Quintessentially English in her style and manner, the popular singer Rosemary Squires has died aged 94. Equally at home in front of a big band or in an intimate cabaret setting and with a penchant for jazz, she was also happy to mix it with comedy performers on television and radio.
When another singer described her as “commercial” it was a compliment, signifying Squires’ professionalism in dealing successfully with differing musical assignments. Over the six decades of her career, Squires earned such sobriquets as the “Queen of the Jingles” – for 40 years, she was the voice of the Fairy Liquid TV advertisement, singing “For hands that do dishes to be as soft as your face ... mild green, Fairy liquid”, and enjoying the repeat fees – or Britain’s Doris Day, in tribute to the relaxed purity of her vocal sound.
She told BBC Dorset that she made her first radio broadcast for the BBC’s Children’s Hour programme when she was 12, but also emphasised how much she had loved dancing to the music she heard at the American bases, saying: “I’ve been thrown over many American soldiers’ shoulders in a jitterbug. Once you got in a corner and got carried away, it’s a wonder we weren’t all flung through the windows.”
At 20 and with a settled stage name, Squires moved to London and was soon immersed in the worlds of commercial sessions, radio broadcasts and summer seasons, working alongside star entertainers including Ken Dodd, Alma Cogan and Frankie Vaughan.
She recalled, somewhat ruefully, standing in for an absent singer with the rumbustious Tommy Sampson big band on their 1948 forces tour in Germany. Sent off on her own, she and her luggage were separated when the train divided prior to her arrival in Hamburg.
With a loaned dress and no idea what she was to sing, she had to “get through it somehow”, and she did. In her words, Sampson’s outfit was “a rebel band, but what a band it was”. Packed with future jazz stars, it was far too progressive for the dancing public. Back in the UK, Sampson dispensed with her services, saying he could not afford to pay her. “Well, he hadn’t paid me anyway, so I left.”
The 1950s and 60s were her performing heyday, with regular appearances on the BBC Light Programme shows Melody Time, Workers’ Playtime, and especially, Top Tunes, from 1955 onwards. “You did your own spot,” she remembered. “That really put you on your mettle, one tune going into another, all done ‘live’ before an audience.”
The BBC decided to stage Top Tunes on the Queen Mary over a 13-week series, sailing to and fro across the Atlantic, with Geraldo’s orchestra in tow. “We had first-class accommodation, and it was lovely,” she said, recalling that singer Gracie Fields had been among the passengers on one trip.
Squires’ comedy skills also seem to have been in demand, starting with the ITV series Let’s Stay Home in 1956, then After Hours with Michael Bentine for three episodes in 1958, and later, in 1967, with the comedians Ted Ray and Reg Varney in Hooray for Laughter. She also made TV appearances on Six-Five Special, with Pete Murray, and on Juke Box Jury. Briefly she had her own TV show, Rendezvous With Rosemary, in 1961.
Squires released 13 singles, one of which, Frankfurter Sandwiches, made in 1961 under the pseudonym of Joanne and the Streamliners, became a minor hit. But increasingly disenchanted by the rise of pop and rock, she moved to the US, where she stayed for 18 months, and gained a regular slot on the prestigious Johnny Carson Show, also performing with US stars Danny Kaye and Sammy Davis Jr, before making for home.
She recorded 11 albums, starting with Everything’s Coming Up Rosy for HMV in 1963 (reissued in Japan in 2012), and including two jazz releases for Spotlite and Mainstem among her more popular outings for Decca and Meridian.
Eventually Squires returned to her home city of Salisbury, Wiltshire, in 1983 and married retired police divisional commander Frank Lockyer in 1991, joking that her best financial decision was “marrying a man with a police pension”.
Content to concentrate on her work with local charities, she kept her career going with self-promoted tours, and her occasional participation in the singer Barbara Jay’s popular Ella Fitzgerald Songbook Show in the 90s, backed by saxophonist Tommy Whittle’s jazz quartet. Jay recalled: “She was a lovely lady, easy to work with. She was a star in her own right, with a unique, very fresh style.”
That same clear, perfect vocal quality encouraged her friend the saxophonist Vic Ash to help her create a Doris Day tribute show, accompanied by his jazz group and including fellow singer Dennis Lotis. Opening at Grays in Essex in October 1996, the show ran continuously for the next seven years. Her final hurrah came in 2012 with two special national tours celebrating both the Queen’s jubilee and Squires’ own in show business, culminating in two appearances at the Royal Festival Hall.
Born in Bristol as Joan Yarrow, she was the daughter of a civil servant and was brought up and educated in Salisbury after her family relocated there. Her mother came from a musical family, and Rosemary took singing lessons at St Edmund’s girls’ school in the city. She began to sing while still a teenager with local music groups and even a Polish military band, helping to entertain the troops at the UK and US army bases around the Salisbury area.
Squires was appointed MBE in 2004 and eight years later she received the British Music Hall Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Her husband predeceased her; she is survived by her sister, Julia, and a niece, Pat.
• Rosemary Squires (Joan Rosemary Yarrow), singer, born 7 December 1928; died 8 August 2023
