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Silkin served in the Royal Navy (1942-1946). He was commissioned as a sub-Lieutenant, R.N.V.R. in 1943, serving in East Indies Fleet, Eastern Fleet and British Pacific Fleet aboard HMS George V and HMS Formidable, and ashore at Anderson, Ceylon (FECB). He was promoted to Lieutenant, R.N.V.R. He was demobilised in 1946 and returned to Cambridge.


Silkin, Jon (1930–1997), poet and editor, was born on 2 December 1930 in London, the only child of Jewish parents: Joseph Silkin (1904–1990), a lawyer, and his wife, Doris Rubenstein (1905–1996). His maternal grandparents, Harris and Matilda Rubenstein of Llanelli and Swansea, and paternal grandparents, Abraham Silkin (c.1865–1948) and Fanny Sopher (d. 1924), had left Lithuania to escape the pogroms. Harris Rubenstein, who started a wallpaper and decorating business, had been on his way to the United States of America when the ship stopped for water in Swansea, and he decided to stay there, establishing a connection with Wales that was important for Jon Silkin. Abraham Silkin had settled in the East End of London, where he ‘cleaned the toilets of the Synagogue, gave Hebrew lessons, and sold fruit off a barrow’ (Silkin, ‘The first twenty-four years’, 244). Joseph Silkin's elder brother Lewis became a clerk in the Millwall docks and then a lawyer, an MP, and the first Baron Silkin. Lewis's sons, Sam and John Silkin, became Labour cabinet ministers.

Jon Silkin was named after Jon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga. His early childhood was spent in Herne Hill and he attended Dulwich Hamlet School. His was a relatively secure, middle-class upbringing in a home which radiated warmth, intellect, political commitment, and Jewishness (his father organized League of Nations Union meetings on foreign affairs from 1937 to 1939 and specialized in naturalization proceedings for refugees, some of whom stayed in the Silkin household on their arrival in England). Aged seven Jon began his religious education at the synagogue and had Hebrew lessons for two years at home. In 1939 his school was evacuated to Kent, and in the following year he stayed with relations in Swansea, where he attended Parc Wern school before it too was evacuated. At Dolau Cothi in Carmarthenshire he spent a happy year with virtually no formal education. In the winter of 1941 he attended the Methodist public school Wycliffe College in Lampeter, but asked to be excused from Christian worship. He read the Jewish Bible and, even if he understood little, absorbed much of its language and rhythms. In 1945 he returned to London and attended Dulwich College, where he studied little, enjoyed athletics and rugby, became interested in music, and when music failed, turned to poetry. At fifteen he attempted to versify the book of Exodus and read John Milton, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce; he was expelled for truancy in 1947.

Silkin worked as an insurance clerk and a journalist in south London, before being called up for national service (he became a sergeant instructor in the education corps). He collected his early verse and poems written during army service into a privately printed volume, The Portrait and other Poems (1950), published just after he was discharged. Although required to be an army reservist, he refused to serve in the Korean War and was eventually released. He then found work as a grave filler in Fortune Green cemetery. He lived in, and was evicted from, various furnished rooms, and may have spent some time living rough. Sacked from the cemetery for sitting on a grave reading Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, he got a job with the National Cash Register Company, which dismissed him shortly afterwards for trying to form a union.

With £5 back pay in February 1952 Silkin started the literary magazine Stand, which he edited until his death. He also worked for a time as an English master in a boys' prep school, and between 1956 and 1958 he taught English to foreign students. He lived with Cynthia Redpath, with whom he had three sons. The death of their eldest son, Adam, informed his most famous poem, ‘Death of a Son (who Died in a Mental Hospital Aged One)’. John Berryman thought it did ‘not edge into the terror, but starts there and stays there … and it is as brave, and harrowing, as one might think a piece could be’ (Berryman, 317). His collection The Peaceable Kingdom (1954) was later judged by the critic Merle Brown as ‘the finest first volume of poetry written by a living English poet’ (Brown, 363). A further collection, The Two Freedoms, appeared in 1958. In the same year he was awarded the Gregory fellowship in poetry at the University of Leeds, where he took a first-class degree in English in 1962 (he wrote on himself in an open finals question), and then embarked on postgraduate work on the First World War poets.