Ian Dury

by Will Birch

  When the dapper Bill Dury spotted twenty-seven-year-old Peggy Walker it was lust at first sight. Peggy, the long-legged daughter of an Irish country doctor, had flunked college and worked as a health visitor for Camden Council, whilst Bill, the dashing bus driver of immense charm, came from Kentish working class-stock, but their contrasting backgrounds were no bar to courtship. Magnetically attracted from the outset, their love affair would be fuelled by two overriding factors: Peggy’s yearning for children and Bill’s desire to rub shoulders with toffs.

  William George Dury was born on 23 September 1905 at 18 Speldhurst Road, Southborough, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. His parents, William Ernest and Mary Dury, already had four daughters when Bill arrived, and a second son, Victor, was born in 1911. To avoid confusion at home, the family referred to William junior as ‘Will’, whilst to his nieces and nephews he became ‘Uncle Billy’. Personally, he preferred ‘Bill’. His father had worked as a school caretaker and general labourer, but became too ill to work by the time Bill turned thirteen, leaving the young boy no option but to quit school and seek employment to help support the family.

  A keen amateur boxer, Bill took a series of menial jobs, ending up at the Royal Blue Coach Company, where he learnt to drive. When Royal Blue became part of Western National in 1935, Bill found himself driving coaches between London and the West Country. Occasionally his journey called for an overnight stop in Winchester, where he would visit his cousin, Bert Tipping, an army man who lived with his family in the drill hall. ‘Bill Dury was very suave,’ recalls Bert’s son Leslie Tipping. ‘He would sometimes bring his girlfriend, and they’d stay with us. On one occasion we all went to see Dury Street in Winchester and had our photograph taken there.’

  Bill was curious about his family name. Later in life, he researched its origins and discovered that Dury was part Scottish, part French. He thought about visiting the town of Dury in northern France, but never got round to it. He learnt that in Scotland, the name was spelt ‘Durie’; that Robert Louis Stevenson devised a character called Henry Graeme Durie for his novelette Master of Ballantrae; and that in 1868 the French had a minister of education named Victor Dury. The history books tell us that in eighteenth-century Kent, smugglers Thomas and William Dury, from Biddenden and Flimwell respectively, were members of the notorious Hawkhurst Gang, but Bill decided that his immediate forebears were all born and raised in Southborough.

  In stark contrast to her suitor’s humble background, Peggy Walker was descended from the sprawling bloodline of an Irish Protestant land-owning dynasty that farmed County Donegal throughout the nineteenth century. It was said that her branch of the Walker family could be traced back as far as the Reverend George Walker, joint governor of Derry who in 1689 helped defend his town against the besieging Catholic forces of King James II. Reverend Walker was later to die at the Battle of the Boyne. His famous monument, erected by the Protestant ‘Apprentice Boys’ in 1826, was blown up by the Irish Republican Army in 1973.

  Peggy’s grandfather, William Walker, was a wealthy dairy farmer who had inherited from his parents a 300-acre estate in the Finn Valley between the twin towns of Ballybofey and Stranorlar. In 1866, aged twenty-three, William set sail for Scotland, where he found a wife, one Margaret Ferguson Cuthbertson of Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, some 30 miles north-west of Glasgow. William and Margaret married in Scotland in 1867 and settled at 46 Charlotte Street, Helensburgh. They would frequently commute to County Donegal in Ireland and stay at Kilcadden, a substantial family home that provided accommodation for their vast family. Five sons and two daughters were born between 1868 and 1880. In 1881, William and Margaret returned permanently to Ireland, where three further children were born. Most of the Walker children rejected the farming life and moved to England as quickly as possible to pursue professional careers in civil engineering, journalism and, in the case of their second son, John, medicine.

  John Cuthbertson Walker was born on 5 March 1870. Upon leaving school, his medical studies took him to England, where he qualified as a general practitioner. In 1894, he secured a post in Mevagissey, a fishing village on the south coast of Cornwall, where he became a partner at the surgery of Doctor Charles Walker Monro Grier. He would frequently return to County Donegal, where at the turn of the century he met Mary Ellen Pollock of Finneederk, whom he married in Londonderry. He brought his bride back to England, and they lived for a year in a rented cottage at 106 Church Street, Mevagissey. As soon as he had established himself as a medical practitioner, thirty-two-year-old John designed and built a new house with an adjoining surgery for himself and Doctor Grier at the top of School Hill, Mevagissey John Walker named the double-fronted property ‘Pentillie’ (the original name for Mevagissey) and employed a domestic servant, one Elizabeth Blight, to assist Mary in running the home.

