*”Elton John’s….Pinner”-(plus a little bit of mine)!!!

“Sir Elton Hercules John” is up there as probably being one of Britain’s most successful music artists of all time.

A globally recognised, highly acclaimed singer, pianist, and composer – who, in partnership with his long-time co-songwriter, lyricist Bernie Taupin – has sold in excess of 300 million records worldwide.

But Elton John hasn’t always been Elton and hasn’t always been successful – it’s been quite a long and at times, tough journey from his humble beginnings to where he is now. This London Shoes article takes a brief look at Sir Elton’s very early beginnings, and in particular, the location of his early and formative years.

So, here’s my……….

“Elton John’s-Pinner – (plus a little bit of mine)”…….

The Sir Elton John we know and love today was born ‘Reginald Kenneth Dwight’ on 25^th March 1947 in Pinner–North West London

It is documented that he was born at 55 Pinner Hill Road, the council house home of his maternal grandparents, where his parents Sheila & Stanley Dwight were residing at the time.

Sir Elton spent the first 6 years of his life living with his grandparents at 55 Pinner Hill Road – and attended Reddiford School – an independent day school for children aged 3 to 11 – located not far from Pinner Station.

It is said that it was Elton’s grandmother Ivy Sewell, noticing his early interest in music, sat him down at a piano and encouraged him to have lessons.

After 6 years living at his grandparents 55 Pinner Hill Road – Elton John’s parents bought their own home at no.111 Potter Street – Pinner.

It was at his new Potter Street home that Elton first heard the music of the top rock ‘n roll recording artists of that period such as Bill Haley & the Comments and Jerry Lee Lewis as his mum was a keen record buyer and would always be playing the hits of the day’s most popular singers/groups at home.

While living at 111 Potter Street he attended ‘Pinner Wood Junior School’ in Latimer Gardens–Pinner.

At age 11, Elton John won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music – and for the next 5 years he attended Saturday classes at the Academy School in central London.

Having sailed through the 11 Plus exam – his next school was ‘Pinner County Grammar School’ – which, at that time (ie the late 1950’s) was situated in Beaulieu Drive – Pinner, again – not too far from Pinner tube station – and a turning off of ‘Cannon Lane’ – which I will cover-off a little later in this story.

Pinner County Grammar School as it was – closed in 1982 and was merged in with another school – but interestingly, 2 of its former pupils are Reg Dwight and Simon LeBon lead singer with Duran Duran.

Elton John’s parents Stanley and Sheila’s relationship had always been a bit ‘rocky’ by all accounts – and if you’ve seen the bio-pic film ‘Rocket Man’ that fact will be blindingly obvious to you.

Anyway – they eventually divorced in 1961 when Elton (their only child together) was aged just 14.

Sheila Dwight then re-married and settled down with local painter & decorator Fred Farebrother and they set up home in an upstairs flat at no.3a Frome Court – an 8 apartment building on the Pinner Road.

By around the age of 15 Elton was playing piano regularly in a pub called the ‘Northwood Hills Hotel’ that was directly across the road from Northwood Hills tube station (the next station on from Pinner) on the Metropolitan Line.

Apparently – Elton’s mum Shiela and stepdad Fred (who Elton affectionately referred to as Derf – Fred spelt backwards) were instrumental in getting him the ‘gig’ at the Northwood Hills Hotel – where he was known as ‘Reggie’ and was hired to play in the evenings from Thursday to Sunday – where he would bang out all the popular songs of the day and all the golden oldies from performers like Jim Reeves and Ray Charles.

The old Northwood Hills Hotel building is still in situ – but today its called The Namesate Lounge – an Indian Restaurant and Bar

By the early 1960’s Elton John was in a band called Bluesology – who gained quite a favourable reputation on the London club circuit, and beyond.

In fact, by the mid-60’s Bluesology were regularly being hired as a backing band for some of the major US soul/rhythm & blues artists who were booked to tour the UK – performers such as the Isley Brothers and Patti LaBelle plus many more – all toured with Bluesology as their backing band.

One of the UK R&B/Blues artists backed regularly by Elton John’s Bluesology band was (the now late) ‘Long John Baldry’ – a very underrated British blues singer (in my opinion).

Legend has it that, many years ago, it was Long John Baldry who spotted Rod Stewart playing harmonica on a deserted Twickenham rail station, after he had just seen Baldry at the iconic Eel Pie Island venue down by the River Thames– Baldry was so impressed with the blues music he heard Rod playing on the station platform, that he took him under his wing and encouraged him to continue to pursue his ambition of being a top blues/rhythm & blues performer – and for a short while he had Rod Stewart accompany him on lead vocals in the band ‘Steampacket’……..and from then on, the rest, as they say – was history for Rod Stewart.

