Continually broke, Bernard Kops maintained a flow of books and plays which was all the more remarkable because much of his life was dogged by depression and a drug addiction so unflagging that in the early 1970s a doctor gave him six weeks to live. “I believe I owe the world a living,” he said in 1978. “I’m a survivor — life is a bonus.”
Despite this he became, with John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter, a cornerstone of the so-called new wave of British “kitchen sink” drama which emerged in the mid-1950s, though his work was surreal and offbeat in a genre of dry realism and social comment.
He gained fame memorialising the Jewish East End of the 1930s, in literature that quoted Blake, TS Eliot and the Bible and meditated on themes of belonging and escape. “We brought our backgrounds, our experiences and our traditions,” he said. “We were writing about the kind of things we knew or felt or dreamed of.”
Yet what launched him from drifting poet and barrow boy to established playwright was The Hamlet of Stepney Green, his first play. Irritated by Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and its ilk but bolstered by an Arts Council drama award of £500 for a year’s writing, he wrote the play over three days in 1958 at his second-hand bookstall near Cambridge Circus.
Subtitled “a sad comedy with some songs”, The Hamlet of Stepney Green tells the story of an invalid Jewish fishmonger who returns from the grave to advise his son not to do as he had done and waste life — a recurrent theme in Kops’s work. It inverts Shakespeare: here the “poison” is a love potion and the ending is happy.
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“The matrix of your childhood,” Kops once said, “is the stuff of your life.” Born in 1926, he grew up in a house in Stepney Green where seven children, he the youngest, shared two beds in an attic. His mother Jenny (née Zetter) and his father Joel had arrived, separately, from the Netherlands. A near-blind leather worker, his father was by then unemployed but somehow managed to feed his brood, who regarded it as a happy childhood, despite contracting rickets and burning old shoes for warmth.
“These were long stinking days of starvation and joy and no real education,” Kops recalled in 2017. “One bath for seven children once a week in a zinc bath, bugs crawling across the walls, we lived on potatoes and cabbage and pea soup from the Jewish Soup Kitchen in Aldgate.”
Though he was scholarship material, Kops’s education at Stepney Jewish primary school ended during the Blitz, when he was 13, and he set about teaching himself at Whitechapel Library. He read voraciously and began to harbour ambitions of becoming a writer. “How often I went in for warmth and a doze” went his poem Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East, “The newspaper room whilst my world outside froze.”
The family resisted relatives’ pleas to return to the Netherlands, though Kops vividly remembered the hoots and derision with which Oswald Mosley’s provocative visits to their neighbourhood were greeted. This gave Kops a lifelong sense of justice.
Before long, however, his family’s East End home was bombed and they moved to Leeds, living in a flat which doubled as a brothel. When bombs began to fall on the north, the family returned to London and moved to a house on Brick Lane.
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Having by now developed a taste for Marx and Henry Miller, he became hooked on TS Eliot’s desolate depictions of London and memorised Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he declaimed at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park until the crowd wearied of it. As he tried to establish himself as a writer, there were spells as a trainee cook, on a market stall, in the packing department of a music publishing firm, in a shoe factory and in a flour mill. For a while he had a hankering for the stage — with a northern touring company he went from village to village, often filling the female roles as war turned to peace.
Aged 18 he joined the Communist Party and found sanctuary in Soho cafés — “where my Jewish neurosis became an attribute”— among a madcap crowd that introduced him to marijuana. “The way to see a city is to be broke,” he said of the late 1940s. “Then it reveals itself to you.”
He saw it, from all angles, at all hours, on harder drugs — until an advert in The Stage encouraged him to join a company bound for Africa. The slow journey by land saw them marooned in Spain, where they lived on oranges and anise until Tangier, where Kops taught English for a time.
Returning home, he wrote incessantly in between stints as a door-to-door salesman and a waiter. As the beatnik scene in Soho grew, he stashed drugs around the city and foraged for fag-ends. In grief over his mother’s death in 1951, he was sent to Belmont, a psychiatric hospital which had been established for soldiers after the war. The incarceration was, he said, as if coming “up through the primeval slime of the soul” and he was back in Soho in 1952 for a job as a liftman at Selfridge’s.
