Soap star scrubbed up well

THE headgear was unfamiliar and so was the smile.

She would normally be seen wearing a buttoned-up coat, a hairnet and a look that could stop a tank in its tracks.

As the immortal Ena Sharples, Violet Carson was one of soap's first superstars.

And when she made personal appearances, the actress who played Coronation Street's fearsome pillar of moral rectitude got the full VIP treatment.

Even if the crowd barely recognised the scourge of the Rovers Return, they jostled to catch a glimpse of the face behind the Ena Sharples scowl.

Miss Carson is pictured here on a visit to the Potteries in September 1963 when she opened two new showrooms of Telefusion, the Blackpool-based TV rental chain.

Maybe you recognise yourself in this picture taken by former Sentinel cameraman Horace Wetton at the Tunstall store, or were present when she officially opened the new branch in Longton.

If so, you'll remember how different she was from her television persona, both in appearance and personality. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat with elaborate floral embellishment, she happily signed autographs for fans young and old.

Violet Carson was Ena Sharples for 20 years, a fixture in the snug of the Rovers where she drank milk stout with Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst and passed judgment on the less worthy residents of Coronation Street – notably the brazen Elsie Tanner, played by Pat Phoenix.

The road to the Rovers began in 1898, when Violet Carson was born in Ancoats, Manchester. As a child, she was one of the two Carson sisters, a singing act, and later worked in cinemas, providing piano accompaniment to silent movies.

A regular on children's radio programmes, she was for a time the pianist in Have A Go, the famous radio show presented by Wilfred Pickles.

But it was Ena Sharples that made her a household name. Awarded the OBE in 1965, she was in Coronation Street throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, although ill-health forced her to leave the soap in 1980.

She retired to the bungalow she shared with her sister, Nellie, at Bispham, Blackpool, and died on Boxing Day in 1983 at the age of 85.