 It's a pleasure and a joy to report that the memoirs of the novelist Alexander Baron, Chapters of Accidents, have been published for the first time.
Baron (born Alec Bernstein and known within the family as Joe) was a wonderful chronicler of the 'poor bloody infantry' experience of the Second World War, notably in his debut novel From the City, From the Plough. And The Lowlife is rightly regarded as one of the classic accounts of post-war London, and is one of my favourite pieces of literature. This memoir covers Baron's childhood and family connection to the East End. There's also a wonderful and detailed account of his recruitment into the Communist Party, his entryist activity in the Labour Party's youth wing, and then his part in the CP's preparations for operating underground in the event that they were banned during the Second World War (while the Daily Worker was banned for a while, the party avoided proscription). There's also a powerful account of Baron's wartime service in France and Italy, and the memoir ends in 1948 with the publication of his first novel and his decision to devote himself to writing. The book is handsomely produced and includes many photographs. It's published by Valentine Mitchell and sells for £16.95. A bargain!
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 My friend Muriel Walker celebrated her 94th birthday this month. Happy birthday! We called on her for a coffee and a chat. Muriel had a long association with the Hayward Gallery. In this photograph she is standing beside a wonderful portrait of her by her friend Philip Sutton RA. Just as striking is a photograph of Muriel taken many decades ago by her brother.  I got to know Muriel when I was researching into the novelist Alexander Baron. At 18, she got a job at Unity Theatre - and quickly became part of the team working on the monthly journal Baron edited, New Theatre. In this 1948 photo below taken during a Unity Theatre outing to Box Hill, Muriel is third from left at the front, with dark hair and a hand towards her mouth. Alexander Baron is three to the right - with glasses and arms folded.  After a few years, Muriel and her friend Beryl - another Unity Theatre regular - decided to head to Italy. Baron had served in Italy during the war, an episode he wrote about powerfully in There's No Home, and he wrote Muriel this letter of introduction:  While in Italy, Muriel worked on location during the filming of the cinema classic Vulcano and then with the actor Anna Magnani - what an adventure!   The Baron Seven: l to r Andrew Whitehead, Ken Worpole, Muriel Walker, Sean Longden, Susie Thomas, Nadia Valman, Anthony Cartwright. Photos courtesy of Larraine Worpole The wonderful Old Church on Stoke Newington Church Street was the venue over the weekend for a book launch - part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. The volume is about a son of Stoke Newington, the novelist Alexander Baron, best known for his D-Day novel From the City, From the Plough and his cult classic of post-war Hackney, The Lowlife. Six Baron enthusiasts have come together in So We Live: the novels of Alexander Baron to examine aspects of his life and writing. We were joined by Muriel Walker, who is 92 and worked alongside Baron in the late 1940s on the journal 'New Theatre'. She read from a letter Baron had sent her in 1949 when she was in Italy - where Baron had served during the war.  Ross Bradshaw of the publishers Five Leaves with Nadia Valman. Photo: Larraine Worpole The launch was a great success with a hundred or so people packing the church pews. And lots of books were sold.
So We Live is published by Five Leaves - and they have also just published four of Baron's novels, three of them republications and in one case, The War Baby, the first publication of a powerful novel set amid the International Brigades fighting Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
There's more about Alexander Baron here - and we have also posted online a 'walk round Baron's manor', complete with map, which will guide you round Stoke Newington and Dalston in the footsteps of the author.
