YESTERDAY BERNARD L. KING TOLD US about the Waters sisters and the adventures in a Bentley Oxborrow and Fuller Continental Tourer. But there’s a lot more to this talented pair: Elsie and Doris Waters were the most influential social satirists of their era and among the highest paid performers in the U.K. Here are tidbits gathered from Wikipedia together with my usual Internet sleuthing. (There’s a movie puzzle here too.)
Bromley-by-Bow Bred. Florence Elsie (1893–1990) and Doris Ethel (1899–1978) were among six siblings raised by Maud and Ted Waters in Bromely-by-Bow, part of London’s East End. Their father and mother encouraged all of them to learn musical instruments. Wikipedia describes, “Elsie learned the violin, and Doris the piano and tubular bells; the entire family performed together as E.W. Waters’ Bijou Orchestra. Another sibling, Horace John “Jack” Waters (1895–1981), became a leading entertainer and actor from the 1930s onwards, using the stage name Jack Warner.”
Theatrics. Wikipedia continues, “Elsie and Doris Waters both attended Coborn School for Girls in Bow, and were choristers at St. Leonard’s Church. They studied at the Guildhall School of Music, before joining a theatrical company in Southwold, Suffolk. As singers, musicians, and comic entertainers, they started to perform widely in concert parties, at functions, and on variety bills, and made their first appearance on BBC Radio in 1927. From 1929, they made commercial recordings for the Parlophone label.”
Elsie and Doris Waters. Image from Song & Sketch Transcripts.
Gert and Daisy. “For one recording, in 1930,” Wikipedia recounts, “they were short of material. Interviewed in the 1970s, Elsie Waters said: ‘We thought: what on earth can we do? Anyway, we decided to do a talking record for a change. Well, what shall we talk about? Well, we thought, people like wedding bells, so Doll [Doris] sat down and she wrote a little tune and I put some words to it. We called it Wedding Bells and we did a little bit of chat, and that was the first of Gert and Daisy. After we had done it, we forgot all about it.’ ”
Wikipedia notes, “Their banter as Gert and Daisy, drawing on the conversations they had overheard when growing up in the East End, became an immediate success, and audiences requested them to repeat and develop it.”
At the Forefront of Feminism, Even Today. The Daisy character had a mythical husband Bert; Gert, a supposed long-standing fiancé Wally. But, as noted by Wheeler Winston Dixon, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Elsie and Doris Waters are perhaps the most influential social satirists of the period.”
Dixon wrote, “By forming their double-act around the ever-affianced Gert and the indissolubly married Daisy, they offered women an ontological choice: whether to find their meaning in themselves and with other women, or in the state of gender subalternity, through servitude to men and to patriarchy.”
Dixon observed, “By evoking laughter through song, music, patter, gossip, cross-talk, conversation, malapropisms, puns and jokes, through humour, wit, irony, burlesque, parody, satire, ridicule and a gynocentric misanthropy (counterbalancing misogyny), they also invoke a condition of delight, in which men and women might laugh at themselves, at their subject formations, their gender postures, their beings.”
Truth Will Out. “All good comedy,” Elsie said, “should have truth. Unless Gert and Daisy speak the truth [in good honest East London accents], it’s no good.”
Wartime Activities. “During the Second World War,” Wikipedia relates, “they broadcast cookery and home maintenance hints, gave cookery demonstrations, and were given special passes to make regular trips to entertain troops stationed around the world. Gert and Daisy were favourites of Winston Churchill and had elephants named after them at London Zoo. They performed regularly on BBC Radio’s Workers’ Playtime, and their high profile was used by German propagandists such as Lord Haw Haw, who said in one broadcast that “the people of Grimsby must not think that Gert and Daisy can save them from the might of the Luftwaffe.”
How wrong Lord Haw Haw proved to be.
“She’s a Lily But Only By Name.” As a confessed old-time-movie addict, I find special delight in this cut from Gert and Daisy’s Week-end. It’s a 1942 movie about the two volunteering to escort kids to the countryside from war-torn London. (Their suitcase gets them mixed up in a jewel robbery.)
Note the fellow behind them to your right. Image from YouTube.
I’ve seen that fellow before. And, indeed, English character actor O.B. Clarence also appeared in Pygmalion, the 1938 flick starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. In that film, and similarly attired here, he portrayed Mr. Birchwood, the Vicar. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025