Violet
Carson (1st September 1898 to 26th December 1983)
As a copper-bottomed Northerner I’ve been watching Coronation Street for decades. My mum
has always watched it and I can remember her watching it in black and white
when battle-axe Ena Sharples
was a regular fixture (my mum was watching it a portable television - I thought
we were rich - a television in a room
other than the main living room – blimey!)
Even though Ena Sharples left the show in
1980 this no-nonsense guardian of Victorian morals is still one of the dramas
well-drawn characters. I remember seeing her interviewed once and she had a
posh voice, wore no hairnet and had taken her coat off (in Coronation Street
she always seemed to be wearing a coat even though she was indoors.) In real
life this lynchpin of the Rovers Return and relic of a by-gone age lived
quietly at her home north of Blackpool Tower. Here I am outside her detached
bungalow where she died in her sleep on Boxing Day in 1983.
I only knew
Violet Carson as hair-netted harridan Ena but she
enjoyed a long career in radio and television as a singer, pianist and actress.
She was born in Ancoats, Manchester. Dad was the boss
of a flour mill. Perhaps because her mum was an amateur singer and she learnt
the piano at school Violet got into performing. Soon Violet and her sister
Nellie had a singing act and were The Carson Sisters. The piano lessons were justified
when she got a job at a cinema playing the piano to silent films.
Aged 28 she
got married but her husband, a cricketer, died within two years. They had no
children and Violet Carson never re-married. She must have got echoes of this
trauma later in Coronation Street
when Ena Sharples was
created and was permanently single after her fiancée had died young in the
Great War.
Aged 37 she joined BBC Radio in
Manchester and was on the wireless regularly covering a wide repertoire of
musical hall style songs to operatic arias (she had a fine soprano voice.) Not
only was she the pianist for the Mabel and Wilfred Pickles radio show Have A Go for six years but was a
presenter for Woman's Hour for five
years (I still listen to it now.) She acted in countless dramas in radio and on
stage.
Aged 62 she
won the roll of the flint-faced Ena Sharples in Coronation
Street and remained there for twenty years. Ena
was known for moralising in the snug at the Rover’s Return pub, supping milk
stout and her many clashes with Elsie Tanner (Pat Phoenix). These two
characters couldn’t be more different - Ena was ugly,
manly and gloomy whereas Elsie was attractive and blazing with sexuality. Ena’s coat was usually buttoned up and Elsie’s dresses were
nearly pinging off their buttons they were so tight-fitting. Ena was afraid of no-one, exuded a dour frostiness, thought
smiling was a sign of weakness but was a cornerstone of Victorian morals.
Through her
70's Violet suffered a series of strokes and played Ena
intermittently. At 74 she suffered nervous breakdown and took more time away
from the cobbles. Her final appearance was in April 1980. She was due to come
back but became ill with pernicious anaemia (body can’t make enough healthy
blood.) The storyline claimed that Ena had moved to
Lytham near Blackpool temporarily. In real life she’d moved to
Thornton-Cleveleys near Blackpool many years before - to this bungalow. She
lived here with sister Nellie and was forced to leave the drama due to ill
health. She had an operation to remove an abscess but her health never
recovered.
The
85-year-old died in her sleep on Boxing Day in 1983. She’d done well: was given
an OBE, had a rose cultivar named after her (the 'Violet Carson) and completed
1148 episodes of Coronation Street.
Wax figures of her made for at Madame Tussaud’s in
London and New York.
It
was a quiet road. I had a stroll up and down it and only one car passed by in
fifteen minutes. The bungalows and houses look onto a green hedge over which is
Bispham Gala Field. I’d have gone up to Violet’s bungalow and touched the door
handle but there was someone stood in the front window watching me. There was no
blue plaque. I drove up the road and came out by The Norbrek
Hotel by the sea within a couple of minutes.
Though
the bungalow is within a ball’s throw of a church a cemetery Violet was cremated
at Carleton Crematorium a mile or so away. I’ve been there before but went to
have a look anyway. There’s a plaque in the Memorial Gardens.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Pointing at Violets detached
bungalow where she died…
To the crematorium where Violet was
turned to dust…
Into the Memorial Gardens…
