The actor June Spencer, who has died aged 105, will be best remembered as Peggy Woolley (formerly Archer) in the long-running BBC radio soap opera The Archers, a part she played from the show’s pilot episode in 1950 until August 2022.
Peggy was a pivotal character, the matriarch, and central to the plotlines even in her old age. Spencer always believed that, while she may have shared her alter ego’s steel and determination, in real life she had a sense of humour, which Peggy lacked.
Already an established radio actor, Spencer was originally contracted for a five-part run of the programme in May 1950. The show proper started on New Year’s Day in 1951, and in the early years Spencer played both Peggy and Irish baker’s assistant Rita Flynn. Often described as “an everyday story of country folk”, The Archers was to sound as genuine as possible. “We were told it was not a drama: it was real life overheard,” she told the Guardian in 2019.
Spencer left in 1953 in order to raise her family, but returned first as Rita in 1956 and then as Peggy in 1962, when her replacement in the role, Thelma Rogers, departed the series.
Peggy was introduced as a migrant “townie” with little knowledge of the country (and thus an avatar for the audience, who might need certain things about rural life explained to them). Her alcoholic husband, Jack Archer, died in 1972 and she remained landlady of their pub, The Bull, at first rebuffing the advances of a local businessman, Jack Woolley (Arnold Peters), whom she eventually married in 1991, an event deemed noteworthy enough to mark the programme’s 40th anniversary.
Peggy was strait-laced and somewhat old fashioned, but was a loyal wife and faced adversity with grim fortitude. When a storyline was proposed about Jack succumbing to dementia, in 2003, Spencer became heavily involved in its development: her real-life husband, Roger Brocksom, had recently died from the disease, and she was keen to raise awareness about the plight of carers.
When Jack died in 2014, his gradual deterioration over a decade sensitively portrayed, the scene in which Peggy said goodbye to him, listening to Al Bowlly’s recording of Love Is the Sweetest Thing, was a genuinely moving piece of radio.
Born in Sherwood, Nottingham, June was the only child of William Spencer, a commercial traveller for Crawford’s Biscuits, and his wife, Rosalind (nee Thorne). She was stagestruck as a three-year-old when cast as King of the Land of Nod in a school production, and claimed she was hooked upon getting her first laugh.
After a happy time at Mountford House preparatory school, she enjoyed herself less at Nottingham high school, but extra-curricular elocution and drama classes helped her to achieve a London Guildhall School of Music and Drama performers’ diploma. She also studied part-time at Stockwin Music College from the age of 12 and attended dance classes. At 15 she left school in order to look after her mother, who was in failing health.
Taking a job as a junior governess at a small private school enabled her to fund her drama lessons: these led to an appearance as Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Sir Frank Benson’s Company at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham. She also wrote monologues, which she performed as after-dinner entertainment at Masonic lodge events. Two volumes of these were published – June Spencer’s Monologues (1941) and Odes and Oddities (1946) – and she wrote three satirical radio programmes, plus material for the comedian Cyril Fletcher.
While she was doing war work at Nottingham City Treasurer’s Office, her versatility and gift for playing younger than her real age earned her a professional break as a 12-year-old in Quiet Wedding at Nottingham repertory theatre (1943). She stayed for a year, playing any child role required, and everything else from juvenile leads to an old woman to a houseboy. After a salary dispute when cast as the lead in Alice in Wonderland for the theatre’s Christmas show, she walked out and instead volunteered as a telephone switchboard operator (known as “hello girls”), and performed in morale-boosting stage shows for the forces.
She had joined the BBC radio repertory company in the Midlands in 1943, and appeared in numerous productions including Children’s Hours productions (from 1944), Dick Barton – Special Agent (1948) and Bartholomew Fair (1949) before The Archers began in 1950. Among the radio productions she appeared in at the same time as the soap opera was Guilty Party (1954) – an appearance in its small-screen incarnation (1956) was a rare foray into television, though she contributed voice work to a David Rudkin Thirty-Minute Theatre (Bypass, 1972) and was in an episode of Doctors (2000).
Spencer was in constant demand for opening fetes and the like, appeared as herself on an edition of Songs of Praise, and in 2010 was a castaway on Desert Island Discs. Her autobiography, The Road to Ambridge, was published the same year.
She was awarded an honorary degree by Nottingham University in 2012 and a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Audio Drama awards in 2014. She was made an OBE in 1991 and a CBE in 2017, and was granted Freedom of the City of London in 2010.
In 2021 Spencer was invited to Clarence House with her co-stars to celebrate The Archers’ 70th anniversary, and cut the cake with Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall. She retired from the show the following year, aged 103.
In 1942 she married Brocksom, whom she had met on holiday when they were both 17. He died in 2001. Their son, David, died in 2006. She is survived by their daughter, Ros, and a granddaughter.
• June Rosalind Spencer, actor, born 14 June 1919; died 8 November 2024
