# Violet Carson
**Violet Helen Carson** (1 September 1898 – 26 December 1983) was an English actress, pianist and singer, best known for playing the sharp-tongued caretaker [Ena Sharples](https://www.edgepedia.org/ena-sharples) in the soap opera *Coronation Street* from its first episode in 1960 until 1980, after a long career as a BBC radio performer.[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/) • [2](https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Born / died | 1 September 1898, German Street, Ancoats, Manchester; 26 December 1983, Cleveleys, Blackpool, aged 85[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/) |
| Signature role | Ena Sharples in *Coronation Street*, 9 December 1960 to 2 April 1980, 1,136 episodes[3](https://www.corrie.net/profiles/actors/carson_violet.html) • [4](https://coronationstreet.fandom.com/wiki/Ena_Sharples_-_List_of_appearances) |
| Radio career | First broadcast in 1924 on the 2ZY Manchester station; her own program *Songs at the Piano* ran regularly on the BBC from 1935 until about 1952[5](https://voxturturis.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/violet-carson-pianist-singer-musician-1898-1985-part-1/) |
| Honor | OBE in the 1965 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to drama, the first *Coronation Street* cast member so honored[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/) |
| Degree | Honorary Master of Arts from the University of Manchester for her long association with broadcasting[6](https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Television-%26-Radio-ITV/ITV-Guide-to-Independent-Television-1974.pdf) |
| Namesake | A yellow-blend Floribunda rose, 'Violet Carson', was named after her[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/) |
## Early life and music
Carson was born in German Street, Ancoats, Manchester, the older of two daughters of a flour miller and his amateur-singer wife.[3](https://www.corrie.net/profiles/actors/carson_violet.html) She began piano lessons at the age of three and left school in 1918 to play piano at the Market Street cinema in Manchester; by her mid-teens she was working as a professional musician.[3](https://www.corrie.net/profiles/actors/carson_violet.html) • [7](https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/) When sound films arrived, she moved into singing and radio commercials, and performed around the North West with her sister Nellie as the Carson Sisters singing act.[3](https://www.corrie.net/profiles/actors/carson_violet.html) • [8](https://swintonlocalhistory.weebly.com/violet-carson.html)
Her first broadcast came in 1924, on the 2ZY Manchester station, where she appeared as a mezzo-soprano alongside her sister Nellie; she never mentioned this early broadcast in any interview.[5](https://voxturturis.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/violet-carson-pianist-singer-musician-1898-1985-part-1/) From 1935 until about 1952 she regularly broadcast her own program, Songs at the Piano, a 15-to-20-minute mix of folk songs, [Lancashire](https://www.edgepedia.org/lancashire) dialect verse set to music, art songs and syncopated numbers, on which she accompanied herself with what one retrospective describes as a natural rubato and clear diction.[5](https://voxturturis.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/violet-carson-pianist-singer-musician-1898-1985-part-1/) Related wartime series included *Songs that Father Sang* with the BBC Northern Orchestra, *Edwardian Echoes*, and two-piano programs with the pianist Edith Roscoe; she also played orchestral piano and sang in the close-harmony trio the Three Semis.[5](https://voxturturis.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/violet-carson-pianist-singer-musician-1898-1985-part-1/)
Much of her fame rested on children's and light-entertainment radio. She worked on *Children's Hour* and, from 1964, on Wilfred Pickles's quiz *Have A Go*, and appeared on BBC North Region's *Woman's Hour*.[3](https://www.corrie.net/profiles/actors/carson_violet.html) • [7](https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/) Whether she was ever known on air as "Auntie Vi" is disputed: several fan and reference sources use that nickname for her, but a detailed study of her broadcasts argues that "Auntie Vi" was a different BBC performer, Violet Fraser, and quotes Carson saying "I was never anybody's Aunt".[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/) • [5](https://voxturturis.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/violet-carson-pianist-singer-musician-1898-1985-part-1/)
Her marriage was short. She married George Frederick Peploe, a road contractor she had known from childhood, at Manchester Cathedral in September 1926, her twenty-eighth birthday; he died in 1929, after which she settled with her sister Nellie in a bungalow in Cleveleys, Blackpool.[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/) • [3](https://www.corrie.net/profiles/actors/carson_violet.html)
## Ena Sharples and Coronation Street
*Coronation Street*, created by Tony Warren for Granada Television, launched on 9 December 1960, and Carson played Ena Sharples from the first episode.[9](https://www.itv.com/watch/collections/coronation-street-greatest-episodes/28PuApiW8062hJYDonUaBq) • [3](https://www.corrie.net/profiles/actors/carson_violet.html) The casting came late: dozens of actresses had been tried without success, and Carson was the last to audition. Warren, who had appeared on *Children's Hour* in his youth, reportedly suggested her, saying she was "Auntie Violet on BBC North"; at her audition she put on the character's hairnet.[10](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/sep/11/ena-sharples-violet-carson) • [11](https://coronationstreet.fandom.com/wiki/Violet_Carson) • [12](https://www.granadaland.org/geoff-lancashire/) She was 62 when the series began, and she had already appeared on television in *Hilda Lessways* (1959) and *An Age of Kings* (1960).[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/) • [7](https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/)
