Chaplin

SID CHAPLIN (1916 - 1986)

Chaplin was born at 23 Bolckow street, Shildon, and worked as a miner until 1946. While living at 9 Gladstone Terrace in Ferryhill, he published his first masterly collection of stories The Leaping Lad (1946). It gained him a prize which enabled him to take a year off and produce his first novel My Fate Cries Out about the lead miners of Weardale.

Sid Chaplin may be said to have influenced a whole generation of post-war British writers, including Keith Waterhouse and Stan Barstow. He also helped to form Northern Arts, the country's second (and largest) Regional Arts Association in 1961. Meanwhile his 1950 novel The Thin Seam formed the basis for a successful and moving musical play Close the Coalhouse Door by local writers Alan Plater and Alex Glasgow (q.v.).

From 1957, Chaplin lived at 11 Kimberley Gardens in Sandyford, Newcastle. Remarking that the term regional writer made him spit blood, he wrote television scripts, including some for When the Boat Comes In. His two important novels The Day of the Sardine and The Watcher and the Watched are set among the working class communities of Scotswood, Byker and Elswick. D.J. Taylor in A Vain Conceit remarks that in the novels of Barstow and John Braine (q.v.) the gutsy protagonists wanted houses and cars and a chunk of Macmillan's affluent society. Only in Sillitoe's Arthur Seaton do you find Chaplin's sort of anarchic, purposeless vitality that somehow places the character outside the normal channels of ambition and achievement. Most of Chaplin's gifts as a writer in fact are displayed in The Day of the Sardine published in 1961. In many ways it is a similar work to Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with Arthur Haggerston, its moody hero experiencing the same problems with older women and useless labour, the sense of being part of some imperfectly perceived system, rebellion against which will always be futile. There is still aspiration but it exists only to be mocked: John Braine's heroes really want the trappings of material success, Arthur is being ironic.

Chaplin's style sets him apart: stark elliptical blocks of sentences, stripped of pronouns and prepositions. 'Once mentioned this... Times you want to scream.' It conveys the twists and cadences of local speech, but without mimicking the bourgeois manner which George Orwell deprecated, and frequently rises to an odd, quirky lyricism - sharp fragments of prose that have a strangely voluptuous quality. Taylor goes on to characterise Chaplin as one of those 'fine Northern autodidacts', whose novels are, on one level a conscious extension of their own lives. 'His young modern equivalent would be off to Oxford and a job at the BBC - a fine thing for him no doubt, but a career unlikely to inspire a book like The Day of the Sardine which is in its way a better novel than many of the alleged landmarks of post-war British fiction. Taylor adds that Chaplin may continue to be classed as a regional author, but few novelists have so comprehensively demonstrated the hulking debt that post-war British fiction owes to Our Friends in the North.

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
SID CHAPLIN (1916 - 1986) Chaplin was born at 23 Bolckow street, Shildon, and worked as a miner until 1946. While living at 9 Gladstone Terrace in Ferryhill, he published his first masterly collection of stories The Leaping Lad (1946). It gained him a prize which enabled him to take a year off and produce his first novel My Fate Cries Out about the lead miners of Weardale. Sid Chaplin may be said to have influenced a whole generation of post-war British writers, including Keith Waterhouse and Stan Barstow. He also helped to form Northern Arts, the country's second (and largest) Regional Arts Association in 1961. Meanwhile his 1950 novel The Thin Seam formed the basis for a successful and moving musical play Close the Coalhouse Door by local writers Alan Plater and Alex Glasgow (q.v.). From 1957, Chaplin lived at 11 Kimberley Gardens in Sandyford, Newcastle. Remarking that the term regional writer made him spit blood, he wrote television scripts, including some for When the Boat Comes In. His two important novels The Day of the Sardine and The Watcher and the Watched are set among the working class communities of Scotswood, Byker and Elswick. D.J. Taylor in A Vain Conceit remarks that in the novels of Barstow and John Braine (q.v.) the gutsy protagonists wanted houses and cars and a chunk of Macmillan's affluent society. Only in Sillitoe's Arthur Seaton do you find Chaplin's sort of anarchic, purposeless vitality that somehow places the character outside the normal channels of ambition and achievement. Most of Chaplin's gifts as a writer in fact are displayed in The Day of the Sardine published in 1961. In many ways it is a similar work to Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with Arthur Haggerston, its moody hero experiencing the same problems with older women and useless labour, the sense of being part of some imperfectly perceived system, rebellion against which will always be futile. There is still aspiration but it exists only to be mocked: John Braine's heroes really want the trappings of material success, Arthur is being ironic. Chaplin's style sets him apart: stark elliptical blocks of sentences, stripped of pronouns and prepositions. 'Once mentioned this... Times you want to scream.' It conveys the twists and cadences of local speech, but without mimicking the bourgeois manner which George Orwell deprecated, and frequently rises to an odd, quirky lyricism - sharp fragments of prose that have a strangely voluptuous quality. Taylor goes on to characterise Chaplin as one of those 'fine Northern autodidacts', whose novels are, on one level a conscious extension of their own lives. 'His young modern equivalent would be off to Oxford and a job at the BBC - a fine thing for him no doubt, but a career unlikely to inspire a book like The Day of the Sardine which is in its way a better novel than many of the alleged landmarks of post-war British fiction. Taylor adds that Chaplin may continue to be classed as a regional author, but few novelists have so comprehensively demonstrated the hulking debt that post-war British fiction owes to Our Friends in the North.
Return to Index	On to next Author