Poetry was a life-saver – and the phone was a lifeline for activist and editor Eddie Linden
Eddie Linden kept in contact with his comrades right up until his death aged 88
Friday, 15th December 2023 — By Tom Foot
Eddie Linden [Granville Davies]
THE ring-ring of a telephone interrupted the funeral for Eddie Linden on Saturday, triggering roars of laughter from friends and family celebrating the life of the poet and political activist.
“I hope that’s not Eddie!” said the humanist celebrant Phil Warder.
The service heard about Mr Linden’s strong association with the telephone that he used to keep in contact with his comrades right up until his death aged 88 last month.
The former Times Literary Supplement columnist James Campbell said that Alexander Graham Bell could have invented the telephone “especially for Eddie”.
“We’ve all heard the expression: ‘It saved my life’.
“Dance. Learning the mandolin. Climbing Mount Everest. It saved my life…
“For Eddie, it wasn’t a cliché, poetry saved his life. Pure and simple.
“And the telephone was his other lifeline.
“In my case, and possibly with you too, he always ended in the same way: ‘I’ll let you go’. We’ll let you go, Eddie.”
He had recalled Mr Linden reciting his poems with “chin raised, eyes closed and hands clasped to the forehead” during fond memories of Christmases together in Belsize Park.
Mr Linden – who came to London from Scotland to work at Kentish Town railway station – was remembered as a political activist, charity founder, feminist, gay man, communist, pacifist, Labour Party member, publisher, Scotsman, Irishman, Catholic, atheist and poet.
The editor of the influential poetry magazine Aquarius, and a noted poet in his own right, died in a care home in Maida Vale.
The actor Bill Paterson – who was cast to play Mr Linden in an unrealised film adaptation of his biography – Labour MP Karen Buck, Westminster City Council leader Adam Hug, writer Robert Fraser and gay rights activist Peter McGraith were among the mourners attwo services at the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Lourdes and St Vincent de Paul in Harrow Road and the West London Crematorium in Kensal Green.
A message from the Northern Irish novelist Glenn Patterson said that he never left Mr Linden’s company or put down the phone without feeling that he had “learned something of value”.
The Flowers of the Forest by the Scots Guards was played and his cousin Geraldine Gallacher read a poem written by Mr Linden for his late uncle James.
The cremation service concluded with Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, from the Ninth Symphony.
