Teddie Beverley, last of the Beverley Sisters, who were once Britain’s highest-paid female entertainers

Teddie Beverley, who has died aged 99, was one of the Beverley Sisters, the singing trio who lit up the Fifties with such hits as I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and Little Drummer Boy; wholesome but desirable, they were the brightest lights in Britain’s gloomy postwar years.

Teddie and her twin Babs, and their older sister Joy, were as famous for their identical clothes and their blonde curls as for their close-harmony versions of songs that included Sisters, How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? and Little Donkey.

Sisters, written specially by Irving Berlin, contained the celebrated line “Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister”. They were, indeed, inseparable, and habitually finished each other’s sentences – when they appeared together on Desert Island Discs one of them advised: “Don’t worry about who says what, we all think the same.”

In 1989 Teddie caused a stir when she admitted on television that she had taken Babs’s driving test for her, and that both twins had often posed as each other to vote if the other were busy.

They were, by some measure, Britain’s highest-paid female entertainers, and were the first British girl band to break America; in 2002 Guinness World Records named them as the world’s longest surviving vocal group without a change in line-up.

They have been called the Spice Girls of their day, and, indeed, Joy was married to an England football captain, Billy Wright, making them precursors of “Posh’n’Becks”. When they married at Poole register office in Dorset – not, perhaps, the Irish castle favoured by Victoria Adams and David Beckham – the nation went slightly bonkers. At the ceremony itself there was such a crush that Teddie lost her shoes.

Their aura of sweet innocence was the perfect counterpoint to their often risqué repertoire, with such numbers as We Like to Do Things Like That; It’s Illegal, It’s Immoral, or It Makes You Fat; and the pro-contraception ditty, We Have to Be so Careful all the Time, which also poked fun at the BBC’s broadcasting standards.

The sisters had showbiz in their blood. Teddie Beverley, real name Hazel Pamela Chinery, and her sister Babette, or Babs, were born on May 5 1927, three years after their older sister Joycelyn.

They were Cockneys, from Bethnal Green; their parents, George and Victoria, had been the music-hall act Coram and Mills, celebrated for their rendition of Are You Lonesome Tonight?, but had retired to run a shop. Victoria instilled values of collectivity into the girls – “a little less ‘I’, a lot more ‘we’,” she would tell them – and they were, in a sense, like triplets. Into old age, they would answer the phone: “Hello, one of the Beverley Sisters speaking.”

The family lived in a two-up, two-down in Homerton, near Hackney, and the girls shared a bed into their teens. During the Second World War they were evacuated as a threesome to Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, and amused themselves by working out close-harmony arrangements of hymns.

The twins trained to be typists while Joy joined the RAF, but when they auditioned for an Ovaltine ad for the photographer Jock Ware, he was knocked out by their singing and recommended them to the BBC producer Cecil Madden.

He became their manager and named them the Beverley Sisters. They auditioned for him at the BBC in 1944 – and working in the next studio was Glenn Miller, who liked what he heard and took them off with him to record with his orchestra at the BBC’s secret wartime studio in Bedford. A few months later his plane disappeared over the English Channel.

In 1947 the sisters began working for the BBC at Alexandra Palace, making the series Three Little Girls on View, which soon became Those Beverley Sisters and ran for seven years.

They went on to sign to Columbia Records, and in 1952 they made the first of five appearances at the Royal Variety Show. In December 1953 they made it to No 6 in the UK charts with I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, beating off competition from Billy Cotton and his Band, who could only reach No 11 with their version.

By then they had already cracked America, appearing with the Glenn Miller Orchestra on NBC, and towards the end of the decade they played The Ed Sullivan Show, whose host pronounced them “sassy but classy”.

By the end of the decade they were earning a reported £1,000 a week. In 1960 ITV tempted them away from the BBC with a better deal; the new set was designed to look like a home.

Though they effectively retired towards the end of the 1960s, they enjoyed a feted afterlife as gay icons following an appearance at Peter Stringfellow’s Hippodrome in 1985 alongside the Little Foxes, the band formed by Teddie’s daughter, Sasha, and Joy’s daughters, Vicky and Babette. As one of the Beverley Sisters recalled, with all the dry ice, lasers and pounding noise, “we felt we were back in the air raids”.

They went on to grace Gay Pride events, aided by a disco remix of Sisters, released a new album, Sparkle, and played cabaret – where, Joy noted, some of their audiences wore “more make-up in an evening than we wear in a year”.

In 1990 they famously danced onstage with Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth, her last as prime minister and party leader.

There had been a darker side to their rise to fame, it transpired. When Teddie Beverley was asked by the Telegraph if she would publish her memoirs, she replied that she would have to wait until certain people were dead: “You always have to say what this producer or that producer did for your career. You can never say what they really did or tried to do in darkened wings, with their trousers in disarray.”

In 1995 the sisters made headlines when they were hired to perform at a lavish New Year’s Eve party for the footballer John Fashanu, only for the party organiser to run off with their fee. The sisters were each appointed MBE in 2006.

Teddie married Peter Felix, a British waterskiing champion who later became a dentist, in 1959. That was dissolved in 1972, and she married, secondly, Donald Cottage, a property developer, who presented his fiancée with a £40,000 diamond ring once worn by Elizabeth Taylor. He predeceased her and she is survived by her daughter from her first marriage. Joy died in 2015, Babs in 2018.

​Teddie Beverley, born May 5 1927, died June 17 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]