'You Have To Bring A Bit Of Yourself To Writing'

- Linda Dearsley

One Remembrance Sunday a few years ago, singer and actor David Essex was watching the parade pass by when a group of old soldiers caught his attention. Frail and stooped they might be but they marched along, proud heads held high, rows of medals pinned smartly to their chests.

There was something about their quiet dignity that moved David more than he could say.

‘I thought, what a past you must have had,’ he says, ‘and how sad that in the west, older people are so often deemed to be in the way. As I watched those old soldiers, the seed of an idea began to form.’

At the time, David had an autobiography out and the publishers wondered if he’d like to try his hand at a novel. Faded Glory, set in London’s East End of the 1950s and 60s, was the result.

The story, about a lonely, old ex-boxer who works in a pub below a boxing gym and befriends a fatherless boy, was inspired by David’s own past. ‘I was lucky enough to grow up in a very colourful area in the East End,’ he says. ‘Terry Lawless, the famous boxing manager, was an old friend of my father’s from the docks, and the Royal Oak pub, with boxing gym upstairs, was at the end of our street. Frank Bruno was just one of the legendary fighters who trained there. In those days I suppose boxing offered a route to better things.’

David’s own childhood, during the same period in which the book is set, reads like a novel itself. Born in July 1947 in West Ham to Dolly and Albert Cook, a docker, the family were left A young David with his parents (on either side of him on the right) and cousins homeless when their landlord decided he didn’t want children in the one-bedroom flat they rented. But wartime bombing meant that accommodation in the area was scarce.