Two Fat Ladies

Biographies

Clarissa Dickson-Wright

Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson-Wright was no stranger to good food as a child. She was born into a home where eating caviar and pheasant shooting were the norm and pigeons were flown in from Cairo for supper. Her father was a respected surgeon, but also a violent alcoholic. When Clarissa won a place at Oxford, he refused to subsidise her unless she read medicine. So she went to University College London to study law and was called to the bar aged 21. She practised successfully as a barrister for several years, before settling on cooking as her true calling. She ran her own catering business, cooked on a yacht in the Caribbean and served 60 meals a day at her London luncheon club. Her 12-year bout of alcoholism, triggered by the death of her mother in 1978, has been well documented. She eventually turned to Alcoholics Anonymous and, while in a halfway house, she started working at Books for Cooks in Notting Hill, London. Along the way, she also became one of only two women in England to become a guild butcher (the other was the Queen Mother). She is also the first woman to be rector at the University of Aberdeen. She rode into fame in the sidecar of Jennifer Paterson's motorcycle in the TV series Two Fat Ladies and she was often seen as the slightly saner sidekick. However, Clarissa refused to make another series of Two Fat Ladies after her co-star's death in 1998. In her latest TV project - Clarissa and the Countryman - she joins her lifelong friend sheep farmer Sir Johnny Scott to pay homage to rural Britain, sharing their passion for field sports and traditional country activities. There's no denying she's a survivor, and her ability to talk on almost any subject along with her down-to-earth philosophy and straight-forwardness makes her a natural star. It's unlikely we'll see her cooking on our screens again, but she has published six books on food and cookery, and it's a sure thing that food will always be part of this lady's life!
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Jennifer Paterson

Chain-smoking, hard-drinking, outspoken, politically incorrect, fat, jolly and ever so slightly dotty, Jennifer Paterson was one of our most-loved TV chefs. Jennifer was an unlikely TV food celebrity who claimed she had never had a cookery lesson in her life. She was though, an enthusiastic cook from the age of four, spending hours hovering in the kitchen concocting what she described as 'little messes'. Born in London, the daughter of an army officer, she spent the first four years of her life in China before her family returned to live in Rye, East Sussex. She was expelled from her convent boarding school at the age of 15 for being disruptive. She developed her talent for cooking when she later lived abroad, in Berlin, Portugal, Venice, Sicily and Benghazi in Libya, looking after the children of various friends and family. In 1952, she returned to England and worked for various magazines before working behind the scenes for the ITV show Candid Camera and as an assistant stage manager at the Theatre Royal in Windsor. Other jobs included the unlikely role of matron at a girls' boarding school near Reading and housekeeper to a Ugandan diplomat. She was a familiar face on the London party circuit in the 1960s. In 1977, she became the cook for the Spectator magazine, cooking for star guests from a tiny kitchen on the top floor, and stayed for 15 years. Despite meeting Clarissa Dickson-Wright at a party in Tuscany in 1991, it was several years before the Two Fat Ladies series was conceived by producer Patricia Llewellyn, and the pair was brought together to forge a partnership that lasted four and a half years. Jennifer was a devout Catholic who would ride for miles to go to mass during filming. She died 'peacefully, painlessly and full of caviar' on 10 August, 1999 at the age of 71 after losing her battle with lung cancer. Such a huge personality is sorely missed, but take comfort in the words of her culinary chum, Clarissa Dickson-Wright. Writing about her friend's death in Scotland on Sunday, she said: "Jennifer is no doubt sitting on a cloud, with her bike parked beside her, smoking a fag and discussing menus with St Peter, singing hymns with St Lucy and writing recipes with St Honore before going off to lunch with Noel Coward."
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