Archie Hind

Mar 3 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

AT FIRST, you would not have thought the elegant singer with the perfectly groomed hair had much in common with the gently-smiling, rangy figure with his grizzled beard and lumberjack shirt.

But they had both known great poverty in tough, portside cities, united by spirit and experience.

Frankie Vaughan, the Liverpudlian, understood that, so in addition to charitable works in his own city, he helped start the Easterhouse Project to help improve life on the notorious Glasgow estate.

Archie Hind was a social worker there, truly dedicated to the principles which had fired his early life and resulted in one of Glasgow’s great post-war novels, Dear Green Place.

Others in that catch-all wagon of working-class writers, so fashionable in the 1950s and 60s, betrayed their beliefs at the first glimpse of a fluted glass. Hind didn’t.

He was born into Glasgow’s East End, the son of a train driver, but was brought up by a grandmother in a family broken by his father’s violence.

On occasions, he would not go to the public baths, so livid was his bruising. The family only reunited when Archie and his brother, John, a slaughterman, warned that they would meet fist with fist.

Against this background, Hind sought culture in literature and music, loving the writing of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and DH Lawrence, as well as jazz.

After leaving school at 14, he worked in an engineering works, serving with the Army in Singapore and Ceylon during the war.

His subsequent jobs as a trolley-bus driver and a slaughterhouse labourer followed the tradition of the sensitive man cherishing beauty in the most unsympathetic surroundings.

And Dear Green Place (1966), which won the Guardian fiction prize, tells of Mat Craig’s struggle to be a writer.

Hind was long married to Eleanor Slane, from a more genteel background, and their home became a haven for artists.

Although an affable chap and an engaging conversationalist, Hind was tormented by self-doubt, even working as a newspaper copy typist

Typically, for a writer, his success did not bring wealth, but he was made Aberdeen’s first writer-in-residence and wrote 10 plays, including a version of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the novel by Robert Tressell (Robert Noonan), buried at Walton Cemetery, Liverpool.

Hind is survived by his wife and four children.

Archie Hind, writer; born June 3, 1928, died February 21, 2008.