Do give it a try!  What a wonderful piece of political ephemera! Tom Mann was a hero of the British Communist movement - an activist who was a living link from the socialist revival of the 1880s, the 'new unionism' movement which sought to organised the semi-skilled and unskilled and the renowned 1889 Dock Strike through into the Popular Front period fifty years later. He was also a good, brave and decent man, who was loved as well as respected. I've just been reading the (as yet unpublished) memoirs of the novelist Alexander Baron, who was an influential communist in the late 1930s. He says: By this time, like my grandfather Levinson, I had shaken hands with Mr. Tom Mann, the old trade union pioneer. [John] Gollan had introduced me to him and told him something about me. True to his Victorian origins - he had taught in a chapel Sunday School when he was young - the old man clasped my hand and told me, in the words of the Christian hymn, to fight the good fight with all my might. ... Mann was small and bent when I met him, but he looked hale, with a leathery, unblemished skin, sprouting moustache and clear, merry eyes. When he cracked a joke he skipped in a little three-step dance to celebrate it. I revered him for the great deeds of his younger days and he still seems to me to have been one of the few early socialists who remained pure souls to the end. He had belonged to the Communist Party since its foundation, seeing it as the home for a revolutionary trade unionist. I believe that he lived insulated by his own goodness from knowledge of the dark side of communism and that to the end of his life in 1941 he cherished the same innocent dreams and illusions that my friends and I had when we were sixteen. The menu shows how conventional was this 80th birthday testimonial dinner for a comrade: at a Bloomsbury hotel, with roast lamb and roast potatoes, toasts (I wonder if there was alcohol?) and classical-style singers (all male). It is the hallmark of revolutionary conformity. The menu is signed by Mann, and it's a nice thing to have.   One of the finest London novelists, Alexander Baron, was born a century ago today. He is the author of the classic The Lowlife and another handful of wonderful London novels, and he also in From the City, From the Plough caught the raw, infantry experience of the D-Day landings and then fighting across Europe. Baron was born Alec Bernstein. He is something of an enigma - a very private person. He became active in the Communist Party as a teenager in north London and - although his party membership was never publicly acknowledged (he was active in the Labour Party too) - he became a figure of influence at the CP headquarters. During the war, he moved away from communism, but in his writing repeatedly returned to the ideology which ensnared him in his youth. His part of London was Hackney and the East End. He grew up in Dalston and Stoke Newington and his family were from Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. Here's how his unpublished memoirs open: I was born on December 4, 1917 at 30, Penyston Road, Maidenhead, in Berkshire, eleven months before the end of the Great War. My mother went there to get away from the air raids. She stayed with relatives of Mr and Mrs Simmonds, a couple whom she and my father knew in London. Mr Simmonds was a policemen. She arrived in Maidenhead a week before I was born and went back to London with me three weeks later. My father, Barnet Bernsgtein, was born in Poland. He came to London when he was thirteen. My mother, Fanny Levinson, was born in Corbet's Court, Spitalfields. She was twenty-one and my father was twenty-three when I was born, a little more than a year after their marriage. My father worked as a fur cutter. We lived for a year with his parents above their cobbler's shop in Hare Street, Bethnal Green. Whenever there was an air raid at night my mother carried me a few hundered yards to the railway arches in Brick Lane. People came in crowds to shelter under the arches until the All Clear sounded. Sometimes her younger sister Hetty was with her; and since I was a very fat baby they had to take turns to carry me the short distance. I was only in my first year, but they told me that I used to point at the searchlights that combed the sky and shout, "Up! Up!" 
The UnLondon festival at Stoke Newington old church yesterday was a rip-roaring success. Great, cosy, historic venue, with very well attended talks and readings in the afternoon - including the inspiring Bernard Kops, and Ken Worpole talking about Stoke Newington's own Alexander Baron, author of The Lowlife (and yes, 'London Fictions' was there too).
And in the evening the guys who had organised the free event took to the stage. They are The Unfortunates, named after a B.S. Johnson novel, the one where the pages are sheets in a box and, apart from the first and last, can be read in any order. They play well, really well, sort of skiffle-meets-punk (I may have got that wrong, but that's how it struck me). And there they are above doing their encore, not their own number but Robyn Hitchcock's Trams of Old London - a song I didn't know, but a great choice, and yes those are the lyrics of the chorus on the blackboard. And here they are in full: Trams of old London, Taking my baby into the past in it. Trams of old London blow my mind. Ludgate, Fenchurch, Highgate Hill; Rolling slowly up there still, uh-huh. Waterloo and Clerkenwell, Out to Aldgate East as well, uh-huh. On a clear night you can see Where the rails used to be. Oh, it seems like ancient myth They once ran to Hammersmith. Trams of old London, Taking my baby into the past in it. Trams of old London blow my mind. Through Electric Avenue, Brixton, down in southwest too, uh-huh. Teddington and Kennington, Twickenham and Paddington, uh-huh. In the blitz they never closed Though they blew up half the roads. Oh, it hurts me just to see 'em Going dead in a museum. Ah... Trams of old London, Taking my baby into the past in it. Trams of old London blow my mind. Trams of old London, Taking my baby into the past in it. Trams of old London blow my mind.  It's curious how one thing leads to another. I posted recently on this blog a Unity Theatre photo from the late 1940s which included Joe Figoff, a name which meant nothing to me but which is sufficiently distinctive that I thought I'd see what an internet search revealed. And, indirectly, it has led to the photo above - taken at Arncott Camp, near Bicester, in 1942.  I am publishing the photo with the blessing of Pat Langham-Service. It belonged to her father. George Dorrington, who died a couple of years ago in his 90s. He features in the photo, along with other members of a Pioneer Corps company - one of them, the tallish guy just right of centre, is Joe Figoff. George Dorrington had done what so many others neglect to do - written down the names of all those in the photo on the back. Some of these same colleagues, though not Joe Figoff, put their names to a wonderful signed Christmas menu - at the time, December 1943, they were serving with the Pioneer Corps in Catania in Sicily. Again, my warm thanks to Pat Langham-Service for permission to post this moving memento of war. I wonder how the 'community singing in the dining hall after dinner' went?  It may well be coincidence and nothing more - but also among those fighting in Catania in 1943 was Alec Bernstein, the novelist Alexander Baron, who was later a colleague of Joe Figoff at Unity Theatre. He had also at one time been in the Pioneer Corps. Baron wrote about his few weeks in Catania in one of the most powerful of his novels, There's No Home, republished just last year. I wonder if he would have known any of those who signed this Xmas Day menu?
