Alice Hyde: the ‘First Miss World’

Andrew Shail and Marie-Claire Rackham-Mann

This post examines a situation in which a member of the public was pressured into lying on national television, to show what a confluence of forces in the film industry of the late 1910s, tabloid journalism in the 1980s and content-creation on live television in the late 1980s did to a person who was unfortunate enough to be caught at the centre of them.

The 9^th BBC Children in Need telethon took place on the evening of 18 November 1988. Early in the evening, at roughly 7.50pm, a roughly 10-minute segment was devoted to discussion of Miss World contest, which had taken place the previous night at the Albert Hall. First, the hosts Terry Wogan and Joanna Lumley interviewed the contest’s winner, Linda Pétursdóttir, and then Wogan turned to the camera. The clip of the ensuing 5 minutes is available on Box of Broadcasts, but for those unable to access it, that ensuing 5 minutes is transcribed below:

Terry Wogan: The first Miss World contest was held in 1912. Now in those days, the contestants had to swim, row and sing [mild audience laughter]. So meet now, please, the very first Miss World: Alice Hyde.

[Applause. The orchestra plays Al Dubin and Harry Warren’s ‘Keep Young and Beautiful’ as walk-on music for Alice Hyde, who enters at the rear of the stage, wearing a ‘Miss World’ sash, holding the walls on either side of the entrance. A stagehand’s arm can be seen supporting her by the shoulder. She bows. Terry walks over to meet her, while she remains next to the entrance, leaning against the set to steady herself, possibly unable to walk any further unaided. Terry takes her hand and supports her as she walks down three steps towards the sofa. She bows again. Terry steers her to the sofa, gives her his place between Linda Pétursdóttir and Joanna Lumley, and seats himself on the arm of the sofa, with Pétursdóttir between him and Hyde.]

Wogan: Alice, you’re welcome.

Alice Hyde: Thank you.

Wogan: Gosh, 1912. How old are you?

Hyde: 94. Soon 95 [Sounds of awe and renewed applause from the audience. Hyde waves.].

Wogan: Alice, you saw the show [the Miss World contest]. I mean, did you approve of the winner?

Hyde: Today? I certainly did. Ooh yes we all did, all the people all around me, they said it was a lovely … girl.

Wogan: Do you still approve of the contest? Do you think it should …

Hyde: Yes I do.

Wogan: Yeah.

Hyde: I do approve of it, very much. I think anything beautiful should be applauded and recognised. I really do.

Wogan: Yeah. So what did you have to do to win it in 1912?

Hyde: Well it was a little bit more difficult.

Wogan: It certainly sounds it.

Hyde: I had to ride. And I could ride. I used to ride up on its neck like a jockey. And that was unusual in those days, for me, for a lady.

Wogan: Yes.

Hyde: And I could drive a car. And er, … do all sorts of things, you know.

Wogan: Did you have to swim for it?

Hyde: Swim and dive. I dived, to my sorrow, because, in diving, I didn’t look first of all how deep the water was. And of course I dived from the ceiling. Not this ceiling [pointing up] [laughter]. It wasn’t quite so high.

Wogan: I may do that before the evening is out [laughter].

Joanna Lumley: And what happened? It was too shallow, was it?

Hyde: And it was too shallow.

Wogan: Is that why you’re so small?

Hyde: [laughing] Yes. Yes, it is. [Hyde applauds Wogan]

Wogan: No I don’t mean that. But you were always a petite Miss World, weren’t you? You were, you were five-foot three or four when you won it?

Hyde: Yes, four, four and a half. [Inaudible]

Wogan: Oh certainly, I think it’s terribly important. [The camera fades to a sepia portrait photo of Alice Hyde when she was much younger.] But you do look wonderful. And do you – do you do much…? What do you do to keep fit?

Hyde: [The camera fades back to Hyde talking.] Well, I do exercises. I can still do press-ups [Lumley gasps; murmurs from the audience]. You know, ordinary. I’m just ordinary.

Wogan: You certainly are not – you’re 94. I mean I … I’m 50 and I can’t do press-ups. [Laughter.] Well I can do about one. How many do you do?

Hyde: Four. Three or four.

Wogan: Three or four more than I can. [Inaudible] I mean, is there any great difference in your weight now between, between the time you …? [Hyde shakes her head] There isn’t.

Hyde: No. I’m exactly seven stones, five … what are they? Pounds.

Wogan: Pounds, they are pounds [laughter].

