Sid Chaplin

Sid Chaplin (20 September 1916 – 11 January 1986) was an English writer whose works (novels, television screenplays, poetry and short stories) are mostly set in the North East England of the 1940s and '50s.^[1]

Chaplin was born into a Durham mining family and worked in pits as a teenager.^[2] In 1946 he won the Atlantic Award for Literature for his collection of short stories, The Leaping Lad. After another stint as a miner, Chaplin began writing full time for the National Coal Board magazine from 1950.^[3] He later wrote for The Guardian, including theatre reviews, essays of social observation and, from 1963, his own column Northern Accent.^[4]

Chaplin's literary career pre-dated the so-called angry young men genre but has been credited as an influence on the late 50s/early 60s "kitchen sink" social realism of writers such as Alan Sillitoe.^[5] His 1961-2 novels The Day of the Sardine and The Watchers and the Watched have been cited as classics of "working class existentialism"^[6] and were most recently reprinted by Flambard Press in 2004.^[7]

In 1997, the Chaplin family deposited the bulk of Sid Chaplin's papers at Newcastle University's Robinson Library, Special Collections.

His son is Michael Chaplin.

Selected bibliography

Novels

• My Fate Cries Out (1949)
• The Thin Seam (1950)
• The Big Room (1960)
• The Day of the Sardine (1961)
• The Watchers and the Watched (1962)
• Sam in the Morning (1965)
• The Mines of Alabaster (1971)

Short stories

• The Leaping Lad (1946)
• The Smell of Sunday Dinner (1971)
• A Tree With Rosy Apples (1972)
• On Christmas Day in the Morning (1979)
• The Bachelor Uncle (1980)
• In Blackberry Time (1987)

References