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Celebrating television's This Is Your Life

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THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Ethel Goldsack, teacher, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews outside the BBC Television Theatre, having been led to believe she was there to watch a film.

Ethel, who was born in Bradford and educated in Glasgow, was training to be a teacher in Manchester and Preston when her aunt, Lady Ewing, who was undertaking research at Manchester University on the problems with deafness, invited her to assist in her research. This led Ethel to specialise in teaching deaf children, in particular, to lip-read rather than use sign language.

As the head teacher of the Royal Residential School for the Deaf in Old Trafford, Manchester, she advised on technical aspects of the 1952 Ealing Studios film Mandy, an adaptation of a 1946 novel called The Day is Ours about a young deaf girl, which was filmed at the school.

programme details...

• Edition No: 97
• Subject No: 97
• Broadcast date: Mon 4 May 1959
• Broadcast time: 7.30-8.00pm
• Recorded: Mon 20 Apr 1959
• Venue: BBC Television Theatre
• Series: 4
• Edition: 32

on the guest list...

• Jim Smith
• Mrs Smith
• Dorothy Wale
• Harold Whitton
• Kathleen Ives - sister
• Gwen Simpkins
• David Bleackley
• Mandy Miller
• Leslie Norman
• Len Hutton
• David Lewis
• Judith Clarke
• Jacqueline Comish
• Brenda Finney
• Colin Wilkinson
• Beverley Wright
Filmed tribute:
• Janet Leary – sister

production team...

• Researcher: Liam Nolan
• Writer: Liam Nolan
• Director: Vere Lorrimer
• Producer: T Leslie Jackson

Jack of all Trades

from domestic cleaner to teacher

Photographs of Ethel Goldsack This Is Your Life

Daily Express 5 May 1959

LOOKING-IN WITH NANCY SPAIN

SIR LEN SURPRISES CRICKET-FAN ETHEL

LAST night I dodged sadly from network to network, hoping for some intelligent entertainment. On the whole, the BBC won.

Their "Tonight" programme had some exciting pictures of a Canadian lumberjack doing the hair-raising job known as high-topping, i.e. lopping off the top of a pine tree about 150ft. high.

And then, also on BBC came This Is Your Life telling the inspiring story of Ethel Goldsack, a thoroughly nice woman who has educated hundreds of deaf children.

(It is easy to be aware of the blind, but few people are capable of imagining what life is like for children who don't hear).

A tightrope

Ethel had no nonsense about her. But she spilled over into real emotion twice, once when her sister reminded her how they had gone to a matinee of Rose Marie together ... and the other time when Sir Leonard Hutton appeared, and we learned, astonishingly, that Ethel's hobby is cricket.

This Is Your Life is an amazing programme.

Every week producer T. Leslie Jackson walks a tightrope between mawkishness and genuine emotion.

The wonder is that nine times out of 10 he succeeds in bringing off the real stuff.