Cecil Philip Taylor

Cecil Philip Taylor (1929 – 1981), usually credited as C.P. Taylor, was a Scottish playwright. He wrote almost 80 plays during his 16 years as a professional playwright, including several for radio and television. He also made a number of documentary programmes for the BBC. His plays tended to draw on his Jewish background and his Socialist viewpoint, and to be written in dialect.

Taylor was born on 6 November 1929 in Glasgow and grew up in the Crosshill district of Govanhill, in a politically radical Jewish family with strong ties to the Labour Party. His parents immigrated from Russia. He left school at 14 and began his working life as a radio and television repairman.

In 1955, when he was 26, he met his first wife, Irene Diamond, in a drama group. In order for them to afford to marry, he took a job as a record salesman in Newcastle, the city where his mother had grown up. He and Irene lived there, in Fenham, for many years and had two children, Avram and Clare.

In 1967 he married Elizabeth Screen, with whom he also had two children, David and Catheryn. Shortly after their marriage, he and Elizabeth settled at the village of Longhorsley in Northumberland, where he lived until his death on 9 December 1981. He is buried in St. Helen's Church graveyard in the village. His death from pneumonia has been attributed to his habit of writing in his garden shed.

His first play Mr David (1954) won second prize in a playwriting competition organised by the World Jewish Congress. Unperformed until 1969, a production was arranged by the Jewish State Theatre in Warsaw.

In 1962 Aa Went Tae Blaydon Races was the first play by Taylor to be premiered by a professional theatre company. A historical drama about a miners' strike on Tyneside in 1862, it opened the new Flora Robson Theatre in Newcastle.

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