Mary Lee was 13 years old when she spotted a newspaper ad that read: “Personality girl wanted for Roy Fox Orchestra”. The popular London-based band led by the American Roy Fox was topping the bill at Glasgow’s Empire Theatre that week and, in advance of a singing competition there, auditions were being held that afternoon in the restaurant at Pettigrew & Stephens department store on Sauchiehall Street.
Writing her memoirs decades later, Lee, who would become the last surviving dance band singer of the pre-war period and also sang with the celebrated Ambrose and his Orchestra, recalled: “I immediately thought: ‘This is for me.’ I plunked school that afternoon and took the tram to Pettigrew & Stephens.” She sang the popular hit of early 1935, My Kid’s a Crooner, a novelty number inspired by Bing Crosby, and was about to head off home when she was asked to hang on for a chat. She had made it to the final that Friday evening at the Empire.
She came first in the competition, and was invited to join the band permanently — but her father had to confess to the orchestra manager that Mary was still only 13. He promised they would send for her when she was of age. By the time of her 14th birthday, six months later, she had given up hope and was working in an office, but a telegram duly arrived, inviting her to join the band in London.
For three years, she sang with the band on the radio, on records and in variety theatres and dance halls up and down the UK, earning impressive reviews from day one for her natural swing and beating Vera Lynn to the top spot in the Melody Maker readers’ poll for the best singer of 1937. It was the start of a unique career that produced success across the UK as a dance-band singer, and in Scotland and Northern Ireland as a comedian — though she will be best remembered by many as Mrs Jack Milroy.
She was born Mary Ann McDevitt born in Kinning Park in Glasgow in 1921. Her father, William, was a lorry driver for Shell-Mex, and her mother, Isabella (née Barbour), was a housewife. She and her younger brother Edward grew up in a room and kitchen on Scotland Street, and attended the nearby Scotland Street School, where she played “the school piano as the children marched to their classes after morning prayers”. She went on to Lambhill Street School.
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A natural performer, she was singing in public from the age of ten “on Saturday nights at the church hall and my Dad had a megaphone made for me. No microphones in those days and it really helped me to save my voice.” In her early days as a professional, she had to stand on a wooden box to reach the mic.
During her first two years with the Fox band, she travelled with a chaperone whose pay came out of her meagre wages. Roy Fox changed her name to Mary Lee, and usually introduced her as “Little Mary Lee”. With his Savile Row suits, Rolls-Royce, racehorse (named after his hit song, Whispering) and American accent, Fox “seemed like a god” to the singer, and although she had little to do with him in rehearsals, they would team up together for lunch in the swankiest restaurant in every town the band visited, as a publicity stunt for the local newspapers.
“Everybody looked on me as a star, which I was. It was a golden start to a showbusiness career,” she wrote in Forever Francie, her 2005 book about her life and that of her late husband, Jack Milroy, who is best remembered for his Francie and Josie double act with fellow comedian Rikki Fulton.
When, in 1937, the band came to Glasgow for a week at the Empire, it was big news. “My folks ordered a taxi to take me to the theatre each evening. There must have been 100 people waiting at the close to see the local girl star going to work. What they didn’t know was that my father stopped the taxi at Paisley Road Toll and we continued the journey by bus, because we couldn’t afford the fare into town.”
With the outbreak of the Second World War, she hotfooted it back to Scotland and discovered her flair for comedy when she was offered a summer season at Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre with the comedian Tommy Morgan. After touring Egypt with ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association), she established herself as a talented comedian and gag writer in shows and pantos at Scottish variety theatres and in Belfast, where she met the less well-established comedian Jack Milroy, whom she married while they were appearing in the summer season at Aberdeen’s Tivoli Theatre in 1952.
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As Milroy’s career took off, Lee was content to focus on raising her two children, James, who became a drummer, and Diana, who went into business. She is survived by Diana; Jack died in 2001 and James died in 2014.
In her late fifties, she resumed both prongs of her career: she worked with Milroy and Fulton in pantomime and sang twice at London’s Festival Hall — in a big band show presented by BBC disc jockey Alan Dell, and at a tribute show for Roy Fox at the London Festival Hall. In the early 1990s, she became a DJ herself, presenting The Aunty Mary Lee Show, “a homely show geared to the Golden Oldies” – based on her own idea – on Radio Clyde on Saturday nights. It won her a Sony Award in 1991. The Scottish Music Hall and Variety Theatre Society made her an honorary vice-president in 2005.
She always remained connected to her roots, and as recently as 2017 when she took her seat in the audience for the King’s Theatre pantomime, she was given a round of applause – an unmistakable and glamorous figure, with her bright blonde hair, and signature false eyelashes and high heels.
She attributed her sense of style to her early days with the Fox band. It was, she told Memory Lane magazine in 2000, “the best college education I could have wished [for]. I was groomed in every way — speech, dress, manners — you name it, I had it. But the only thing I wasn’t instructed in was singing. Roy Fox used to say to the band: ‘Boys, don’t let the kid hear any Ella Fitzgerald records or Peggy Lee records.’ He wanted me to keep my own style of jazz singing which came from nowhere.”
Mary Lee Milroy, singer and comedian, was born on August 13, 1921. She died on March 13, 2022, aged 100