Eddie Linden

Edward Sean Linden (born John Edward Glackin; 5 May 1935 – 19 November 2023) was a Scottish-Irish poet, literary magazine editor, and political activist.

Linden was born John Edward Glackin in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, on 5 May 1935, the illegitimate child of Irish parents Elizabeth Glackin and Joseph Watters.

Linden never knew his birth father, but did know his birth mother.

His name was changed to Edward Sean Linden upon being adopted by Mary Glenn and coal miner Eddie Linden, whom he came to regard as his true parents; his adoptive father was actually related to Elizabeth by marriage.

Linden was raised Roman Catholic in Bellshill.

Mary died in 1944 and Eddie married a Presbyterian woman who disliked the young Linden.

She failed to have him put in an asylum, so instead had him sent to an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity.

He was educated at Holy Family school in Mossend and St Patrick's school in New Stevenston.

At the age of 14, he was "released" from the orphanage, and was often homeless.

He was put to work in a coal mine, then worked in a steel mill after being fired from mining.

He was also employed as a ticket collector and porter at Hamilton West railway station.

He was rejected for conscription as he was deemed underweight and suffered from a duodenal ulcer.

His religious upbringing caused him to struggle with his homosexuality and he even sought treatment from doctors, but abandoned this after falling out with the medical staff.

Linden's political and literary awakening came when he joined the Young Communist League as a teenager.

"At that time, the Communist Party had education classes – not just Marxist classes, but in Dickens, in Shakespeare – that was another discovery for me. Then there was the Workers' Educational Association. This was my way of getting away from that place and that life," he later recalled.

According to his biographer John Cooney, "Linden sought freedom to explore his capabilities, away from what he felt were the dual Calvinist and Jansenist suffocations of the west of Scotland."

"It was some time at the end of the 1950s when I first came across a little bookshop in Glasgow called the Freedom Bookshop. This was run by an eccentric Cockney, Guy Aldred, who was then editing a paper called Freedom. I saw a book entitled I Believe by Douglas Hyde. Also that day in that shop I picked up the American Catholic Worker produced by a remarkable person named Dorothy Day. The paper identified itself with the cause of peace and reconciliation. The book told a story of a man who had dedicated his life to Communism. At the time I was disillusioned but was still loosely attached to the Communist Party and the Young Communist League. These two items were to lead me back to a reconversion to Christianity of much greater social awareness."

Linden is said to have "wavered" in his communism following Moscow's suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

In August 1958, by then in his early 20s, the young Edward, who would be known as Eddie, moved to London to work as a porter at St Pancras railway station.

That year, he met the Catholic priest Anthony Ross, who helped Linden come to terms with his homosexuality and encouraged him to take part in peace protests: he became involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Catholic Worker.

This led to friendships with the journalist Douglas Hyde and Jesuit priest Thomas Roberts.

Upon Ross's death, Linden wrote an obituary of him for The Guardian.

An April 1959 article by Hyde in The Catholic Herald outlined the origins of the Catholic Nuclear Disarmament Group, for whom Linden would become secretary.

Linden later noted:

In 1959, Linden arranged a meeting in Highbury Place for the Catholic CND, which was attended by novelist Pamela Frankau (the founder of the British version of The Catholic Worker), Barbara Wall and John O'Connor, secretary of Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement.

According to Linden, "the whole idea was to publicise the immorality of the bomb": the group were affiliated to the national CND, and a letter was sent to General de Gaulle to protest the French test explosion.

The first Catholic banner was seen on an Aldermaston March in 1959, with 200 people; 600 associate members were part of the organisation.

Meanwhile, in 1963, he co-founded the Simon Community, a charity in aid of the homeless, with Anton Wallich-Clifford, a probation officer at Bow Street Magistrates' Court.

By 1966, Linden had become less politically active, and gone to study at the Catholic Workers' College in Oxford.

Linden took part in an August 1968 protest against Pope Paul VI's ruling over birth control which made headlines in the British press.

The previous month, the Vatican had issued an encyclical, Humanae vitae, with a papal condemnation of contraception.

In reaction to the sacking of British priests who opposed this stance, there were "heated exchanges" which "started a scuffle" on the steps of Westminster Cathedral as the congregation left a mass service.

In a "verbal battle", Linden protested at a banner in support of the pope, saying, "I am entitled to my view. The Pope's document is splitting the church in two."

A man began arguing with Linden, and the pair had to be separated.

The man had earlier "snatched and torn" a poster held by a youth group who were supporting Father Paul Weir, an assistant priest who had been suspended for objecting to the ruling.

Following the protests, Linden said, "I feel strongly for Father Weir. Here is a man who has given his life to the priesthood but, because he disagrees with the encyclical, he is out of a job."

From 1969 to 2002, he published and edited the poetry magazine Aquarius, which The Irish Post said made him "one of the leading figures on the international poetry scene".

The journal was significant in the growth of British, Irish, and international poets and has been described as Linden's "crowning gift to literaturethe nurturing and developing of poetic talent".

In 2001, he said he was "a lifelong socialist".

In an interview with The Tablet in 2017, Linden said, "I've been described as a Catholic atheist, but that's not right. I am a Catholic who finds it difficult to believe in God. There was a day when I used to run about with rosary beads and stuff like that, but I don't do that now."