A Flash in the
Pan
by Jilliana
Ranicar-Breese
Claude Lyons,
my uncle, my mother Peggy’s elder brother,
was a practical joker. As a child in Liverpool, I
recall my uncle visiting ‘Beach Lodge’,
his brother Lewis’s big mansion with grounds
and a tennis court. I remember I would sit on his
knee and he would reveal six penny pieces from
behind my ears. Obviously Uncle Claude was an
amateur prestigitateur. He convinced me that he
had tea at 3.00 every Wednesday afternoon with
the Queen. I believed him when I was about 5 or 6
and bragged to all my school mates that he went
to Buckingham Palace for tea and scones served on
a solid silver platter. Decades later I inherited
a limited edition self published soft back
illustrated book of a playing card game he had
invented. Uncle Claude must have been into tricks
and playing cards.
Claude Lyons was a master electronics engineer
and a member of The Worshipful Masters in London.
He had set up the Claude Lyons electronics
factory in Hoddeston, Hertfordshire with his
brother and partner Lewis at the Liverpool office.
There was a Paris office in Avenue Foch, so my
uncle must have made a few shillings or francs in
his time.
I think my uncle must have been sadistic too
because I remember him carrying me outside as a
child in my very short dress during a hot summer
to the driveway where his posh car was parked and
firmly placing me on the scorching hot bonnet. I
screamed and he laughed.
Then there was the Lyons scandal in the late 60s
before divorce was legal. He was married to a
demanding harridan of a woman called Zia who gave
him 2 sons, William and Edward, my dear first
cousins who were decades older than little me.
Both sons eventually went into the family
business and were on the board along with Uncle
Lewis and his materialistic well endowed wife
Auntie Tillie. We called her cash till Tillie
because she only spoke of money and stocks and
shares.
Claude was so unhappy with his wife who would not
divorce him, that they split the large house in
Hendon in two. Claude lived on the ground floor
while Zia had a separate life upstairs visited
only by her doting son Edward.
What a dysfunctional family! Edward and William
loathed each other. William fell out with his
father because at 72 Claude had fathered a son
nicknamed Gino after he began to live contentedly
with his uneducated Italian housekeeper Anna from
a village near Salerno. How he despised his
father and would have nothing to do with the baby,
his half brother.
When Gino was 7 or 8 he began to show some
artistic talent under his elderly father’s
watchful eye. His black ink watercolour sketch of
‘Trees and monkeys’ was so professional,
that Uncle Claude decided to submit it into the
Summer Exhibition at The Royal Academy. It was
chosen! There were no restrictions on the entry
age so the mischievous Claude Lyons did not
divulge his son’s age. He was such a joker
so why not trick the stodgy Royal Academy?
The opening vernissage took place with the press,
art critics and journalists. Gino was too young
to be present but as my uncle, who was a Board
member, was admiring and discussing Gino’s
masterpiece to a journalist, the man asked how
old Gino was when he painted it. Uncle Claude
paused and thought for a moment and then declared
Gino was 12 now and must have been 7 or 8 at the
time.
All hell broke loose that evening. The boy became
a flash in the pan star of the media, on TV, on
radio, Cardinal Henan was called in as the boy
was half Catholic and half Jewish. Kandinsky from
The States wrote wanting Gino as a child prodigy,
American art investors contacted my uncle wanting
to buy more artworks as the original was never
for sale.
The submission regulations for the Royal Academy
were altered as Millais had been the youngest at
12. I never checked but probably Gino that year
in the 1960s, would have got into the Guinness
book of records.
Inevitably my uncle fell out with me as well as
his sons William and Edward and Zia. It was not
until decades later, a journalist friend of mine
traced Gino, known as Lewis Lyons, to London
after Anna his mother had died, where he too is a
journalist. We met in Brighton and spent the day
together. He told me he never took up painting
and it was indeed a flash in the pan!
Written
for Hove Writers Group 2 November 2018.
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