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. 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.

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. That year, Daiken migrated to London.

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.

Daiken kept up his links with leftist Irish writers and dissidents and edited the collection of working-class political verse Goodbye Twilight: songs of the struggle in Ireland (1936),

Daiken did not go to fight in the Spanish Civil War, although his Irish Front colleague Charlie Donnelly did, and was killed;

In 1939, Mairin Mitchell was highly critical of the Irish leftists, and in particular Daiken, for their views on the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and wrote to Desmond Ryan in September "Brian O'Neill, Bloomsbury, and Daiken will sing Russia right or wrong."

In October 1939, at the time of the wartime National Registration Act, Daiken was living in a studio at Old Castle Wharf, Twickenham, and described himself as "Script-writer and advertising copywriter".

During the Second World War, Daiken enlisted in the Corps of Signals of the Irish Army, a neutral force, and also worked for Reuters as a correspondent on education.

In the early 1990s, Katrina Goldstone interviewed Daiken's brother, Aubrey Yodaiken,

Private life In 1944 at Kensington Daiken married Lilyan Marion Jean Adams (born 1908), a Canadian actor. and was cremated.

Selected works Goodbye Twilight: songs of the struggle in Ireland (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1936), ed. Shamrocks for Mayakovsky: Anniversary Lines 1933–1943 (1943) They Go, the Irish: a miscellany of war-time writing (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1944), ed. Signatures of All Things (Hoddesdon: The Clock House Press, 1945, verse) Children's Games Throughout the Year (London: B. T. Batsford, 1949), with cover illustration by Kate Greenaway Teaching Through Play: A Teacher's Handbook on Games (1954) London Pleasures for Young People (London: Thames Hudson, 1957) The Lullaby Book (London: E. Ward, 1959), collection of lullabies, with my sical research by Mary Hillis and Sebastian Brown Pageantry and Customs: A Swift Picture Book (London: Longacre Press, 1960) Out She Goes: Dublin street rhymes, with a commentary (1963) Children's Toys Throughout the Ages (London: Spring Books, 1963) World of Toys (1963)