19 Facts About Jack Common

Jack Common was a British socialist, essayist and novelist.

Jack Common soon won admirers throughout the 1930s as a writer with a genuine proletarian viewpoint, as distinct from the purveyors of middle-class Marxist fiction.

Jack Common was invited in 1930 by John Middleton Murry, founder and editor The Adelphi, who had noticed an essay he had written, to become circulation promoter and later assistant editor of the magazine.

Jack Common's writing reflects on the separation between the ideas of middle-class intellectuals and the ideas of workers.

Jack Common inspired, prefaced and edited the compilation Seven Shifts, in which seven working men told of their experience.

Too early to be an angry young man of the 1950s, Jack Common was unable to sustain a career in writing.

Jack Common was born in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne, close to the rail-sheds where his father worked as an engine-driver.

Jack Common became a vigorous speaker in socialist circles at the Royal Arcade in Newcastle and began submitting articles to left-wing journals.

In 1928, against the wishes of his father, Jack Common went to London with hope of a better chance of finding work than at home.

Jack Common was poor enough by now to be subsidised by Orwell on occasion, and when the latter was in Morocco in 1938 Jack Common and Mary Anderson looked after the Wallington cottage.

At some time during the Second World War Jack Common moved Peter to Frating Community Farm in Essex, where conscientious objectors, Quakers and refugees attempted to avoid contributing to the war effort by self-sustaining farming.

Mary died in 1942 from cancer, and Jack Common began living with and eventually married Constance Helena Wood, nee Sambidge, who had a son Jan from her first marriage to Gilbert Wood, another Newcastle friend of his youth.

The family changed residence several times, ending up in a council house at 32 Warren Hamlet, Storrington, Sussex, with Jack Common trying to make ends meet by working at a mushroom nursery, while toiling over scripts and reviews at night, and writing for himself in between.

In 1956 Jack Common embarked upon a two-year stint as guide to Chastleton House in the Cotswolds, a position obtained for him through Sir Richard Rees.

Predictable disagreements with the owner, Alan Clutton-Brock, put an end to an arrangement whereby Jack Common had been able to get some writing done in the winter months.

Jack Common had always been interested in astronomy, and Fred Hoyle's theory of an endlessly self-renewing universe, which dispensed with a creator, was attractive.

Jack Common was not a joiner or an activist, nor did he encourage his children to be so.

Jack Common did blossom in the right setting, often in pubs, where he enjoyed political arguments with self-taught thinkers like himself.

Jack Common died of lung cancer in 1968, leaving a mass of unpublished material, which forms the Jack Common Archive, now held in Special Collections at Newcastle University Library.