Lady Isobel Barnett: the rise and fall of a household name
On the anniversary of her birth, ROBERT LEEMING reminds us of the surprising life of Lady Isobel Barnett.
Posted by Elderjuice
on July 1, 2012. Filed under Culture,Memory Lane.
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Lady Isobel Barnett 30 June 1918 – 20 October 1980
On the anniversary of her birth, ROBERT LEEMING reminds us of the surprising life of Lady Isobel Barnett.
To television audiences in the 50s and early 60s Lady Isobel Barnett was a symbol of upper class elegance, wit, and sophistication.
She appeared on popular programmes such as What’s My Line? as well as many BBC radio productions. With her cut glass accent and prim and pretty manner, she became a household name and the epitome of the English aristocracy.
Image
The truth, of course, was very different from her public image. Her sad demise in 1980 was an example of how punishing the pressures of the British class system could be on those who fell beneath its wheels.
Lady Barnett was certainly no blue blood. Her title came not through her family, but through the knighthood of her husband, Sir Geoffrey Barnett, who was ennobled in 1953 for services to the City of Leicester, later becoming Lord Mayor.
Lady Barnett was a trained and qualified doctor, following in the footsteps of her father, as well as being a shrill and authoritarian Justice of the Peace.
What’s My Line?
She came to the general public’s attention after becoming one of the original panellists on the BBC game show “What’s My Line?”. The original host was that irascible old grump Gilbert Harding and later Eamonn Andrews, a debonair game show host and the Terry Wogan of his day.
The show was immensely popular during its original ten year run. It involved a contestant, with an unusual occupation miming and answering questions fielded by the panel, until the contestant’s occupation was guessed.
The contestants ranged from a Polish postman; with Lady Barnett inquiring if his job was ‘practical’, to the surely un-guessable saggar maker’s bottom knocker – a person who moulds the bottoms of saggars, which protect pottery from damage while in the kiln.
Cheater
There would also be a round which involved guessing the identity of a mystery celebrity guest. The panel would wear blindfolds, Lady Barnett’s always with provocatively frilly edges, while the celebrity answered the panel’s yes or no questions with a comic put-on accent to stump the inquisitors further.
After a hot winning streak of correct answers Lady Barnett was unmasked as a cheater by Bob Monkhouse. After sitting in her chair for an episode discovered the correct answer could be spied on a card, shown to the audience, and reflected via a window straight into Lady Barnett’s eye-line.
Radio
While her appearances on the programme, alongside the likes of Kenneth Williams and David Nixon, were the cause of her fame, she also appeared on a number of popular BBC radio shows, exuding her usual superior sparkle.
She was a regular guest on The Petticoat Line for example – a now forgotten all -woman panel show, the Loose Women of its day. Lady Barnett was often joined on the programme by other significant female personalities of her day, including Fanny Cradock, Barbara Cartland and Beryl Reid.
She was also involved in the BBC Radio 4 panel game Many a Slip based on the old proverb ‘there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip’, and hosted by Roy Plomley.
Sex symbol
She even began to be recognised as something of a sex symbol, with the late hell raiser Oliver Reed remembering her as “that cool, marvellous, material lady,” whom he “fell in love with,” while watching her on the television in his youth.
But her fame was not to last. With the arrival of the new tastes of the 1960s her brand of upper crust elegance, coupled with a reserved manner, became outdated and her time in the public eye drew to a gradual conclusion.
Fall
Her fall from grace, when it came, would be as embarrassing as it was tragic. After the death of her husband, Lady Barnett began to lead an increasingly eccentric and isolated life.
In October of 1980, she was then 62, Barnett was arrested for shoplifting from a local store in Cossington, Leicestershire. The stolen items amounted to a meagre 87p and included a tin of tuna and a carton of cream.
It was likely not a one off incident as she admitted concealing the items in a “cloth bag pinned inside her coat,” a poacher’s pocket to you and I.
She was, despite the tiny value of the items, dragged before the courts, with the shopkeeper receiving hate mail for pressing charges for personal gain. The whole event becoming a national sensation with even Time Magazine printing an article on the subject.
Cruel
It was a cruel spectacle for the one-time ‘prim epitome of the British aristocracy’ to have to endure, particularly as her mental state was obviously hindered at the time.
Her friends described her as facing the situation with a stiff upper lip, but a few days later Lady Barnett was found dead in her bath, after taking an overdose of pills and then deliberately dropping an electric heater in the water. She died though, said many, of shame.
Flowers
Lady Barnett has since become something of a cultural footnote, with books being written about her life, flowers being named after her, and the story even inspiring the name of a punk band – Isobel Barnett and the Shoplifters.
She is also, often, incorrectly identified as the subject of the David Bowie song God Knows I’m Good which actually predates her run in with the law, but the story told predicts her later fate perfectly.
Lady Barnett was certainly a woman of her time, who was undone by trying to live up to a fostered image and the often phoney standards of the day. An inelegant end for a particularly elegant lady.
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2 Responses to Lady Isobel Barnett: the rise and fall of a household name
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kinglear
July 1, 2012 at 11:13 am
She once opened our village fete, and I believe more people attended that – having come from far and wide – than ever turned up in Leek Wootton. Apart from for Winston Churchill.
Steve Latham
August 4, 2012 at 12:03 am
In the mid fifties Lady Barnett epitomized the ideal elegant and sophisticated lady. To a ten year old boy she was ‘everything’.
In the late seventies I was Circulation Manager of the Birmingham Evening Mail. As sponsors of our Ideal Home Show Lady Barnett was hired to open it. I had the good fortune to meet her. Sadly this icon of feminine beauty smoked heavily and her once beautiful white teeth were very badly discoloured. It was a very sad experience to see her knowing how she looked twenty years previously.