I first met Patricia Routledge in 1972 after I went to see a show called Cowardy Custard at the Mermaid theatre in London, a musical compilation of Noël Coward’s best works. Patricia would have been 43, and she did this number called I Went to a Marvellous Party. And I don’t think I’d ever seen anything so exciting or thrilling in the theatre before, including Laurence Olivier’s Othello.
I had the opportunity to meet Patricia in a television studio shortly afterwards, and of course I told her that her performance was the greatest thing ever. And to begin with, our friendship was really based on our shared enthusiasm for Coward, whom she had met and knew. That devotion never wavered for either of us.
The last time I shared a stage with her was just last year. It would have been Coward’s 125th birthday and there was a big show at the Prince of Wales theatre in London’s West End. Top of the bill was Patricia doing this very same number. She was 95 and she could still belt it out. Of course, we think of her as Hyacinth Bucket [from the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances] – how wonderful to be able to create a definitive character like that, known across the world. But she always thought of herself quite as much as a singer and actress as a comedian, and was perhaps most proud of the work she did on Broadway – she won a Tony award for Darling of the Day – as well as those incredible monologues she did for Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads.
We got to know each other well. She always lived alone but was very sociable. As well as Noël Coward, the other thing we bonded over was that her family, like mine, was from Cheshire. She grew up in Tranmere, where her father had a haberdasher shop. And so she thought of herself very much as a north-west of England person. If she was aspirational though, unlike Hyacinth, it was always intellectually rather than socially. She was highly intelligent; she had been to the University of Liverpool at a time when not many women went. When I became chancellor of the University of Chester 10 years ago, I said that the first person I wanted to give an honorary degree was Patricia, because the north-west mattered so much to her.
The ceremony was in Chester Cathedral. There was a podium to stand on with a microphone, but she pushed the podium to one side, disdained the microphone, and instead stood in front of the high altar and gave the best speech to undergraduates that I have ever heard. It was about the virtues of integrity and hard work, and being the best you can be at whatever you choose to do. At the end she recited a long passage from Shakespeare by heart; there were a thousand people in the cathedral and they all had tears in their eyes.
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When I was an MP in the 1990s I would see her in the House of Commons. She wasn’t a political animal, but her best friend for many years was Betty Boothroyd; Betty, the former Tiller Girl, was the speaker at the time. They were cut from a very similar cloth. Strong, strong personalities. It was quite something to see them walking together through the Palace of Westminster.
She remained that same formidable force to the very end. My wife and I would go down to see her in Chichester, where she lived for probably the last 25 years. She had a lovely house but when that became too much for her, she moved into a very nice residential home nearby. She’d be in the upstairs sitting room, which had always been cleared for Dame Patricia to have visitors. Tea and cakes and biscuits and sandwiches were all brought in; it was a little bit like having an audience with the Queen.
She loved to talk about the theatre and she was working to the end; her instinct was to say “yes, yes” to whatever she was offered. On one of the last times we talked, the conversation came around to going to heaven; the church was always very important to her, she raised an awful lot of money for Chichester Cathedral. And we discussed who she would first hope to meet at the pearly gates. And, of course, it was Noël Coward.
She was convinced that she would be going to a marvellous party.