Who is Jacqueline Gold’s husband and did she have children?

Jacqueline Gold, the boss of Ann Summers, has died from breast cancer aged 62 – just ten weeks after her father David Gold passed away.

Jacqueline was surrounded by her closest family when she died, including her husband, Dan Cunningham, 45, and the couple’s daughter Scarlett, 14. 

Gold, who became Ann Summers’ CEO in 2022 had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016 – the year she was handed a CBE.

Her famous father, the co-chairman of West Ham United, rose from abject East End poverty to a £500million fortune, died after a short illness on January 4th aged 86. 

He handed Ann Summers and its four stores to Jacqueline in 1981 – today it has 80 stores and annual sales of £113.8million.

A statement from Jacqueline Gold’s family said: ‘It is with unspeakable sadness that Ann Summers confirm our amazing executive chair Jacqueline Gold CBE passed away yesterday evening with her husband Dan, daughter Scarlett, sister Vanessa, and brother-in-law Nick, by her side’.

WHO IS JACQUELINE GOLD’S HUSBAND? 

The Ann Summers CEO first met her husband Dan Cunningham, 17 years her junior, in early 2002, having earlier divorced her previous husband, an Ann Summers dancer, after a brief marriage.

City broker Dan, now 45, is a Director at West Ham United football club, which his late father-in-law David Gold was Chairman of.

Ann Summers tycoon Jacqueline Gold seen with her husband Dan, who she first met in 2002, four years ago

The couple, pictured in 2011, wed in 2006, and endured a seven-year battle to conceive

The couple embarked on their first round of IVF shortly after getting together but the fertility treatment failed, and was followed by two more unsuccessful attempts.

The physical and emotional demands of the treatment prompted them to part briefly in the early noughties.

When they got back together, they decided they would have one more try at IVF, this time in America, and they conceived in 2009. Jacqueline, by then in her late forties, gave birth to twins, Alfie and Scarlett, after seven years of trying to conceive a child. 

 Alfie, was born with a severe brain disability, and died at just eight months’ old, after receiving 24-hour care for a fatal condition known as alobar holoprosencephaly.

The couple later wed in a lavish ceremony at Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace in 2010, with their one-year-old daughter Scarlett by their side. 

At a celebration of his late father-in-law David Gold’s life on February 1st this year, Dan read out a eulogy, as requested by David before his death in January at the age of 86. 

WHO IS THE COUPLE’S DAUGHTER SCARLETT?

Jacqueline Gold enjoyed a close relationship with her daughter, Scarlett, now 14, once saying ‘being her mother is the greatest honour and joy’.

She was born in 2009, after the Ann Summers CEO and husband Dan Cunningham finally conceived following several unsuccessful IVF attempts. 

Scarlett and her twin brother Alfie arrived in May 2009, but Alfie’s life was cut tragically short by a severe brain disability, and he died at just eight months’ old. 

The entrepreneur pictured with her daughter Scarlett, now aged 14. Jacqueline and Dan lost their son, Alfie – Scarlett’s twin – when he was just eight months’ old in 2010

Jacqueline Gold, then 49, and husband Dan Cunningham, then 33, with the couple’s then one-year-old daughter Scarlett on their wedding day at Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace in 2010

In 2018, in a moving interview on Desert Island Discs, the Ann Summers boss recalled the agony of hearing her desperately ill baby boy ‘crying in pain’ when he was born.

She said: ‘I really struggled on a number of levels,’ she said of Alfie’s health battle. ‘I’d been told at about 12 weeks that one of my babies had a fatal abnormality and wouldn’t survive the birth.

‘There was an assumption that he would pass naturally,’ she said, but added that while pregnant that was ‘very hard to accept, understand or rationalise’.

‘I sort of grieved for my baby while he was in the womb.’

Jacqueline had long since championed her daughter to follow in her footsteps; she told Lauren Laverne that Scarlett had been sitting in on her business meetings since she was five – because ‘I desperately want my daughter to grow up believing she can be whatever she wants to be’.