THE LIFE & TIMES OF PETER CHEYNEY
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Chapter 1 • East-End Boy

Peter Cheyney was born Reginald Southouse Cheyney – Reggie – in the East End of London on 22 February 1896. The last of five children to Catherine (neé Southouse) and Arthur Cheyney, Reggie was fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a fresh complexion and was known at school as ‘a round, rather rough little boy’.

He was bright, but not academic, learning from his older brothers to be street-wise. Their home, at 92 Whitechapel High Street, had a tiny backyard and the ground floor was their mother’s corset shop, with workrooms above.

Whitechapel High Street of the 1890s was a vibrant place, a hay market, shops and stalls selling everything from fruit, fish, cloth, live animals, to Everlasting Sticks, the Police Gazette and joke visiting cards. Men with trays of collar studs, hairpins, bull’s eyes, senna pods, hair restorer.... And food: pease pudding, faggots, chestnuts, hot potatoes, oysters, jellied eels, mutton pies, sarsparilla, lemonade, whelks, cockles and pigs’ trotters. Even “little street arabs” with pail and brush to collect droppings from the huge dray-horses, to sell for the gardens of the grand houses. People on the street would be drunk at all times of the day and policemen still wore frock coats. This was the playground of Reggie Cheyney.

His father was among those selling oysters, and those who drank, and much to Arthur’s shame, it was Kate who supported the family. They separated in 1898, as witnessed by the 1901 census, Kate took on a maid-apprentice and Kate’s sister Aunt “Polly” moved in. The census listing also shows her sons Arthur Joseph (14), Stanley (7) and Reginald (5). Between the two elder boys listed, Kate had also had a daughter who died at less than one year-old, and a son, Sydney, who died at the age of twelve, shortly before the census. Sydney had been her favourite son (as the other boys were much more like their father in character) and she transferred her attention to Reginald and gave him the best education she could afford, even trying to send him to boarding school, away from the less positive effects of Whitechapel High Street. As Michael Harrison writes in his 1954 biography of Peter Cheyney:

...the most significant evidence of this close intimacy which existed between mother and son is to be found in the fact that all the ‘nice’ women in his writings – every one of them – the Catherine Cheyney whom he found waiting for him, when he realised he had escaped the threat of separation.

She was then just over forty ... he is perfectly sincere in finding women attractive at forty and over. He is not even aware here that he is going against a deep-rooted convention of ‘popular’ writers...

Take, for instance, the short story Double Alibi, in which Callaghan – the idealised Cheyney – meets Mrs. Charlesworth. “Mrs. Charlesworth was a plump and pleasant woman of forty. Her hair was freshly waved, her frock fashionable. Callaghan looked at her admiringly.”

The middle brother, Stanley, wanted to become a professional musician, but Kate found him an apprenticeship to a tailor, but elder brother Arthur had already found success on the stage. He was in the troupe of music-hall star Fred Karno, which at various times included Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton. Kate’s business had become very successful and she had high hopes for Reggie, despite his less than shining school career, and found him a place as a junior in a law firm. In between he went to a college where he learnt to type, use shorthand and understand company accounts, and elements of business law, all of which would stand him in good stead later in life. But his own ambition was to follow his brother onto the stage.