Ian Robins Dury (12 May 1942 – 27 March 2000) was a British singer, songwriter and actor who rose to fame during the late 1970s, during the punk and new wave era of rock music. He was the lead singer and lyricist of Ian Dury and the Blockheads and before that of Kilburn and the High Roads.
Dury was born, and spent his early years, at his parents' home at 43 Weald Rise, Harrow Weald, Middlesex (though he often pretended that he had been born in Upminster, Essex, which all but one of his obituaries in the UK national press stated as fact). His father, William George Dury (born 23 September 1905, Southborough, Kent; died 25 February 1968), was a local bus driver and former boxer, while his mother Margaret (known as "Peggy", born Margaret Cuthbertson Walker, 17 April 1910, Rochdale, Lancashire; died January 1995) was a health visitor, the daughter of a Cornish doctor and the granddaughter of an Irish landowner.
William Dury trained with Rolls-Royce to be a chauffeur, and was then absent for long periods, so Peggy Dury took Ian to stay with her parents in Cornwall. After the Second World War, the family moved to Switzerland, where his father chauffeured for a millionaire and the Western European Union. In 1946 Peggy brought Ian back to England and they stayed with her sister, Mary, a doctor in Cranham, a small village in Essex. Although he saw his father on visits, they never lived together again.

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