David Mercer (27 June 1928 – 8 August 1980) was an English dramatist. Early life Mercer was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England, the son of an engine driver while his mother had been a domestic servant. Both of his grandfathers had been miners. After failing to gain entry to the local grammar school, Mercer left school at 14, worked as a laboratory technician and in the Merchant Navy before attending university. After attending courses at Wakefield Technical College he matriculated at University College, Durham to study chemistry, but eventually grew bored of this and switched to studying art at King's College Newcastle – which was then part of Durham University. Just after graduation he married Jitke Sigmund, a Czechoslovakian refugee who was studying Economics at King's. Her father had been killed by the Gestapo. With his wife, he spent a year in Paris living with emigres from Communist regimes, where he attempted to become a painter. On realising he was not cut out to be a painter, he burnt all of his canvasses and turned to writing instead. In late 1957, now separated and living with Dilys Johnson (whom he later married), he rented a room in a flat at 10 Compayne Gardens, London NW6, that was rented, in turn, by the poet Jon Silkin from Rudolf Nassauer (a wine merchant, poet, and novelist) and his wife, Bernice Rubens, who was later recipient of the 1970 Booker Prize. The historical novelist Malcolm Macdonald, then a student at the Slade, was another of Silkin's tenants at that time. At this location, Mercer wrote a more political novel whose acerbic Northern hero, Congo Booth, was an early prototype of many disaffected-marxist heroes in his television plays. Neither novel was ever published. All three – Silkin, Mercer, and Macdonald – earned a living teaching English as a Foreign Language at the St Giles School of English in Oxford St. Mercer later taught English and Science at the Hairdressers College until his television and stage earnings enabled him to write full-time. Writing career Much of Mercer's television work for the BBC was made in collaboration with the director Don Taylor. This dated from the beginning of Mercer's career as a television dramatist with the play trilogy, The Generations, an attempt to depict the decline of an idealistic form of socialism over 60 years through the members of three generations of one family. This was