Barbara Speake, fearsome founder of stage school

As a martinet of aspiring young actors, Barbara Speake was both revered and feared. She had her favourites and was not shy in showing it. Not only was she straight-talking, sometimes frighteningly so, she could also be miserly and short of fuse.
“Miss Speake would pull you down, and you don’t want to get on the wrong side of her,” one former pupil, Leon Pettit, noted. “She never forgets. You never get back in favour with her. Once, only once, she really shouted at me for 20 minutes, and I cried. She teaches you how to respect others and yourself, so she must be doing something right.”
Yet her eponymous stage school in East Acton, west London, gave opportunities to children from disadvantaged backgrounds and fostered confidence and self-belief in its students. “We are what you would call upper working-class,” she said. “Our kids come from ordinary families. Many even go into debt to buy their children a chance.”
A chance they certainly got, because Speake would supply the West End with a steady stream of young talent for shows such as Bugsy Malone, Les Misérables and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. As well as Keith Chegwin, Brian Conley and Kwame Kwei-Armah, the former artistic director of the Young Vic, she nurtured such future stars as Jack Wild, who was cast as the Artful Dodger in the film Oliver!.
June Collins, who headed Speake’s agency department, had discovered Wild kicking a football around in a London park with her son, the future pop star Phil Collins, who was also a pupil at the school. Speake would later describe Collins as “an ideal pupil, never in trouble”.
For his part, Collins would write of her in the foreword to her 2009 autobiography Angels in the Wings: “She is stubborn yet can be soft, bloody-minded yet considerate, kind yet ruthless, thoughtful yet selfish, hard-working yet frugal.”
Naomi Campbell was another alumni of the school. She was “quiet and never naughty or rude” back then, according to Speake — there was no foreshadowing of the histrionics that would mark Campbell’s adult years. She had joined aged three with dreams of becoming a dancer, but Speake saw her potential as a model after she took part in a fundraising campaign. “We had second-hand clothes brought in and did a modelling show to try and sell them and raise money,” she told The Stage in 2007. “That’s when I discovered that she could put anything on and look great in it.”
Speake was herself a child when she began to dance, and was 16 when she started the school, so she knew something about youthful ambition. After becoming the youngest person to pass the Advanced Teachers Certificate of the Royal Academy of Dance, she decided to open a dance school in 1945 at St Dunstan’s Church Hall, where she had learnt to dance. “I’d left school aged 15 between an air raid and the all-clear signal,” she recalled whimsically. “I couldn’t do anything at school and I was a reasonable dance technician but never had any talent for performance. I wanted to give children like me a chance.”
The enterprise was soon making a profit; the rent was half a crown (12 and a half pence) and eight children aged 11 and 12 each paid one shilling and sixpence (seven and a half pence) for their first dancing lesson. Within a few months she was preparing children for the kind of exams which she herself had passed not long ago. A year later the dance school had 17 children in West End shows.
In 1961 Speake brought in June Collins to start an agency arm. Two years later it became a full-time school. Speake proudly declared that there wasn’t a “single pregnancy or sex scandal” and, as the Swinging Sixties arrived, “none of that flower power nonsense”. Female students wore black and white dogtooth capes, white gloves and an air hostess-style cap with a yellow star embroidered with their initials.
The following decade she bought the freehold of St Dunstan’s Church Hall and on its creation in 1978 Grange Hill, a television show set at a fictional comprehensive in the north London borough of Northam, recruited its young actors from the Barbara Speake Stage School.
Barbara Mary Speake was born in Hammersmith, west London, in 1928 to Ida (née Sturgeon) and Richard. Both were Methodist Sunday school teachers and her father later became a self-employed window-cleaner. By the age of ten Barbara had passed Grade IV Royal Academy of Dance and on return from a short evacuation passed the next grade at 14, two years before starting her school.
Slim, with sharp, bird-like features, and in later life large round glasses and long white hair, usually pulled into a tight ponytail, Speake rather resembled a frightening headmistress from a Roald Dahl tale. She was still working in her seventies. “I’m supposed to come in late and to have one day off a week but I can’t quite bring myself to,” she said in an interview as the school celebrated its diamond anniversary.
Despite its success, the school became a target for Ofsted, which judged on more than one occasion that it had failed its pupils. One early inspection concluded that 9 per cent of its pupils received a grade A-C in their GCSE exams and in 2020 it closed its doors after being put into special measures by Ofsted.
“I understand you’ve been trying to get in touch with me,” Speake said in a video posted to her former students on an alumni Facebook page. “Well, here I am. The school has gone. I’ve sold the building. Somebody was going to try and continue the school but I don’t think they’ll manage it. They thought it was easy. It wasn’t, because you lot were difficult.”
No doubt her former pupils will have watched and listened to her video post in a spirit of fondness and fear.
Barbara Speake MBE, stage school founder, was born on August 25, 1928. She died on August 1, 2024, aged 95