Helena Kean - Music and Images

Madeleine Dring Madeleine Winefride Isabelle Dring was born at 66 Raleigh Road in Hornsey, London on the 7th Sept 1923. This wonderfully gifted and multi-talented English composer, singer, pianist, lyricist, cartoonist and actress was born into a family of talents amateur musicians, who supported and encouraged her precocious musical talent from an early age. Her father Cecil John Dring (1883-1949) was an architect and surveyor and her mother Winefride Isabel née Smith (1891-1968) came from a Scottish family. Madeleine had an elder brother Cecil, who was born 1918. The children had a fairly strict Roman Catholic upbringing, a happy family life, with holidays and plenty of music-making. Their mother was a trained singer, a mezzo, who gave a concert at Wood Green in 1926 with stars from the London Coliseum. Their father played the cello and the piano, also entertained them with his ventriloquism act, which he had learnt working in a World War One Concert Party; he had also been a stretch...