Hyde: [Inaudible]

Wogan: We’ll be asking you how to reduce that to kilos in a moment. [Laughter] So I mean – what about winning: did you win much money?

Hyde: Well, not as you do these days, because it was all different. But er, it was two-hundred and fifty pounds, and that was a lot to me, in those days. Yes.

Wogan: So what did you do with your money?

Hyde: Ooh. Well. One thing. It led me to a new husband. [Hyde affects a cheeky expression. Audience laughter.]

Wogan: Ooh.

Lumley: He was a bounty hunter – was he after you for your money?

Wogan: Was he after you for your dough?

Hyde: [Laughs] Yes, he must have been. But he was a very … very lovely man, a nice man, and I loved him very much, and he loved me. And …

Wogan: In those days, did people disapprove of contests like that?

Hyde: I’m afraid they did. My parents included. Yes.

Wogan: Did you have to change your name or what to take part?

Hyde: No. My real name is Lavender Lee. That’s my name. And I entered as Lavender Lee. And that …

Lumley: What a lovely name.

Wogan: It is a lovely name. It’s very good to have you here, and it’s very nice to have with you, the present Miss World.

Hyde: It certainly is [She reaches out to hold Pétursdóttir’s hand and kiss her on the cheek.]

Wogan: And you both grace our simple studio here. [Terry gestures to Hyde and Pétursdóttir.] Miss World and Miss World. [Applause. Shaking of hands and waving at the audience.]

The clip starts at 20.05 in the original broadcast, which is available at: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/RT41ACB2?bcast=119900735

In these five minutes, first Terry Wogan, on Alice Hyde’s behalf, and then Hyde herself provided four main pieces of ‘information’:

1. The first Miss World contest took place in 1912.
2. Alice Hyde won the 1912 Miss World contest.
3. Hyde won a prize of £250 in the contest.
4. Hyde’s real name is Lavender Lee.

All four of these claims, however, are false. First, the first Miss World contest did not take place in 1912. It took place on 27 July 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain. The contest’s organiser Eric Morley initially called it the Miss Festival of Britain Contest and the Festival of Britain Bikini Contest, but when it started to attract entrants from outside the British Isles, the press started calling it the Miss World contest. For example, the Manchester Evening News stated in its 21 July 1951 issue that the “Prettiest girl in Sweden” Kerstin Håkansson would shortly arrive in Britain “for the Festival International beauty competition”, and that “she may become “Miss World.””[i] On the day of the contest the Daily Mirror announced that Jacqueline Lemoine, “Miss Bikini of France”, would be participating “in the finals of the Festival of Britain “Miss World” contest.”[ii] Morley reportedly used the title “Miss World” on the night of the contest and adopted it as the contest’s official title for the following year.^[iii] So Alice was 39 years too early here with her date of 1912. Second and third, Hyde did not win the first Miss World contest – the winner of the 1951 contest was the aforementioned Kerstin Håkansson,[iv] a Swedish model who was aged 22 at the time, while Hyde would have just turned 57 by the time of the first Miss World contest. Hyde was not involved in the 1951 contest and even if she had applied, ageism would have prevented them from accepting a 57-year-old. Fourth, at no point in her life was Alice Hyde’s real name ‘Lavender Lee’. She was born Alice Lee, daughter of Sophia Lee and George Lee on the 18^th of July 1894 (see Figure 1), and she took the surname ‘Hyde’ when she married one Charles Edwin Hyde in June 1921 (see Figure 2).

Figure 1: Birth certificate for Alice Lee, 18 July 1894. (Register of Births in the District of Doncaster, 1894, entry 150).

Figure 2: Marriage certificate for Alice Lee and Charles Edwin Hyde, 18 June 1921.

The default explanation for why Alice Hyde provided these pieces of misinformation is that a combination of 70 years of intervening time, which provided massive scope for misremembering, with the dementia of which this 94-year-old was showing signs, meant that it was unlikely that she would provide Wogan and Lumley with any accurate information. But Alice’s dementia was not so advanced that she was unaware of her own name. And as we will show below, there is evidence that in the years immediately before the 1988 Children in Need telethon, Alice had good recall of her life in the 1910s. That is, she was not misremembering; instead, she was lying. As we will also show, though, she was lying because she thought she had no choice.

