The true story of Rosemarie Frankland: the Lancaster Marks & Spencer shop girl who became Miss World

But this wasn’t any ordinary woman, this was Rosemarie Frankland who, three years earlier in 1961, became the first British woman to win Miss World, aged just 18.

Rosemarie’s win was well covered by the Lancaster Guardian and in November 1961, just hours after she was crowned in London, a reporter snatched an interview with the city’s newest celebrity while she was staying in a luxury London hotel.

“Lancaster’s Miss World picked up the receiver, yawned and told a Guardian reporter: ‘I am so tired and longing to get back home.’”

Asked about rumours that she had been due to marry before entering the contest, Rosemarie said: “I am not engaged. Even if I wanted to get married, my mother wouldn’t let me.”

And she denied she would be going on a shopping spree with her £6,000 prize money.

“So many plans are being made, I am in a whirl,” Rosemarie said. “I think I’m going to America to take part in a Bob Hope television programme and could be in America for Christmas although I would love to be home with my family who I’ve seen so little of lately.”

Just a couple of days later, Rosemarie did see her family again when she arrived back in Lancaster looking ‘as fresh and glamorous as at the moment of her crowning’.

Rosemarie told the Guardian: “I am so glad to be home. I might get a little rest but I then my plans are uncertain but I know there is pressure of work ahead.”

But this work was very different from that she had left behind.

Among photos featured in the Lancaster Guardian was one of a 16-year-old Rosemarie clocking on at Lancaster’s K Shoe factory where she worked before moving to a job at Marks & Spencer.

And just days after she became Miss World, Rosemarie’s first local engagement was to officially open the new K Shoe shop in New Street.

“People who had waited more than an hour to see her perform her first public engagement in the city cheered as police cleared a way through the throng, ” the Guardian reported.

Among the crowd was Rosemarie’s own mother who had refused to join her daughter in a car to the engagement, preferring to arrive by bus.

By contrast, Rosemarie was given VIP treatment and chose a pair of black Gold Cross shoes as a gift.

She later visited the K Shoe factory in Bulk Road where she was a machinist just two years before.

“I’m thrilled that my first public engagement in Lancaster is to open this shop and I’m looking forward to seeing the girls again. It will be my last engagement in the city as I have to go to Paris, Rome and America in the near future,” said Rosemarie who also had civic receptions in Lancaster and Morecambe to fit into her busy schedule.

So how did a young woman who lived with her parents and 14-year-old sister, Sheila, in Granville Road go from being Miss Morecambe to Miss World?

Born in Wales in 1943, Rosemarie was the daughter of a hospital cleaner and a factory foreman, Mr and Mrs Cyril Frankland.

The family moved to Lancaster when Rosemarie was still a child and just a few years later, she began entering beauty pageants.

She won the Miss Morecambe contest at the Super Swimming Stadium in 1960, Miss Lancashire and Miss Lake District.

Just a year later, Rosemarie won the Miss Wales and Miss United Kingdom titles which qualified her for Miss World.

But before competing in Miss World, she entered the Miss Universe competition in Florida and came second, winning a £1,420 cash prize as well as film and television offers and while still in America, Rosemarie met President Kennedy at the White House.

When she eventually won Miss World, the competition attracted a television audience of 10 million.

And when comedy legend, Bob Hope, crowned Rosemarie as Miss World, he described her as the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and later they struck up a relationship.

Just a year after making a non speaking appearance as a showgirl in A Hard Day’s Night, Rosemarie appeared in I’ll Take Sweden, alongside Bob. In 1964 she also featured in We Shall See, The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre and The Beauty Jungle.

She accompanied Bob on a tour of American forces in the Arctic too where he joked that Rosemarie was ‘so hot, we’re in real danger of going through the ice’.

However, Rosemarie’s film roles soon fizzled out so she became Bob’s personal assistant before the relationship ended.

Rosemarie had previously had a short-lived marriage in 1964 to Ben Jones, a photographer 16 years her senior, who had described her as not having the capacity to deal with the fame which came with the Miss World title.

“To throw an 18-year-old from behind the counter at Marks and Spencer in to the deep end of Miss World with no guidance and nobody to help her was too much.”

In 1970, Rosemarie married the singer/guitarist Warren Entner and they lived in Los Angeles. They had one daughter together and divorced in 1981.

Rosemarie continued to live in America until her death in 2000, aged 57, but her ashes were interred at her Welsh birthplace near Wrexham.