“She’s all fur coat and no drawers!” Grandma Woodward would cackle about Grandma Hancock, who for her part put on some peculiar airs and occasionally danced in the street.
“My grannies were little old ladies. They never talked about their lives to me or my sister,” says Hancock. “I’m a granny. And I’m me. If they were here now there are things I would love to ask them. I didn’t know my father’s mother had lived in Milan, or that my other dear gran had lost two children. In fact I don’t think even my mother knew that.”
So when the producers of Who Do You Think You Are?, the television series that traces celebrities’ family backgrounds, approached her, she says she was “so ashamed that I knew so little. I didn’t even know my grandad’s Christian name”.
Hancock had misgivings about doing the programme because she thought it would be “boring”, and was only talked into it by one of her five grandchildren: Lola, 7, who saw it as her chance of telly stardom. And like a good modern granny, Hancock, 72, demanded to see the final edit to make sure Lola’s big moment hadn’t ended up on the cutting-room floor.
We know an awful lot about Hancock since she published The Two Of Us — about life with her husband, John “Inspector Morse” Thaw — which became a runaway bestseller and won her the Reader’s Digest Author of the Year award in 2005. But she knew almost nothing about her own background.
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“I always considered I was working class,” she says, “if the definition was people who didn’t own their own home and had parents who worked six days a week. Though John would say, ‘F*** off, you’re not working class’. His dad was a miner and a lorry driver and they were incredibly poor.”
Hancock’s family fortunes turned out to be much more complicated than Thaw’s unremitting horny-handed northern poverty, and show the shifting nature of class boundaries.
Before the move to “so dull” Bexleyheath and jobs in a factory and a shop, her parents ran a pub in King’s Cross. But, as the programme’s researchers revealed, Hancock’s paternal grandfather had once been the Thomas Cook agent in Milan, a “coveted job” almost equivalent to honorary consul, which involved visits to the opera with titled and even royal clients.
No wonder Grandma Hancock felt she had the right to a few airs and graces — especially since her own father had been a bewhiskered pillar of Victorian middle-class respectability, the superintendent of a magnificent sewage pumping station on the Thames.
Yet as this line slid down the social ladder — a decline probably aided by Hancock’s father’s fondness for the bottle — there were signs of entrepreneurial spirit in her mother’s forebears, who in the past had risen quite a long way in the other direction. Though it made Hancock laugh when she took a portrait of an ancestress to Sotheby’s and the lady behind the desk pronounced that “this is obviously a nouveau riche”.
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Yet “my poor grannies both ended up dependent on my mum and dad” in that room in Bexleyheath, the result of a system that left them without pensions or even property, since they had had “living above the shop” jobs.
Hancock began her ascent out of that world and into what she calls the “classless limbo” of the acting profession via a scholarship to Dartford county grammar school and then Rada, where class also mattered. “I had a hard time wiping out my diphthong vowels,” she says. “John had the same problem with his Manchester accent.”
So is her voice very different to the way she and her family spoke when she was growing up? “Oh God, yes. No way could I have become an actress with the voice that I had.”
“Beautiful, safe and middle-class is what you had to be, like Virginia McKenna,” is her memory of the setbacks she faced getting her career started. So it’s ironic, then, that one of her first big successes was as a factory worker in the 1960s sitcom The Rag Trade. “I went right back to my original voice.”
The programme’s research shows no signs of theatricality in Hancock’s lineage, though you can see where she got her “big chin” — the resemblance to Grandfather Hancock is striking, so it perhaps was not kind of one of her daughters to scream “Bruce Forsyth!” when shown his photo.
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So is she pleased now that she let little Lola talk her into doing the programme? “Aristocrats always knew their roots. I filmed at Castle Howard once and the Howards very kindly let me delve into their family archives — it was amazing. When I was young I didn’t even learn about working-class history.
“Now everybody can learn about their parents and grandparents. I met so many people in the records office, often elderly, getting great joy delving into old papers.”
And any of their stories would, she agrees, be just as fascinating as her own, but “they have to sell it to the schedulers, don’t they?”.
Her own grandchildren, of course, will not have to conduct research in dusty archives to find out about granny’s life. But it’s debatable whether Hancock’s surprise at discovering her own grandmothers’ secrets would be greater than how those two embattled old ladies would feel if they could see how that little girl from Bexleyheath has turned into a very different species of granny.
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Who Do You Think You Are? is on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9pm