Wogan’s introduction to Alice’s appearance implied that the producers of the BBC Children in Need telethon had done what they thought was some research before inviting Alice Hyde on the programme. This rudimentary research was entirely inadequate, of course. For example, it would not have been at all hard for them to check the first three of Alice’s four claims, because Eric Morley was still alive and his wife Julia Morley was still running the contest, and could have answered questions about the first Miss World contest and its winner and its prize. Some degree of contact, albeit indirect, with one or both of the Morleys would already have been involved in arranging Linda Pétursdóttir’s appearance on the telethon. But not only do the producers of a telethon seldom include trained researchers, Alice Hyde also had no evident motive for lying either in any preliminary interviews or live on national television, and, as we will show, the producers also thought that they had effectively done some fact-checking by relying on the work of a professional who was employed to report facts correctly, while the chain of events that conspired to oblige Alice Hyde to lie on national television was also very unusual. We will describe these events in chronological order.

Between late August 1918 and early March 1919, the British film fan magazine Pictures and Picturegoer and Broadwest, a production company based in Walthamstow, held a ‘star search’ competition called the ‘Pictures Girl’ competition. We have examined this competition in detail in our recent article in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television.[v] To summarise: Alice Lee was one of 14 women who in early December 1918 were longlisted and invited to conduct screentests on 15 January 1919. Around this point Alice adopted the pseudonym ‘Lavender’. ‘Lavender Lee’ was then one of three women who were shortlisted in early February 1919, and after a longer second screen-test, ‘Lavender Lee’ won the competition in early March 1919. There was no prize money: the prize had two components: a) being featured as ‘The Pictures Girl’ in editorial matter in Pictures and Picturegoer and b) “a part in support of the leading lady and on a full salary basis in a forthcoming Broadwest photo-play, and if her anticipated success deserves it, a contract for future work in the same company will follow.”^[vi]

What happened in the ensuing months is unclear. What we do know is that while Alice ‘Lavender’ Lee was indeed publicised under her self-appointed pseudonym in Pictures and Picturegoer, she did not appear in any Broadwest films. That is, the staff at Broadwest seem to have decided not to give Alice Lee the role that was the film’s ostensible prize. Alice ‘Lavender’ Lee quietly disappeared from the pages of Pictures and Picturegoer after July 1919 and was not featured in any publicity for any Broadwest film or any film made by any other company that we are aware of. We speculate on various possible explanations for Alice’s effective ejection from the film industry in our article in the HJFRT; they include the possibility that Broadwest breached contract because, when Alice won the competition, she was an unmarried mother, which might have led to a payment for that breach of contract. But they also include the more pedestrian possibility that, like many winners of ‘star search’ contests, Alice simply failed to sufficiently wow her prospective employers enough to get any work, given that ‘star search’ contests have as their primary purpose not the creation of a star but the creation of copy and the stimulation of circulation/viewership and advertising revenue.

So even by 1920, something had happened to Alice Lee that she did not want people to know about, and she did indeed deceive people about this in the ensuing years. This copy from the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star on 15 June 1920 appears to have come from an interview with Alice:

Miss Lavender Lee, of Mexborough, who was introduced to the film world some time ago when she won the all-England Broadwest beauty competition, is shortly to be married. She has decided to bid goodbye to the picture studio and will settle abroad for a year or two. Since she proceeded to London last year Miss Lee has been engaged almost continuously in film work and has fulfilled many contracts. “Being a film artist is not so easy as it looks,” she told the writer of these notes, “and it certainly has the effect of disposing of all interest and delight in watching the pictures you have seen “shot,” or, for that matter, in watching any pictures at all.[vii]

Alice Lee was lying here: she had not fulfilled any contracts with any film studio. Here she was presenting the act of leaving the film industry, something she had been forced to do, as her own decision. But also notice this phrase “the all-England Broadwest beauty competition”: this is probably what Alice called the competition to this anonymous journalist, and if it was mainly a beauty contest, just by winning it, Alice had succeeded, which was not the case with a talent contest, where the winner then has to establish a career. Already we can see the beginning of an incremental process of Alice fabricating her history to save herself pain. So although it is tempting to attribute her much later misreporting of the original events on the BBC Children in Need telethon to a combination of both the dementia that she was probably already suffering from and the misremembering that is all too common amongst even those with no dementia, even in 1920 she was already misreporting what had happened.

