Docker, Lady Norah: Artificial blonde in search of stardom

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Born to a working class Derby family 100 years ago, Norah Turner was destined to become one of the first true society celebrities, as Nicola Rippon reveals.

Fans surround Lady Norah Docker’s car

Putting on the style: fans watch as Lady Norah Docker applies her make-up

Lady Norah Docker, out on the town with her third husband Sir Bernard Docker

Lady Norah Docker was a keen marbles player

Lady Docker entertains miners on yacht Shermara on Isle of Wight

If the cult of celebrity is a modern phenomenon, then Lady Norah Docker, the granddaughter of a Derby wheelwright and born 100 years ago this year, was one of its pioneers.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, the girl born over a butcher’s shop on London Road cut a colourful, extraordinarily extravagant swathe through polite post-war society, with her yacht, gold-plated cars and taste for pink champagne.

But, while Lady Docker could claim to be the wealthiest woman in Britain, she also revelled in the company of people from every strata of society, an egalitarianism that perhaps lay in her origins: a Derby family whose roots lay firmly in working-class soil.

She was born Norah Royce Turner, on June 23, 1906, at premises near Victoria Buildings – “It was a flat over a butcher’s shop,” she was always happy to announce – a middle child of Sydney and Amy Turner.

Her paternal grandfather was a wheelwright, her father, a mechanical engineer who had begun working life as a shopfitter for Boots the Chemist.

He was, as Norah proudly recalled: “All self-made man.”

Sydney Turner, whose own family apparently came from Shaftesbury Crescent, turned his small business on London Road into a “mill furnishers and motor car manufacturers”.

Eventually, he moved the family to Birmingham where he invested in a car showroom.

When Norah was 16, her father, who had suffered a nervous breakdown, took his own life on a ferry between Holyhead and Dublin.

The Turners had to sell their car showroom and release their servants. Amy Turner invested in a pub – the Three Tuns at Sutton Coldfield – but Norah found it so difficult to adjust to her new life that she could not bring herself to work behind the bar.

She was even more dismayed when her mother decided to leave the thriving business to invest in another pub – this time the Swan Hotel at Tenbury Wells. This business quickly failed and the Turners were forced to return to Birmingham, now in financial difficulties.

This brief flirtation with poverty made Norah determined never to experience it again. Just before his suicide, her father had made her promise that she would take care of the family, should anything untoward happen to him.

Aged just 18, she moved to London to make her fortune. She was, as she recalled, “an artificial blonde among thousands of artificial blondes searching for stardom”.

Although a bright child, Norah found no interest in academic study. She preferred sporting activities, becoming an accomplished tennis player.

She loved to dance and decided to pursue that as a career. She studied with Santos Casani in Regent Street and later took work at London’s most fashionable society haunt, the Cafe de Paris.

Norah Turner was one of the most popular “young ladies” employed by the establishment to be available to dance with unaccompanied gentlemen.

She was able to charge them £1 per dance – far more than any of the other dancers.

Despite her family’s assertion that she “wasn’t as pretty” as her sisters, the girl from Derby was never short of male admirers.

In particular, she had a talent for attracting the attentions of extremely wealthy men – one admirer even bought her an hotel.

She claimed her success was down to one simple rule: “Through my life I set both my sights and my price high.”

At the Cafe de Paris she met, and fell in love with, Clement Callingham, head of Henekeys wine and spirit merchants.

Although he was awaiting a divorce from his estranged wife, Norah and Callingham set up home together in Maidenhead, eventually marrying at Chelsea Register Office when Norah was 32. They had one son, Lance, upon whom Norah doted.

During the Second World War, Norah joined the Mechanised Transport Corps. Even in uniform, her stubborn streak shone through.

Instead of the thick, abrasive standard issue stockings, she wore her own – dyed khaki. Nor did she take readily to orders, once crossing a hazardous area of bomb-ravaged Bath to deliver essential supplies to those trapped on the other side.

