“Oh, what a shame.” Those were Sharon Osbourne’s words when her brother called to say their mother had died. Then she put the phone down.
Hope Shaw was a trained ballet dancer, the wife of British music manager Don Arden, and the mother of Sharon Osbourne. She was born on April 12, 1916, in Chorlton, Lancashire, England, and she died in December 1999 in Surrey, England, at the age of 83.
The distance between her and Sharon did not come from a single argument or a single moment. It was built slowly, over decades, starting long before Don Arden was in the picture and long before Sharon was born. A childhood shaped by poverty, a father who left, an aunt who died of tuberculosis, and a criminal charge at twelve years old left marks that Hope Shaw carried for the rest of her life.
Sharon only understood any of it twenty years after her mother was gone.
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Born Into a Family of Performers
Hope Shaw came from a world that lived on stage.
Her father, Arthur James Shaw, known professionally as James, was a music hall artist. Her mother, Doris Almgill, known as Dolly, was a dancer and choreographer of Irish descent. Together with Dolly’s sister Ira, the three performed as The Hewson Trio, a vaudeville act that toured theatre circuits across Britain in the years around the First World War.
James married Dolly in 1915 and was called up for military service within months, sent to Egypt in October 1915. Hope was born one month after he left, in April 1916.
In 1918, tragedy reached the family home at 29 Acre Lane, Brixton, South London. Dolly’s sister Ira died of tuberculosis at the age of 18. She had been performing while ill for two years. Theatres in that era were well known for spreading infection, and TB was one of the deadliest diseases in Britain. A vaccine became available to children just three years after Ira died.
James and Dolly’s marriage did not survive. By 1922, the residential directory for 29 Acre Lane listed only “Mrs Shaw.” He was already gone.
A Childhood in Poverty and the 1929 Arrest
With James out of the picture, Dolly was left raising Hope and a younger brother alone, with no steady income.
In 1929, Hope was twelve years old when she and her mother were arrested. A local newspaper covered it under the headline:
“A Brixton Incident. Mother and Daughter Charged. Child Takes the Blame.”
Dolly, who was going by the name Mabel at the time, and young Hope had been caught stealing two pairs of stockings and other articles. When they appeared before magistrates at Lambeth Police Court, Hope told them:
“I will take all the blame if you will let Mummy go.”
Both were convicted. They spent two nights in cells. The building where they were held is today a Buddhist meditation centre.
Sharon Osbourne discovered this while filming the BBC documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, broadcast on September 4, 2019. Researchers showed her the jailors’ index, which contained a photograph of her mother’s face at twelve years old. Sharon put her head in her hands on camera and said:
“I feel a pain in my heart looking at my mum’s little face in this photo.”
She added: “That is just heartbreaking. To have two kids, a husband gone, it must have been really hard.”
Hope Shaw’s Career as a Ballet Dancer
A photograph postcard from 1935, taken in a studio in Southampton, is one of the few surviving records of Hope Shaw as a performer. It shows her in full stage costume, and it was Sharon’s niece Gina who brought it to the BBC filming as part of the family’s collected memorabilia. When Sharon saw it for the first time, she laughed: “I definitely got her legs. Thanks a lot, Hope.”
Hope Shaw built a career as a trained ballet dancer and dance teacher. Dance ran through the family on both sides. Her mother Dolly was a choreographer. Her grandmother had performed in vaudeville. By the time she was managing a theatrical boarding house in Brixton in the late 1940s, performing was the only professional world she had ever known.
Her First Marriage and the Children Rarely Mentioned
Before Don Arden, Hope had already been married and divorced.
Her first husband was Richard Edward Tubb. The marriage produced two children:
- Dixie Tubb, later known as Dixie Patricia Harlow, born around 1937
- Richard Tubb, born around 1942
Sharon wrote about both in her autobiography, Sharon Osbourne Extreme:
“There was my half sister, Dixie: always some drama with her. And different sorts of problems with my half brother, Richard. My father detested both his stepchildren, who by the time I was born were fifteen and ten respectively. But I was very close to them when I was growing up.”
Dixie made Sharon’s clothes. Richard helped with babysitting. Don Arden, by Sharon’s own account, had no patience for either of them. He eventually arranged for Dixie to be sent away to boarding school.
After the marriage to Tubb ended, Hope continued using her birth surname, Shaw, the name she had carried since childhood from her father Arthur James Shaw.
