UNITED KINGDOM. The fearsome Fanny Cradock, who wore a ball gown for her TV cookery demonstrations and could reduce grown men to mumbling nervous wrecks with a single stare, was the subject of “Fear of Fanny”, a dramatisation of her life and loves on BBC4 TV on Monday 23 October.

Fanny Cradock was a rude snob with undoubted talents, a combination that was the perfect recipe for compelling and amusing viewing. Brian Fillis’ dramatisation of Cradock’s career, which thrived between the 1950s and mid-1970s, was based on interviews with her friends and family. It starred Julia Davis in the lead role, with Mark Gatiss playing her subservient husband – “Come on Johnnie, hurry up!” was a frequently heard command during her TV demonstrations.

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But little of her Spiritualist beliefs were revealed, apart from a candlelit seance with Fanny Cradock depicted as the manipulative medium. What was missing? www.ParanormalReview.com is pleased to reveal a few aspects of “the other side” of Phyllis (Fanny) Cradock.

According to her obituary in The Daily Telegraph (she died on 27 December 1994), her mother, Bijou, was an actress and singer who gave her one-year-old daughter to her mother as a birthday present. Fanny remained with her grandmother until she was 10, so it was presumably she who introduced her to Spiritualism, as well as teaching her most of what she knew about food and wine. Her father was novelist and lyricist Archibald Thomas Pechey.

“Away from the table,” the obituary continued, “Fanny spent her early childhood dress-making and communing with the dead: ‘I was on intimate terms with the court of Louis XIV,’ she recalled.”

At the age of 15 she was expelled from her boarding school, the Downs, for encouraging other girls to contact the spirit world, according to one account, and another puts her age at 14 when she was expelled “for giving ouija board readings to younger girls”.

As well as being a high profile TV chef, Fanny Cradock was a prolific journalist and writer, producing novels under her own name, a series of cookbooks, and a 56-instalment partwork on cookery, as well as writing regular columns for The Daily Telegraph under the names Bon Viveur, Alsa Frances, Frances Dale, Nan Sortain and Philip Essex.

That last nom-de-plume was used for a series of articles on the lost city of Atlantis and that was also the topic of two of her novels – Gateway To Remembrance and The Eternal Echo – written under her own name but which she claimed were produced by automatic writing.

The flysheet on The Eternal Echo explains: “The Phyllis Cradock novels, she declares, are written through her, not by her, she being incapable of writing the superb prose or originating the lofty thoughts and philosophy they contain. Her Atlantean novels are both a literary curiosity and a portent for these days.”

Fanny and Johnnie were guests of honour at a Psychic News dinner in the 1970s at which she spoke of her Spiritualist beliefs.

According to Brian Fillis, the writer of this “Fear of Fanny”, in a feature for the Daily Mail, it was a conversation about reincarnation at their first meeting which led Major John Whitby Cradock to abandoned his wife and sons for Fanny.

Her recovery from bowel cancer, he adds, “was even more remarkable in that she refused all conventional treatments and claimed she was cured by a faith healer. She was convinced of her own clairvoyant powers and was often giving people snippets of advice that had been communicated to her from on high.”

There are few things we can speak of with certainty in relation to this larger-than-life eccentric. Though The Daily Telegraph obituary says she was born in the Channel Islands on 26 February 1909, other sources claim her birthplace was east London. Indeed, the borough of Leytonstone very specifically records at Fairwood Court, Fairlop Road, E11:

“Fanny Craddock [sic] 1909-1994. On this site until 1930 stood a house called Apthorp, birthplace of the famous TV cookery expert Fanny Craddock [sic]; born Phyllis Pechey.”

Though she took Johnnie Cradock’s name and they were regarded as husband-and-wife throughout their TV career, it was not until 1977 that they married. “Living-in-sin” was then a sackable offence at the BBC. Her memory for detail was never very good, so it was not too surprising that at the registry office there was confusion over both her age and her name. She claimed to be 55, even though her first son was then 50 (she was widowed while still pregnant with him) and her other son by her second marriage was 48.

“Fear of Fanny” was a fascinating, funny and often poignant dramatisation of someone who enriched many lives and who, according to the late Queen Mother, was largely responsible for the improvement in British catering after World War II. But a little more Spiritualism and references to her copious writings would have provided viewers with a much more accurate picture of her life.

Julia Shaw in the role of Fanny Cradock, in BBC4's "Fear Of Fanny"

Posted on Sunday, November 12, 2006
Category: Spiritualism

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