Lou Preagar

One of the lesser known Jewish bandleaders, but for ill health, Lou Preagar (sometimes spelt as Praegar) would have lasted the distance. He showed himself willing and able to accept the new styles of music that abounded post-war.

 

He was born in 1906 in Poplar son of a tailor (we are told). He appeared in the music scene in a professional manner in the mid-twenties, aged 19, having dabbled with bands in a semi-professional way before them while working in an accountancy office.

He was not averse to following trends. Before becoming a bandleader and during the tango craze, he joined “Eugene Pini and his Tango Orchestra" at the Monseigneur, and later joined the Billy Reid Accordion Band, learning the accordion in three weeks.

 

So he served his apprenticeship, playing piano and accordion. By 1933 he was leading the dance band at Romano’s restaurant, and his life more or less followed the usual life of the dance bandleader – making records, going on tour, and becoming very well known.

 

The war intervened. He joined up but due to an accident was invalided out of the army. He now formed a band at the Hammersmith Palais in 1942 where he stayed for 18 years…..and maybe this is where we can explore his ability to survive, for he showed he was not a one trick pony. 

 

As well as his bandleading he was a disc jockey for the radio programme “Music While You Work”, and in particular hosted a show called Write a Tune for £1000, in the late forties. This song writing contest 'Cruising Down the River', “made a fortune for a couple of spinsters, Nellie Tollerton and Elly Beadell”

 

It is worth pausing for a moment while some trivia floods in. Not only was ‘Cruising Down the River” to become a hit record, it was used in the BBC serial “The Singing Detective”, where Michael Gambon sang it in the second episode, but also featured in one of the most remarkable post-war incidents

 

When HMS Amethyst was being held hostage by the Communists on the Yangtse River in 1949, the BBC Light Programme invited the sailors, to send in requests. One Ordinary Seaman Henry Harris requested "Cruising Down the River" by Lou Preagar, the singer being Paul Rich, who incidentally was Jewish.

 

When they escaped “Two days later, the Amethyst and the Concord rendezvoused with HMS Jamaica just north of Formosa. Six hundred cheering sailors greeted them from the upper deck, and a band of the Royal Marines played "Cruising Down the River" as the men of three ships lustily joined in:”

The old accordion playing a sentimental tune
Cruising Down The River on a Sunday afternoon!

Coming back to Preagar, he also presented Housewives' Choice on the BBC Light Programme and led the band for ‘Come Dancing’ on the BBC

 

He suffered from ill health from the sixties onwards, and retired.. in 1962. He moved to Slough and bought the Carlton Ballroom, which he ran for 5 years Interestingly his survival instincts were still keen; he told of an argument with his management team over whether to allow rock music into the Ballroom, and threatened to walk out if they banned it.

 

He died in Majorca in 1978, aged 72.[

 

He cannot be said to have been one of the generation of Jewish bandleaders that arose out of the East End. His great grandfather, Woolf Praegar was born in 1801 in Prussia – and his mother came from an old Sephardic/Amsterdam family, the Cohens de Murcia.

 

That is the only bit of Yiddishkeit that I can find about Preagar. He lived his life apparently in a secular manner. Even Palgrave’s Dictionary of Anglo Jewish history remarks how the Jewish Chronicle only had a very small obituary for him.

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