BETTY DRIVER: TO THE youthful, Betty Driver will be remembered as Betty Turpin (later Betty Williams), the barmaid, shoulder to cry on and wife of the policeman Cyril Turpin in Granada television's Coronation Street, whose cast she joined in 1969.
She will also be remembered by an older audience for her appearances in repertory theatres and in stage revues; as the child star who took over from the popular singer Gracie Fields on a stage tour, doing some of her best-known numbers; and as the principal singer for a year with the leading dance orchestra leader of the time, Henry Hall, on his BBC radio programme, Henry Hall's Guest Night. She sang for seven years with Hall, and with him and far more mature artists than herself entertained the troops during the second World War.
Driver was one of the pre-feminist female singer-comedians who made their mark with a perky, slightly rebellious manner. There was little of the wilting English rose about the songs she sang or the parts she played, even if the bright edifice often concealed her own emotional pain. It helped that she was a large woman who once considered it a victory when she got her weight down to 13 stone.
Born in Leicester, she spent her childhood in Manchester. Her parents were a police inspector and a pianist mother, determined that her daughter should get a foothold in show business. In her memoir Betty: The Autobiography(2000), Driver wrote that she had been at the mercy of "an overbearing, ambitious, cruel and pushy mother whose insistence on putting me into show business at a young age effectively robbed me of my childhood . . . [Nellie Driver] was one of the most loathed women in the business."
At the age of seven, Betty joined the Terence Byron repertory company and played with The Quaintesques, a group of men dressed as women who visited Manchester once a year. When mother and daughter came to London at the end of her schooling – at her mother's instigation, they presented themselves at the stage door of the Prince of Wales theatre. Without a band rehearsal, Betty was allowed to go on stage and sing a number of songs, and was hired to appear as Gracie Fields's double in Mr Tower of London. She was later hired for a long tour of the revue. Films, BBC broadcasts and appearances in the revues of leading impresarios followed.
Betty appeared in It's Foolish But It's Funat the London Coliseum, and did film work, notably in Ealing Studios comedies. She made Boots! Boots!(1934) with George Formby, Penny Paradise(1938), Let's Be Famous(1939) and Facing the Music(1941). Her hit recordings started with Jubilee Baby(1934), and went on to include The Sailor With The Navy Blue Eyes, McNamaras Band, Pick The Petals of a Daisy, Jubilee Babyand September in the Rain.
Aided by her sister, Freda, she took control of her own financial affairs, only to find that instead of banking her earnings — which often reached the then impressive sum of £150 a week — her parents had spent it all on cars, drink and other luxuries for themselves.
But she was still bankable. In 1952 the BBC gave her her own regular radio programme, A Date with Betty,and she married Wally Peterson, from South Africa.
In 1958, she starred on stage in The Lovebirds, followed by a short break as a housewife in South Africa, which did not suit her. Back in Britain, she played in Pillar to Post, made cabaret appearances and did summer seasons, including the immensely popular What a Racketwith Arthur Askey at Blackpool. Finding that her husband was not only a philanderer, but was spending her money freely, she separated from him after seven years of marriage. They were divorced 11 years later.
It was her switch to drama that led to her long association with Granada and Coronation Street. She appeared in the TV series Pardon the Expression(1965-66), a Coronation Streetspin-off and appeared with James Bolam in the Granada production of Love On the Dole(1968), before making her first appearance in Coronation Streetin June 1969.
She later became one of the longest-serving characters in the soap, known for serving up her signature dish, Betty’s hotpot, in the Rovers Return – indeed, so well-known that a Lancashire pie manufacturer marketed a hotpot to Betty’s recipe. Cyril died in 1974, and in 1995 her character married her wartime sweetheart, Billy Williams, only to be widowed again two years later. She appeared in more than 2,800 episodes, the final one broadcast last May.
Driver took part in a Royal Variety Performance in 1989, and 10 years later was appointed MBE. She kept faith with her northern roots by living near Altrincham, Cheshire, and collected paintings and antiques.
Betty (Elizabeth Mary) Driver, born May 20th, 1920; died October 15th, 2011