DB was born in Hull in 1913 and began work as an apprentice electrician. As an alternative to the dole he went to night school eventually getting to university and becoming a teacher at a Hull school. He joined the army in 1940 as a Lieutenant and was captured in Africa in 1942. It was in a POW camp that he wrote his two novels, The Cage, in collaboration with David Dowie. He died in 1945 trying to put an end to the activities of an informer. He is buried near Fermo, Italy.

As ever, we have a great list of things to do this week including a twilight art class, a visit to a ‘bee corner’ in Salford, and readings and music at Chetham’s Library about a radical reformer. BC worked as an ambulance driver in a large colliery. He contributed mainly documentary stories to New Writing in which he was first published as well as Left Review and the CPGBs Daily Worker. His only novel was published by the Labour Bookclub. After serving in the First World War , he became a plasterer and an active member of the Plasterers’ Union. He was also involved in the National Unemployed Workers’ Union during the depression of the 1930s – which led to several run-ins with the police and a few brief stints in jail.

One of the main arguments for the value of Hilton’s writing today is the way it probes the development of his own ideas, his own relationship to the myths that hold up the class system. His writing models this process of critical self-examination to the reader, as if in invitation for us to join in. Benjamin Clarke is a professor of literature at the University of North Carolina. He tells me how this depth in Hilton went unseen — “[Hilton’s] writing is so distinctive, it’s so unusual, I would like to think people would see it today and understand that there are so many dimensions to working-class writing; it goes far beyond just simplistic realist accounts of what happens in factories or mines.” Over three hundred years of civilised evolution, and still the workhouse for the native, and the spike for the rover, the propertyless are still with us, they are multiplied over a hundred times…You get there about 5.30 and find others there like yourself, waiting aimlessly and fatigued, spread along the road, making a picture of untidiness to the eye of the aesthetic. Slowly a distant thin chained army is streaming in dribbles to the bottom of this road, the prelude, the wait, for the opening of the spike. GT was born in 1913 in Cymmer, the youngest of 12 kids in a family whose father was an unemployed miner. He attended University where he was”profoundly unhappy”. By 1942 he was working as a teacher in Barry and became a full-time writer and broadcaster in 1962. Much of his writing expresses injustice with a sardonic almost surreal humour.

It seemed there was little hope – Hilton was married twice but had no children and his closest relative moved to Australia and had long since died.Band on the Wall welcomes Hempress Sativa, a reggae star who is on a tour of the UK. Expect reggae, hip-hop and afrobeat vibes. Starts 7.30pm. Book here. Before his death, Hilton used to come round to Mary and Brian’s for tea several times a week, eating with them and their two boys. None of the family had known that he’d ever been a writer, nor did they ever hear much about his tumultuous early life. Croft, Andy (1990). Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s. Lawrence and Wishart. ISBN 0853157294. A small band of diehard Hilton fans, mostly literary academics, tried many times over the decades to solve the mystery without success. Hilton was proud to be a plasterer. Part of the magic of Caliban Shrieks is the novel’s interrogation of the status games compelling so many into decades of drudgery, in the mills, trenches, factories. He never wanted to rise above his class, “the lower working-class type,” into mortgaged respectability: "Whenever I’m with the intellectuals I always feel they do not belong to my world,” he wrote, continuing, “...with all their theories and mentalised life they have had very little experience of living…they’ve been too sheltered, and too looked up to." If the price for becoming a professional writer was his position within the working-class — the aspect of his life he believed enabled him to write with such critical directness about what he saw — then he would choose plastering, and proudly so.

JC was born in Newcastle in 1903 the son of a railway man. He had various jobs throughout his life including clerk, caretaker, labourer and various stints unemployed. During the 30s he worked on the magazine Adelphi and had many short articles published. It was during this time that he became friendly with George Orwell. Each striking detail in the account Hilton gives of his early life in Caliban Shrieks had left me keen to know what had happened to its author and where his story had gone. Details like the first chapters’ image of an eleven-year-old Hilton shuffling into the mill on “puny little legs” as part of the half-time system of child labour — equipped for the day’s graft with nothing more than a half-empty stomach and a bleary belief in the “myth of work being a recreation.”Born in 1901 in Dublin of Irish parents JH was brought up in Liverpool; worked as a stoker aboard ships from the age of 14 and later on the Lancashire railways; fought in WW1 where he was gassed; eventually became a professional writer. He settled in North Wales in the 1930s where he led”the life of a recluse”. His son Liam Hanley says of his father’s work”For me his strength lay in the fact that he was never cruel with his characters, never distanced, never clever. He gave working men and their wives and children a voice -their voice”. JH died in 1985. OT Creative Space in Old Trafford has a ‘Twilight Art Class’. It’s a 6-week art course, and no experience is needed. You’ll learn how to create art with charcoal, pastels, and watercolours. Starts 6.15pm. Info here .