Elton’s Bluesology regularly backed Long John Baldrey throughout tours of the UK – in fact, it is said that they backed him an incredible 16 times at the legendary ‘Marquee Club’ in Wardour Street W1.

Another member of Bluesology at that time was saxophonist ‘Elton Dean’ – and by merging his name with that of Long John Baldry – that is how Reg Dwight came up with his new name……. “Elton John”.

As an aside, the classic 1975 released Elton John hit “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” tells the story of when Elton John was engaged to be married to a then girlfriend. However, deep down inside Elton knew that he didn’t really love her enough to marry her and felt so trapped by the relationship. At the point of utter desperation Elton John contemplated suicide by attempted to stick his head in the gas oven at his home. The story goes that it was his good friend Long John Baldry who found him in that state – sat down with him and convinced him to abandon his plans to marry, and to save and progress with his musical career.

I’ve digressed slightly – sorry…..back to the main story.

Returning back to 1967 – a young aspiring poet/lyricist named Bernie Taupin, from the wilds of Lincolnshire, answered an advert that had been placed in the weekly New Musical Express paper, that was looking for new songwriters.

In the response, Bernie Taupin said he could do lyrics but couldn’t write music.

Apparently, Elton John answered the very same ad – explaining that he could write music by not lyrics.

Within a very short time Elton & Bernie were a partnership – which remains to this very day – and to date they have collaborated on over 30 albums and 100 singles worth of work. Their albums together to date – range from ‘Empty Sky’ (1969) to ‘Who Believes in Angels’ (2025)

Around 1969 – having lived temporarily in a few locations around London, both Elton and Bernie moved in with Elton’s mum Sheila and Fred – at their 3a Frome Court flat.

It is said that it was at this address, that the songwriting duo composed their early classics such as ‘Your Song’ / ‘Tiny Dancer’ / ‘Skyline Pigeon’ / ‘Lady Samantha’ – the very beginnings of what has turned out to be an amazing career and body of work – that has brought so much pleasure to so many people across the globe.

By 1972 Elton had left his Pinner roots behind and bought his first house – a bungalow in Virginia Water-Surrey.

However – he has never forgotten his roots, and it has been well documented that he has returned to Pinner a few times over the past decades, particularly to attend school reunion events at his old Pinner Grammar School (before it closed).

So – that was my London Shoes coverage of Sir Elton John’s-Pinner – hope you enjoyed the overview of Elton’s early formative years – and that the photos help bring the story to life a bit.

But that’s not where this story ends.

Here’s the 2^nd part of London Shoes “Elton John’s-Pinner (plus a little bit of mine)” – this is the ‘plus a little bit of mine’ bit.

Although I was born in Battersea (South West London) in 1957 – my Mum & Dad moved to Ilford on the eastern side of London, way back in 1962 when I was just 5 yrs old. I grew up in Ilford, it will always be my hometown.

I did all my schooling in Ilford / I was a Cub Scout in Ilford / I was a Boy Scout in Ilford / I went to Church in Ilford / my ‘playground’ was South Park in Ilford, where I would spend most of my time playing football and getting involved in other stuff, with all my mates, after school and during the school holidays / I attended Youth Club in Ilford / I played in a band that was formed in Ilford and we played local youth club venues and also a couple of local pubs / I did most of my drinking (mostly under-aged) in the pubs of Ilford, and surrounding areas / In my early to mid-teens I used to go and watch bands play ‘live’ at venues in Ilford and the surrounding East London districts / I was living in Ilford when I started work at the age of 16 / and with disposable income ‘in me sky’, I started to frequent night clubs and music venues and pubs, a little further ‘up west’ from Ilford and would often rock up back at my Ilford home at silly o’clock in the morning……Ilford was my ‘home’ – I felt comfortable living there – I had loving parents, and although I was an only child, I had all my mates (male & female) around me –  and I loved every minute of growing up there…..I never once felt ‘lost’ or ‘alone’.

However – in 1974, at the age of just 17 – the world that I knew came crashing down around me – when my Mum & Dad informed me, totally out of the blue, that ‘we’ were moving home – to a place called ‘Pinner’ !!!!

I’d never heard of bloody Pinner before, let alone know where it was!!!

Why did we have to move??  – and why now?? – and what was gonna happen to me work wise, as I’d only been in full time employment for just about 1yr?? – what about all my mates, how am I going to see them??…….these were all questions that my parents couldn’t answer, and if I’m being honest, I don’t think they had even considered – it was just assumed that I would tag along with them to this new world in an unknown North West London territory.

If I’d been a couple of years older, say 20/21 – because I was working in a Bank, then perhaps I could have got a staff mortgage and bought my own flat or something like that – but that just wasn’t possible at just 17yrs old.

