Announcing a change of cover (now that is a boring subject heading)

At Lowdham Book Festival, one of the venues we use regularly is the Primitive Methodist Chapel, a lovely old Victorian building, little changed. On the main table is a carved block of wood. For years I wondered about it until I sat at the right angle and suddenly saw the letters JESUS in relief. Some people never see it, others immediately. Perhaps you see what you expect to see, or want to see, and it took a while before JESUS came into my life, as it were. I only mention this because of our new cover for London E1. I never really liked the old cover, not least as it did not express the joi de vivre of the novel (though, rest assured, not all the novel was full of joi de anything) and of the East End. Not that it put people off - the first printing sold out - but that gave us a chance to change the front. And here it is... When I first printed it out I could not see the "E1" thinking it looked more like an ill-fitting jigsaw and anyway the full title is "London E... oh, there it is". Now I can't see the jigsaw, and E1 is perfectly clear. I hope it is for readers.
The photos we used this time came from Robert Poole's nephew, John Charlton, who showed us a series of pictures of East End street life, including one of a charabanc trip. They all appeared on the Spitalfields Life website. Thanks, for these John.

The TLS on London E1

The small Nottingham-based publisher New London Editions [think Five Leaves with an East London accent] specializes in reviving interest in forgotten London writers such as Alexander Baron and Roland Camberton, and their latest reprint is quite a find. Robert Poole’s only novel was originally published in 1961 and reviewed in The Yorkshire Post by Anthony Burgess who praised its “vitality and flow”, and expressed an interest in the author’s future work. There wasn’t to be any – Poole died two years later, aged forty, from an accidental overdose of painkillers.

Details of his life are sketchy. The youngest of nine children (like the novel’s protagonist), Poole was born in the East End in 1923, near the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. He had various dead-end jobs, joined the merchant navy, jumped ship in New Zealand and became a popular radio broadcaster. He was then arrested and spent a month in jail before being deported. Back in London he drifted aimlessly and in 1958 moved to Margate where he ran the bingo concession at Dreamland Amusement Park.

London E1 is set during the 1940s in Poole’s native Stepney, beset by breadline poverty, random violence, crowded slums, anti-Semitism and the Blackshirts. The novel’s narrator, Jimmy Wilson, is in prison for murder and recalls events in his life from the age of eleven when he earned a few pennies as a “Shabbas Goy”, lighting fires and candles for Orthodox Jews on Friday nights. The story then follows the next twelve years of Jimmy’s life, from his experience of the Blitz (with a tremendously powerful account of a direct hit on a crowded pub) to the mid-1950s. Young Jimmy – bright, articulate, selfconscious and clearly based on the author – falls in love with Pinkie, a haughty mixedrace girl whose mother works as a prostitute to pay for her daughter’s private education. Poole is especially adept at portraying the arrival of new immigrants from India, and their cultural impact on the working-class populations, both Jewish and Gentile.

There is plenty of evocative period detail: an all-day wedding party with gallons of booze and piles of boiled bacon sandwiches; hacksaw-wielding “gas-pipe kids” scavenging bomb sites for scrap lead; teenage girls going on the game; newly arrived Indians sleeping ten to a room and setting up the first curry houses (quite possibly, as the publishers claim, the earliest treatment in fiction of this new wave of migrants to the East End). There’s little sentiment and no nostalgia, but there is a real understanding of the consolations to be found amid ignorance and poverty, especially in the rough affection of family, friends and neighbours.

Rachel Lichtenstein rightly admits in her introduction that London E1 is no masterpiece. The writing is plain, sometimes uneven and, in a pleasing way, quite artless; the situations are memorably dramatic and clearly ripe for screen adaptation: producers should be fighting over the rights.

David Collard
TLS, 1st March 2013

Brick Lane stories

Readers of this blog and friends of the press might remember that we'd posted a "Desperately seeking Robert Poole" note, hoping that someone would help us find any living relatives of the late Robert Poole. We'd wanted to publish his London E1 - the old edition is pictured, with the new edition below, with two family pictures attached (and in the background my rather fetching purple cardie). Two of his family - Lisa Watson and Debbie Towns - got in touch with us. They'd googled their great uncle Robert and were astonished to discover our search. It was all to the good and we moved forward with publication. The book launch was held last week - Lisa spoke on behalf of the family, the broadcaster Alan Dein read from the book and discussed the content with Rachel Lichtenstein. Her introduction to the book is here - http://www.londonfictions.com/robert-poole-london-e1.html - together with some maps and photos of Brick Lane, the setting for Robert's - Bob's - only published novel.

