Alas! It is 29 years since the world was deprived of one of its more colourful culinary characters: Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey – better known as double bigamist, child abandoner, amphetamine user, dangerous driver and celebrity cook Fanny Cradock 
Fanny’s eccentricities presented themselves early. She was sent to private schools, where – according to her Telegraph obituary – she “was on intimate terms with the court of Louis XIV”. She was expelled from one for encouraging her fellow pupils to contact the spirit world
She eloped with her first husband, a pilot, when she was 17, but his plane crashed a few months after the wedding – or a few days, according to Fanny: “I married on Wednesday, settled his debts on Friday and he died on Sunday.” Either way, she was a pregnant widow
According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, she took an understandable desire to prioritise putting food on the table to... questionable lengths
She then married civil engineer Arthur Chapman, had another son, Christopher, and “when this second son was four months old, she abandoned them both”. As the Telegraph says: this marriage is “not mentioned in her highly unreliable memoirs”
(To be fair to her, in ‘Fabulous Fanny Cradock: TV's Outrageous Queen of Cuisine’, biographer Clive Ellis says “she was so poor that she was forced to give up her elder son to his paternal grandparents” )telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/r…
Chapman either was, or became, a Catholic, so wouldn’t grant her a divorce, so when she married her third husband, Gregory Dye, it was bigamous – although she did leave him a few weeks later for the love of her life, Major John Cradock (who was married with four children)
She had lived with her grandparents as a teenager, and earned her keep by cooking every night (while dressed for dinner, at their insistence – a habit which stuck), but wartime was when she learned to be truly creative in the kitchen. The Telegraph again:
She also wrote bodice-rippers, and then became a cookery writer after the war. Live touring cookery demonstrations followed, and then – after a nose job from plastic surgery legend Sir Archibald McIndoe – television
From the 1950s to the 70s, they encouraged culinary adventure in postwar Britain, and (ODNB again) “developed Johnny’s character as the subservient sidekick, good only for handing Fanny her frying pan and knowing which wine to serve”
Her attitude to the amateur (but clearly gifted) cook who had won a contest to prepare a feast for Edward Heath was a bit rich coming from someone whose “speciality [at home] was a dish called ‘Dog’s Dinner’: mashed sardines and boiled egg, squashed onto brown bread”
But, intriguingly, she was an early pioneer of organic food. Ellis says “she campaigned against artificial flavourings and fertilisers”, and her tomatoes at home were raised on a feed made from tea and urine, nicknamed... er, “Madam’s Tonic”
Still, she was a... challenging person
This was not the last time she would be on the wrong side of the law, or indeed the road
By this time, she and Johnny had married – in 1977, because she had, apparently, heard that the troublesome Catholic second husband had died. He hadn’t, making this a second bigamous marriage – although she was never prosecuted for that
After her death her ‘erratic’ behaviour was put down to a diet of amphetamines (to suppress her appetite, despite assurances to viewers that her food wouldn’t make them fat) and downers (to allow her to sleep after all that speed)
In 1987, she went missing for seven days during another court case, this time over £80,000 worth of jewellery stolen from her house. When she turned up, she blamed the police for not looking for her, claiming she’d been at home all the time
Her story even has a weird footnote: her daughter-in-law Nicky de Peche Cradock was once Kingsley Amis’ lodger – and “ went to bed with both Kingsley and his oldest son, Philip, who was then aged 14” theomnivore.com/craig-brown-on…
That can’t be attributed to anything in the genes, of course, but still: interesting family
If you’ve enjoyed this…
https://twitter.com/oddthisday/status/1730263166913769614
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