  John and Mary Walker’s first child, William Cuthbertson Walker, was born at Pentillie on 7 February 1904. Two years later, there was much excitement in Mevagissey when the celebrated author George Bernard Shaw rented a room in John Walker’s house to carry out background research for his new play, The Doctor’s Dilemma. On 5 June 1906, the Walkers’ second child, Doris Elisabeth Cochrane Walker, was born. She would grow up to detest the name Doris and asked everyone to call her Elisabeth.

  In 1909, following a financial disagreement with Doctor Grier, John Walker moved his family to the north of England. William and Elisabeth were five and three years old respectively when their parents moved into 188 Milnrow Road in Rochdale, Lancashire. It was there that Peggy was born on 17 April 1910 and christened Margaret Cuthbertson Walker. A fourth child, Mary, was born on 8 September 1913, also at Milnrow Road. Mary, who would become known as Molly, remained the youngest of the Walker children, none of whom inherited their parents’ Irish accent. In fact, they would all speak impeccable Oxford English. But although the Walkers were outwardly upper middle-class, they were far from wealthy. ‘Money was a very difficult thing for my father,’ says Molly Walker. ‘He wouldn’t have anything to do with borrowing it. An overdraft was as far as he would go. He thought banks were respectable, but this wretched overdraft pursued us all throughout our childhood.’

  In 1914, the entire family left Rochdale and returned to Mevagissey, but two years later John Walker was enlisted into the army and posted to Stockport, Lancashire, to work at the military hospital, from where he would write a number of lively letters to the British Medical Journal. Throughout the First World War, William and Elisabeth were away at boarding school, and Peggy and Molly were sent to Ireland to stay with their grandmother at Kilcadden. Upon returning to Mevagissey in 1918, Peggy and Molly were sent to the local primary school, while William and Elisabeth continued their secondary education further afield. All four children gained the grounding that would equip them for university and, in most cases, excellent qualifications.

  In 1923, seventeen-year-old Elisabeth entered University College London for three years of preclinical studies, resulting in a degree in medicine. Eight years after Elisabeth’s graduation, Molly also went to University College and studied French, gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938. Peggy, however, was overshadowed by her sisters’ academic achievements and, although she attended University College, left after one year, having failed her exams.

  In 1935, Peggy and Molly pooled their resources to rent a small flat at 29 Adelaide Road, Chalk Farm, later moving to 1b Belsize Road, near Swiss Cottage, where Peggy was living when she met Bill in 1937. Peggy’s work as a children’s health visitor chiefly involved calling on families with small children and keeping an eye out for head lice. As she cycled the streets of Camden, she dreamed of having children of her own but first needed to find a husband, marriage being a prerequisite for parenthood in polite 1930s society. In contemplating wedlock, however, Peggy knew she would be breaking with family tradition; none of her aunts or female cousins ever married and her two sisters continued the trend. ‘The Walker girls,’ recalls a descendant, ‘didn’t go in for that sort of thing.’<
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  There was, however, a somewhat apocryphal explanation for such rampant spinsterhood; it was said that several generations earlier, within their Irish Presbyterian family, a young Walker girl had married a Catholic man against the wishes of her father. The father was so outraged by what was a very public ceremony that he placed a curse on all Walker women. From that day on, he declared, they would all die as spinsters. Peggy was having none of it. ‘She was fed up with all this business about us Walker women never getting married,’ remembers Molly. ‘She had been visiting Kilcadden and heard that our uncle Arthur was going up to the little place where they used to live, the place where the father had cursed all the Walker women. Peggy said to Arthur, “I’d love to come with you,” and she followed him up the hill. I never heard the details of what happened next, but I do know that a few months later Peggy got engaged to Bill and quite soon after a lot of her cousins got engaged.’

