Australian Dictionary of Biography

Joy King, 1937

Courtesy of Wigglesworth family

Joy Patricia Wigglesworth (1931–1996), child performer and housewife, was born on 2 October 1931 in Sydney, youngest of six children of locally born parents Albert Lewis Daniel Kingman, wharf labourer, and his wife Alice Carmel, née Foley. The family shortened their surname to King for unofficial purposes, reportedly so that Albert could avoid confusion when he worked with his brother at the same wharf. Joy, who came to be described as an ‘antipodean Shirley Temple’ (Warden 16 May 1982, 2), was raised in a Catholic working-class household in the beachside suburbs of Sydney’s east.

In late 1937 King entered a State-wide singing competition for the popular confectionary product Aeroplane Jelly. Interested boys and girls were instructed to post in expressions of interest accompanied by a face panel torn from Aeroplane Jelly or Aeroplane Custard Powder packaging. Selected entrants sang live on air on the radio stations 2UW Sydney and 2HD Newcastle over several weeks, and from around two hundred competitors, King emerged as the winner. She subsequently recorded a rendition of the ‘Aeroplane Jelly Song,’ initially composed in 1930 by Albert Lenertz, who was co-owner with Bert Appleroth of Traders Pty Ltd, which manufactured Aeroplane Jelly. The recording occurred sometime before March 1938, and was accompanied by the Radio 2SM Orchestra, conducted by the studio manager John Dunne. She later remembered the ‘fifty-piece orchestra was sitting around very patiently’ as she struggled to pronounce the word ‘quality’ (Wigglesworth 1980). For her efforts, she won about ten guineas and a lifetime supply of Aeroplane Jelly.

During World War II, King performed at charity concerts, juvenile balls, and children’s events around Sydney. In 1940 her ‘delightful singing aroused the wonderful admiration of all’ (Campbelltown News 1940, 1) at a recruitment rally at the Campbelltown Town Hall, where she performed as part of the 2GB Concert Party. Opportunities for child performers were restricted by the State Child Welfare Act (1939), which included a prohibition against children performing at night and required a license for certain types of public entertainment. She later recalled these restrictions when explaining her own retirement from the limelight around the age of twelve.

For over fifty years King was the voice of Aeroplane Jelly. The jingle was reportedly played on commercial radio stations up to a hundred times a day in the 1940s. Traders Pty Ltd’s saturation advertising campaign extended to Cinesound newsreels, with two animated cartoons—‘Bert the Aeroplane’ and ‘Bert the Jet’ (1942)—as the company’s entrée into cinema advertising. Her voice featured in both, as well as in a later commercial for television in 1959, where the child actor Barbara Llewellyn famously mimed the lyrics from a backyard swing.

After leaving school, King worked as a stenographer and an usher at a movie theatre, probably St James Theatre in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, where she met Gilroy Barry Wigglesworth, an assistant theatre manager. They married on 25 July 1953 at St James’s Church of England, Sydney. The pair initially settled at Belmore in Sydney’s south-west before moving to Brisbane, where Barry managed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Metro Theatre. By the early 1960s they were living at Aspley in the city’s north, where they raised their four children: Susan, Robyn, Rodney, and Mark. From 1969 they lived at West Chermside. ‘We always had loads of Aeroplane Jelly cartons in the pantry,’ remembered Mark, ‘[and] with my father later working for Pauls Ice Cream company, we had the perfect match!’ (Wigglesworth, pers. comm.).

In the 1970s Aeroplane Jelly was launched beyond New South Wales and soon wobbled its way into nationwide prominence. The song quickly graduated from an advertising jingle into the realm of Australian folk songs. As Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser discovered in June 1976, when two Australian journalists gave a merry rendition of the jingle after being asked to sing a traditional national song during an official banquet in China, it was an easy and memorable tune.

Throughout these years, attention also shifted from the song to the singer. Wigglesworth attributed the interest to nostalgia, but this was also a time of growing confidence in Australia’s cultural heritage. Ironically, she received far more publicity as a housewife than she ever had as a child performer. She was invited to fairs and fêtes, interviewed by journalists on radio and television, and treated as a local celebrity. In 1978 she attended Aeroplane Jelly’s fiftieth anniversary in Sydney, where she sang with Tommy Dawes, who had also been a finalist in the 1937–38 singing competition, but had instead been chosen as the ‘whistling boy’ whose face would appear on the jelly’s packaging for many years. As Aeroplane Jelly grew into a multimillion-dollar product, the cultural cachet of ‘I Like Aeroplane Jelly’ also bloomed. By the 1980s the entertainer Barry Humphries considered the jingle ‘our true national anthem’ (Warden 12 May 1982, 3).

An athletic woman who was always very active in the community, Wigglesworth played tennis, squash, and lawn bowls. In her later years she volunteered at the Freemasons Home at Sandgate and was involved with the Clayfield Bowls Club (president c. 1996). Her children remembered her with great affection—a sweet, down-to-earth lady, with a wonderful sense of humour, unfussed by the late interest in her, and proud of her link with Aeroplane Jelly, although she once admitted that it irked her that she was never paid more than the original prize money. A longtime friend of the Appleroth family, she was saddened by news in 1994 that Traders Pty Ltd had been purchased by the American food corporation McCormick & Company. On 7 August 1996 she died of a stroke in Brisbane, and was cremated. Her husband and four children survived her. In 2008 the ‘Aeroplane Jelly Song’ was added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia registry. McCormick revived the jingle in a 2017 advertising campaign, which briefly featured Wigglesworth’s original rendition.