Eva Petulengro obituary, fortune teller to the stars (2024)

Eva Petulengro spent more than half a century telling fortunes on Brighton seafront and became known as the clairvoyant to the stars. Among those who consulted her psychic powers were at least two Beatles, titans of stage and screen, and a member of the royal family.

Some, such as Bob Monkhouse and Michael Crawford, visited her in her booth opposite the West Pier, a converted garden hut with a painted sign that read “Eva Petulengro, Palmist and Clairvoyant” and furnished inside with a card table and two chairs.

With others she was invited backstage or flown to Hollywood to predict the future.

When she met the Beatles before a concert at the Brighton Hippodrome in 1964, she was photographed reading George Harrison’s palm. She refused to share what she told him but was more forthcoming about what Paul McCartney’s palm told her. She informed him that he would not marry his then girlfriend Jane Asher but would find happiness with “a fair-haired American girl with an independent spirit”. McCartney and Asher broke up four years later and he married the New York-born photographer Linda Eastman. John Lennon did not ask to have his palm read but had he done so Petulengro was convinced she would have foreseen his fatal shooting in 1980.

She claimed that she did not like to be the harbinger of bad news but in 1970 she told the singer Kathy Kirby, who at the time was having an affair with Bruce Forsyth and was thinking of ending her relationship with the band leader Bert Ambrose, not to do so because within a year he would be dead and she would hate herself for hurting him. Ambrose, who was more than 40 years older than Kirby, was in his seventies and in ill health and so the prediction was perhaps not as startling as it seemed.

After she had read the palm of Prince Edward she asked him if he had any further questions. “Yes, do you know any good jokes because I have to do an awful lot of after-dinner speaking?” he replied.

Joan Collins first made use of Petulengro’s clairvoyancy in 1979. “She’d just made The Stud when I met her in Brighton and I predicted she’d go abroad and do something even bigger. Of course, Dynasty happened next,” Petulengro recalled.

It may have been on Collins’s recommendation that soon after she was flown to Los Angeles to give readings to Michael Caine and his wife Shakira in their Hollywood home, where the actor cooked her a curry.

Yet it was not in her Gypsy nature to be starstruck and she took her work just as seriously when giving readings to the thousands of anonymous holidaymakers who patronised her hut on the seafront.

Eva Petulengro was born in 1939 in the horse-drawn wagon of her Romany grandparents, Alice and Nathaniel Petulengro. Their surname was an ancient Gypsy name that means “blacksmith”, reputedly derived from the Sanskrit petul (horseshoe) and engro, a Romany word for “fellow”.

After her mother, also known as Eva Petulengro, met her father, Eddie Price, at a fairground, they married in secret because he was a gorger (non-Romany). He took up the travelling life and joined the family in what grew to be a convoy of three wagons, all drawn by black-and-white cob horses.

Their daughter later recorded her memories of a Romany childhood in the book The Girl in the Painted Caravan and recalled growing up in a vardo (a traditional wooden caravan) painted red and gold, the interior lined with wooden carvings and engraved mirrors and lit by oil lamps.

As they travelled the Lincolnshire fens and the lanes of East Anglia, evenings were spent around a campfire eating meals of foraged wild mushrooms, illegally bagged pheasants and partridges and hotchi (hedgehog baked in clay) while her uncles carved clothes pegs from lengths of willow. Her job was to tie the pegs together in bundles, which her mother and aunts would sell door to door.

The family never stayed in one place long enough for her to go to school but she taught herself to read and write, borrowing books on library cards with fake addresses.

Her mother and grandmother read palms for anyone who would pay and when Billy Butlin opened his first holiday camp in Skegness, the Petulengros set up a booth. By the age of nine Eva had learnt the trade. “It’s a gift that has run in our bloodline for centuries because our race is taught from birth to say how we feel and keep an open mind,” she said.

Her books, written so her grandchildren would know about their Romany heritage and a vanished way of life, looked back with a rose-tinted nostalgia. “I can’t remember any privations. We didn’t know any better. I had the happiest childhood a person could hope for,” she insisted.

Yet although it may have been a simpler existence, in reality it was certainly not an easy one. Winters were hard and animosity and discrimination towards Gypsies were widespread. When Petulengro was a little girl her father toughened her up for the harsh life that lay ahead by inviting her to jump from the steps of their vardo into his arms and stepping aside at the last moment so she fell on her face in the mud. “Let that be a lesson to you. Never trust anyone,” he told her.

Life on the road came to an end at 21, when her family reluctantly moved into a flat in Brighton. She set up a booth for dukkering (fortune telling) on the seafront and shortly after offered her services at a charity ball organised by the Brighton Evening Argus. There she gave readings to William Hartnell and Norman Wisdom, among others. It led to an invitation to write daily horoscopes for the paper for £3 a week. Within six months her columns were being syndicated nationally and she had appeared on the television game show What’s My Line, in which a panel of Lady Isabel Barnett, Barbara Kelly, Gilbert Harding and Gerald Nabarro were required to ask questions to guess her profession.

Her real name would have been a giveaway so she appeared as “Eva Smith” but Kelly soon worked it out and asked “are you a clairvoyant or astrologer?”

Her gorger husband Jonnie predeceased her. They met in Brighton in the early 1960s and although she knew at once he was the one, her father’s lesson had left its mark and she made him wait three years before accepting his proposal. She is survived by their children, Claire, a well-known astrologer, and sons Gregory, Bradley and Warren, whom she claimed were also “very psychic” but like many Romany men chose not to use their gift.

In later life she spent several years living in hotels around Brighton rather than a permanent home, for she found comfort in knowing she could pack up and move on whenever she wished. “I’m a Romany,” she explained. “I don’t have it in me to stay put.”

Eva Petulengro, Gypsy clairvoyant, was born on March 18, 1939. She died of undisclosed causes on May 26, 2024, aged 85