Margot Boyd

May 23 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

EVERYTHING was perfect about the name, the casting and the character development – and when her voice thundered through the webbed speaker on your wireless, you could hear the squelch of country lanes, smell the jam in WI pots and imagine the rebukes addressed to an Afghan hound, who is hoping to cock a rear leg at an inappropriate moment.

Yes, Marjorie Antrobus was her name in The Archers, the radio serial, which should never be vulgarised as a “soap”.

And that surname comes from a Cheshire village, south of Warrington, which was listed as Entrebus in the Domesday Book and, through complicated linguistic twists, derived from an Old Norse word for bush.

Anyway, Margot Boyd became Mrs Antrobus, “the dog woman” in the Archers in 1984, when she addressed the Ambridge Over 60s Club on “The Colourful World of the Afghan Hound”.

As the dog-breeding widow of soldier and big gamehunter, Teddy Antrobus, from the old British Empire, her place was established.

She represented the no-nonsense style of an England that has gone, using her own real experiences of British theatre to drill Ambridge’s thespians in local dramatic production – and singing robustly in church from hymns ancient and modern, but mostly ancient.

Miss Boyd was born Beryl Billings and brought up in Bath, the daughter of a soldier and landowner.

This background was ideal for her part in The Archers, as she revealed in her 90th birthday interview. “Bath was full of ex-colonial people who had servants galore. They were all very horsy and doggy...”

However, she also confided that she was wary of horses and bigger dogs.

Inevitably, she has been associated with her radio work, but she attended RADA as a “gal”, appearing in a play produced by George Bernard Shaw, before entering repertory with the Theatre Royal, Leeds.

In 1953 she worked with Michael Redgrave in Stratford and this resulted in her playing the lead in his production of Noel Coward’s Waiting in the Wings.

Four years later, briefly, she had her own TV series, Our Miss Pemberton. There was plenty more work on stage and TV and she was a member of the BBC Radio Drama Company.

Miss Boyd, who didn’t marry, last broadcast as Mrs Antrobus in September 2004. She died in a home for old actresses in Middlesex.

Margot Boyd, actress, born September 24, 1913; died May, 20, 2008.