Tributes paid to poet and editor Eddie Linden at memorial service

Friends and family of poet and editor Eddie Linden gathered to remember him at a memorial service in London last week.

The service for Linden, who died at the age of 88 in November last year, was held on Thursday 11th July at the October Gallery in Bloomsbury.

Guests from across Britain and Ireland gathered to remember the late Scots-Irish poet, who was the editor and publisher of the respected poetry journal Aquarius for more than 30 years.

His admirers included Auberon Waugh and Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman. Aquarius published work by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy. Harold Pinter, who helped fund the magazine’s launch, allowed Aquarius to publish his poems exclusively, and later based a character in his play No Man’s Land on Linden.

The celebration of Linden’s life was hosted by fellow poet Hilary Davies, a former Royal Literary Fund Fellow at King’s College London and the British Library. Davies, a close friend of Linden’s, knew him for more than 40 years, and was married to his biographer, Sebastian Barker.

Tributes were paid to Linden by LGBTQ+ rights activist and writer Peter McGraith and Times Literary Supplement columnist James Campbell. Linden’s former neighbour, Theo Morgan, who Davies described as a “devoted” friend, spoke of the contradictions behind Linden’s self-described label as a “a homosexual atheist working-class Communist from Glasgow”, and read Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night”.

Born the illegitimate child of Irish immigrant parents in Motherwell, Scotland, Linden could barely read or write when he left school at 14. He worked as a miner and a porter in a hospital morgue, among other menial jobs, before founding Aquarius, which he edited from his bedsit in Maida Vale, west London. He was a member of The Poetry Society’s Executive Council.

As a poet himself, Linden was heard on BBC One, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Scotland, Radio Clyde and LBC Radio. He also gave readings in person, at venues in the UK, Ireland, France, Canada and the US. “City of Razors”, used on a BBC documentary about Scotland’s gang culture, evoked the sectarian violence of his youth, while “Hampstead by Night” vividly describes the seedy side of London’s Bohemian hub in its heyday.

A collection was held on behalf of The Simon Community, a charity in aid of the homeless which Linden had helped to establish in the 1960s, which is still going today. More than £1,000 has so far been raised in memory of Linden, with contributions coming from actor Bill Paterson, historian Francis Beckett and poet Blake Morrison.

Donations can be made at www.justgiving.com/page/eddielinden.