Leslie Daiken

Leslie Herbert Daiken (29 June 1912 – 15 August 1964) was an Irish-born advertising copywriter, editor, and writer on children's toys and games, in his youth in the 1930s a poet active in leftist politics and editor of the duplicated circular ''Irish Front''.

Beginning life with the name Yodaiken, Daiken was sometimes known to friends as Yod. He also published work under the name Ned Kiernan.

In the last year of his life, Daiken became a lecturer at the University of Ghana and died in post.

Early life

Born in Dublin's Little Jerusalem into a Russian-Jewish family, Daiken was the son of Samuel and Rosa Yodaiken."DAIKEN, Leslie (writer) Reference: MS 5647"
reading.ac.uk, accessed 20 August 2021 His father was a dealer in rubber and scrap metal, with premises in Dublin and Glasgow, and he was educated at two independent fee-paying schools, St Andrew's College and Wesley College,From Little Jerusalem to the University of Ghana: the life and work of Leslie Daiken
comeheretome.com, 25 October 2016, accessed 14 August 2021 and then in 1930 he entered Trinity College Dublin. In his first year, one of his lecturers in French literature was Samuel Beckett. Daiken was an active member of the Dublin University Socialist Society and a founding member of the college's Gaelic Society.

In 1932, and again in 1933, as Yodaiken he won the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for English Prose, and while at Trinity, he published short stories and verse (seen as wild and strange) in ''Choice'', ''The Dublin Magazine'', and '' The New English Weekly''.Paul Rouse
"Daiken, Leslie Herbert"
''Dictionary of Irish Biography in Eccles Street, Dublin, also used as a Workers' College, when it was attacked by a mob of Blueshirts. Daiken led the immediate defence of the building, which was saved on that occasion by the intervention of IRA men posing as the police.

In 1934, as Yodaiken, he graduated with a BA from Trinity in English and French Literature, with a Second Class degree. After graduating, Daiken worked briefly as a schoolteacher in Dublin. In April 1935, his short story “Angela” was published in ''The New English Weekly'' under the pen name of Ned Kiernan. That year, Daiken migrated to London.

Life in England

Soon after his arrival in London, Daiken was one of the three founders of a duplicated publication called ''Irish Front'', together with two other poets, Charlie Donnelly and Ewart Milne.Gazebo, "Coming down O’Connell St.” i
''Irish Democrat''
(April 1969), pp. 4, 8

In England, Daiken started to shorten his surname from Yodaiken to Daiken, for his publications, but he did not make this change formally until doing so by deed poll in 1943.

In December 1935, ''The Irish Times'' reviewed a production in Camden Town of ''Ireland Unfree'', a stage version by Daiken of Patrick Pearse’s poem "The Rebel". It stated that "Mr Daiken carries Pearse’s theme beyond his idealistic conclusion to the revolutionary viewpoint of the Irish workers."

Daiken kept up his links with leftist Irish writers and dissidents and edited the collection of working-class political verse ''Goodbye Twilight: songs of the struggle in Ireland'' (1936), illustrated by Harry Kernoff. ''The Irish Press'' described this as "forty young poets with blazing eyes and clenched fists". In another review, Louis MacNeice called the book a "collection of proletarian poems – some communist, some Irish republican, and all written in a defiant spirit of opposition ... a violent reaction against Yeats and all that he stood for."

Daiken did not go to fight in the Spanish Civil War, although his ''Irish Front'' colleague Charlie Donnelly did, and was killed; but he was active in fundraising for the Connolly Column, the Irish section of the International Brigades. He was also a contributor to the branch of Republican Congress in London, an Irish republican and Marxist-Leninist pressure group which aimed to engage Irish emigrants working in the city on socialist issues.

In 1939, Mairin Mitchell was highly critical of the Irish leftists, and in particular Daiken, for their views on the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and wrote to Desmond Ryan in September "Brian O'Neill, Bloomsbury, and Daiken will sing Russia right or wrong."

In October 1939, at the time of the wartime National Registration Act, Daiken was living in a studio at Old Castle Wharf, Twickenham, and described himself as "Script-writer and advertising copywriter".

During the Second World War, Daiken enlisted in the Corps of Signals of the Irish Army, a neutral force, and also worked for Reuters as a correspondent on education. In 1944, Daiken edited ''They Go, the Irish'', a collection of essays, including one from Sean O'Casey. In 1945, a collection of Daiken's verse was published under the title ''Signatures of All Things''. In the summer of that year, Samuel Beckett gave Daiken his unpublished novel ''Watt'', in the hope that Daiken could find a publisher for it, but he failed to do so. They continued to write to each other and met in London and Paris in the 1950s. Daiken also kept up with another friend from Trinity, Con Leventhal.

After he became a father in 1945, Daiken's main interest moved on from political activism to children's games and toys, and by 1951 the basement of his London home had become a toy museum. He wrote on the subject and made television and radio programmes for the BBC
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