TOMMY Leech, musician and songwriter, died 39 years ago, but he is due one final encore.

Southend in the Fifties and Sixties was full of larger-than-life characters, but Tommy headed the bill. For almost half a century he was the authentic sound of Southend seafront. He made music in every pub along the Golden Mile.

Tommy, along with the other entertainers of his generation and the audiences that flocked to them, have almost all gone now, and memories have faded fast. But Tommy’s daughter, Lorraine French, 65, wants her father to be celebrated one last time.

Lorraine is now very ill with advanced diabetes and angina, and barely leaves her Shoebury home.

“I’m held together by pills,” she says. “I’ve got this feeling something is going to happen. I was going to wait to celebrate the 40th anniversary of my father’s death, next year, but I’m not confident I’m going to make it.

“I’d never forgive myself if I missed the chance to tell people about him. I’m not interested in any memorial for myself. I want the memory of him to be my memorial. He was such a wonderful man and father.”

Tommy originally led his own band, Tommy Vanodell’s Accordion Band. A self-taught musician, he had worked alongside such legendary Twenties and Thirties showbiz names as Gracie Fields and Sandy Powell.

But he preferred a more personal style of entertainment. When he met Lorraine’s mum, Gretta, he closed down the band.

The couple went into business together as a performance duo, the Two Vanodells. Gretta sang, Tommy composed much of their repertoire, and played the musical accompaniment.

Most musicians are content to play one instrument at a time.

“Dad played three instruments together,” says Lorraine. “He could do it because he had these huge hands. He played the accordion, the clavolin (an early keyboard), and a cymbal.”

When performing, Tommy and Gretta dressed in Dutch costume.

“I don’t know why they chose that particular style, but it always worked well for their act,” says Lorraine.

The Two Vanodells worked seven days a week, night and day, including Christmas Day.

This left little time for child-raising, so Gretta’s mother helped out with the children.

“She knew a thing or two about kids,” says Lorraine. “She’d raised 15 of her own. She was very strict, but was a diamond.”

Sometimes Lorraine would make her way to the seafront and find the pub where dad and mum were performing.

“I always remember the smell of greasepaint,” she says. “Also the way dad would talk to people, especially people who were sitting by themselves or had a solemn face on them. He just loved everybody. And he knew everybody, hundreds of people on the seafront. I’m the same. I’ve got my father’s personality.”

As younger performers, Tommy and Gretta travelled to other areas, including London and Bath. But as time went by they increasingly concentrated on performances in their home town.

“It wasn’t just because they were close to home,” Lorraine says. “It was because Southend seafront was their sort of place, and Southend pub crowds were their sort of audience. They worked every single pub on the seafront at one time or another.”

By the time he died in 1971, Tommy had completed a total of 45 summer seasons on the seafront. In latter years, he and Gretta concentrated on one pub in particular, the Hole in the Wall, in the Borough Hotel (now the Liberty Belle). They were performing there on the day Tommy was felled by the haemorrhage that led to his death soon afterwards.

Tommy hoped Lorraine would follow her parents into the entertainment business.

“But,” says Lorraine, “I hate standing there with lots of people looking at me. I studied ballet and tap for his sake, but it was never going to work.”

Instead, she became a nurse, specialising in care of the elderly, and ultimately became the matron of a care home.

In a sense, Lorraine has never let go of her dad. She wears his ring all the time. “It has never left my hand,” she says. “He was the most wonderful man. He taught me everything I know.”