Spitalfields Life

This is the eulogy for writer and historian Gillian Tindall by travel writer Colin Thubron which he read at her memorial gathering held at Cecil Sharp House in Regent’s Park on Friday last. Gillian died aged eighty-seven on 1st October and we are proud to have published her final work Journal of a Man Unknown. She was a Contributing Writer to Spitalfields Life for many years.

Gillian Tindall used to say with some amusement that her literary life was split into different regions.  Whereas in England she was known for her urban studies such as The Fields Beneath or The House by the Thames, in France she was recognised as the author of Celestine, and in India as the writer of Bombay: City of Gold.  In fact her Indian obituary recorded that ‘she had a huge impact on Indian readers and writers, and strongly influenced Mumbai’s urban heritage movement.’  Whereas a recent article in the journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects writes that her work on London ‘helped forge a way of seeing cities and places that is integral to most architects’ education’.

While hallmark interests run through all Gillian’s work, its range across genres is extraordinary.  Beside those books of so-called micro-history for which she is celebrated, she wrote nine distinguished novels – Fly Away Home won the Somerset Maugham Award – three collections of short stories, biographies of George Gissing and of Wenceslaus Holler, (whose etchings are a crucial guide to seventeenth century London), an appreciation of Rosamund Lehmann, radio plays, a study of London’s future Elizabeth Line, and a poignant reflection, partly autobiographical, on the memories evoked by leftover objects: The Pulse Glass, and the Beat of Other Hearts.

She also wrote an affecting survey called Countries of the Mind: the Meaning of Place to Writers.   And place – the observation of a street, a house, even of chance artefacts – was the wellspring of her non-fiction.  ‘Houses and barns,’ she wrote, ‘gate posts, hedgerows, field slopes and the lie of paths, persist and persist, even when people that created them are earth themselves’.  In effect cities and buildings become, in her work, a palimpsest, in which the past lingers beneath the surface of things, and continues to shape them.

We think not only of The Fields Beneath but of The House by the Thames, which breathes life into forgotten individuals, from traders in coal and iron to a motley middle class, over more than four centuries.  Of Three Houses, Many Lives, with their changing medley of uses: a girls’ boarding school, a vicarage, a lorry drivers’ drinking club; and of her Footsteps in Paris which illuminates the Latin Quarter through six past, transient inhabitants, including, obliquely, herself.

Memory, in Gillian’s work, seems almost to be embodied in the buildings and objects that elicit it.  In her novels, too, the past presses up beneath the present, but here as a corrective to the illusions or evasions of the living.  In her novel Spirit Weddings the past reasserts itself with shocking revelations.  The protagonists of two other novels, Give Them all my Love and To the City become overwhelmed by memories that fracture their lives.  And Gillian’s sixth novel Looking Forword might be read as a reflection on memory itself, and on loss.

France, in whose heartland in the Indre she and her husband bought a village house, was an abiding love.  ‘In my teens,’ she wrote, ‘my personal England seemed a dark, ramshackle, threatening place… Lacking any internalised Paradise derived from my actual childhood, I have apparently worked in a back-to-front manner from my youthful attachment to French urban life and culture, accreting round myself the compost of an older France….In central France, I have found the mythic house of childhood simplicity.’

It was here, in an abandoned home near her own, that she came by chance on a sheaf of letters addressed in the mid-nineteenth century by five different suitors to the local innkeeper’s daughter, and from which, with Gillian’s intimate knowledge of French rural history, she was able to resurrect a world on the brink of change in her celebrated Celestine.  ‘A narrative of enigmatic beauty,’ wrote the poet W.S.Merwin in the New York Times, ‘a glimpse of time and mortality.’

It was typical of Gillian that the lives she resurrected were not those of the so-called great but of the overlooked and unremembered, who seem, in her work, to stand in for the great mass of those forgotten, who have nevertheless shaped our own world.  For instance, her The Journey of Martin Nadaud, based on unpublished papers, traces the career of a nineteenth-century French stone mason.  Her last novel, published earlier this month, is the vividly imagined life-story of a Sussex-born ironmonger, Journal of a Man Unknown. In The Pulse Glass she remarks that in the recreating of family trees those who don’t procreate are sidelined, and she affectionately resurrects, from a wide and convoluted family history, a distant relative, a benign Aunt Bess, who died almost two centuries ago.   

Gillian’s research was meticulous, excited and focused, and crucially productive of the telling detail and anecdote.  Besides the regular volumes of history and sociology, the archives of her choice were multiple: town and parish records, local newspapers, chance letters, the memories of the old.  ‘To sit all day in a newspaper library’ she wrote, ‘with a succession of leather-bound broadsheet volumes before you, turning pages through the weeks, months and years, is to feel both the copious existence of daily life and its transience…. You could write a complete social history of the twentieth century simply out of the pages of the Hornsey Journal’.

When she and her husband had finally to leave their beloved house in France, she compiled, in French, a history of its previous owners – poor farmers, for the most part – which she was able to give to people in parting.  ‘Both I and those who received my account’, she wrote, ‘were pleased that another handful of such people had been brought back from the quiet darkness of forgetting.’

Gillian’s was a richly distinctive mind and voice, and in her conviction that the death of the past impoverishes the present, she created books that will surely stand the test of time.

But typically she was conscious of the vulnerability of all communication.  ‘No one has yet invented a better storage and retrieval system than the book,’ she wrote.  ‘Our current digital methods of record are, by comparison, laughably ephemeral, vulnerable to time, error and the obsolescence of technology…. even now wiping out vast potential areas of paper record that have been the staple of research for centuries.  Time will show,’ she continued, ‘whether this change is just another version of the casually brutal but necessary wastage and winnowing that have always occurred….’  But ‘I don’t somehow think that in thirteen centuries’ time some future archivist will be lovingly cradling a preserved hard disc in his hand and produce the means to decode its secrets.’

But we may be confident that, in whatever form it takes, Gillian’s own work, with its rare combination of scholarly rigour and imaginative sympathy, will endure into the uncertain future.

Click here to order a copy of Journal of a Man Unknown