Author Archives: James

About James

James specialises in digital literary heritage projects. He spends most of his time in front of a computer screen writing about life instead of living it. Therefore, do not trust a word he says.

National Holocaust Remembrance Day: Ruth Schwiening

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Friday 27 January is National Holocaust Remembrance Day. In this article, James Walker discusses a project celebrating the remarkable life of Ruth Schwiening who came to Britain at the age of three as part of the Kindertransport during WWII.

In my early twenties, I devoured every book imaginable about World War II. Through literature, I wanted to read every perspective so that I could try to understand that which was completely incomprehensible: the deliberate, organised, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews, as well as other groups of people who fell into the category of Untermenschen (subhuman) and therefore did not deserve to live. This included disabled, gay, Romany, and Jehovah’s Witness people and anyone else who contravened the ideology of racial purity.

Sebastian Haffner’s memoir Defying Hitler was a particularly memorable read because it opened with a line I had never considered before: The first country to be invaded by the Nazis was Germany. Until that point, the narrative had been simple – at least by my education. All Germans were bad, all Allies were good. To realise that many German people were also victims of Nazism complicated my simplistic understanding of war by bringing humans to the centre of the story.

I mention this because I recently invited Ruth Schwiening and her husband Jürgen to give a talk to some of my creative writing students at Nottingham Trent University. Ruth and her family were born and bred in German. Her parents ran a farm and taught others – a bit like woofing – so that they could live independently off the land. But when the Nuremberg Laws were introduced in 1935 another aspect of their identity was made prominent: They were Jews. This meant they were denied their German citizenship, forbade to marry non-Jews, and had all political rights removed. They were forced to sell the farm and flee the country.

Ruth was put on the Kindertransport when she was three and came to Britain. She still lives here now, in Newark, Nottinghamshire. However, there wasn’t room for her twin and other brother. Her father was arrested and sent to Dachau – the prototype concentration camp. Remarkably, there’s a happy ending of sorts to this story. The family were eventually reunited and lived to tell their tale. But Ruth’s most rebellious act was to later marry a German man, Jürgen, who had been raised as a member of the ‘master race’. But that’s another story.

Ruth is as an artist who has turned to paint, ceramics and poetry to make sense of her life and to warn others against complacency. With the growing rise of authoritarianism and fascism across the globe it is vital her story and others are not forgotten. It’s with this in mind that I have been working with Debbie Moss and the National Holocaust Centre to produce a spin-off website as part of their project called The Listening Project. This will feature Ruth’s story as well as responses to her artwork from John Lewell, Kai Northcott, Ellie Jacobson and myself.

My Story by Ruth Schwiening was published by The Association of Jewish Refugees in August 2022.

     

 

 

Lord Biro Has Left the Building

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Lord Biro left the building on 4 December 2022. He was a Nottingham legend, campaigning on everything from free neutering of cats and Boris Johnson to impeaching Tony Blair for war crimes. The above video is a celebration of his life via artefacts found in the Ray Gosling Archives and from his website.

For years, I would bump into Lord Biro in Forest Fields, out on the campaign trail. He would have massive Elvis ‘Las Vegas’ glasses on, greet you with an ‘uh huh,’ and be armed with a plaggy bag full of flyers he’d had photocopied down the nearest community centre.

On the surface, his campaigns seemed a bit puerile – a poem in rhyming couplets and a drawing that looked like it had been knocked out in a few seconds. But beneath the puns and euphemisms he was fighting serious social issues – both local and global – many of which were in collaboration with Ray Gosling.

In May 1963, Ray Gosling stood as an Independent Liberal in the Lenton Ward, inviting people to ‘Vote for a Madman. For just once in your life. Vote for a madman’. He got 475 votes and it would pave the way forward for people such as Screaming Lord Sutch. However, a criminal record would later prohibit Gosling from standing again which is the point at which Biro stepped in. Together they formed the ‘Bus Pass Elvis Party’.

As a member of the ‘Bus Pass Elvis Party,’ Biro and Gosling fought the cause of the elderly. Gosling did this on TV via his Inside Out documentaries addressing issues such as poverty and loneliness. He also paid the £500 retainer required to stand for election, knowing full well that Biro was unlikely to obtain the specified proportion of votes that would guarantee the refund.

Biro stood in various elections up and down the country. In 1997 he went up against Neil Hamilton in the Conservative stronghold of Tatton. Hamilton was at the centre of a ‘cash for questions’ row which would eventually see him lose his seat to Martin Bell, who was running as an independent MP. If you want to read more about this, see John Sweeney’s excellent book Purple Homicide: Fear and Loathing on Knutsford Heath.

In 2014 he reaped a success of sorts in Nottingham City Council when he received 67 votes, beating the liberal democrat candidate, Tony Marshall, who managed a measly 56 votes. Biro campaigned for a 30 percent discount in brothels for OAPs, later it would be free condoms for OAPs. But beneath the silliness was a serious question: What were the council doing to provide for the elderly. This would see him campaigning against the lack of public toilets, and the right to use your bus pass at any time.

One social issue he was particularly vocal about was the Bedroom Tax. This was a provision of the British Welfare Reform Act 2012 whereby tenants living is social housing could lose benefits for having a spare room. The policy was intended to evict people from their homes – no matter how long they had lived there. The implication being they should be grateful for whatever they were given. Biro was ‘all shook up’. It’s one of the few times I witnessed his humour give way to anger.

In 2014, when I began putting together Dawn of the Unread – a series of online comics celebrating Nottingham’s literary history, I wanted to include a nod to Biro’s campaigning and so included his flyer ‘Elvis Wouldn’t be Seen Dead in Tesco’ on a pub wall in Issue 12. Again, this campaign was raising a really important point about the homogeneity of city centre planning or as the Militant Elvis Anti-Tesco Popular Front (one of the numerous names his party went under) put it, our aim is to ‘overthrow the Corporate Capitalist State which turned Elvis, a man of immense talent, into a fat media joke’.

We tried to interview him for LeftLion numerous times, but he wasn’t interested in discussing his upbringing or his working life as a painter and decorator. He just wanted to do the fun stuff. In 2010 we worked together at the British Art Show at the Nottingham Contemporary where he read some pithy poems slagging off art establishment celebrities. One of these was Damien Hirst, who in 2007 spent £12 million sticking 8,601 diamonds onto a skull he called For the Love of God. Appalled by this vulgarity, we nipped into Toys R Us, bought a medical skull toy, and covered it in jelly tots. Unfortunately, nobody bought it.

Dave Bishop ‘left the building’ on 4 December at the age of 78.

The above article was originally published on LeftLion. I chose the title Return to Sender for this as it is the greatest headline never published. It was the original headline for Elvis’s death in The Sun (I think) but was pulled at the last minute out of respect. 

For more information on Lord Biro see grumpyoldelvis.co.uk