Emily’s mother, Joyce Golding, a well-respected variety performer and impressionist during the Fifties, appearing on the stage, as well as broadcasting on radio and TV, also recalls Roger fondly. “We appeared together in a pantomime Jack And The Beanstalk at the Brixton Empress Theatre and duetted the popular song No Two People Were So In Love. I remember that the orchestra started, and they decided to send us up by playing the music in the wrong key! Roger was on TV just a few years ago, being interviewed about his career, and he mentioned that we had worked together in panto.”
Joyce continues: “He was a nice man and in fact, I knew Roger before Dorothy had even met him. Dorothy and I had a mutual friend Betty Newman, who Dorothy had gone to school with in Wales and who was Anna Neagle’s under-study. I was with my husband Fred, who was Dorothy’s brother, and Betty at Streatham Ice Rink when Roger walked in with his first wife, the ice skater Doorn Van Steyn. I think that they were living in Streatham at the time. Roger was a friend of Betty’s so we were introduced. At the time he was in the successful West End play The Little Hut, understudying an actor called David Tomlinson. Later, of course, Betty invited Roger to a party at Dorothy’s home in Bexley and the rest of the story is well documented.”
Joyce met Dorothy’s brother Fred – also known as William Squires – when she was working in Blackpool. “At the time Fred was Dorothy’s manager and he asked me out, but the Squires family didn’t think that I was good enough for their little boy! Funnily enough years many later Dorothy was exactly the same about Emily’s boyfriends – none of them were ever good enough for her!”
Emily is keen to scotch persistent rumours that Dorothy was a drinker or, worse still, performed onstage while under the influence. “She never really drank – Dorothy only had to have a couple of drinks for it to have an effect. She was certainly never, ever drunk onstage. That’s what made me so angry about the book and subsequent television series of The Long Firm in which Dorothy was depicted as being inebriated while performing. I remember that she would perhaps have one glass of sherry before she went onstage, probably to give her confidence, and later it was just a glass of wine. But she was too much of a professional to allow drink to affect her performances, and she never swore onstage either which was another myth perpetuated by The Long Firm.”© 2004 www.dorothysquires.co.uk
