Beatrice Lillie

1894–1989 · Canadian-born British comic actress and revue singer

Beatrice Lillie was born in Toronto in 1894 and became one of the defining comic performers of the West End and Broadway revue, celebrated for a deadpan delivery that could puncture a room without raising its voice. She married Robert Peel in January 1920 and became Lady Peel in 1925, when he succeeded to the baronetcy — a title she used with visible relish, and which supplies the entire mechanism of this joke. She told the butcher’s-wife story herself in her 1972 autobiography, Every Other Inch a Lady, written with James Brough.

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“You May Tell the Butcher's Wife That Lady Peel Has Finished”

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