Leslie Daiken
Leslie Daiken
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Leslie Daiken

Leslie Herbert Daiken (29 June 1912 – 15 August 1964) was an Irish advertising copywriter, editor, and writer on children's toys and games, in his youth in the 1930s a poet active in leftist politics and editor of the duplicated circular Irish Front. Born Leslie Yodaiken, Daiken was sometimes known to friends as Yod. He also published work under the name Ned Kiernan. In the last year of his life, Daiken became a lecturer at the University of Ghana and died in post.

Born in Dublin's Little Jerusalem into a Russian-Jewish family, Daiken was the son of Samuel and Rosa Yodaiken. His father was a dealer in rubber and scrap metal, with premises in Dublin and Glasgow, and he was educated at two independent fee-paying schools, St Andrew's College and Wesley College, and then in 1930 he entered Trinity College Dublin. In his first year, one of his lecturers in French literature was Samuel Beckett. Daiken was an active member of the Dublin University Socialist Society and a founding member of the college's Gaelic Society.

In 1932, and again in 1933, as Yodaiken he won the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for English Prose, and while at Trinity, he published short stories and verse (seen as wild and strange) in Choice, The Dublin Magazine, and The New English Weekly.

In 1933, Daiken was present at the house of Charlotte Despard in Eccles Street, Dublin, also used as a Workers' College, when it was attacked by a mob of Blueshirts. Daiken led the immediate defence of the building, which was saved on that occasion by the intervention of IRA men posing as the police.

In 1934, as Yodaiken, he graduated with a BA from Trinity in English and French Literature, with a Second Class degree. After graduating, Daiken worked briefly as a schoolteacher in Dublin. In April 1935, his short story “Angela” was published in The New English Weekly under the pen name of Ned Kiernan. That year, Daiken migrated to London.

Soon after his arrival in London, Daiken was one of the three founders of a duplicated publication called Irish Front, together with two other poets, Charlie Donnelly and Ewart Milne.

In England, Daiken started to shorten his surname from Yodaiken to Daiken, for his publications, but he did not make this change formally until doing so by deed poll in 1943.

In December 1935, The Irish Times reviewed a production in Camden Town of Ireland Unfree, a stage version by Daiken of Patrick Pearse’s poem "The Rebel". It stated that "Mr Daiken carries Pearse’s theme beyond his idealistic conclusion to the revolutionary viewpoint of the Irish workers."

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