Hattie Jacques - Early Life

Early Life

Hattie Jacques was born Josephine Edwina Jaques in Sandgate, Kent on 7 February 1922, the daughter of Robin and Mary Jaques. Her father was an RAF pilot and footballer for Clapton Orient and Fulham who was killed in an aeroplane crash 18 months after her birth. Her mother was an amateur actress. Her brother was the artist and illustrator Robin Jacques.

Educated at the Godolphin and Latymer School, she served as a nurse in the VAD and worked as a welder in a factory in north London during the Second World War. Around this time an American soldier, Major Charles Kearney, proposed to her; Jacques later claimed he had been killed in action. While researching for his Jacques 2007 biography, however, author Andy Merriman discovered that Kearney had a wife and children in the United States when he had proposed to Jacques and in 1984 had been living in Massachusetts.

At the age of 20, she made her theatrical debut at the Players' Theatre in London. Almost immediately, she became a regular performer with the company, appearing in music hall revues and playing the Fairy Queen in their Victorian-style pantomimes. It has been reported she sometimes "sang Marie Lloyd songs and ended her act by leaping into the air and doing the splits".

After achieving success in radio, television and film, she returned to the Players' regularly as a performer, writer and director. It was during her time at the Players' that she acquired the nickname "Hattie" – appearing in a minstrel show called Coal Black Mammies for Dixie, she took to the stage blacked up and was likened to the American actress Hattie McDaniel (of Gone with the Wind fame). Thereafter the name stuck.