Kenneth W Gillman – 1937 to 2019

 

I was unable to attend Ken’s funeral in Katonah, NY, USA on 21 December 2019 but I wrote a few words in his memory

 

Ken was my Big Brother. There were three children in our north London working class family, Ken – born a couple of years before the war, David the wartime baby, and me, the post-war baby boomer. Five years between each of us. Dad was a bricklayer – later to rise to master builder in charge of the site, Mum worked part-time in a local shop.

When Dad went off to war in 1943 (Mum always said that, despite being exempt as a builder, he enlisted then to get away from the new baby…..), Ken was told he was now the Man of the House, and he always took that responsibility very seriously, even after Dad’s return.

After the war, rebuilding London provided employment for Dad, and the three of us were able to flourish and grow with the support of the UK’s new welfare and education systems. All three of us were bright, clever kids who did well at school.

Ken and I were similar, inheriting our mother’s adventurous streak. In his late teens, after a stint as a tea taster in the City, Ken was conscripted to the Air Force for his national service, and I have fond memories of him taking me around the coffee bars of fifties’ Soho when he was home on leave. Mum wasn’t told he’d taken a 9 year old to one of the least salubrious parts of London – instead he’d come up with some story of a park or a gallery – but he engendered in me a love for wandering London’s back streets and people watching. Ken had a broad range of interests – cricket at Lords, the British Museum’s Reading Room, opera (I hated with a passion his repeated playing of Bellini’s ‘Norma’, much preferring David’s rock ‘n’ roll collection!), and he was skilled at seeming more cultured than his upbringing should have allowed. He would adopt names – for years everyone was told his middle name was Maxwell – and pretend backgrounds. I looked up to him – and quickly came to share his non-conformity and refusal to fit the mould.

When Ken brought Gisela and Gabi into our lives he shocked the narrow minds of a neighbourhood deeply infused with hatred of the recent enemy, but our parents stood up to them and this taught me respect for other nationalities. I went on to learn languages, including German, at school as a result of that experience. Ken had been stationed in Germany before the Berlin Wall went up, and he had friends in the East, even though as a national serviceman he was banned from going there. After the Wall came down, I sent him photos from the roof of the newly opened Reichstag so he could share the view.

During the late 60s, by which time I was grown and mingling with London’s artistic and political sub-cultures, and Ken had finally moved on from the Air Force, we lived near each other in Kensington. We’d graduated from coffee bars to restaurants by then, and Ken’s knowledge of good eating places meant we spent some enjoyable evenings together. The British taste for ‘foreign’ food was not as it is today, and we were fortunate to live in one of the few areas of the country where it was possible to taste a range of cuisines.

I missed him when he left London for New York. But he visited often enough for us to remain good friends; and we could go years without contact and then just pick things up as though it had been yesterday. Sometimes his visits were a surprise – without social media to tell others of your every move Ken would often visit our parents without contacting me – but I do remember him turning up one evening unannounced in Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton where I was a leading local councillor demanding to see me because a taxi driver had just told him it had been burnt down and he wanted to check for himself!

When my partner died in 2008 Ken and Wendy became a refuge for me, somewhere far away I could go to hide, to be looked after by my Big Brother. I was always his little sister, treated no differently to his children, hardly surprising given that the age difference between him and me is the same as it is between me and his eldest.

Ken will always be my Big Brother, and I will miss him.

Joan

 

Ken’s obituary was published in the New York Times on 19 December 2019