Occupation Music hall vocal comic Name Leo Dryden Children Wheeler Dryden | Spouse(s) Hannah Chaplin 1892-3 Role Singer Grandchildren Spencer Dryden | |
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Full Name George Dryden Wheeler Born June 6, 1863 ( 1863-06-06 ) Died April 21, 1939, London, United Kingdom Great grandchildren Jeffrey Dryden, Jackson Dryden, Jesse Dryden Similar People Wheeler Dryden, Hannah Chaplin, Charles Chaplin - Sr, Sydney Chaplin, Spencer Dryden | ||
George Dryden Wheeler, Sr. (6 June 1863 - 21 April 1939), known as Leo Dryden, was an English music hall singer and vocal comic.
Life and career
George Dryden Wheeler was born in London, the son of Sarah Ann (Frost) and George Kingman Wheeler. In 1892, he met music hall performer Hannah Chaplin (stage name Lily Harley), whose young son Charlie would become a leading actor, comedian, and director. They had an affair and a son, George Dryden Wheeler Jnr., leading to the breakdown of her marriage to Charles Chaplin, Sr. The couple split up and Dryden kept his son, leading to Hannah's bouts of mental illness and admission to the Cane Hill Asylum at Coulsdon. This also marked the end of Hannah's career and the start of a long decline. She was not reunited with her son until the 1920s.
Wheeler married singer Marie Tyler (real name Marian Louise Crutchlow) in London in 1897.
Leo Dryden was best known as the Kipling of the Halls, noted for his patriotic and colonial songs including "The Miner's Dream of Home" (1891). He also performed parodies, including "Shopmates" and one on "Feniculi Fenicula". He dressed to fit the songs, as a Canadian Indian for "The Great Mother", as an Indian soldier for "India's Reply", and "How India Kept Her Word" (1898). Even America did not escape, with "America Looking On", about the Boer War.
These examples of colonial fealty were well received by British audiences, and were parodied in Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads. He also was known for tear-jerking ballads such as "Don't Go Down the Mine, Dad" (1910), possibly inspired by the great 1907 mining disaster at St. Genard in South Wales, and "Good-bye, Mary!" (1911).
At the start of World War I, he returned to patriotic songs with "Call Us and We’ll Soon Be There" (1914).
Dryden also appeared in The Lady of the Lake (1925), an early sound film inspired by the Walter Scott poem.
With the music halls in decline by the 1930s, and his son joining his own half-brothers in America, Leo Dryden was reduced to busking in the streets. He died in London 21 April 1939.
He is the paternal grandfather of rock musician Spencer Dryden, the drummer for Jefferson Airplane.