Gilda O'Neill - Lives remembered...

GILDA O’NEILL – LIVES REMEMBERED…

We were very sorry to hear recently about the death of the author Gilda O’Neill. Gilda was only 59, and an enthusiastic advocate for public libraries and the work we do; in return, library users loved her books, and recognised an authentic storyteller and pioneer of oral history.

Nowadays, there are loads of books recording ‘lost voices’ of working people, but it was Gilda who set the standard for recording voices from the East End…"Real history for real people”…

Her roots were proper East End – a grandfather was a tug skipper on the Thames, a great uncle had been a minder at a Limehouse gambling den, and her mother ran a pie and mash shop.
Well, Londoners aren’t known for their reserve or lack of cockney chat, but – back then – many people were still reluctant to spill the beans, to tell their own life stories to strangers or outsiders – so Gilda could relate to them as “one of their own”. She knew that everyone had a story to tell – and what stories!
She recalled one particular anecdote from her father…once passing the little terraced house where he grew up in the 1920s she expressed amazement that all his extended family could have squeezed into it, especially when Aunt Mog came home from the workhouse at weekends…That’s not the half of it, her father replied, “we had the Harrises living upstairs!”…

Hop pickers, street life, changing communities, larger than life characters – these were the themes that dominated her books, but Gilda was a versatile writer, too – she could turn her hand to history as well as fiction (she wrote both East End sagas and crime novels). She was passionate about writing, too, urging everyone to try it, to tell a story, and record their own family life histories.
Her stories reflect an age of change, of transition and uncertainty…she wrote: "People are often mourning when they tell their stories, mourning the loss of a way of life in which they were part of a community that had grown organically over the generations… Unlike the planners and architects who moved them around as if they were pawns in a chess game, they understand that communities are not created by ordering removal vans simply to transplant people from one location to another – not if they are to have a cohesiveness that makes sense to those who live within them."

Gilda O’Neill ~ 1951-2010