Writers have long since been drawn to Chiswick. Former BBC Media Correspondent Torin Douglas celebrates a literary locale...
Which writers come to your mind when you think of Chiswick?
WM Thackeray, perhaps? After all, the opening chapter of Vanity Fair is entitled ‘Chiswick Mall’, and two houses by the river still vie for recognition as the setting for Miss Pinkerton’s Academy, where Becky Sharp threw the dictionary out of the carriage.
Or maybe EM Forster, or Alexander Pope, both commemorated with blue plaques on their Chiswick homes – as is Patrick Hamilton, another past resident, whose novels feature scenes here.
Or how about WB Yeats? Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he lived for several years in Bedford Park, where he wrote perhaps his best-known poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Or John Betjeman, the former poet laureate and first patron of the Bedford Park Festival, a key figure in the campaign which saved 356 Arts & Crafts houses from demolition in the 1960s?
And don’t forget the living: residents such as the broadcasters Clare Balding and Jeremy Vine, who have spoken and signed their books at the Chiswick Book Festival.
All these people have well-publicised connections. Other Chiswick literary links, however, are less familiar. Did you know that another Nobel Prize winner, Harold Pinter, crafted his celebrated play, The Caretaker while occupying a small flat here?
“Pinter wrote it while living in a first floor flat in Chiswick High Road at number 373,” explains his biographer, Michael Billington. “The events that happen in the play are a fairly close transcription of real events. Pinter and his wife Vivien and their very young son Daniel were living in this very modest two-room flat…”
Look Back in Anger, another of the 20th Century’s most significant plays was also born here – on a houseboat, where the playwright and actor John Osborne was living at the time. On the 50th anniversary of “the night that changed British theatre”, Mark Lawson wrote in the Guardian:
“Reading on deck a copy of the theatrical paper The Stage, the aspiring writer saw an ad for a new group called the English Stage Company whose director, George Devine, was seeking new plays. He posted off a script... On August 12 1955, a grey-haired, breathless man was to be seen approaching the boat, having unwisely rowed out at high tide. This was Devine, who offered Osborne £25 for an option on the Porter play.”
These and other observations can be read on the Chiswick Timeline of Writers and Books, an online archive on the Chiswick Book Festival website. Inspired by Chiswick Timeline: A History in Art and Maps, the remarkable mural at Turnham Green tube station, it lists more than 200 writers who have lived in Chiswick or written about the area (chiswickbookfestival.net/programme/chiswick-timeline-writers-books).
When we started the Chiswick Book Festival 10 years ago, we set out to honour the writers who had lived here, beginning with Thackeray. And when the Chiswick Timeline mural appeared, celebrating Chiswick’s artists from Hogarth to Peter Blake, I thought that the timeline concept would be a great vehicle to mark its writers too.
We duly invited residents to submit names for inclusion and offered a prize for the person who came up with the most. It was no surprise when it went to the local historian and museums consultant Val Bott!
I was confident that we would not be short of writers. Not just professional authors – novelists, screenwriters, journalists, scientists and historians – but also actors, broadcasters and musicians who had written their memoirs, from Eamonn Andrews and Phil Collins to Sir Michael Redgrave and Sir Jimmy Young. Yet the sheer volume of distinguished names took me quite by surprise.
Writer's Trail rev2
Now we’ve compiled a Writers Trail featuring 21 acclaimed novelists, poets and playwrights who have lived in, or written about, Chiswick. It includes two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature (and one nominee), plus one Booker Prize winner, three Oscar winners (and one nominee), a poet laureate and several more commemorative plaques. You can pick up a map from St Michael and All Angels Church, Bedford Park, showing the associated addresses (or download it from the website).
As well as Thackeray, Pope, Forster, Hamilton, Betjeman, Yeats, Pinter and Osborne, the Trail includes Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), Nancy Mitford (Love in a Cold Climate) and Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons), who all lived for a period of time in Chiswick. GK Chesterton also features: his fiancée lived in Bedford Park, which he satirised as ‘Saffron Park’ in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday.
During the course of our research, we unearthed some deeply buried Chiswick gems. In one exhilarating 24-hour period, I discovered that Dame Iris Murdoch and JG Ballard both lived in Barrowgate Road. Neither of their houses is blessed with a blue plaque – though there is one for the comedian and magician Tommy Cooper, who lived in the road at the same time as Ballard.
According to Murdoch’s 1999 obituary in the Daily Telegraph: “The family moved to London when Iris was nine when her father joined the Civil Service. She grew up in Hammersmith and Chiswick.” Her biography throws additional light on the subject, stating that Iris lived in Barrowgate Road in the 1940s.
As for Ballard, he was in residence during the 1950s, according to his obituary in the Guardian: “The family moved from digs in Notting Hill, west London, to a flat in Chiswick and then on to Shepperton, where they had settled by 1960.”
I found out more from his daughter, the artist Fay Ballard, who told me that her father had loved walking with his family in the gardens of Chiswick House. What’s more, she sent me two pencil drawings (see above left) which she had produced years later, showing her as a baby with her parents in front of one of the gardens’ most recognisable features: the Sphinx.
“The drawings are based on a pair of small 6” x 4” black and white photographic prints,” she explained. “My mother’s sister, Peggy, gave me the print of my mother and me when I went to visit her with my own baby daughter in 1997, aged 40. Mary [Fay’s mother] had given it to her soon after it was taken.
“After my father’s death in 2009, I discovered the companion photograph in his study and reunited the images, conscious of being the common link between the two. When I visited Chiswick House Gardens to see the Sphinx, it had moved from the front garden to the rear.”
I’m sure that there are lots more stories waiting to be discovered, and shared, about Chiswick’s cohort of writers. If you know of names that you would like to see included, or would like to help update the archive, please let us know at admin@chiswickbookfestival.net.
And perhaps the time has come to start lobbying for more blue plaques in Chiswick!
Torin Douglas is Director of the Chiswick Book Festival. This year’s Festival will take place from September 12th to 16th. Visit: chiswickbookfestival.net
