Lewis Cohen's daughter writes a memoir of her months with 'Mr Brighton'

Christine Cohen Park^2,3,4, the daughter of Labour mayor Lewis Cohen, has written a memoir about the time she spent living with him in Brighton in the 1950s. In My Father’s House is published by Caburn Press on 10 October. The book was first reported by the Argus¹.

She went to him after her parents’ divorce, and the Argus says she barely knew him before then. The book moves between his grand house on Dyke Road Avenue and plates of faggots and mash in Kemp Town.

Cohen was known as “Mr Brighton”. The Argus says he became the town’s first Jewish socialist mayor in 1956. He founded the Alliance Building Society, worked on housing as a councillor, and was made a life peer, Baron Cohen of Brighton, in 1965. According to Brighton Dome⁶, he proposed a Brighton Festival in 1965. He died before it happened, and the festival launched the year after his death.

Cohen Park is a novelist and short story writer and a former tutor on the University of Sussex MA in Creative Writing programme. She lives in Lewes. She will give a reading at the book’s launch in the Council Chambers, Lewes, on Saturday 10 October, from 5.30pm to 7pm. She is also doing a reading at Lewes Library later in the month.