I investigated as to whether any of my mates’ parents had a spare room that perhaps I could rent – but then the realities of feeding myself / doing my own washing & ironing etc etc kicked in– and the idea just didn’t seem practical.

So – it was with a very heavy heart that I had no other option than to follow Mum & Dad to our new home over in leafy Pinner.

I’ll be honest, on moving day, as the front door of my childhood home was shut for the very last time, and I climbed into the back of my Dad’s car, the 17 year old me couldn’t hold back the tears as we pulled out of our street for the last time –  my world changed overnight.

My new home was 135 Cannon Lane–Pinner, a 3-bedroom terraced house much bigger than the Ilford home we’d moved from. It needed a lot of work done to it to bring it up to scratch – but my dad was in the building game, and he was really looking forward to getting stuck in to all the renovations required.

My Mum was happy too as her younger sister and her niece and nephew, lived not too far away in Ruislip – my Mum’s older brother and his family lived reasonably close by too, in a place called Sudbury Hill, as did her younger brother……so, yippee for my parents, they were both sorted!!!

Work wise, I had somehow managed to arrange a transfer to another Bank branch – as obviously I couldn’t continue working at the Leytonstone branch I had joined when I left school 12 months earlier – as it would have taken me half a day to get there.

I had specifically requested to Barclays Bank that my new branch be somewhere near to Pinner – but instead, I was transferred to Wardour Street in the Soho district of London’s West End – at least a 1 hour+ train journey from Pinner!!!

I was now living in a place totally alien to me – I knew no one, and those people that I did happen engage with or speak to, were nothing like me – I had absolutely nothing in common with them…….it was an extremely lonely and low period in my life.

Most nights, when I eventually got back home from my new work place – I would walk the quiet streets of leafy Pinner, in an attempt to try and get a ‘feel’ for the place and its people.

Quite often I would pop my head around the door of ‘The Victory’ (now a Sri Lankan restaurant) or the ‘Hand in Hand’ (now an Asian eatery and cocktail bar) pubs that were in Pinner High Street – just to see if I could get some sort of ‘vibe’ from the pubs and its people – but it just never happened.

In those days (1974) – there were no mobile phones or internet or stuff like that, so if I wanted to contact any of my old mates back in Ilford, it would have to be via the house phone or from a telephone box – trouble is, whenever I tried phoning any of them, they were always ‘out’ somewhere….no doubt enjoying themselves.

There was a pub at the end of Cannon Lane (the street my new home was located) -called ‘The Whittington’ and because it was less than a 5 min walk from my new home – in the first few weeks of having arrived in Pinner, I used to pop in there for a drink or two – but I found it to be the most characterless, boring pub I had even been in – bland wood panelling on the walls – a front-room carpet on the floor – no juke-box or music of any sort – and (in my opinion at that time) the most boring of old farts sitting up at the bar talking about how wonderful their lives were in leafy Pinner – I hated the place with a vengeance!!!

However – after having lived in Pinner for about a month or so – something very strange happened.

One night, I was doing my usual ‘walking the streets’ and ‘feeling sorry for myself’ – and I happened to pass a pub called the “King George IV” that situated next to the railway bridge at Pinner station. As I was walking past, I heard the sound of acoustic guitars and singing coming from inside. I distinctly remember that the song being played/sung as I was walking past, was ‘Blackbird’ from the Beatles–White Album. This ‘live’ music sound intrigued me – and so I ventured into the pub to take a closer look.

What I saw was a bar packed with people all sitting/standing around listening to a couple of guys playing acoustic guitars and knocking out songs which everyone appeared to know and enjoy. It wasn’t just one ‘act’ playing – there were 4 or 5 people who individually got behind the mic to bang out a few songs – it was a great atmosphere.

In between singers/musicians sets, I found myself up at the bar and got chatting to the guy who I’d seen earlier singing ‘Blackbird’. I think his name was ‘Ginge’ and I sort of told him my ‘backstory’ and how I ended up in Pinner. Having told the fella I was chatting to at the bar, that I could play guitar and sing – he suddenly asked me to pop back home, collect my guitar, come on back to the pub – and he would allow me 10 mins at the end of the evening’s proceedings, to get up there and knock out a few tunes (if I wanted to, of course).

So – 30 mins later, I found myself back in the King George IV pub being introduced as “this is Geoff from East London, who’s gonna end the night’s entertainment for us…. Let’s give a big hand for Geoff”…..

Now – during the evening I had heard the other acts performing stuff that ranged from traditional folk music / to Irish folk music / to Simon & Garfunkel stuff / to Beatles stuff plus much more. The trouble was, I wasn’t confident or competent enough to do stuff like that so I had to think on my feet and come up with something different that the punters might know. So – I decided to do well known Motown tracks, but in a folky/acoustic style – why I thought of that, and how I managed to pull it off, I just don’t know – but as I was performing I could see the looks on the faces of the audience – thinking to themselves ‘I know this song from somewhere – what is it’!!!

