More to Persephone than just a burlesque dancer

10:27am Monday 11th August 2008

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You wouldn’t think this quite remarkable woman would be reticent about anything.

Yachtswoman, forensic science writer, businesswoman, mother, grandmother, musician, comedienne – oh, and burlesque artist; catch her act on YouTube – Persephone Lewin has been there and got the T-shirt.

That’s her real name, by the way. Her mother was Greek so, naturally, named her daughter after a Greek goddess.

“But I don’t have the stature of a Greek goddess,” she smiled.

Stature has nothing to do with height. Persephone is petite, 4ft 11ins and fills any room she walks into. Today, she is in a fitted crimson skirt, belted at the waist, and a white, short-sleeved blouse. She wears little make-up but has painted her near-perfect fingernails duck-egg blue. She walks barefoot, then produces a pair of four-inch heel, open-toe shoes which shout “party” very loudly. She insists on putting them on for the photograph.

“I want them to be seen,” she declared. “I love shoes – I must have 400 pairs.”

Persephone and her husband, David, live in a large house near West Mersea Yacht Club. They met at London’s Little Ship Club – a meeting place for people into boats – and, while it was love at first sight for David, Persephone needed more persuading.

She was then a student at the Royal Academy for the Dramatic Arts (Rada), but had no real inclination to be an actress. Being a student at Rada was just something she wanted to do. Yet there must have been a bit of the entertainer in her. Look what happened later – stand-up comedy.

Persephone shrugged. At this stage of her life, she seemed more interested in sailing. Certainly, that was what brought David and her together.

“Eventually, I began to feel the same way about David as he did about me,” she said.

“We married a year later in Caxton Hall in London, and went to live in Essex. David was a dentist – his family had a dental practice in Romford.”

She seemed eager to skip over much of her family history. Not because of any lurking skeletons; Persephone felt too much information might give away her age – and that was something she was not going to reveal. So she glossed over the year she went to Rada, the year she married and the ages of their two children, Alexander and Juliette.

“As a burlesque artist, age could be an issue,” she explained. “It isn’t that I am concerned about how old I am, but I am competing with 20-year-olds, so not revealing my age is an edge.”

But before burlesque there was her own manufacturing company (it made security fixings), ten years of raising their two children and then, something completely different, forensic science.

By the time the family moved to West Mersea in the early 1990s, David had left the dental practice and set up as a forensic odontologist. He worked for the police matching suspects’ teeth to bitemarks found on victims. The bulk of his job was in mortuaries, and Persephone was fascinated enough by the stories he told to start going with him.

It was the beginning of the first husband-and-wife team in forensic investigation. Soon, David and Persephone were appearing regularly at criminal trials – he took the witness box, she set up the slide show – and his techniques were being used to unravel high profile cases, including the murder of nine-year-old Victoria Climbié in 2000.

In 2006, Persephone wrote a book about their work and many of their cases. Bite to Byte was reprinted earlier this year with a new, more eye-catching jacket featuring lots of red and a knife.

But before the book came burlesque. It all started when she was taking French conversation lessons at Greyfriars, then the adult education college in Colchester. The college had decided to put on a revue to raise money for a lift. Persephone was asked to take part. Dressed in a Christian Dior frock complete with lifejacket and sou’wester with a toy penguin as a prop, she told a joke – in “very slow” French – about said penguin and a lifeguard.

“David was at this point in charge of the RNLI lifeboat at West Mersea,” she explained, “so that’s where I got the lifejacket from – and the lifeguard idea.”

But it was a course in stand-up comedy at Colchester’s Quakers Meeting House which pushed her into the whole burlesque thing. She suddenly realised she had a lot more to offer than stand-up. She could sing, dance, play the trumpet and had a real knack for making fin de siècle costumes. At this point she hadn’t heard of burlesque, but that’s what her act became. So, complete with that penguin – now called Freddie – she took her very visual act to London, and is now a regular at Madam JoJo’s Burlesque Show in Soho.

She strips, too.

“Not really,” she laughed. “I just take off my dress – at the insistence of Freddie – but still have clothes underneath. When I did it during my first burlesque at a working men’s club in Bethnal Green, my son said was he supposed to tell his friends his mother is a stripper in a club!”

Remarkable doesn’t really cover it.