  Just as Peggy had a weakness for children, Bill Dury had a weakness for class. His niece, Margaret Webb (née Dury), observes, ‘A gulf existed between Auntie Peg’s side of the family and ours. There wouldn’t be a gulf now because we’re all on an equal standing, but back then Mummy said, “Uncle Billy married Auntie Peg because he had aspirations to be a gent.” He used to come and stay with my auntie and walk around in a sort of smoking jacket and wear silk dressing gowns. He also spoke very nicely. He liked to think of himself as a gentleman. They said that’s why he married Peggy. He was marrying someone of a different class.’

  At thirty-two, Bill Dury had charmed his way into many a girl’s arms but had always retained his independence. Settling down was not really on his agenda, but, like many couples of the day, Bill and Peggy were thrown closer towards marriage by the threat of war with Germany. It seemed like it really could be the end of the world, and the usual courtships were often dispensed with. But the conflict was almost a year away when Peggy and Bill announced their plans to marry at All Souls Church in Loudoun Road, South Hampstead on 23 December that year. Peggy’s mother, Mary, travelled alone from Cornwall to attend, her husband, Doctor John Walker, having died just weeks before the ceremony.

  The turnout was small, since both families regarded the marriage as an unwelcome event. The Dury families, their men manual workers, their women housewives, looked on the Walkers as non-family-orientated, middle-class intellectuals. In turn, the Walkers dissociated themselves from the Kentish clan. Bill’s nephew, Leslie Tipping, says, ‘Peggy wasn’t accepted by some members of the Dury family, and they didn’t have a lot to do with one another. Amongst Peggy’s family, the consensus was that she should never have married.’ After the wedding and a small reception back at their flat, Bill and Peggy got down to the business of starting a family. Bill had left his own lodgings at 103 Finchley Road and moved in with Peggy at Belsize Road. Molly also shared the accommodation. ‘I just sort of flopped about and worked in various places and finished up with a job in education,’ says Molly Walker. ‘My particular interest was children who needed special help.’

  Elisabeth, now a paediatrician, was a frequent visitor to 1b, much to Bill’s irritation. The three Walker sisters were inseparable and found much to discuss about their complementary professions and shared interests. Molly, in particular, was passionate about Eastern philosophy and the teachings of her ‘guru’, Basanta Kumar Mallik, a renowned Indian thinker who, in 1937, settled in Oxford, where Molly would later work as a director of Nuffield College. With the Walker sisters’ skills clearly focused on the welfare and education of sick or disadvantaged children, their family infrastructure was such that, if they were to ever encounter a child with special needs, he or she would be guaranteed the best possible support.

  Early in 1939, Peggy announced that she was pregnant. The flat in Belsize Road had already become too cramped for its three occupants, and, with a baby due, Bill and Peggy sought to move to a larger home. Bill had heard about some new rentable housing that was being built at Harrow Weald, Middlesex, specially designed for young families who wished to escape the centre of London. The first dwellings in Weald Rise had been built in 1927, but even by the summer of 1939, when Bill and the pregnant Peggy arrived at number 43, the thoroughfare was still unmade and without pavements. The end of their road tapered off into a muddy field. ‘I went along with them,’ recalls Molly Walker. ‘It was a funny house on a kind of estate. You didn’t get to know people very well and there was no social life. I was working at the time and what I objected to was when all the lights went out and I had to get home on the bus. It was a difficult journey in the dark.’

  From their new semi-detached home, Bill made friends with Tom Johnson, also a bus driver, who lived next-door-but-one. Maurice Cattermole, who lived three doors down and was still a resident of Weald Rise over sixty years later, remembers: ‘Mrs Dury loved children. There were always kids playing in the street and they had a big English sheepdog [named Bella] that used to join in. If any of the parents in the street had trouble with their children, Peggy went over to help.’ But the idyllic street scene was to be shattered by the outbreak of war and, more profoundly, a family tragedy. The pressure of moving home had put great strain on Peggy’s pregnancy, and her first, longed-for baby was stillborn. Molly remembers: ‘It must have occurred a short time after we moved to Harrow. The moving may well have had something to do with that. I suppose they thought I was just a kid and I wasn’t to be worried about any details of it, but I know that it happened pretty soon after they moved. Peg was very fond of children and must have been very upset.’