Pleasingly, my short 10min performance went down better than I had expected, and I received a lot of decent feedback at the end of the evening – which pleased me no end, and cheered my little 17yr old heart for the first time since I had moved to blessed Pinner.

As I was about to head back home that evening, the guy who had given me the 10min slot, came up to me to thank me for my stint – and then proceeded to tell me that he, and his music partner  played the King George IV pub every Tuesday night – he then explained that they also performed regular ‘music nights’  at a pub called the Coach & Horses in a place called Ickenham near Ruislip and also another pub in the area that (I’m afraid I cannot for the life of me, remember the name of it) – and…..would I like to join them and do a 10/15min slot those nights!!!!

Obviously – I was well up for it, as this offer was right up my street – it came totally out of the blue, and if I’m being honest, I believe that it ‘saved’ me, and was meant to be. The whole experience that night reminds me of that famous old Alan Sherman song that used to be played regularly on the Junior Choice radio prog on Saturday mornings – the song being “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”, that tells the story of  a young lad who’d been sent away by his parents, to a summer camp. He hates everything about the place and its people – and so writes a letter to his parents telling them all about his hatred of being. But whilst writing his letter of woe, the sun suddenly comes out, and all the kids there were getting involved in loads of exciting activities and enjoying themselves – and that’s when the singer ends the song by saying “Mudda Fadda kindly disregard this letter” !!!

That night in the King George IV – Pinner, was my ‘Muddah / Faddah’ moment – because from that day on, I played the pubs for a couple of years, in which time I hardly ever had to buy a drink – there were always pints of lager lined up for me on stage or at the bar – I met loads of new/different people. My new work colleagues at Barclays Bank Wardour Street branch, also became my new friends – and those that lived near Pinner used to come along to pub to watch me sing, Also, I quite often used to get recognised whenever I walked the streets of Pinner……it was a fantastic experience, and it taught me a lesson in life.

As I said earlier – the King George IV pub experience, I feel sort of ‘saved’ from what was a particularly bad time in my life. But there was someone else who was equally pivotal in playing a massive part in keeping me ‘together’ at that time.

When I moved from my beloved Ilford to Pinner in 1974, I had just started ’going out’ with a girl called Angela, who also worked for Barclays Bank and had not long been transferred to the branch where I was working at that time (ie Leytonstone – London E11).

Angela – lived in Epping-Essex, (an even leafier place  than Pinner) – and she became the one ‘constant’ connection to my ‘old’ life – as every other weekend, we used to alternate our time – she would travel over to Pinner to stay with me and my parents – and then I would travel over to Epping to stay with her and her family. 

To cut a very long story short – 4 years later in 1978, we were having our Wedding Banns read at the St. John the Baptist Church in High Street-Pinner – and similarly at St. John’s Church-Epping – and in May 1978 Angela became the current ‘Mrs Shoes’.

However – my love of my home town area of Ilford never left me, and following our marriage we moved firstly into a Bank Flat above a Barclays branch in Ilford Broadway, then 2  years later, we moved into our first house, which was right next to South Park–Ilford, the park that I looked upon as my playground as a youngster.

So – me revisiting Pinner after an absence of many decades – for the sole purpose of this blog article – was an interesting Shoes project, and experience, and one that took 2 visits to, firstly follow the Sir Elton John trail – and then to do the ‘little bit of mine’ part of this piece.

For the 2^nd visit, I was pleased to have my long-time mate Pete accompany me – and at the end of what was a hot and exhausting day on our trotters pounding the Pinner pavements – we were in desperate need of some liquid refreshment and a few chips.

Sadly – the old King George IV pub where I used to sign and play, is no longer around – it was pulled down some time ago and replaced with some soul less flats (apologies to anyone reading this who may live in them).

The other pubs in Pinner that I mentioned earlier in this piece – the Hand in Hand and The Victory, are also no longer around. But what was still in situ, was what I remembered as the hideous-lifeless-boring “Whittington” located at the end of Cannon Lane where I used to live.

However – what a surprise I had upon my return to the pub after what is almost half a century – it is now a comfortable – spacious Green King pub – that dishes up tasty food and a very refreshing pint – me and Pete thoroughly enjoyed our grub and beers in there.

So – that concludes my… “Elton John’s-Pinner (plus a little bit of mine)” blog. Sorry it’s a long’un but the 2 topics dovetail nicely together, and I could not have told the story any other way.

Hope you enjoy the read and its accompanying photos.

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See below the entire gallery of photos and images that accompany this blog article