The showgirl sisterhood: five former variety stars look back at their wild careers – in pictures

default I hear the Golden Girls of Eastbourne before I see them – hooting laughter leaking out of a house in the East Sussex seaside town. Inside, I find five energetic women in their 80s and 90s, sitting in a knick-knack-filled living room and talking over one another like teenagers. “None of us stripped, did we?” “Oh nooo. We didn’t have rotating tassels!” Friends for more than half a century, the women met in rehearsals and aftershow parties while working as dancers, singers and comedy stooges in the 1960s and 70s. Their careers took them from cruise ships and panto to British seaside theatres, where they performed in sequin dresses, high-cut leotards and huge feather headdresses, sharing bills with the biggest stars of the day. Over the decades, Eastbourne became one of the places where they made their names. In later life, they have gathered here again – this time not for work, but for friendship. It was this sisterhood that caught the eye of photographer David Pickens. A retired circus performer, he was once part of a double act with one of the group’s sons. “I was hearing stories of his mother and her friends and how they were locally known affectionately as the Golden Girls and I thought, that would make a great story,” he says. “They’ve got amazing life stories, amazing camaraderie. What I really admired was the fact they were all women in a very male-dominated world, and then all those men have gone now, and they’re the last people standing.” He decided to photograph them at the town’s Royal Hippodrome – a Victorian theatre where all the women performed when they were younger. “It’s a beautiful theatre,” says former dancer and dance teacher Jenny Lawrenson, 83. Petite, with the voice of Mary Poppins and the impeccable posture of a lifelong ballet dancer, she says she remembers it better for another reason – its tilted stage: “You’re dancing uphill!” “I’ve got something to tell you from the Hippodrome,” says Beryl Plummer, a gentle 90-year-ol…