  In September 1940, Britain’s city centres became prime targets for the Luftwaffe, and thousands of small children were evacuated to escape the bombing. Harrow, a suburb of London, was considered a safer area, and the childless Peggy was quick to take in two children named Richard and Jill, who would stay with her for the duration of the war. ‘They weren’t strictly evacuees,’ says Molly. ‘It was a private arrangement, but Peggy treated them just as other evacuees were treated. They were pretty young, not yet in long clothes, they hadn’t quite started school.’

  Now in his mid-thirties, Bill Dury might have been pressed into one of the armed services but was exempt from conscription owing to his reserved occupation, that of bus driver for London Transport. In 1941, Peggy fell pregnant for the second time and at 9 a.m. on Tuesday 12 May 1942 gave birth, at home, to a healthy baby boy. Peggy had bought a three-year diary in anticipation of the momentous event, and her entry for the day of the birth reads: ‘Weight 7lb 6ozs – marked by forceps – slight facial paralysis – Tuesday’s child.’ Within forty-eight hours, the proud parents registered the birth at Hendon Register Office and, incorporating Bill’s mother’s maiden name, called their son Ian Robins Dury.

  ‘I was conceived at the back of the Ritz and born at the height of the blitz,’ Ian quipped some fifty-three years later when we met to discuss, amongst other things, his early years. It was a typically colourful couplet to describe his world debut. He went on: ‘My mum was a health visitor, and her sister was a doctor, and her other sister an education officer. My dad was a bus driver. He was bright, but he wasn’t educated. He left school at thirteen. He came from a long line of bus drivers, as they say. They were proud of it.’

  Despite Ian’s amusing claim, there is no record of any of Bill’s relatives having been employed on the buses. In fact, Ian’s grandfather was a general labourer who died at the age of fifty-three, and Bill himself was considering a career change. His marriage to Peggy was threatened from two standpoints: her literary leanings and his line of work. In the early days, he would arrive home after a hard day navigating his bus through the ponderous London traffic, only to find Peggy and her two sisters sitting at the kitchen table, embroiled in deep, intellectual discourse. With the intelligentsia at close quarters, Bill began to resent his exclusion from conversations that took place under his own roof. Possessing only the bare bones of an education, he felt humiliated and incompatible. In an attempt to re-establish himself in Peggy�
��s eyes, he started taking steps towards self-improvement, but Peggy was already thinking about departing the capital. The war forced her hand.

  In the autumn of 1943, with a sky full of enemy bombers, the suburbs of London had become hazardous at best. Peggy suddenly announced that she was leaving Harrow and taking the three children to the safety of Penmellyn, a house on the Portmellon Road in Mevagissey, where her mother had lived since becoming widowed in 1938. Bill’s job with London Transport prevented him from joining his family in Cornwall, and he stayed in Weald Rise. At Penmellyn, Peggy nurtured the infant Ian, devoting every spare moment to his early learning. Although he would remain an only child, Peggy’s two foster-children provided Ian with excellent company as he started to toddle. Molly recalls: ‘Peggy said it was absurd that she couldn’t send them to the local school, so she said, “I’ll teach them.” Ian didn’t like being left out of things, as you can imagine, so he came and joined in.’

  Peggy and Bill’s marriage was effectively over, but certain events would reunite the couple. On 26 May 1944, Ian was baptized by the Reverend Charles Whitworth Phillips at St Goran Church, in the parish of St Goran, Mevagissey. Bill made the 540-mile round trip from London. While in Cornwall, he witnessed his wife’s diligent effort to educate their son. He noticed that Ian’s development had become an almost obsessive project for Peggy, who was perhaps driven by her own academic under-achievement and the realization that Ian might remain her only child. The memory of her first son’s stillbirth haunted her, and Bill’s work-related absence made matters doubly difficult. But these factors guaranteed that Ian would receive Peggy’s full attention. The house was crammed with books and other visual stimuli, which, combined with a mother’s guiding hand, encouraged Ian’s love of words and images. He responded well to the continual nurturing, and the hours that Peggy dedicated to him formed the basis of his education.