One can see how, after nearly 70 more years, Alice’s myth-making might have grown to ‘Miss World’ proportions. However, the process that eventually put Alice, now Alice Hyde, on the sofa of the BBC Children in Need telethon was one that, though more lying on her part was involved, ultimately became a situation in which she told her four main lies because she was obliged by other people to do it. That process started in 1978, when Alice Hyde was 84 and living in Penzance. The Truro edition of the Cornish newspaper the West Briton included an article in its 7 September 1978 issue that told Alice’s story (see Figure 3): “Out of 8,000 contestants a petite, vivacious girl from Yorkshire, with tumbling brown ringlets, was selected in a film magazine’s contest to become something very like the first-ever “Miss World”.”[viii] Notice that 60 years after the ‘Pictures Girl’ competition, aged 84, Alice nonetheless still knows that she did not win the first Miss World contest, and that the contest that she did win happened in 1918-1919 and not in 1912. She is still misrepresenting the competition, just as she did in her June 1920 interview with the Yorkshire Telegraph & Star: the journalist, Peter Bloxham, is probably repeating what she has told him when he describes the ‘Pictures Girl’ competition as a beauty contest rather than a talent contest by calling it “something like the first-ever “Miss World”. This is already untrue, as the ‘Pictures Girl’ competition was not an international beauty contest and it was not even the first national beauty contest in the UK: the earliest national beauty contest in the UK that we are aware of occurred a whole decade earlier, in the form of the Daily Mirror running a photographic beauty contest, open to entrants from anywhere in the country, between August 1907 and March 1908.[ix] You can, we think, see where this is going.

Figure 3: Peter Bloxham, ‘‘So this will be, after a lifetime of adoration and unrequited affection, Goodbye Alice…’’, (West Briton 8,163 (7 September 1978), p. 1. British Library.)

There is some indication that Alice, or a friend or family member, had deliberately lied to Peter Bloxham at the West Briton. Elsewhere in the article, Bloxham explains that he is telling Alice’s story now because the staff at the West Briton have recently received a letter written by a man who had fallen in love with Alice back in 1919 and who has been watching her from a distance for nearly 60 years, often travelling internationally to watch her from a distance at various public events:

Into the “West Briton” offices last Friday came a letter signed “Mr Anonymous. America. Paris. London.” It told virtually the whole Lavender Lee story. Its writer, it said, would like us to know a little more about what a famous person Mrs. Hyde once was. “I know,” the letter added, “because I knew and loved her…”

[…]

“When you are reading this, I will be on my way home to my own country, and this won’t be for long, as I am four years older than Alice. So this will be, after a lifetime of adoration and unrequited affection, ‘Goodbye Alice, my love.’”

Mrs Hyde, when she saw the letter, said she found it moving and a little sad. Who could her unseen admirer be […]?[x]

The extreme improbability of all this (nearly 60 years of stalking, expenditure on international travel to do so, an ability to track Alice’s movements in spite of the fact that she was not a public figure, either in film or in any other profession) suggests that this mysterious letter from a mysterious stranger, if it even existed, was fabricated by Alice or someone she knew to try to drum up some fame for Alice now that everyone who was involved in the original competition was dead: it may have been her attempt to try to get the much earlier episode in her life to yield the modest income that she had been promised in 1919 and which she had been deprived of.[xi] But though there is a suggestion of lying here, this was not the falsehood that she was prompted to repeat on national television ten years later.

If we skip forward again nearly a decade to July 1988, just after Alice has turned 94, we reach a point when the story in the West Briton has circulated around various other newspapers and finally made its way to the Daily Mail, which in its 25 July 1988 issue (see Figure 4) is claiming that “veteran glamour girl Alice Hyde […] won the first Miss World contest”.[xii] Multiple stages of exaggeration, that is, have now created quite a substantial myth. The Daily Mail journalist Aubrey Chalmers got some details right, including that the competition was “run by a cinema magazine called Pictures” and that Alice used the pseudonym ‘Lavender Lee’, but he claims that Alice “took the title in 1912”, 7 years earlier than the conclusion of the ‘Pictures Girl’ competition in early 1919,[xiii] and 39 years earlier than the actual first Miss World competition in 1951, and adds £500 in invented prize money, claiming that Alice “won the first prize of £500 in the final”. This article indicates none of the basic fact-checking that – though the relevant regulatory body in 1988, the Press Council, had not established a code of conduct to require it – was already required by the various journalism trade unions’ own codes of conduct at the time (such as the 1936 Code of Conduct of the National Union of Journalists, which prohibited members from falsifying information). An obligation for accurate reporting was only placed on the entire journalism profession when the successor of the Press Council, the Press Complaints Commission, issued the first Editors’ Code of Conduct in January 1991.[xiv]

Figure 4: Aubrey Chalmers, ‘We’re Miss Worlds apart…’, (Daily Mail 28,642 (25 July 1988), p. 15).

