Irene Thomas

Background

Irene Thomas was born Elsie Irene Ready in Feltham, Middlesex, into a working-class family, the daughter of a musician in a military band.

Career

She then embarked on a career as a musician and singer. She branched out into session singing, joined the George Mitchell Minstrels and became the familiar voice of many radio and television advertising jingles in the 1950s. In 1959 while recovering from cancer surgery she applied to join Mensa and her intelligence quotient was rated at 159.

This heralded a forty-year period as a mainstay of radio panel game quiz programmes.

In 1967, after much lobbying of the producers, she joined the panel on Round Britain Quiz, regarded as the most erudite of the British Broadcasting Corporation"s quiz shows, and rapidly became its most celebrated panellist. In the 1970s she co presented a British Broadcasting Corporation daytime television programme entitled The 607080 Show with Roy Hudd.

Her autobiography, The Bandsman"s Daughter, was published in 1979.

Achievements

• She attended Ashford County Grammar School where she was considered to have the potential to win a scholarship to Oxford University, but she left at fifteen to work as a clerk at the Inland Revenue. In 1961 she entered and won radio"s Brain of Britain contest.