As the war drew to a close, Clement fell ill, and died in July 1945.

A year after her first husband’s death, Norah married a friend of Clement’s, Sir William “Wilkie” Collins, chairman of Fortnum and Mason and the Cerebos Salt Co Ltd. That their relationship was less than blissful is, perhaps, unsurprising, given that, by Norah’s own admission: “He was 69; I married him for his money.”

But, if Norah had been seeking financial stability, she also found companionship and missed him terribly after his death only two years later.

Alone again, Norah admitted “deliberately trapping” her third husband, Sir Bernard Docker, into marriage.

As the new wife of one of the country’s wealthiest men – Sir Bernard was chairman of British Small Arms, Daimler and a director of the Midland Bank, Anglo-Argentine Tramways and Thomas Cook and Sons; he also had Derbyshire connections as two of his forebears played cricket for the county – she became a regular star of the society pages.

By her own admission, she was not universally loved for it. But, if polite society cringed at her style, the general public loved it, their constant fascination with her flamboyant tastes matched only by her willingness to share it with the world.

As something of a joke, although not always appreciated as such, the Dockers flew their family flag from their Hampshire home whenever they were in residence.

Norah Docker could be accused of many things, but never of snobbery. Her father had been proud of his working-class Derby origins, and so was she.

She was determined to share some of the delights of wealth with those less fortunate, to “bring some happiness back to a world left hollow by the horror of two world wars”.

When a group of Yorkshire miners invited a delighted Norah to visit their mine, she returned their hospitality by inviting 45 of them on a champagne cruise around the Isle of Wight aboard the Dockers’ yacht Shemara.

“The dear boys, I just loved them!” Norah exclaimed. “It proved conclusively to me that the social barrier only exists in the mind.”

Norah’s outspoken manner, though, would often cause problems. In Monaco, in particular, the Dockers had a series of altercations. In 1955, Life magazine reported that she had assaulted one of the Monte Carlo casino’s employees: “It was a good sock I gave that man, and he deserved it.”

The following year, however, the Dockers were invited to the wedding of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly and, in 1958, to the christening celebrations for the royal couple’s first child, Prince Albert.

The event coincided with Lance’s 19th birthday, and the Dockers asked whether they might bring him too. A brusque refusal meant that Norah decided that she could not attend either.

Unfortunately, she was seen tearing up a tiny crepe Monagasque flag in frustration and the matter was made even worse when a series of misquotes were published.

Prince Rainier issued a statement condemning the Dockers, banning them from the principality and returned their christening gifts without even a note.

Norah complained that, thanks to the media, the public believed she and Sir Bernard did nothing but party, when in fact they worked very hard. She had her own office at Daimler, and, as a means of publicising the company, designed a number of customised Daimlers, decorated with gold-plated stars, ivory dashboards, and upholstery made from lizard skin, red crocodile leather and zebra hide.

Her chauffeur, Prattley, would drive Norah around town and took the BSA girls’ marbles team, of which she was a member, to contests.

In 1956, however, Sir Bernard was forced from the Daimler board when concerns were raised that shareholders were financing the Dockers’ seemingly spendthrift lifestyle.

The couple took refuge in the tax haven of Jersey, before Lady Docker insulted the island’s people, calling them, “the most frightfully boring, dreadful people that have ever been born”.

Sir Bernard died in 1978, after which Norah moved to Majorca. She returned to Britain frequently and retained a remarkable joie-de-vivre, downing glasses of pink champagne to the last.

“I have always had the persistence to march on. I will continue to do that, until the day I die,” she declared.

In December 1983, Lady Norah Docker was found dead in her room at the Great Western Royal Hotel, in London’s Praed Street. She was 77 years old. It was a far cry from her humble Derby origins.

She had lived life to the full.

Adapted from Derbyshire’s Own by Nicola Rippon, published by Sutton Publishing (£12.99).

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