Lionel Bart - Early Life

Early Life

Bart was born Lionel Begleiter the youngest of seven surviving children in East London to Galician Jews, and grew up in Stepney. His father worked as a tailor in a garden shed in London E1. The family had escaped the deadly pogroms against Jews by Ukrainian cossacks in Galicia, which was then part of the Austrian Empire. The sole survivor of the seven children is Lionel's sister Renee Gold.

Lionel changed his name to Bart, derived from when he passed by St. Barts' hospital on the top deck of a bus after he had completed his National Service with the Royal Air Force. A more likely derivation of Bart is from the silk-screen company Lionel founded with John Gorman, G and B Arts.

As a young man he was an accomplished painter. At the age of six a teacher told his parents that he was a musical genius. His parents gave him an old violin, but he did not apply himself and the lessons stopped.

At the age of 14 he obtained a Junior Art Scholarship to St Martin's School of Art. One Friday afternoon, he was suspended for "mischievousness" with another student, John Groom, for making a noise with the rest of the class, involving set squares and other paraphernalia. On the following Monday, he returned to School with a long explanation of his peripheral involvement in the disturbance and was re-instated. After St Martin's, he gave up his ambition to be a painter and took jobs in silk-screen printing works and commercial art studios. He never learned to read or write musical notation; this did not stop him from becoming a significant personality in the development of British rock and pop music.