Billie Houston (1) (1906–1972)

Billie Houston was the daughter of music hall performers James Gribbin and Elizabeth Houston, who had a song and dance act. Her older sister Renée (Caterina Rita Murphy Gribbin, 1902-1980) began a stage career in 1912. Four years later, with their parents suffering from ill helath, the two girls began working together as the Houston Sisters. In the 1920s, the pair enjoyed sustained popularity, topping the bill in venues around Britain and filling the London Palladium on numerous occasions. They appeared at a Royal Variety Command performance in the days when performers really did take part as a result of a command, or request, from the King; and they also appeared together in a handful of films. However, the act eventually broke up due to Billie's poor health. Unlike her sister, who would continue to have a successful stage career, henceforth Billie was much less visible in public on account of her continuing health problems, but also because after two failed marriages she finally found domestic happiness in her third marriage to journalist Paul Wills-Eve. A devotee and voracious reader of detective fiction, she wrote a crime novel called Twice Round the Clock and contemplated a second novel, tentatively named Whatever Happened to Aunt Jane?, which however never progressed beyond the draft and note-taking stage.