John Frederick Leonard Pegg was born in 1882. His father, James, and his Pegg forefathers had been wood turners in Loughborough for some generations. His mother, Elizabeth Strong Street, came from families of clay pipe makers. As a young child, Leonard was affected by poor sight and spent some time at the Royal Ophthalmic Infirmary in London. At home, his sister Florence helped with his musical formation by reading the music and playing it over until he had committed it to memory. From the age of eleven, Leonard attended the Royal Normal College for the Blind in London, where his musical talents were fostered; there he learned the Braille system, on which he tended to rely, except when he had to learn a new piece at short notice. He emerged as a pianist, organist, tutor and aspiring composer. Press notices survive of one or two performances as a concert pianist in London and in Glasgow. A local newspaper article from 1902 speaks of his noted “amiable disposition and simplicity of mind” as a young child and the same article later concludes with the observation that those who knew him intimately valued his musical talents “far below his personal character, his gentleness and consideration ….” Leonard returned to Loughborough to become organist at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, where apparently his own Mass setting was sometimes used in the sung liturgy. Though he came from a non-conformist family background, Leonard evidently became a Catholic at some stage, being confirmed in St. Mary’s. It must have been through local musical circles that Leonard met May Pass, a solo violinist and tutor, four years his senior. A programme for a concert in the Loughborough Assembly Rooms, that took place in 1906, features both of their names among the artists performing. Leonard and May married in January 1912 at St. Mary’s Church in Loughborough. The birth of their son, Raymund, later that year perhaps inspired Leonard to further creativity as several unpublished piano pieces date from that summer and autumn. Early in the following year, May was diagnosed with consumption and went for treatment to the Isle of Wight, aided by a benefit concert organised for her in Loughborough. She died in the summer of 1913. Leonard’s one published work, “Invocation” for violin and piano, may be taken as a tribute to his beloved, as indeed may be his unpublished violin concerto, undated and barely revised as it seems to be. Leonard’s own health failed and in the autumn of 1915 he formally entrusted his three year old son to the good care of the Holloway family in Loughborough. Jo Holloway was a shoemaker, dairyman, and small scale entrepreneur who had bought up several cottages in Hastings Street very close to the church; his second wife, Ada, who had lost a baby, and his own daughters were delighted to help bring up a son and little brother. Raymund (d.2003) had faint recollections of visits to and from his father. His cousin (Florence Pegg’s daughter) Gay (Gertrude), remembers her Uncle Leonard more clearly. She recalls his stick tap tapping along the street as he walked with her hand in his and particularly as he worked out the drop from the kerb to the road. Leonard died of consumption in February 1915, “at the comparatively early age of 34” as the obituary in the local Paper puts it. Perhaps, for a brief time, he was locally acclaimed as a “musical genius”, with remarkable and highly crafted gifts of recall and interpretation. Perhaps, like so many others, his is a tale of unfulfilled potential, blighted by ill health, bereavement and, in the end, straitened economic circumstances.
