Nancy Brooker Spain was a prominent English broadcaster and journalist.
16 Facts About Nancy Spain
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Nancy Spain was a columnist for the Daily Express, Nancy Spain magazine, and the News of the World in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Nancy Spain was born in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, the younger of the two daughters of Lieutenant-Colonel George Redesdale Brooker Nancy Spain, a freeman of the city and prominent figure in local military and antiquarian affairs.
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Nancy Spain's father was a writer himself and appeared in a number of radio plays as well as broadcasting commentaries on Newcastle United games.
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Nancy Spain went to Roedean School from 1931 to 1935, where she began wearing "mannish" clothes, and developed a clear and rich speaking voice that stood her in good stead in her eventual media career.
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Nancy Spain played lacrosse for Northumberland and Durham, and hockey for the North of England, as well as playing tennis and cricket.
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Nancy Spain acted on BBC radio, where she took over star parts vacated by Esther McCracken.
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Nancy Spain was a sports reporter for the Newcastle Journal.
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Nancy Spain followed this up with a series of detective novels set at a girls' school, Radcliff Hall, a thinly disguised Roedean.
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Nancy Spain invented as her sleuths a revue star called Miriam Birdseye and her friend, a Russian ballerina, Natasha Nevkorina.
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Birdseye was based on Hermione Gingold, who had become a good friend of Nancy Spain and had urged her to portray her in a book.
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The success of the novels helped Nancy Spain become a star columnist for the Daily Express, She and the News of the World in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Nancy Spain died, with Laurie and three others, on 21 March 1964.
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Nancy Spain was travelling there to cover the 1964 Grand National, which was taking place that day.
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Nancy Spain was cremated with Laurie at Golders Green Crematorium, London, and her ashes were put in the family grave in Horsley, Northumberland.
16.
Nancy Spain is the inspiration of the song 'Nancy Spain' written by Barney Rushe and performed by, among others, Christy Moore.