I am sure I have told you before about my great admiration for a blog entitled Spitalfields Life. For more than 15 years the Gentle Author has been publishing a daily post about the history, past and present, of Spitalfields in the east end of London, and the people who live and have lived there.
Among the contributors to this blog has been writer and historian Gillian Tindall and it was with sorrow that the Gentle Author informed his readers of his friend’s death this week.
The first book of Gillian’s I read was The House by the Thames and I quickly became a great admirer.
I am copying here the Gentle Author’s text from Spitalfields Life – I’m sure he won’t mind! I can recommend following the blog – just have a quick browse first, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. Read some of Gillian’s articles and perhaps pre-order the novel.
‘It is with a heart full of emotion that I write to you today. I have two announcements. The first piece of news I have to impart is that my good friend the historian Gillian Tindall died on Wednesday aged eighty-six. The second disclosure is that Gillian came to see me in February and asked me to publish her final work, Journal of a Man Unknown, which comes out on 6th November.
When Gillian and I met for a drink in the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool St Station on that cold night early in the year, she revealed she was terminally ill and that she had written a novel which she would like me to publish. Gillian was a talented writer, celebrated both for the quality of her writing and scrupulousness of her research. She had a distinguished record of more than sixty years publishing books and was a contributing writer to Spitalfields Life. So, of course, I said yes.
I was fascinated that, culminating her career as a historian, Gillian had chosen to write a piece of fiction as her final statement. In an astonishing feat of literary imagination, she projects herself back onto one of her forebears to conjure a compelling vision of seventeenth century England.
Journal of a Man Unknown is an eloquent first person narrative. The protagonist is a Huguenot iron worker, an occupation that leads him from the Sussex Weald to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and beyond to the North Country. While in London, he lives above a coffee house in Brick Lane and the book conjures a vivid evocation of Spitalfields at the time of the Huguenots.
Gillian’s novel serves as a personal manifesto expressing her belief in the true nature of history as composed of the lives of working people, those who pass through life not leaving a trace, except in the hearts of those into whose lives they have been cast. It is a sentiment with which I am fully in sympathy and makes Journal of a Man Unknown a poignant and heartfelt final statement.
All summer, as Gillian’s health declined, I worked with designer David Pearson to prepare a beautiful edition of her novel in the hope and expectation that she would be here to see it published. But it was not to be. My last contact with Gillian was when she approved David’s splendid cover design above and selected this blue and yellow version from the different options that David proposed.
It was a shock to learn of Gillian’s death this week just as her book was at the printers, but on reflection I think there is also a certain poetry in the notion of an author passing from this world knowing that her final work is to be published within weeks. In this sense, we never truly lose writers because they stay with us through their books.
We will be announcing a book launch presently, but in the meantime you can preorder a copy of Journal of a Man Unknown which we will send out at the end of this month.’
The Gentle Author, Spitalfields Life
Radnor Street Cemetery 