Last week I met with Chris Ross, a.k.a. @TheEastEndPoet on Twitter and Facebook. Chris is a born and bred Cockney, born in Mile End Hospital and raised in Roman Road. He is a retired telephone salesman, dad of one, granddad of six and great granddad of six. And he writes poetry – often about the East End, sometimes in Cockney.
‘Eight or nine years ago, I couldn’t sleep one night and this thing popped into my head. I posted it on Facebook and people went: “Wow, did you write that?”‘, he tells me of his beginnings as a poet. ‘Everytime I sat down I wrote something. It’s just a laugh you know. Then you realise what you’re doing, you’re getting it out of your head.’
Chris writes about everyday and life experiences and memories of the East End. It is poetry that is fun and funny. ‘Well, funny is a very subjective term, innit’, he laughs, ‘I might think it’s funny. But sometimes I wanna make people think.’ He tells me he used to hate poetry, ‘because I didn’t get it…all the romantic poets.’ His own poetry doesn’t need interpretation. ‘If I said I went down the Roman for a coffee, there’s nothing hidden. It’s just what it is.’
It seems like his simple, fun and accessible style is what draws his readers to him. He has over 18,000 followers on Facebook, and over 11,000 on Twitter. ‘I think they relate to the familiarity’, he says. Chris also records short video clips reading his poetry in his Cockney voice. ‘I think there’s something about a working-class accent that makes you comfortable. A Cockney accent is pretty much a working-class accent. It gives you a bit of confidence. You know they’re real people.’ His voice triggers memories in people, especially when they have long left the East End. ‘I have a large following of people in Australia, expats. People will say: “Hearing your voice reminds me of my dad”, or “You remind me of home”‘.
Engagement with his followers is important to Chris. People will ask him ‘”Why don’t you write about this? Why don’t you write about that?”. I come from East London and that’s what I write about. I write about what I know, I write about memories.’ But that doesn’t mean, he is overly nostalgic for the old days. ‘I get: “Oh, but it’s not how it used to be in the old days” – Oh, shut up! “But the East End ain’t how it used to be” – Nor are you, you’re not like you used to be, either. “I miss the old days” – You miss the outside toilet and the old tin bath which you had to drag in from the yard in front of the fire?’, he says laughing. ‘You know what, you miss being young. You miss your dad paying the rent and your mum cooking your dinner!’
He’s also not nostalgic for the old Cockney accent. ‘Language, accent – it evolves; it changes. If you go back 50 years, when there was all that my Gad, Gor blimey, up the apples and pears – that’s gone, innit. Nobody talks like that. But what people don’t understand, the Cockney accent is itself a mixture. The East End has always been a place of different cultures, different nationalities. We’ve always had that mix because the docks were down there and people used to get off the boats and they stayed there. That’s what it is and that’s what it was. The kids now think they’re Jamaican. I don’t care, I don’t mind. It’s supposed to change.’
Not everything he writes lends itself to a Cockney voice. ‘When the Queen died, I wrote a little thing’. Great British Radio, a radio station that sometimes broadcasts his recorded poems, asked if he could record it for them, too. But Chris declined: ‘No, this one is not a Cockney poem’. In the end, someone else at the radio station read it ‘in a David Dimbleby voice’. ‘Hearing someone reading your stuff is really something’, he says.
Apart from posting and reading his poems online, Chris has published four books of poetry (which can be purchased here). He is also a proficient singer, a talent inherited from his father, who used to sing in the East End pubs, and a ukulele player and maker. He has built six or seven ukuleles himself, in colourful designs, one being a ‘West Ham ukulele’. Because of his many creative interests, ‘someone on social media called me a “Renaissance” man’, he laughs. ‘I’m on some sort of evolution, but don’t know where it’s headed.’ People recognise him ‘down the Roman Road’ and he gets stopped in the streets in Raleigh and other places in Essex, where many old East Enders now live. Recently, on holiday in Spain, a woman from Australia approached him in a karaoke bar ‘”It’s you, innit? It’s Chris Ross, innit?”‘. So wherever he is going with his projects, he seems to be headed for quite a bit of offline fame, too.
LONDON TALKS 