Alexander Baron


Alexander Baron was a British author and screenwriter. He is best known for his highly acclaimed novel about D-Day, From the City, from The Plough, and his London novel The Lowlife.

Early life

Baron's father was Barnet Bernstein, a Polish-Jewish immigrant to Britain who settled in the East End of London in 1908 and later worked as a master furrier. Baron was born in Maidenhead, where his mother Fanny had been evacuated during Zeppelin raids. The family soon returned to London, and Baron was raised in the Hackney district of London. He attended Hackney Downs School.

Politics and wartime

During the 1930s, with his friend Ted Willis, Baron was a leading activist and organiser of the Labour League of Youth. He helped establish what became the League's monthly paper, Advance. He campaigned against the fascists in the streets of the East End and edited the Young Communist League magazine Challenge. Baron became increasingly disillusioned with hard left politics as he spoke to International Brigade fighters returning from the Spanish Civil War. He was for a while a full-time Communist Party worker and according to his unpublished memoir had been chosen to go underground in the event that the Party was proscribed during the Second World War, which it initially denounced as 'an imperialist war'. He finally broke with the communists shortly after the war.
Baron served in the Pioneer Corps of the British Army during World War II, and was among the first Allied troops to be landed in Sicily, Italy and on D-Day. Between 1943 and late 1944, he experienced fierce fighting in the Italian campaign, Normandy and in Northern France and Belgium. In 1945 he was transferred as an Instructor to a British Army training camp in Northern Ireland, where he received a serious head injury and was hospitalised for over six months. Other themes of his novels were London life, politics, class, relations between men and women, and the relationship between the individual and society.
While he continued to write novels, in the 1950s Baron wrote screenplays for Hollywood, and by the 1960s he had become a regular writer on BBC's Play for Today. He wrote several episodes of the A Family at War series: 'The Breach in the Dyke', 'Brothers in War', 'A Lesson in War', 'Believed Killed', 'The Lost Ones', and 'Two Fathers'. Later he became well known for drama serials like Poldark and A Horseman Riding By, and in the 1980s for BBC classic literary adaptions including Ivanhoe, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre , Goodbye, Mr Chips , Oliver Twist, and Vanity Fair. He also scripted the pilot episode, "A Scandal in Bohemia," for Granada Television's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
In 1991, Baron was elected an Honorary Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London, in recognition of his contribution to the historical and social understanding of East London.
Baron's personal papers are held in the archives of the University of Reading. His wartime letters and unpublished memoirs were used by the historian Sean Longden for his book To the Victor the Spoils, a social history of the British Army between D-Day and VE Day. Baron has also been the subject of essays by Iain Sinclair and Ken Worpole.
Since Baron died in December 1999 his novels have been republished several times, testifying to a strong resurgence of interest in his work among the reading public as well as among critics and academics. These include Baron's first book, the war novel From the City, From the Plough ; his cult novel about the London underworld of the early 1960s, The Lowlife, which was cited in Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming as a literary antecedent of punk; King Dido, a story of the violent rise and fall of an East End London tough in Edwardian England; Rosie Hogarth ; and his second war novel There's No Home, the story of a love affair between a British soldier and Sicilian woman during a lull in the fierce fighting of the Italian campaign. Baron's third work based on his wartime experiences, The Human Kind, was republished by Black Spring Press in Autumn 2011. His novel about a Jewish RAF officer's return to post-war London, With Hope Farewell, was re-issued by Five Leaves in 2019, and his semi-autobiographical account of a young man's political coming of age, The In-Between Time is also scheduled for re-issue in the near future.
In 2019 Five Leaves also published, for the first time, Baron's Spanish Civil War novel The War Baby, described by critic David Herman in a long review in the Times Literary Supplement as 'his best account, and one of the best accounts by any British writer, of disillusionment with the left.' In 2019 also, the Imperial War Museum issued its own edition of From the City, From the Plough as one of its IWM Wartime Classics.
In 2019 the first full-length study of Baron's life and work was published by Five Leaves: So We Live: the novels of Alexander Baron, edited by Susie Thomas, Andrew Whitehead and Ken Worpole. In addition to essays by the three editors, other essayists include novelist Anthony Cartwright, military historian Sean Longden, and historian Nadia Valman. The study also includes interviews with Baron as well as key articles by him on Jewishness and literature, together with archive photographs, and a walking guide to Stoke Newington highlighting key locations mentioned in his novels.

Works

Novels
Film screenplays
Story
Studies