How Hope Shaw Met Don Arden
Don Arden, born Harry Levy in Manchester in 1926, was working the vaudeville circuit as a singer when he arrived in Brixton looking for lodgings.
He rented a room at Hope’s theatrical boarding house on Angell Road, Brixton. The house was not owned by Hope. It was rented from Winifred Atwell, the celebrated honky-tonk pianist whose recordings were selling in large numbers across Britain at the time.
Six weeks after Don moved in, they were married. The ceremony took place in April 1950 in Lambeth, London.
Hope was in her mid-thirties. Don was 24, ten years younger than her. She was an Irish Catholic from a performing arts background. He came from a strict Ashkenazi Jewish family in Manchester. He called her “Paddy” because of her Irish roots, and sometimes “Paddler,” because, in his words, it sounded more Jewish.
After the wedding, Hope gave up her dancing career to raise the children.
Life With the “Al Capone of Pop”
Don Arden went on to build one of the most notorious reputations in British music. He managed the Small Faces, ELO, Black Sabbath, and a long list of other major acts, earning nicknames including the “Al Capone of Pop” and the “Yiddish Godfather” for his aggressive and often brutal business methods.
For Hope, that life meant years of pressure and unpredictability at home. Sharon later described the house on Angell Road as “always overflowing with people”, with rooms rented out to other artists when money ran short.
Their two children together were Sharon, born October 9, 1952, and David Arden, born in 1953.
What the Relationship Between Hope Shaw and Sharon Osbourne Actually Looked Like
Sharon has spoken about her mother with consistent directness, across interviews and in her published autobiography. Her position has not shifted over the years:
“I didn’t like my mother at all. I think there was an underlying love, but there was no friendship, nothing at all, we didn’t like each other.”
Several specific incidents defined what that relationship looked like in practice:
- At 17, Sharon became pregnant. Hope’s immediate response was a demand that Sharon end the pregnancy. She did not accompany her daughter on the day of the procedure.
- On a later visit to her parents, Hope’s dogs attacked Sharon while she was pregnant. Hope was slow to call them off. Sharon lost the baby.
- A serious car accident left Hope with a traumatic head injury. Writing in The Guardian in 2009, Sharon said it “unhinged her.”
- Sharon did not attend her mother’s funeral in 1999.
Writing in Sharon Osbourne Extreme, published in 2005, Sharon described the household where she grew up with a clarity that has stayed on record: she had parents who were both consumed by the business, and a mother who was, from her earliest memories, emotionally absent.
What the 2019 BBC Documentary Revealed
The BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? aired Sharon’s episode on September 4, 2019. It was the first time Sharon had examined her mother’s childhood in any detail.
She saw the 1929 newspaper headline. She saw the jailors’ index with the photograph of her twelve-year-old mother. She learned about Dolly being left alone with children and no income, about Ira’s death from tuberculosis, about a childhood in Brixton built on little more than survival.
By the time filming ended, Sharon said she had found a way to understand her mother that had not been available to her while Hope was alive. The behaviour she had experienced growing up had roots. Hope Shaw had grown up with a mother who stole stockings to keep the family fed, a father who disappeared, and an aunt who died before there was a cure for the disease that took her.
Sharon said she had finally forgiven her mother. It had taken twenty years and a BBC documentary to get there.
How Did Hope Shaw Die?
Hope Shaw died in December 1999 in Surrey, England, at the age of 83. She had lived her final years quietly, removed from the music industry world that had shaped most of her adult life.
Her daughter did not attend the funeral. When Sharon was informed of the death, she said “Oh, what a shame” and put the phone down.
By 2019, when Sharon sat in front of a camera and looked at a photograph of her twelve-year-old mother in a Lambeth jailors’ index, Hope Shaw had been dead for two decades.
What the BBC programme gave Sharon was not a resolution to something that had already ended. It was context for something she had spent her whole life trying to make sense of. A mother who was cold, who missed the abortion, who let the dogs keep going, who became strange after the accident. A woman whose own childhood had given her almost nothing to draw from.
Hope Shaw is most often described as Sharon Osbourne’s mother or Don Arden’s wife. Both are accurate. But she was also, before any of that, a girl standing in a Lambeth courtroom in 1929, telling a magistrate she would take all the blame if they would just let her mummy go.
That detail, more than any other, is who Hope Shaw was.
