Two hours before Cilla Black’s coffin arrived at St Mary’s church, the streets of Woolton started to swell. There were pensioners making a day of it with flasks and biscuits; shop assistants in tabards; workmen in hard hats and high-viz jackets; wheelchairs, pushchairs and 71-year-old Tony Biggs, who had come in his leathers all the way from Stoke on his Suzuki Intruder because “Cilla was one of the lads”.
Jane Richardson had come from Huddersfield in her best dress. “I like going to celebrity funerals – I’ve been to Reggie Kray, Princess Diana,” said the 49-year-old. “But I did like Cilla. She was a good northern lass.” Val Fawcett, 71, was in her Tesco uniform with her daughter, Angela. “It feels like the end of an era,” said Fawcett. “We met her in 2008. We went to see her in panto at the [Liverpool] Empire, 20 of us, front row seats. She was the Fairy Godmother. Afterwards we waited outside and she was so lovely. Her chauffeur was there, saying ‘come on!’ but she said ‘no’ and made time for us. Angela even gave her a kiss.”
Irene Burke, 66, summed up what was special about Cilla (no need for the surname). “She had no airs and graces. She was one of us.” Mark Finch, a Blind Date contestant who got turned down on the show, said she was “so down to earth.”.
It was a common refrain, how normal she was, how grounded, and how she never forgot her roots. Yet as soon as the funeral service began and Sir Cliff Richard took to the pulpit it was clear how far Cilla had come from Liverpool’s Scotland Road, where she was born Priscilla Maria Veronica White on 27 May 1943.
The pair had become friends in Barbados, where they both had holiday homes, said Richard. Black didn’t drive so he would ferry her around the island in his “Dukes of Hazzard-style” Ford pick-up. Her remembered her legs as she slipped out of the truck: “She did have beautiful legs.”
The chatshow host Paul O’Grady, who delivered the closing tribute, said he had first met Cilla when they both appeared on Parkinson. “We were soulmates,” he said, going on to accidentally declare her a “true daughter of London”.
Other guests included Sir Tom Jones, who chartered a private jet from Slovakia; Carol Vorderman, who said Black was an inspiration; Andrew Lloyd Webber, Les Dennis, Gerry (and the Pacemakers) Marsden and Krypton Factor presenter Gordon Burns. Jimmy Tarbuck led the prayers; Christopher Biggins did a reading.
O’Grady said he delighted in leading her astray, introducing her to New York’s underbelly “and the sort of nightclubs taxi drivers would be reticent to take you to” after the death of her beloved husband and manager, Bobby Willis, in 1999.
Standing at the front of the same church where Cilla and Bobby had wed in 1969, O’Grady told a story of Cilla getting locked out of her Barbados villa and him holding her ankles as she got stuck trying to get in though a window. “When the neighbours came she shouted ‘Surprise Surprise!’” He even dared a cocaine joke, regaling the congregation with another tale involving the pair of them in the casualty department of a Bajan hospital after he broke his nose and Cilla made things worse by chucking a packet of frozen sprouts at his face. Cilla had taken her water tablets and she also had a cold, so was constantly running into the loo at A&E, coming out sniffing and rubbing her nose. “We looked like something out of Shameless,” he said, to great laughter.
They spent two decades together “hellraising”, he said, quickly asking for forgiveness from Tom Williams, the auxillary bishop of Liverpool, who prescribed “three Hail Marys”.
But the funeral wasn’t just a chance for Cilla’s famous friends to hold forth. Her youngest son, 35-year-old Ben, talked of how his father shielded his mother from so much that she was able to remain childlike. “She loved being a star. She loved to entertain and make people happy.” She also liked to look good and as young as possible, he said, recalling the time when he had got into yoga and she had asked him whether meditating would make her look younger. He told his mother it might help her tap into some inner divine essence. She reflected. “I don’t need to wear high heels,” she began. “As long as I look good in a pair of jeans I’m ok.”
• This article was amended on 21 August 2015 to correct the name of the church where Cilla Black’s funeral was held.
