Used very good.
…Introduction
He gets on very well with his music,' said the mistress
at George Grossmith's prep. school in Hampstead, "but I
aIm afraid he will one day be a clown. Grossmith re-
cords this remark with justifiable zest in his forgotten
autobiography, Society Cloen, for when that book was
written n 1888 he was at the height of his rermarkably
sucoessful career and had been clowning his way through
Gilbert and Sullivan operas since 1877. Certainly he was
born to be a comedian, but like so many other people of
talent he took years to discover his vocation. Yet he
served a very early apprenticeship by singing comic
songs to his own piano accompaniment at children's
parties, and by attenpting to ride that strange novelty,
the bicycle, which was complicated in his case by a front
wheel thirty-six inches high.
He was born in December 1847 and his earliest
memories were of the Duke of Wellington's magnificent
funeral and of the girl with whom he fell 'desperately in
love' when he was five years old. A series of such inno-
cent love-affairs enlivened his years at the North London
Collegiate School and other schools in the neighbour-
hood, and he was 'still in jackets and turned-down
collars when he became attached to the girl whom he
ultimately and happily married.
The home was a happy one. The father was 'brimful
of Humour, and there were few people so good at
repartee'. He wrote sketches for performance by George
and his brother, Walter Weedon, who was five years
younger, and as his sons grew up he collaborated with
them more and more. A part-time law reporter at Bow
Street Police Court, he was mainly a professional lec-
turer and reciter, virtually a member of "the profession',
and he had many friends who were members. So the
boys were well acquainted with some of the leading
stage personalities of the day, Ellen Terry, Henry Irving
and T. W. Robertson among them. …….