“There’s so much more I want to do”
IT WAS in an underground shelter, with bombs raining down above, that Sheila Hancock discovered a gift for entertaining people.
She was just seven when the Blitz started, living with father Enrico, mum Ivy and older sister Billie in the London suburb of Bexleyhearth. Huddled underground during bombing raids Sheila would entertain the assembled throng with impersonations of Cicely Courtnidge, Evelyn Laye and her contemporary, ‘little’ Julie Andrews.
“I must have been the only person in Bexleyheath who wanted the bombs to fall nearby,” she recalled later.
Nearly 90 years on, Sheila is still entertaining, be it with her best-selling books and TV appearances, most recently in the detective series Unforgotten, or just being her funny, engaging truthful self on Just A Minute and Celebrity Gogglebox.
She first discovered a love for showing-off when, as a precocious five-year-old, she would regale customers at her father’s pub, The Carpenter’s Arms in King’s Cross, with the whole of the recently-released Disney film Snow White.
It was one of many pubs and hotels around the country that Enrico would manage for the brewery Brakspeare Beers and it was at another, the Blackgang Hotel on the Isle of Wight, that Sheila made her first dramatic entrance, being born there on February 22, 1933.
After Enrico left the hospitality business, just before the war, he took a job at the Vickers factory in Crayford. When war was declared, and the bombs started falling, Enrico initially refused to evacuate Sheila and Billie, reasoning that if the little Princesses were staying put then so should his daughters.
But by May 1941, with London either ablaze or in ruins, Sheila and Billie were evacuated to