The idea for a barrow business came from a “rosy-cheeked” flower-girl in Soho. Kops paid a woman a pittance for a library, sold books at a considerable profit and discovered that one which went for a florin was auctioned in Paris for £300. Thrown out of a bedsit in Camden for failing to pay rent, he “wandered, slept around, and jawed the night away”, until he met Erica Gordon at a coffee house in 1954. They were married soon after his divorce from a woman called Joyce.
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Erica had been working in a hospital but threw in her lot with Kops, helping him on the stall, though Kops read more books than he sold.
“Chutzpah had been my only weapon,” he said of his early years, and he needed it still, for he had a self-destructive tendency which a desire to write could not rein in. His luck would turn when one evening in 1958 he read The Hamlet of Stepney Green to an audience which, unbeknown to Kops, included the producer Sam Wanamaker. An option was taken on it and it opened to acclaim at Oxford Playhouse. He was then appointed playwright-in-residence in Bristol: he found the post contrary to his nature, though he admired Peter O’Toole and Frank Dunlop, and found a congenial spirit in a local reporter and playwright-to-be, Tom Stoppard.
When Kops returned to London, his play The Dream of Peter Mann, a loose adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, toured to poor reviews. He continued writing in a new flat near the British Museum, but began to sell things to stay afloat, including Erica’s family possessions. Despite the success of his 1961 play Enter Solly Gold and a 1964 BBC play about dossers, Stray Cats and Empty Bottles, more funds were needed: he was hooked on speed.
Over the years Kops was prolific, writing more than 40 plays for television, stage and radio, along with ten novels, eight volumes of poetry and two of autobiography (the first in 1964, The World Is a Wedding, about his early years). His fiction, written at dawn, could turn from farce to tragedy. Family life and escape from the banalities of daily life were twin themes. His novel By the Waters of Whitechapel (1969) tells the story of a man deluded that he is a successful barrister when in fact he is kept by his mother, living above a sweet shop, while The Dissent of Dominick Shapiro (1966) was about adolescent revolt.
As Kops’s family grew — and to distance himself from narcotic temptations — he and Erica moved to West Hampstead. As he sought to wean himself off drugs his new publishers, Secker and Warburg, paid his sanatorium bills, but to no avail. Then one day in 1974 he set out in his car, a second-hand taxi, determined to crash into a wall on Kilburn High Road. As he put his foot on the throttle, something made him think again. “I closed my eyes and could hear the birds singing, the beginning of a morning I wasn’t supposed to be in,” he said. He bought some bagels, walked home, and told Erica that he would never take drugs again: a promise he kept.
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His second volume of autobiography, Shalom Bomb, chronicled his path to sobriety and the antics of a man who was witty yet volatile and often filled with self-loathing.
He is survived by Erica, his wife of more than 50 years, and four children, Adam, Hannah, Rebekah and Abigail.
His work for television included the Emmy-nominated film It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow (1975), about the Bethnal Green tube disaster of March 3, 1943, when 173 people were crushed to death. Later he turned a play about communism into a novel, On Margate Sands (1978), and wrote a line of biographical plays, ranging from Ezra (1981), an exploration of the madness of Ezra Pound, to Dreams of Anne Frank (1992), based on her famous diary. Playing Sinatra (1991) sprang from a dinner with neighbours who did nothing but that the whole evening.
As well as publishing his eighth volume of poetry, The Room in the Sunlight, in 2009 and his tenth novel, The Odyssey of Samuel Glass, in 2012, Kops gave masterclasses in playwriting.
“I’ve watched him teach in his study, his craggy, noble profile echoed by the iron busts sculpted by his son, Adam,” wrote Beverley d’Silva in The Independent in 1997. “He aims his forefinger like a harpoon at a student, yelling ‘Bad! Exposition!’ or ‘Good! Revelation!’ — sometimes followed by an apologetic ‘I wasn’t too hard on you, was I?’”
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Despite his output he remained on the fringes of the West End, but in later years he appeared to be at peace with the twists and turns of his life.
“I am Bernard Kops, still alive and working at 90 years old,” he said in 2017. “I’ve seen everything and loved everything. And died and was born again and again.”
Bernard Kops, playwright, novelist and poet, was born on November 28, 1926. He died on February 25, 2024, aged 97