Fittingly the launch was at the Brick Lane Bookshop, hosted by Kalina and Denise, who told me the shop was doing very well at the moment. It is, by the way, one of the few shops that started out as a community bookshop (THAP), became a radical bookshop (Eastside) and is now a local, community and commercial bookshop - which stocks a lot of our books.

But the real surprise was John Charlton, who came along - as did other members of Robert Poole's family. John was his nephew and knew him well, but also lived locally to Brick Lane and was able to confirm or reveal some of the real sites of events mentioned in the book, and reveal some of the real people who crop up in the novel. Among the strong points in the book - read out by Alan Dein - was a description of how local children used to jump onto the speeding brewery dray carts for illicit and dangerous rides. John was one of those children! He described some of the East End pub singalongs when Robert would bring down his showbiz friends, top pianists (Robert himself was an excellent self-taught pianist), to play for the hell of it. Sadly he was unable to identify "Pinkie" the mixed race girl the main character, based on Robert himself, was in love with and did not know whether Pinkie was real or fictional. But John did describe how he would regularly go to an Asian household, with his pot, to pick up a curry made in the back kitchen - that family would later open the first Asian restaurant on Brick Lane.

John was also a "shabbes goy" when he was a child - a gentile who would perform "work" tasks for Orthodox Jews living in the area, such as lighting candles or getting fires going, as Orthodox people cannot work on shabbes (this was long before time switches or central heating). Another Five Leaves writer, Roger Mills, who still lives in the East End, emailed later to say that his mother and aunt were also shabbes goys in the area between the wars. 

The launch was one of those where fact and fiction, East End history and family legends began to blur as the family remembered more of their past and others remembered more of their East End.

First Five Leaves London events of the year

New from Five Leaves, London E1 by Robert Poole

I have yet to find out who suggested this book for our New London Editions series. All the usual suspects say it was not them, so who was it who found this otherwise completely forgotten book? London E1 was first published by Secker in 1961. There was one review as far as we know, in the Yorkshire Post by Anthony Burgess, taking time off, perhaps from writing A Clockwork Orange. Did the book sell well? We don't know. But two years later Robert died, probably from an accidental overdose of painkillers. There had been talk of another book but all trace has vanished and Robert and London E1 slipped from public memory. Robert Poole was born a few yards from Brick Lane, the setting of this novel. He described his education as "practically nil". His later life included service in the Navy, various dead-end jobs and the Merchant Navy. He jumped ship, changed his name and became a broadcaster in New Zealand before being caught and deported. His last known job was running a Bingo stall in Margate.
What makes London E1 interesting is that the book was set in Brick Lane before, during and after WWII. The Jews were leaving and new settlers were moving in, "the Indians". The young "Jimmy Wilson" had an awful life of poverty and violence, but was fascinated by the white woman Peggy, a prostitute who worked with the Indians, and her mixed race daughter Pinkie who show him the possibility of escape from his family and his limited horizons. I can't think of any other novel that describes that changing world, written so close to the time by one who was there.
As a result of a couple of earlier blog mentions of Robert Poole Five Leaves is now in touch with some of his relatives and we expect some will join the broadcaster Alan Dein and Rachel Lichtenstein (who has written a foreword to the book) in discussing the book on Tuesday January 29th, 6.30pm at the Brick Lane Bookshop. Everybody is welcome. There will be refreshments from 6.30 with the event running from 7.00-8.30 or so. Please email info@fiveleaves.co.uk if you would like to attend. In the meantime copies of London E1 are available from www.inpressbooks.co.uk/london-e1/ now, or from Brick Lane and other bookshops later this week.

Desperately seeking... Robert Poole

Robert Poole wrote one book only, as far as I can tell - London E1, published by Secker in 1961. There are more recent writers called Robert Poole, but the one in question was born in 1923 and appears to have vanished without trace. Secker - now part of Random House - still hold the rights. We have been in touch with them about republishing the book in our New London Editions series, but would like to contact him, if he is still alive, or his Estate and know more about the man. In the book he describes his career in somewhat racy terms. He was born fifty yards from Brick Lane, held various jobs, jumped ship in New Zealand, was jailed there for a month then deported. He sold clothes in Oxford Street, and in 1958 moved to Margate and ran the Bingo stall at Dreamland. And after that? We know nothing. And Google knows nothing either. A similar blog for another writer in the series turned up a daughter, so we step forward in faith again. The book itself is set in Brick Lane during the blitz and is of particular interest as it describes, in what must be true to life fiction, the relationship between the host community and the Asians then starting to settle in the area.