To the Manor Born, Then and Now — Penelope Keith Was the Last

Classic British telly, and the people who made it — where they are now. A Georgian house in Somerset, a gravel drive, and a widow at the gate of a home she can no longer afford. To the Manor Born began on BBC One on the 30th of September 1979, written by Peter Spence, who set it in a house his own father-in-law owned. Cricket House at Cricket St Thomas became Grantleigh Manor, and by the end of that first series nearly twenty-four million of us were watching. Forty-seven years on, all eight faces in this video have gone. WHERE THEIR LIVES ACTUALLY WENT Penelope Keith (Audrey fforbes-Hamilton) was born in April 1940 and her father walked out when she was a baby. The Central School turned her down for being five foot ten, so she paid her way through Webber Douglas working evenings at the Hyde Park Hotel — watching the very people she would spend fifty years taking apart. She was made a Dame in 2014 and ran the Actors' Benevolent Fund for thirty-two years, succeeding Laurence Olivier as president. Peter Bowles (Richard DeVere) played new money in a Rolls-Royce. Off screen his father was a valet, chauffeur and butler to aristocratic families and his mother a nanny to the Duke of Argyll. He married Susan Bennett in 1961 and stayed married sixty-one years. Angela Thorne (Marjory Frobisher) was born in Karachi in 1939. While she was the mildest woman in the village on Sundays, she was on the Whitehall stage playing Margaret Thatcher in Anyone for Denis? — and Mrs Thatcher came to see it. THOSE WE'VE LOST Daphne Heard (Mrs Polouvicka), who taught Peter O'Toole and Patrick Stewart at the Bristol Old Vic, died on 22 June 1983, aged 78. John Rudling — Brabinger, a draughtsman before the RSC — followed on 18 December 1983, aged 76: both gone within twenty-five months of the final episode. Michael Bilton (Ned the gardener), wounded at El Alamein, died 5 November 1993, aged 73. Daphne Oxenford (Mrs Patterson) — the voice of Listen with Mother, and an original 1960 Coronation Street cast member — died 21 December 2012, aged 93. Gerald Sim (the Rector), Richard Attenborough's brother-in-law, died 11 December 2014, aged 89. Peter Bowles died 17 March 2022, aged 85, and Angela Thorne on 16 June 2023, aged 84. Dame Penelope Keith died at home in Surrey on 29 June 2026, aged 86. Hundreds of her neighbours lined the pavement in Milford for the funeral. She was the last of them. Be honest: which one do you miss most — and was it Brabinger, crossing a room with a drinks tray at the only speed he had left? Tell us in the comments, and subscribe if you would like more of these. A note on sources: ages, dates and figures here were checked against publicly available records as of August 2026, and any amounts mentioned are estimates. The narration on this channel is AI-assisted. RETRO TELLY is made as a respectful tribute to British television and to the performers and families behind it.