Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
STAR: ENDERS
For most of us, he’s simply been the quiet, reassuring figure who, for more than three decades, was always on hand to comfort the often distressed residents of Albert Square.
But his character stood for so much more. Softly spoken Dr Legg was the original East End boy who made good and dedicated his life to the hard-knocks community in Walford he called home.
And tomorrow, the Eastenders stalwart slips away at 98 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, with his most loyal patient, the hypochondriac Dot Branning (June Brown), comforting him.
Harold Legg was one of the original 23 characters to inhabit Albert Square when the BBC1 soap started in 1985.
Until his retirement in 1998 he was a constant: the witness and confidant in a catalogue of suicides, breakdowns, abortions and murders that would force most GPS into early retirement.
He helped Mark Fowler come to terms with HIV, confronted Ethel Skinner’s assisted suicide, and even once failed to diagnose Vicki Fowler’s meningitis.
Since then he’s played cameos. But the poignancy of his final scenes is born of the authenticity of his character, a man of East End roots, who has come home to die. Roots very similar to the actor’s.
Leonard Fenton, 92, who is very much alive, has said his “lucky break” of playing Legg for all these years was like playing himself: a self-christened “old cockney”.
“It was the first time I’d played myself on TV. I’m normally a character actor, but Dr Legg was based on me,” he said.
He, too, grew up in London’s East End, battling the boundaries of a working-class upbringing which never encouraged him to consider acting as a career.
And, as a Jew like his character, he was aware of his family’s brushes with antisemitism after initially arriving in London as immigrants from Europe.
Leonard, whose original surname was Feinstein, has spoken of his family’s experiences of hatred in a part of London historically heavily populated with Jewish immigrants and descendants.
More than two million Jews left Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914, due to economic hardship and persecution, especially after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in Russia in 1881.
Many landing here intended to go to America, but about 120,000 stayed.
Thousands were attracted to the East End as a place to live cheaply, and because they could find work in the “rag trade”.
The area became a target for fascist Oswald Mosley’s far-right protests in the 1930s, when Leonard was a child.
He said: “Mosley used to have meetings outside our house, because we were surrounded – it was a very poor area and we were the only Jews in the street – and my mother used to swear at him from the window with a baby in her arms.
“He was talking against the Jews and their bank balance and my mother shouted, ‘Would you like to see my bank balance?’ She was a very brave woman.
“The neighbours used to say, ‘No, no, we’re not talking about you, we’re talking about the others’. So, in a way, I grew up appeasing people.” Dr Legg’s recent
return to the Square has charted his own distress at the new wave of anti-semitism, reflecting the disturbing rise of real-life hate crime.
Although his character’s history has always largely been kept quiet, the original outline describes how his parents changed their name, taking Legg “from the street they used to live in”.
Describing his background, it says: “The tough time came in the mid-30s, when the extreme right and Mosley, on one hand, and persecution of the Jews in Europe, on the other, forced him as a teenager to become positively aware of racism, freedom and persecution.
“He didn’t become a Communist, he