Ena Sharples became one of the program's defining characters: a hairnetted, moralizing widow who feuded with Elsie Tanner and sat with Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst in the snug of the Rovers Return.[13](https://coronationstreetupdates.blogspot.com/2012/06/corrie-originals-violet-carson-obe-as.html) • [14](https://backonstreet.blogspot.com/2009/07/1965-violet-carson-obe.html) The program, twice weekly on Britain's Independent Television network, regularly attracted more than 10 million viewers a night, and Carson's characterization was described by the *Guinness Television Encyclopedia* as one of television's unforgettable characterizations.[7](https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/) • [15](https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/History/Guiness-Television-Encyclopedia-Evans-1995-22-06-06.pdf)
**The role's cost.** Carson resented being identified with the part. "She's a back-street bitch," she once said of her character, and "I don't want to be Sharples, that old bag, all my life. I want people to remember I'm Violet Carson."[7](https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/) In a 1978 *TV Times* interview she said that "Violet Carson was destroyed the day Ena Sharples first appeared in *Coronation Street*".[11](https://coronationstreet.fandom.com/wiki/Violet_Carson)
She appeared in 1,136 episodes over the twenty years to 1980, though her workload fell sharply after she suffered a stroke in 1974; 1974 brought only 13 episodes, and her final appearance, on 2 April 1980, came after a return had been prevented by a serious bout of anemia.[4](https://coronationstreet.fandom.com/wiki/Ena_Sharples_-_List_of_appearances) • [11](https://coronationstreet.fandom.com/wiki/Violet_Carson) She was never written out of the program by script: the characters maintained the fiction that Ena had retired and moved away.[7](https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/)
## Honors and later years
Recognition followed quickly. In 1961, while the series was in its first year, a wax figure of Ena Sharples was placed in Tussaud's Blackpool Waxworks between [Bob Hope](https://www.edgepedia.org/bob-hope) and [Frank Sinatra](https://www.edgepedia.org/frank-sinatra), with the firm predicting she might be its biggest draw since [Mae West](https://www.edgepedia.org/mae-west).[16](https://mcmweb.co.uk/tvtimes/1961/Sept%203rd%201961.pdf) Carson received the OBE in the 1965 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to drama, the first *Coronation Street* cast member honored by the Queen, and received an honorary Master of Arts degree from the University of Manchester for her long association with broadcasting.[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/) • [6](https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Television-%26-Radio-ITV/ITV-Guide-to-Independent-Television-1974.pdf) In her last years she was a regular guest on the religious program *Stars on Sunday*, singing and playing the organ.[15](https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/History/Guiness-Television-Encyclopedia-Evans-1995-22-06-06.pdf)
She died on [Boxing Day](https://www.edgepedia.org/boxing-day), 26 December 1983, at the age of 85, at Cleveleys; the cause of death was not disclosed. She was buried at Bispham Parish Church, Blackpool.[7](https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/) • [3](https://www.corrie.net/profiles/actors/carson_violet.html)
## The rose
A hybrid Floribunda rose named 'Violet Carson' commemorates the actress. IMDb dates its introduction to 1963 and describes it as a cross of 'Mme Leon Cuny' with 'Spartan'; the Russian film database Kinopoisk credits the 1964 introduction to the rose breeder Samuel McGredy IV, a discrepancy the sources do not resolve.[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/) • [17](https://www.kinopoisk.ru/name/1367326/) The flower appears in the 2005 film *V for Vendetta*, where it is renamed 'Scarlett Carson', a variety that does not exist.[1](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/)
## References
1. [Violet Carson, Biography, IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0141340/bio/)
2. [Violet Carson, the actress who played Ena Sharples, dies, UPI Archives, 28 December 1983](https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/)
3. [Violet Carson OBE, corrie.net](https://www.corrie.net/profiles/actors/carson_violet.html)
4. [Ena Sharples, List of appearances, Coronation Street Wiki](https://coronationstreet.fandom.com/wiki/Ena_Sharples_-_List_of_appearances)
5. [Violet Carson, Pianist, Singer, Musician 1898-1983, voxturturis](https://voxturturis.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/violet-carson-pianist-singer-musician-1898-1985-part-1/)
6. [Some Award Winners, ITV Guide to Independent Television 1974, WorldRadioHistory](https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Television-%26-Radio-ITV/ITV-Guide-to-Independent-Television-1974.pdf)
7. [Violet Carson, the actress who played Ena Sharples, the... - UPI Archives](https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1983/12/28/Violet-Carson-the-actress-who-played-Ena-Sharples-the/3409441435600/)
8. [Violet Carson, Swinton Local History](https://swintonlocalhistory.weebly.com/violet-carson.html)
9. [Coronation Street: Greatest Episodes, ITVX](https://www.itv.com/watch/collections/coronation-street-greatest-episodes/28PuApiW8062hJYDonUaBq)
10. [Ena, radio review, The Guardian, 10 September 2009](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/sep/11/ena-sharples-violet-carson)
11. [Violet Carson, Coronation Street Wiki](https://coronationstreet.fandom.com/wiki/Violet_Carson)
12. [Geoff Lancashire, Writer, Granadaland](https://www.granadaland.org/geoff-lancashire/)
13. [Corrie originals, Violet Carson OBE as Ena Sharples, Coronation Street Blog](https://coronationstreetupdates.blogspot.com/2012/06/corrie-originals-violet-carson-obe-as.html)
14. [1965: Violet Carson, OBE, Coronation Street, Back On The Street](https://backonstreet.blogspot.com/2009/07/1965-violet-carson-obe.html)
15. [CARSON, VIOLET, Guinness Television Encyclopedia (Evans, 1995), WorldRadioHistory](https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/History/Guiness-Television-Encyclopedia-Evans-1995-22-06-06.pdf)
16. [At Last, A Model Ena in Wax, TV Times, 3 September 1961](https://mcmweb.co.uk/tvtimes/1961/Sept%203rd%201961.pdf)
17. [Вайолет Карсон, Kinopoisk](https://www.kinopoisk.ru/name/1367326/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Screen people and creators › Screen actors of the Anglosphere and Europe › English actors: 1940s to 1960s › Surnames A to E*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 19, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license