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I hear the Golden Girls of Eastbourne before I see them – hooting laughter leaking out of a house in the East Sussex seaside town. Inside, I find five energetic women in their 80s and 90s, sitting in a knick-knack-filled living room and talking over one another like teenagers.
“None of us stripped, did we?”
“Oh nooo. We didn’t have rotating tassels!”
Friends for more than half a century, the women met in rehearsals and aftershow parties while working as dancers, singers and comedy stooges in the 1960s and 70s. Their careers took them from cruise ships and panto to British seaside theatres, where they performed in sequin dresses, high-cut leotards and huge feather headdresses, sharing bills with the biggest stars of the day.
Over the decades, Eastbourne became one of the places where they made their names. In later life, they have gathered here again – this time not for work, but for friendship. It was this sisterhood that caught the eye of photographer David Pickens. A retired circus performer, he was once part of a double act with one of the group’s sons. “I was hearing stories of his mother and her friends and how they were locally known affectionately as the Golden Girls and I thought, that would make a great story,” he says. “They’ve got amazing life stories, amazing camaraderie. What I really admired was the fact they were all women in a very male-dominated world, and then all those men have gone now, and they’re the last people standing.”
He decided to photograph them at the town’s Royal Hippodrome – a Victorian theatre where all the women performed when they were younger.
“It’s a beautiful theatre,” says former dancer and dance teacher Jenny Lawrenson, 83. Petite, with the voice of Mary Poppins and the impeccable posture of a lifelong ballet dancer, she says she remembers it better for another reason – its tilted stage: “You’re dancing uphill!”
“I’ve got something to tell you from the Hippodrome,” says Beryl Plummer, a gentle 90-year-old with lilac hair, red-framed glasses and a passion for cat-inspired crockery. My host today, she ferries out cups of tea and homemade rock cakes as we chat. She and her late husband Tommy were a smash-hit double act: he played the xylophone and the drums while she tap-danced alongside him. They were a mainstay of variety shows – multi-act performances that could span magicians to musicians, animal acts to a man known for balancing a cartwheel on his head.
“I was coming to the end of the act with my tap dancing, and I had on a halterneck, which dropped down.” She leans forward. “I had nothing underneath. The press were in that night.” She chuckles. “The newspaper cutting said: ‘… and she never missed a beat’.”
“You told me you never stripped!” someone shouts.
The Plummers were so popular they once topped a bill ahead of the Beatles. “They were just normal boys, but you could not hear anything they sang because of all the screaming,” says Plummer.
Another time, they were booked to support Cliff Richard, but the show was called off early after performers including comedian and singer Des O’Connor were pelted with eggs and potatoes. “An announcement was made to say: ‘Give the acts a chance!’”
Plummer isn’t the only one with stories like these. Everyone here today worked with some of the biggest names of the time.
Vicki Goodwin, 85, was a dancer and singer who appeared in shows including Dad’s Army, and performed with her second husband, comedian Ken Goodwin. Jacquie Toye, an 83-year-old former comedy stooge for Ken Dodd – and committed heckler this afternoon – had a West End career that included playing Velma Kelly in the UK’s first production of Chicago. But rather than show off about their greatest hits, the former showgirls prefer to laugh about all the things that went wrong.
Goodwin remembers being found by Bruce Forsyth after breaking her arm. “I fell down a flight of stairs outside his dressing room.” Toye recalls tripping over a plug while rushing for a curtain call, turning off the electricity in a theatre. “I had to apologise to everyone!”
“I worked in a club in Cairo,” says Jan Lynton, 82, a former showgirl, whose performances took her from Japan to Egypt. Her chin-length bob is as sharp as her punchlines. “We did the number with big feathers on our heads, shimmying back and forth. The girl opposite me shimmied back and went into a candle. When she came up, her feathers were on fire. She didn’t know.” Her friends gasp. “Somebody threw a jug of water over her!”
The women say that a shared sense of humour has helped them to bond over the years. Back in the day it was how they’d deal with the less glamorous side of show business. The digs for performers were often ropey. They talk about rooms in Glasgow with black mould and places in London with no hot water. Lawrenson remembers doing a season in Cardiff with her dance partner, Robert Marlowe, and looking for accommodation. “The landlord took us into the bathroom and there was a chipped, brown rusty bath. And he said: ‘And do you know, [comedian] Gladys Morgan had a bath here!’ My God!”
