Gilda O'Neill (1951-2010)

The historian and novelist Gilda O'Neill, who has died after a short illness, was someone who embraced the history of the East End in both fiction and non-fiction. At the time of her death she was living in Limehouse, and was almost certainly the only resident of her riverside apartment block to have childhood memories of how London's docklands used to be, of running through streets long since bulldozed. She understood what it was to be part of a diaspora, and how the uprooting of a community brings with it a sense of loss. As she said, 'We need our memories, and at a very basic level, we need a notion of personal history through which we understand our identities'.

She was born in Bethnal Green to Tom and Dolly Griffiths, who eventually settled in Dagenham as part of the postwar slum clearance. She left school at fifteen, but returned to education later in life, after raising her two children. Her first book was published by the Women's Press in 1989. Called Pull No More Bines (and inspired by her own childhood memories) it was about hop-picking in Kent, and it laid the foundations for the rest of Gilda's work, as both a work of oral history but also a critical analysis of how the account of the lives of 'ordinary people' is mediated by the historian who writes it. The question of how to convey the truth of other people's stories continued to inform both her non-fiction and her fiction.

She described her work as a privilege, and expressed her gratitude to the people whose memories she recorded. It was important to her to avoid, as she put it, 'the orthodox approach of oral historians which, to me, seems to use people's testimonies as just another source of useable material'. Her passion was to tell the stories of those whose voices might otherwise go unheard, and, because of her own background, she was thoughtful about how those voices are represented. When she turned to fiction it was with the same careful research, the same sense of the truth of her characters' lives. She wrote thirteen novels, starting with Cockney Girl, in 1992, the first in a series of East End sagas. Later she turned to crime fiction, with a trilogy of novels published by Random House, of which The Sins of Their Fathers (2003) was the first. As her editor, Susan Sandon, says,

The authenticity of her characters came from her own background and her own childhood, and latterly, her observation of the community in which she still lived. She understood the values of her characters, their emotions and drive, however small the details, however everyday the drama, and that's why she could write page-turning fiction.

At the same time, she developed her non-fiction, with her social histories for Penguin. My East End: Memories of Life in Cockney London (1999) was followed by Our Street: East End Life in the Second World War (2003) and The Good Old Days: Crime, Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London (2006).

Her life and her work were intertwined. She had a writer's curiosity about the people she encountered, and she was as likely to hear someone's life-story sitting next to them on a bus as she was in any official capacity as a historian. And her readers understood this. As she once said, people are often mourning a lost past when they tell their stories, and at all her literary events, there would be a queue of people wanting her to sign her books, responding to her warmth and generosity, wanting to share their own memories.

I knew Gilda as part of a group of women writers called the Material Girls, but most of all I knew her as a friend. Friendship was something for which she had a great gift, and just as in her work, her connections with people were characterized by an unbreakable thread of loyalty. Her generosity, like most things about her, was writ...