Ian Dury

Ian Robins Dury (12 May 1942 27 March 2000) was an English singer, songwriter and actor who rose to fame in the late 1970s, during the punk and new wave era of rock music. He was the lead singer and lyricist of Ian Dury and the Blockheads and previously Kilburn and the High Roads. Early life and education Ian Robins Dury was born on 12 May 1942 in Harrow, West London, and spent his early years at 43 Weald Rise, Harrow Weald (though often misreported as having been born in Upminster, Essex, which he sometimes stated himself). His father, William George Dury (born 23 September 1905, Southborough, Kent; died 25 February 1968), was a bus driver and former boxer, while his mother Margaret (known as "Peggy", born Margaret Cuthbertson Walker, 17 April 1910, Rochdale, Lancashire; died January 1995) was a health visitor, the daughter of a Cornish doctor and the granddaughter of an Irish landowner. They married in 1939. William Dury trained with Rolls-Royce to be a chauffeur, and was then absent for long periods, so Peggy Dury took Ian to stay with her parents in Cornwall. After the Second World War, the family moved to Switzerland, where his father chauffeured for a millionaire and the Western European Union. In 1946, Peggy brought Ian back to England and they stayed with her sister, Mary, a doctor in Cranham, a small village close to Upminster in Essex.). Another sister Mary, and Ian's cousins Martin and Lucy, also lived in Cranham. Although he saw his father on visits, they never lived together again. At the age of seven, Dury contracted polio, most likely, he believed, from a swimming pool at Southend-on-Sea during the 1949 polio epidemic. After six weeks in a full plaster cast in the Royal Cornwall Infirmary, Truro, he was moved to Black Notley Hospital, Braintree, Essex, where he spent a year and a half before going to Chailey Heritage Craft School, East Sussex, in 1951. His illness resulted in the paralysis and withering of his left leg, shoulder and arm. Chailey was a school and hospital for disabled children, which believed in toughening them up, contributing to the observant and determined person Dury became.