Being a young woman in the industry came with its own challenges: bottoms being pinched, stagehands getting their mates backstage to ogle, producers dangling dubious invitations. “You just took it in your stride,” says Lynton. “An agent chased me around a table once. He was horrible.”
The groups’ lives diverged eventually. Lawrenson was only in the business for five years before leaving to settle down with her husband. She moved from Bournemouth to East Sussex in 2005 after his death, and after the loss of one of her twin daughters, too. Plummer and her husband kept threatening to retire, but never quite did it until 2016, settling in Eastbourne. Lynton became a choreographer, only retiring in 2022, while Goodwin moved to Spain and then Llandudno with Ken, until his death from Alzheimer’s in 2012.
“We’ve all been through the mill one way or another,” says Toye. “We’ve all had tragedy in our lives.” She lost her husband. Sisterhood becomes of utmost importance in your later years, they all agree.
“I rely on all my lovely friends here, and if I need them, they will come to me,” says Plummer. “Oh no we won’t!” heckles Toye. Still, when Plummer had a serious operation in 2019, Toye took her to hospital and brought her home several weeks later, decorating her house with welcome home balloons. She also stayed with Lynton when she experienced a period of memory loss.
“The group is inclined to drop things for you if you need it,” says Lynton. “We’re there for each other, and even if you’re not there physically, you can talk on the phone.” Goodwin calls Lynton most nights, and Plummer every evening.
“It’s nothing really, after this length of time,” she says. Then she jokes: “I like to know she’s not lying on the floor in the kitchen.”
But the Golden Girls are not just a support network. They have approached retirement with the same vim they brought to their careers. Their days are filled with lunches, showbiz-themed talks at local hotels and whatever else they can find to keep busy. Toye has a hospital radio show. Lawrenson runs an exercise class. Tomorrow, they’re going to a “gentleman friend’s” tower-block flat to watch an airshow. “He calls it Ladies’ Day at the tower,” I’m told as they all howl.
Lynton says she doesn’t feel her age. “I have to be honest – and we all feel the same – I sometimes say of others, ‘There was this old person.’ And I think, ‘No, I’m old.’ But they just seem a lot older, because of their mentality.” She recently bought some coasters that say “Growing old disgracefully”, she tells me. It’s how she intends to see out her later years. “Age is a number,” she says.
“What’s the secret to that attitude?”
“Gin and tonic,” says Toye. And the laughter starts again.
Jacquie Toye
This is the Cambridge Theatre in the West End. I’m playing Velma in the first UK production of Chicago. Every night there was a buzz.
I also worked with Morecambe and Wise in pantomime at the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, playing a boy. There was suddenly a lot of laughter. Eric had poured a big back of crisps down the back of my jacket then slapped me on the back. I couldn’t get the crisps out!
Jan Lynton
This is me at Birmingham Hippodrome. I was playing the Genie of the Ring with ventriloquist Keith Harris. It was a production that had been at the London Palladium.
When you did a summer season or panto, the cast became like a new family. And as you were going to different places, you’d meet up with people you’d worked with before.
Beryl Plummer
I was a dancer at Butlin’s, where I met my husband. We started a double act, Tommy Wallis and Beryl. It was a hit from the start. This was taken during the summer season at the Cliffs Pavilion in Southend-on-Sea in 1969.
Variety shows often had strange acts. There was a chap who used to have a cartwheel on his head, and somebody had an act with chimps, that used to pinch the girls’ bottoms.
Jenny Lawrenson
These photos were taken to promote my dancing act with Robert Marlowe. We performed on the first Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth cruises going to New York. There was huge first class accommodation, then cabin class was smaller, and then tourist had a very low ceiling. I heard one dancing act lost her wig when it got caught on the sprinkler. She left it up there.
Vicki Goodwin
I was 16 when I came back from the hairdresser blond, and my mother said: ‘My God, you’d better not let your father see that.’ And I’ve been blond ever since.
I reckon I knew I wanted to perform from when I was 12. There were queues for auditions – 400 people for one part. When seasons would finish, we all went out and got jobs. We were never out of work.
