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Discovering the Gift of Music

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Holy Trinity Church,   on Barking Road, Canning Town It is not widely known that Reg started his showbiz career as a musician: singing, and playing the piano and the accordion.   At Holy Trinity Church, he sang as a choirboy. It was while he was recovering in a  convalescent home in Seaford, East Sussex — possibly the Surrey Convalescent Home shown above — that he discovered he could play the piano as well as his father.  He was about seven years old. In his autobiography The Little Clown he recalled that very special moment. ‘My father, although he had never had a lesson in his life, was a natural pianist and played beautifully – his chord sequences were a dream,’ he writes. But Reg’s elder brother and sisters had not inherited their father’s talent, and the family piano was usually kept locked.   At the convalescent home he finds himself in a room with a piano.  ‘No one was around to forbid me, so
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A close-knit family in a strong community

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Continued from http://regvarney100.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/an-east-end-childhood.html Sid, Reg’s father, was a semi-skilled worker in the India Rubber factory at Silvertown in London’s Docklands, pictured in this 1887 print.   He was also employed in the manufacture of alizarin dye at the nearby Beckton Gas Works, pictured above in its last days before final demolition.   With his father He had ‘an infectious smile and laughing eyes,’ remembers Reg in his autobiography. Reg’s former home at Number 7 Addington Road as seen today  But ‘he brought us up in a strict Victorian manner — he made the rules and although he loved us dearly, woe betide us if we strayed from them.’
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School Days

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Continued from  http://regvarney100.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/a-close-knit-family-in-strong-community.html Reg attended Star School for Boys in Canning Town’s Star Lane ‘less than thirty seconds from our street door’ as he says in his autobiography The Little Clown . He writes vividly of his early schooldays, but hardly in a positive vein. School bullies ‘on the rampage’ are one of his memories as a seven-year-old. ‘Being a very timid boy, I was scared to death.’ The head teacher or ‘Governess’ is ‘a terrifying sight’, known as ‘the vulture.’ His form teacher Miss Atkins is not much better. Her repeated ‘Now pay attention’ seems to have been his chief memory of her. ‘It didn’t take long to learn that phrase,’ he writes. ‘I heard it God knows how many times a day from that first day at school till my last day at the age of fourteen.’ A photo of Reg with his classmates at Star School for Boys    Here
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