Violet Carson

It's true that to the vast majority of people alive today Violet Carson is only remembered as Ena Sharples, but she was an established actress and performer long before she took on that role.

Born in 1898 in Ancoats, Manchester, she performed with her younger sister Nellie as a singing act called the Carson Sisters. She then became a cinema pianist, providing the musical accompaniment for silent films.

She married the cricketer George Peploe in 1926, but he died just three years later, aged only 31. They had no children, and Violet Carson never remarried. Peploe's premature death was mirrored in the early life of Ena Sharples, whose backstory was that her fiancé had died in the First World War, and her husband had died prematurely in 1937.

In 1935 Violet Carson joined BBC Radio in Manchester, singing a range of material from comic musical hall style songs to light operatic arias. She began in a show called Songs at the Piano, and performed regularly in Children's Hour on the BBC Home Service; she was also the star of Nursery Sing Song from Manchester. She worked with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts during the Second World War, and for six years she was the pianist for Mabel and Wilfred Pickles's radio show Have A Go.

Her extensive radio career included a five–year period as a presenter and interviewer on Woman's Hour, and she acted in numerous radio dramas. It was while recording a children's programme in 1951 that she first worked with Tony Warren, who went on to create Coronation Street. On stage her curriculum vitae included playing the Duchess of York in Shakespeare's Richard III.

She appeared as Ena Sharples in the first episode of Coronation Street, which was broadcast on 9 December 1960. For much of her time on the programme, which fell just short of 20 years, Ena's moralising caused her to spar regularly with the free–spirited Elsie Tanner (played by Pat Phoenix).

Violet Carson was named ITV Personality of the Year in 1962. She sang regularly on Stars on Sunday during its ten–year run from 1969.

In the 1970s she suffered from a variety of health problems. She took time off from Coronation Street in 1973, and finally left in 1980. She died on Boxing Day 1983, at the home in Blackpool that she shared with her sister Nellie.

Long after her departure from Coronation Street and her own death, Violet Carson continues to be synonymous with the hairnet that was habitually worn by Ena Sharples, the flint–faced and gruff moral voice of the UK's favourite soap opera.