Sheila Margaret Kidd

When Sheila Kidd joined the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRCNS) on 04 July 1943, she brought a very unusual talent to the table, a skill the Navy was able to make good use of.

Just 20 when she signed up for wartime service, Kidd was already a professional ventriloquist who’d had three years’ experience performing in clubs and theatres before entering the WRCNS. She was chosen to perform in the very popular Meet the Navy shows with her not-so-silent partner, a redheaded dummy named Spike Ryan.

Kidd had developed her ventriloquist abilities during her teen years, when she suffered from painful throat ulcers and discovered “I could talk without moving my lips,” as she explained in an August 1943 newspaper write-up.

Her performances with Meet the Navy attracted good reviews, even though at the time, a female ventriloquist was considered a bit of an oddity. As one reviewer commented, ‘For the first time in one’s life one heard a girl ventriloquist, and a very skillful one, in the person of Sheila Kidd.’

Meet the Navy was not an easy gig, by the sound of things. Mornings and afternoons and were spent in rehearsals, and there were sometimes multiple performances in a single day as the show made its way to cities and towns across Canada, and eventually to the UK.

In an interview with The Daily Star newspaper, Kidd observed that “Spike’s a very boastful type”, and went on to say that he had acquired “a personality all his own” since she’d joined the Navy. “Now he is a sailor through and through,” said Kidd, “but he’s no as well-behaved as he might be.”

You get the sense that Kidd might have been having a bit of fun with Spike at the officers’ expense, as one Victoria newspaper noted:

“Navy discipline is the order of the day during rehearsals of ‘Meet the Navy’, but one rating in the show sasses the officers. He is ‘Spike’ and his best friend is Wren Sheila Kidd, girl ventriloquist. Wren Kidd is invariably respectful to the officers in the show, but the dummy Spike is unusually salty.”

We know little or nothing about Sheila Kidd’s life after she was discharged from the Navy at HMCS DISCOVERY, other than the fact that her mother, Mrs. Mona McMahon, lived in Vancouver, and that Kidd had agreed to serve in the Pacific in the event that the war continued. We would love to know if she continued in her showbiz career with Spike, or went on to another line of work.