Entertainers; Margo Henderson, born October 11, 1928; died July 6, 2009; Somme (Sam) Kemp, born 1917; died June 29, 2009. MARGO Henderson and her husband, Sam Kemp, who have died within days of each other, were entertainers who for decades were fixtures on the British variety circuit, with Henderson making it to TV with appearances at the piano on The Black and White Minstrel Show.
She grew up as a young entertainer in the 1940s, singing and dancing for friends and neighbours while German bombs blasted their homes in Clydebank.
Her mother "ran up" her showbiz costumes on a sewing machine manufactured in a factory close to their home, dresses that would make her daughter look a real-life entertainer, like the young lady she later became.
Henderson was on the professional stage in Scotland at 19. That's when, in a summer show at Largs, she met a 29-year-old musician from Edinburgh, Sam Kemp, soon to team up with her and tour the variety theatres of Scotland.
The seaside town of Largs had this personal link for Henderson and Kemp, as they were known on the variety and pantomime circuit; they bought a bungalow within sight of the Barrfields Pavilion where they first met and made it their home base when on tour in their caravan.
An elegant woman of many talents, she was easing into her eighties with grace and still had an eagle eye to pierce the comic injustices of life and to send, with a smile and jest, a wise and passing thought on the bumbling world of today.
She made other TV appearances, including on ITV's impressionist show Who Do You Do? and her offbeat personality was its best when she mimicked the style, the witticisms and the voices of contemporaries such as Fyfe Robertson and Beryl Reid.
Henderson fell victim of a stroke just days after the death at 90 of her husband and lifetime stage partner, the multi-instrumentalist Sam Kemp.
His real first name, Somme, hides a family story. Its proud owner had a much-loved uncle who was killed in the fierce fighting in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
Young Kemp, born just one year later and told subsequently of the hero in his family, went through life with the registered first name Somme. He spoke proudly of his brave kinsman, caught up in terrible events.
Sam himself was to see fierce action in the Second World War and suffered as a prisoner of the Japanese.
Somme had tried hard to keep his unusual first name but the theatre owners and the bill-poster men did not recognise Somme as a name for theatre billing. Therefore, young Somme learned to be known as Sam Kemp, and as such toured the Scottish and English circuits.
They ended their long and happy lives, after fruitful years in theatres from Aberdeen to Brighton, in the sunshine of Estepona, near Malaga, on Spain's Costa del Sol. There they could watch UK television; I wonder how they took to it after being part of the middle glory years of the past century?
Shortly before their deaths, Margo and Sam, still sturdy in his late 80s but suffering from gradually weakening eyesight, were thinking seriously of leaving the warmth and sunshine of southern Spain and returning to Largs.
However, they chose to remain in Spain, close to their son, Chris, 47, and their two grandchildren, Sam and Jeff. By Gordon Irving
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