Keturah Sorrell

Keturah Sorrell was born in Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, England in 1912, the daughter of William and Jenny Sorrell. She attended Middlesbrough High School for Girls where she excelled at languages, a useful talent in her future career. While at school, she was encouraged to enter singing competitions and to perform publicly. She won prizes and made her first radio broadcast from Newcastle at 14 in 1926. It was during one of these competitions that her gift of perfect pitch was discovered. The adjudicator's bell went, and she launched immediately into a Schubert song, perfectly in tune, without waiting for the note from the astonished accompanist. Keturah Sorrell was the principal soprano for the Intimate Opera company and also sang leading roles at Sadler's Wells Opera. During the war she toured with CEMA, the precursor of the Arts Council, and in 1950 she toured North America with Intimate Opera. At 68 she embarked on a new career in television. After leaving school she joined the Civil Service for a while, but she continued singing, performing amateur principal roles in Gilbert and Sullivan with Redcar Operatic Society and also making further broadcasts. After her marriage in 1939 she studied at the Royal College of Music. She received much encouragement from the college principal, Sir George Dyson, whose music she included in her programmes. She continued to sing professionally in concerts and oratorio, and won the Gold Medal in the North of England Musical Festival for the outstanding individual performance of the year. On graduating, Sorrell went straight to Sadler's Wells Opera where she was immediately cast as Esmeralda in The Bartered Bride. Peter Pears was performing the role of Vasek and they became friends. They also performed together in oratorio. She subsequently sang leading roles at Sadler's Wells in The Marriage of Figaro and Il tabarro as well as Gretel in Hansel and Gretel. In 1947 Sorrell joined Intimate Opera whose core repertoire was small-scale one-act operas such as Thomas Arne's Thomas and Sally, James Hook's The Musical Courtship and The Musick Master attributed to Pergolesi. These performances were frequently taken round public schools, colleges and music societies, as well as provincial theatres in Leeds, Cambridge and Oxford. In 1950 the company toured the United States from coast to coast, with further stops in Vancouver and Montreal. The following year the company recorded its entire repertoire on the Decca label. Sorrell retired from solo performance in the mid-1950s, but continued to sing professionally in choirs and with the Ambrosian Singers. In 1980 she embarked on a new career in television as a supporting artiste. Her first appearance was in a Scottish wedding sketch in Not the Nine O'Clock News and she was a regular on Waiting for God (1990) featuring in at least 25 episodes. She also appeared in The Bill (1984), EastEnders (1985), Drop the Dead Donkey (1990), A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1987), an early episode of One Foot in the Grave (1990), in Victoria Wood's Pat and Margaret (1994) as well as in two episodes of Keeping Up Appearances (1990). Her most conspicuous appearances were with the comedians Hale and Pace with whom she allowed herself to be pushed full in the face to send her flying, and expelled from the studio in disgrace during a spoof snooker sketch with Steve Davis and Jimmy White. The consummation of this part of her career was when she crawled along the top of a milk float which she had climbed up after pursuing it on a mobility scooter in a take-off of a James Bond-style chase. She was in her mid-eighties at the time. Sorrell's husband, Eric S Sadler, whom she married in 1939, was a journalist, he died in 1999. Sorrell died in 2012, aged 99. She was survived by her son Paul K Sadler (born 1947).