Feature: Death of 'Kitchen Sink Drama' writer Alan Sillitoe

Published: 29 April 2010
by DAN CARRIER

ALAN Sillitoe had a twinkle in his eye and a mischievous grin when he explained a series of fateful quirks that turned him into a writer.

I was fortunate enough to meet Alan at the relaunch of his 1970 London gangster book, A Start In Life, which coincided with his 80th birthday.

Alan died on Sunday, aged 82. He will rightly be remembered for his kitchen-sink realism such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. His books not only invigorated the working-class novel but provided stories that were well translated onto the big screen.  

Reading from A Start In Life, Alan relished revisiting text he had written more than 35 years earlier – and he played to the audience, nodding wisely and commending the passage he had chosen, joking that he felt it was “rather good and worth a book deal”. 

While Alan’s novels have found a special place in the canon in 20th-century fiction, he was less well-known for his travel writing. But a skill for observing others was in his nature, and was crucial to his ability as a novelist. 

Alan went to the Soviet Union in the early 1960s and produced the travel book Gadfly In Russia. While the Soviets praised him as a working-class writer championing the common man in an unforgiving capitalist society, Sillitoe was no stooge: he criticised the Soviet government publicly for their oppression of free speech and strong-handed attitude towards what constituted “good” culture. 

More recently, he wrote Leading The Blind: A Century of Travel Writing, 1815 to 1914 – a critique of the guidebooks of the Victorian period written for English gentlemen heading abroad. It is hilarious – Alan downplays quite how funny the advice offered to travellers is, but you can hear underneath his prose the wicked tone and the delight he takes in the ridiculous foibles of the upper class Grand Tourer.

He told me his interest in foreign travel was piqued by his early experience as a National Serviceman. 

Trained in the use of Morse code and radio telegraphy, he was posted to a paddy field in Malaya and given the tricky job of guiding aeroplanes from Australia into Singapore, and then on to London.

But it was a disease he picked up while serving that set his life on a course he had not previously considered. He related how he caught TB – and was scared stiff, as he knew that 25 per cent of people had the illness died.

“I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to work again,” he told me.

He was sent to a sanatorium for nine months and the advice, once discharged, to go to live in a warmer climate to let his lungs heal. 

He moved to Mallorca and there met the ageing Robert Graves: the poet became a mentor, finding common ground in the pair’s experiences in the services. 

Alan recalled how meeting Graves, coupled with being laid up, awakened a love of reading within him.

“It was during that time I decided to write,” he said. “I made it my duty to read as many classics as I could. In the next five years I read almost everything. It also gave me a real love of travel.”

But it was the RAF pension that meant he could afford to dedicate himself to honing his craft. 

“I was sent £5 a week,” he said. “I was being kept by a woman – her Majesty the Queen!”