Before he was a pop star, Terence Perkins delivered milk on the Isle of Wight, and the newspapers never let him forget it. As Craig Douglas, “the Singing Milkman”, he took “Only Sixteen” to number one in the British charts in 1959, ahead of Sam Cooke, who had written and recorded it first. He died at home on September 4, 2026, after a short illness, his family said, describing a peaceful death. He was 85.
From the milk round to the charts
Douglas was born Terence Perkins on the Isle of Wight on August 13, 1941. He was a teenager when he began singing at local talent contests, and his wholesome image and clear voice made him a good fit for British television’s early pop shows. He signed a record deal while still in his teens and had his first hits in 1959. He was one of a group of British teen idols, alongside Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and Marty Wilde, who filled the charts in the years between the arrival of rock and roll and the Beatles, and he appeared regularly on the television pop shows of the time.
Only Sixteen
“Only Sixteen” was a gentle song about young love that Sam Cooke had released in America. Cooke wrote it with Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, and the three were credited under the shared pseudonym Barbara Campbell. Douglas’s cover reached number one in Britain in September 1959 and stayed there for four weeks, and it outsold Cooke’s version in the UK. It was his only number one, but he had a run of other hits in the early 1960s, including “A Hundred Pounds of Clay”, “Pretty Blue Eyes” and “Time”, and starred in Richard Lester’s 1962 pop film It’s Trad, Dad!, alongside Helen Shapiro.
A long career
The arrival of the Beatles and the beat groups in 1963 ended the careers of many of the clean-cut solo singers who had come before them, and Douglas’s chart run finished soon after. He kept performing for decades on the nostalgia and cabaret circuits and was a regular on package tours of 1950s and 1960s stars.
Douglas died on the same day as Richard O’Sullivan, two men who had both been teenage performers in the British entertainment business of the late 1950s.