FORGET amateur cake-makers Edd Kimber, Joanne Wheatley and John Whaite – the real winner of The Great British Bake Off is arguably Mary Berry.

Before the series launched in 2010, she was a respected food writer, but now she’s been elevated to national treasure status.

BBC Two are so enamoured of the 77- year-old, they are dedicating a two-part documentary to her, which charts her life, as well as a selection of her favourite recipes.

If you’d never really heard of her before she started debating “soggy bottoms”

with her fellow Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood, it should prove eyeopening.

Berry was born in Bath in 1935, the daughter of surveyor and planner Alleyne WS Berry, who would go on to become the mayor of the city.

She talks about the outbreak of the Second World War, but it seems rationing didn’t entirely stop the Berrys from baking.

She’s said that her mother asked the rest of the family to go without sugar in their tea so it could be used to make cakes.

The war wasn’t the only disruption to her young life. At the age of 13, she contracted polio, which led to her spending three months in hospital. She was in an isolation ward and was separated from her mother during visits by a pane of glass, although her father did manage to bring her beloved pony in to see her.

She was, by her own admission, not particularly academic. There was only one subject where she really shone – domestic science.

“When the time came to leave, the headmistress told my parents, ‘I don’t know what she’s going to do. I suppose she could do something with cooking or look after children.’ Dad said, ‘Well, I pity the children.’ So I took up cooking,” she says.

It was a decision that would eventually take her to London. Fans of her fashion sense – her floral bomber jacket arguably generated more column inches during the last series than the cakes – will no doubt imagine her cutting quite a dash in the swingin’ capital of the 1960s.

But even more importantly, it was the perfect time for an ambitious young woman out to share her culinary ideas with a population keen to move on from post-war austerity.