3:56pm Wednesday 13th January 2010
By Keith Hamilton
A GOLD, jewel-encrusted brooch presented to 1930s superstar, Gracie Fields, when she launched an ill-fated paddle steamer at Southampton, is expected to fetch hundreds of pounds at an auction later this month.
The brooch, in the form of a signal flag and featuring Miss Fields’s initials, GF, was given to Gracie by the Isle of Wight Steam Packet Company when she launched the paddle steamer, bearing her name, built by J Thornycroft at Woolston, on April 8,1936.
As the steamer slid down the slip-way Miss Fields gave a spirited rendition of her hit song, Sing As We Go, which has been described as an anthem for the Depression.
In July 1936, just a few weeks after the steamer’s launch, Gracie chartered the steamer to take orphans on a trip from Bournemouth to Brighton, where she was performing.
However, four years later, in 1940, the paddle-steamer Gracie Fields was sunk after she was bombed while evacuating troops from Dunkirk. Now Gracie Fields’s Southampton brooch and a silver salver, which also belonged to Miss Fields, are set to fetch a total of £700 at the London auction house, Bonhams, next Wednesday.
Gracie Fields, whose real name was Grace Stansfield, was born at Rochdale, Lancashire, on January 9 1898, so this Saturday marks the 112th anniversary of her birth.
From Rochdale she went on to become Britain’s best-loved female entertainer and was later to establish a home on the Mediter-ranean island of Capri.
The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) says: “From 1936 to 1939, she was the top female star at the British cinema box office.’’ In 1936, the year she came to Southampton, she starred in the film : Queen Of Hearts. The following year she signed a deal worth £200,000 to make four films for Twentieth Century Fox and these included Shipyard Sally, which was released in 1939.
The DNB adds : “Gracie Fields was a cultural phenomenon. She was a music hall star, who by being herself, the indomitable, eternal ‘Lancashire lass’ became a British national symbol of the 1930s.’’ The author JB Priestley said of Gracie : “Listen to her for a quarter of an hour and you will learn more about Lancashire women and Lancashire than you would from a dozen books on the subject.
“All the qualities are there: shrewdness, homely simplicity, irony, fierce independence and an impish delight in mocking whatever is thought to be affected and pretentious.’’ Dame Gracie Fields was 81 when she died on September 27,1979. In her will she left £270,153 and that would have been enough in 1979 to buy at least 13 houses in Southampton, as the average house cost £19,925.
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