Photo: Mike Quinn, Creative Commons
A train journey today took me past Catford Stadium - once a mighty dog track. No more! It's now a rotting hulk - though as you pass by, you can just make out the silhouette of greyhounds in the nameboard above the entrance. Greyhound racing stopped at Catford in 2003. I was never a great afficionado of the dogs, but when I lived walking distance from the old Harringay Stadium in the 1980s, I used to go there every once in a while. It had seen better days - at least, I hope it had - but it was still fun. And it touched on the old London sub-culture of Baron's 'The Lowlife', of obsessive gamblers, tic-tac men, and bookies at their on-course stands. Harringay closed in 1987 and the stadium was demolished. White City had been pulled down the previous year. Walthamstow, which I went to once - a palace compared to tawdry Harringay - saw its last artificial hare race round the track back in 2008. According to Wikipedia, there are still twenty-six registered dog tracks in the UK - including stadiums at Bexley, Harlow and Merton. But the glory days are well and truly gone - and I wouldn't put money on them coming back, at any odds. 
Photo: Danny Robinson, Creative Commons
 This wonderful photo dates from 1948 - a Unity Theatre outing to Box Hill outside London. The Unity Theatre was a left-wing theatre group based in St Pancras which numbered among its members several future stars of stage and screen: Warren Mitchell, Alfie Bass, Michael Gambon, Lionel Bart, and others. Such literary giants as Peter Ustinov, Ted Willis and (my particular interest) the novelist Alexander Baron were also key figures in Unity - a creative power house in the years after the Second World War. The Unity Theatre Trust seeks to continue its work. This photo was provided to me by Muriel Walker, herself a Unity veteran. She worked with Alexander Baron, and very kindly shared her memories of Unity and of him. But who are all those featured in this very warm and evocative group photo? With Muriel's help, and numbering those featured as below, I've started to put names to faces - if you can help, please do get in touch by adding a comment or emailing me at [email protected] LATER: We're not doing very well in identifying those in the photo - do please spread the word if you know people who may be able to help. For more about Unity's Red Beryl - do visit these pages: http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/the-purging-of-red-beryl/ http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/1/post/2012/10/red-beryl-at-90.html And there's another Unity photo on this site here: http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/1/post/2012/11/unity-revisited.html  1: Beryl Bass, wife of Alfie Bass
2: 3: Muriel Dobkin 4: 5: Betty Oxenbould 6: Alec Bernstein (Alexander Baron) 7: 8: 9: 10: Ray Bernard 11: 12: Joyce Kirby 13: 14: 15: 16: 17: 18: 19: 20: 21: 22: 23: 23A: 24: Fred Bishop 25: 26: 27: 28: Tom Kernot 29: Gerry Sharpe, general manager of Unity 30: 31: Anita Davis 32: 33: 34:  Alexander Baron is back in style! The first evening of this year's Stoke Newington Literary Festival included a wonderful session on the locality's most famous modern writer. Baron was brought up on Foulden Road, and borrowed from his childhood memories in his classic The Lowlife, as well as in With Hope, Farewell, and the most autobiographical of his fiction, The In-Between Time. Yesterday evening more than seventy people crammed in to an evening meeting to celebrate Baron and his books. Not simply his novels of north London, but also his celebrated fiction giving an ordinary soldier's viewpoint of the fighting in Europe during the latter part of the Second World War.  Sean Longden - one of the speakers and a leading historian of the combatants' experience of war - said Baron's novels turned up more regularly than any others on veterans' book shelves. Baron's son, Nick, talked of a shy man, a pessimist, morose at times - but a hugely accomplished TV script writer as well as novelist. There's much more about Baron elsewhere on this site.
One of his war novels - the hugely affecting and compassionate There's No Home, set in Sicily during a lull in the conflict - has just been republished by Sort of Books. There are now five Baron novels back in print - the greatest number, surely, for many decades. And for Baron fans, of whom I am one, a real cause for celebration. If you are an enthusiast for London novels, let me point towards the London Fictions site - where, among others, Baron's Islington novel Rosie Hogarth is discussed. |
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