Alas! It is 29 years since the world was deprived of one of its more colourful culinary characters: Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey — better known as double bigamist, child abandoner, amphetamine user, dangerous driver and celebrity cook Fanny Cradock.
Fanny’s eccentricities presented themselves early. She was sent to private schools, where — according to her Telegraph obituary — she “was on intimate terms with the court of Louis XIV”. She was expelled from one for encouraging her fellow pupils to contact the spirit world.
She eloped with her first husband, a pilot, when she was 17, but his plane crashed a few months after the wedding — or a few days, according to Fanny: “I married on Wednesday, settled his debts on Friday and he died on Sunday.” Either way, she was a pregnant widow.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, she took an understandable desire to prioritise putting food on the table to… questionable lengths:
She then married civil engineer Arthur Chapman, had another son, Christopher, and “when this second son was four months old, she abandoned them both”. As the Telegraph says: this marriage is “not mentioned in her highly unreliable memoirs”
(To be fair to her, biographer Clive Ellis, in Fabulous Fanny Cradock: TV’s Outrageous Queen of Cuisine, says “she was so poor that she was forced to give up her elder son to his paternal grandparents”.)
Chapman either was, or became, a Catholic, so wouldn’t grant her a divorce, so when she married her third husband, Gregory Dye, it was bigamous — although she did leave him a few weeks later for the love of her life, Major John Cradock (who was married with four children).
She had lived with her grandparents as a teenager, and earned her keep by cooking every night (while dressed for dinner, at their insistence — a habit which stuck), but wartime was when she learned to be truly creative in the kitchen. The Telegraph again:
She also wrote bodice-rippers, and then became a cookery writer after the war. Live touring cookery demonstrations followed, and then — after a nose job from plastic surgery legend Sir Archibald McIndoe — television.
From the 1950s to the 70s, they encouraged culinary adventure in postwar Britain, and (ODNB again) “developed Johnny’s character as the subservient sidekick, good only for handing Fanny her frying pan and knowing which wine to serve”. Their reign lasted two decades, but…
Her attitude to the amateur (but clearly gifted) cook who had won a contest to prepare a feast for Edward Heath was a bit rich coming from someone whose
speciality [at home] was a dish called ‘Dog’s Dinner’: mashed sardines and boiled egg, squashed onto brown bread
But, intriguingly, she was an early pioneer of organic food. Ellis says “she campaigned against artificial flavourings and fertilisers”, and her tomatoes at home were raised on a feed made from tea and urine, nicknamed
Madam’s Tonic.
Still, she was a… challenging person.
This was not the last time she would be on the wrong side of the law, or indeed the road
In 1983 Mrs Cradock was again prosecuted for dangerous driving. She had swerved across her lane (perhaps following her grandmother’s advice to chauffeurs to “stick to the middle of the road”) and caused a collision. When the other driver tried to talk to her she shouted, “How dare you hit my car!” and drove off.
The other driver followed her for 15 miles, “honking and signalling”. He finally overtook her and stood in front of the car, waving her down. Mrs Cradock proceeded to run him over. In court she told the judge that the other driver’s “threatening behaviour” had made her afraid to stop.
By this time, she and Johnny had married — in 1977, because she had, apparently, heard that the troublesome Catholic second husband had died. He hadn’t, making this a second bigamous marriage — although she was never prosecuted for that.
After her death, her ‘erratic’ behaviour was put down to a diet of amphetamines (to suppress her appetite, despite assurances to viewers that her food wouldn’t make them fat) and downers (to allow her to sleep after all that speed).
In 1987, she went missing for seven days during another court case, this time over £80,000 worth of jewellery stolen from her house. When she turned up, she blamed the police for not looking for her, claiming she’d been at home all the time.
Her story even has a weird footnote: her daughter-in-law Nicky de Peche Cradock was once Kingsley Amis’ lodger — and “went to bed with both Kingsley and his oldest son, Philip, who was then aged 14”.
That can’t be put down to genetics, of course, but still: colourful family.
