duke Special (Peter Wilson) presented a documentary on RTE on the life of Ruby Murray on and released Duke Special Sings the Songs of Ruby Murray.

I also watched an Ulster TV documentary.

The words vulnerable and shy keep coming up in relation to Ruby Murray. She had minimal management and no PR or production. She did not know how to move her hands or how to stand. Getting to the centre of the stage is an agony of awkward limbs, the epitome of gawky.

She married her first husband, Bernard Burgess, of the close harmony group the Four Jones Boys, in 1957, and in 1962 they started a year-long tour of Britain in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Her career was never to reach such a peak again as in her annus mirabilis of 1955. Problems in her personal life plus the stresses of her career caused addiction to both alcohol and valium.

Decline

When I was living in Manchester in the 1970s and 1980s, I had heard about Ruby Murray’s alcoholism. The story as I knew it was that she was living rent-free in the Rembrandt Hotel in the Canal Street gay quarter of Manchester. I had thought that Ruby Murray might appeal to the gay community. Google AI has scolded me for daring to suggest that Ruby Murray would appeal to the gay community or live at the Rembrandt. I understand that there is today a drag artist called ‘Ruby Murry’. I have asked the Rembrandt if the real Ruby graced their portals.

Ruby Murray’s affair with Belfast comedian Frank Carson began around 1962 and significantly affected her personal and professional life. The strain of the affair contributed heavily to the breakdown of her marriage to Bernie Burgess. Burgess eventually divorced her in the mid-1970s, alleging physical violence because of her alcoholism. He was awarded custody of their two children.

Despite the affair, Murray and Burgess eventually reconciled as friends; he visited her frequently in Asprey’s nursing home in Torquay before her death in 1996. Carson remained married to his wife until his death in 2012, while Murray married her longtime friend and former dancer/theatre manager, Ray Lamar, in 1991. Lamar, 18 years her senior, a former stage dancer, theatre impresario, and manager for Bernard Delfont. They remained married until her death in 1996, although there is evidence that she wanted a divorce. Lamar inherited her recording royalties after her death in 1996 and himself died in 2005

.Changed Utterly

The year in which Ruby Murray had her greatest success, 1955, was a pivotal year for popular culture. In essence, 1955 was the year the UK’s musical landscape fundamentally changed, raw rock and roll overwhelmed bland English pap, preparing the way for the export of British rock to the States. 1955 was special for UK pop because the UK discovered Bill Haley & His Comets, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis. The era’s traditional “parent’s music” gave way to British acts like Lonnie Donegan who took American blues and folk, made it British and exported it back into the US charts. The home-made music that was skiffle provided the foundation for the careers of Tommy Steele, Adam Faith, Billy Fury, The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks, Van Morrison. Proto-skifflers became mega-stars who launched the British Invasion. Every school, including mine, had at least one skiffle group. British music began to develop in the 1950s from insular and derivative forms to become the leading centre of popular music in the modern world.

There was room in Aunty Evelyn’s record collection for Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Charlie Gracie, Cliff Richard and Ruby Murray but there was not much room for Ruby Murray in an entertainment market where Teddy Boys were slashing seats (and each other) with razors.