In his usual warm tone, he wrote "Very likely we will have to await the arrival of the intellectuals-in-touch, the unemployed man at present reading in public libraries, the young stoker spending the mornings of his back-shift week ploughing through Shaw and Lawrence, fumbling his way through acceptances and rejections towards a cultural consciousness which squares with this communal experience.
In 1951 Turnstile Press published Common's best-known book, the autobiographical Kiddar's Luck, in which he vividly describes his childhood on the streets of Edwardian Tyneside, as seen through the lens of his adult socialism.
There are four chapters on his life before five years old – a feat of detailed memory – while his mother's alcoholism and the overbearing father whom Jack at length dramatically defies, form the dark background to the vigorous, at times bravura, narrative.
[7] Neither book had been a commercial success and Common had not completed the trilogy with his long-promised Riches and Rare, a novel set in Newcastle at the time of the General Strike.
Thus Jack Common, perhaps the finest chronicler of the English working class to follow Robert Tressell, spent his last years in Newport Pagnell writing film treatments at poor rates.
After attending Chillingham Road School, where he developed a lifelong love of Shelley, and Skerry's College, Newcastle, where he gained some secretarial skills, Common found it difficult to extend his education or get a rewarding job.
In 1956 Common embarked upon a two-year stint as guide to Chastleton House in the Cotswolds, a position obtained for him through Sir Richard Rees (editor of Adelphi, 1930–1938).
In 1958 a friend from Frating days, Irene Palmer, was instrumental in obtaining a rented Georgian house at 14 St John Street, in the centre of Newport Pagnell.
There Common spent hours working on books for film treatment reviews in the 'garden' (a cemetery), walking with Connie in the countryside they both loved, and reading to his children.
His daughter Sally later recalled listening to Shelley and Omar Khayyam in the translation of Edward FitzGerald, whose atheistic stance Common was at pains to emphasise.
He died of lung cancer in 1968, leaving a mass of unpublished material, which forms the Jack Common Archive, now held in Special Collections at Newcastle University Library.
[9] Sculptor Laurence Bradshaw used Common's brow as a model for his bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, saying that he found there a similar patience and understanding.