When Anne Rogers was the star of skating spectaculars

Jul 16 2008 by Andrew Baldwin, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

ANNE Rogers, the glamorous red-headed queen of lavish ice spectaculars in the 1950s, who counted the Duke of Edinburgh among her admirers, is still going strong.

She was born Shirley Anne Quarmby in Meltham and celebrated her 80th birthday at the weekend.

A party for several hundred guests was held at the home in Coronation Road, Ascot, of her daughter Alexandra Taylor, a City broker.

Anne Rogers, one of the leading British skaters to achieve international stardom in the postwar golden age of ice spectaculars, will be remembered as a petite 5ft 2in redhead with charismatic glamour.

TV presenter Shaw Taylor, who worked with her, described her as having “incandescent sex appeal”.

She was born at the family’s home at Green Lea, Meltham, eldest of the four children of mungo fabric producer Alexander Quarmby.

Her mother, Joan Evelyn Goddard, was the sister of one of Britain’s most celebrated solicitors, Theodore Goddard.

He acted for Wallis Simpson – who became the Duchess of Windsor after she caused the abdication of Edward VIII – in her divorce from her second husband, Ernest Simpson.

Looking back now, Anne says: “I don’t know where it all came from. There were no performing links in my family.”

After training at the Cone School and the Italia Conti stage school she studied with Dame Marie Rambert and the Russian ballerina, Madame Lydia Kyasht.

It was a childhood attack of scarlet fever that helped to shape her unsuspected future.

“The doctors recommended strenuous exercise and I chose ice skating,” said Anne.

In 1935, at the age of seven, she made her debut as an amateur in an exhibition performance at the Queen’s Ice Rink in London, arranged for her by ice choreographer Gladys Hogg.

But it was as a straight actress that she made her professional show business debut at 13 as Tootles, one of the Lost Boys, in the 1942 production of Peter Pan, with Barbara Mullen as Peter, Alastair Sim as Hook, Joan Greenwood as Wendy and Zena Dare as Mrs Darling.

She joined Sir Donald Wolfit’s Shakespearean company at London’s Strand Theatre for roles in King Lear, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, followed by West End seasons with three more Peter Pans, Ann Todd, Glynis Johns and Celia Lipton.

She appeared in films with Huddersfield-born James Mason in The Night Has Eyes, Vivien Leigh in Caesar and Cleopatra and Patricia Burke in The Lisbon Story.

Then, out of the blue, came an offer to appear at the Ice Drome, Blackpool, in Ice Parade of 1943. “My mother was aghast”, she says, “but it was for £15 a week and I was only earning £4.50 at the time.”

Anne returned to Blackpool for two further summer seasons in 1944 and 1945.

In the latter she was spotted by two American talent scouts and found herself, at the age of 17, on her way to the United States.

She was then teamed with celebrated Swiss skater Armand Perren for tours of America, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland in Armand Perren’s Ice Follies of 1948.

She returned to Britain a fully fledged international skating star and in 1949 became Tom Arnold’s first pantomime principal boy on ice in the title role of Aladdin.

In this she was reunited with Eddie Ward, a skater she had first worked with in Blackpool. They were married in 1950 and for the next seven years were billed as “Britain’s leading romantic pair skating stars” in a series of ice revues and pantomimes.

“We did things that were unheard of then” says Anne. “Like skating to Wagner in our speciality dances.”

By 1953, when Anne Rogers and Eddie Ward starred at the Empire Pool, Wembley, in Humpty Dumpty On Ice, she was described in the press as the Duke of Edinburgh’s favourite female skater.

She was presented to him each time he attended one of her performances.

In 1954 Anne and her husband opened at the Empire Pool in her greatest hit, Ivor Novello’s The Dancing Years On Ice, touring Britain for more than two years.

By December, 1956, when the Wards starred in their final ice pantomime at the Hippodrome, Birmingham, she was three months pregnant.

Their son, Jeremy Ward, now a successful businessman, was born in 1957 and their daughter, Zoë Alexandra Taylor, in 1959.

“I didn’t want my children to be brought up by nannies,” says Anne. “So Eddie and I made a conscious decision to retire from the ice. I was only 28, but I never regretted it.”

Her marriage to Ward ended in 1960 and in 1962 she married another well-known skater, Jack Harnett, who died in 1986, the same year in which Eddie Ward also died from cancer at the age of 60.

Today, she divides her time between her son’s home in Monaco and her house in Windsor, where she lives surrounded by the mementoes of a dazzling career.

“It mattered enormously to Eddie and me to have that huge success when we were so young” she says. “That time will never come again. It’s a lovely memory to cherish now.”