Chalmers’s article in the Daily Mail is almost certainly the reason why Alice ended up on the Children in Need telethon: at the time the Daily Mail was the third highest-circulating daily national newspaper in the UK,[xv] the article provided quite an attention-grabbing story, and the dates line up: the Children in Need telethon took place about 4 months after the article was published. Plus Terry Wogan’s introduction, where he gives the date of 1912 and where he claims that the first Miss World contestants had to swim, row and sing, was clearly drawn from this Daily Mail article, and the specific questions that the producers gave Terry to ask Alice were also designed to prompt Alice to repeat the specific details in the Daily Mail article – for example, that very odd question that Terry asked about Alice’s weight was clearly based on the last line of the Daily Mail article, which reads: “She exercises every day and at 7st 5lb is only five pounds heavier than the day she won the title”. This suggests why the BBC’s producers did no fact-checking: they probably simply trusted that the Daily Mail journalist Aubrey Chalmers had done his fact-checking and so that by reading his article they were doing their research.

While Alice was not required to repeat Aubrey Chalmers’s mistakes on the BBC Children in Need telethon, she was under massive pressure to do so. Imagine the BBC inviting 94-year-old Alice to maybe appear on the telethon, probably interviewing her, definitely involving her in some kind of rehearsal, and at some point in this process, perhaps as late as the moment when she is handed a ‘Miss World’ sash, Alice realises that she has a choice: either correct Aubrey Chalmers’s mistakes before the telethon so that she humiliates a national newspaper journalist to an audience of BBC staff, or correct Aubrey Chalmers’s mistakes on national television so that she humiliates him in front of millions of viewers, or endure the absurd experience of being asked questions that prompt her to tell what she knows are lies, and responding with those lies, on national television. The third option, though painful, was the least painful of the three options; Alice was effectively stuck pretending that she was a member of the same Miss World family as Linda Pétursdóttir. In this box of limitations, it was an admirable achievement that she reined in one of the lies in Aubrey Chalmers’s Daily Mail article: instead of claiming that the prize was £500, she gave a more modest figure of £250. Even if, in 1919/1920, Broadwest had paid Alice a fee corresponding to a full salary for a supporting role in a film in spite of not including any footage of her in any films, this amount would have been much lower than £250, and though Alice Lee might have received some payment to compensate her for Broadwest’s failure to fulfil the competition’s implicit contract to give her a supporting role in a film, there is no evidence of this, so a figure of £250 is, at least, 50% of the way to the (probably) accurate figure of ‘no money at all’. Stuck with that lie, she even gets backed into the implication that she met her future husband Charles Hyde in c.late 1919 because he was after her money and not because he had seen images of her in Pictures and Picturegoer during the time when the magazine’s staff were boosting her as the ‘Pictures Girl’, because though she could imply that she met him because of the publicity of winning the contrived 1912 Miss World competition, she is avoiding talking about that competition at all costs, avoidance that can also be observed in her launching into description of her riding abilities in answer to Wogan’s asking what she had to do to win the contest.

Alice even seems to have told the fourth of her four lies on the spot, apparently to save face for Terry Wogan: in the Daily Mail article, Aubrey Chalmers had accurately stated that Alice Hyde was her real name and that the name ‘Lavender Lee’ was a pseudonym, and so on the sofa Terry asked Alice about that, but because someone at the BBC has misunderstood the situation, that question goes “Did you have to change your name to take part?” Alice replies with ‘no’, because the correct answer is that she didn’t have to change her name: the correct answer is that she used the pseudonym ‘Lavender Lee’ only after she entered the competition, voluntarily and without concealing her real name, with Pictures and Picturegoer stating in their 1 March 1919 announcement of the winner that her real name was Alice. But having given Wogan this answer, she was then stuck without a way of telling everyone about this pseudonym and so obliging the intent behind the question, meaning that she now had to come up with another lie to still mention having two names while also avoiding humiliating Terry and avoiding contradicting her response that she did not have to change her name, hence she told the fourth lie that Lavender Lee is her real name and that Alice Hyde is a pseudonym.

When we imagine someone lying, we tend to think of them lying for their own gain, but when people lie, they usually do it because they think it will prevent worse suffering: here the worse suffering that Alice is avoiding is being responsible for humiliating a national newspaper journalist and a national TV presenter on national television. Alice’s oral account teaches us nothing about media history, and it does not even teach us to be cautious about purported items of media history. Only diligent research in archives reveals reliable information about media history, and only skeptical comparison of oral accounts against those accurate accounts can indicate the need for that caution.