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Brigadista Bob Doyle
PETER FROST remembers a working-class hero he met in his youth

COME with me back to 1962. I lived in Harlesden, north-west London, already a multicultural part of the city on the edge of what was then the huge collection of light engineering factories that made up the Park Royal estate. 

Park Royal was home to the biggest brewery in the world — it made Guinness. 

Harlesden had a big Irish community with some of the best Irish music to be heard in sessions at the Willesden Junction Hotel — today folk music historians claim it was better than you could hear anywhere in Ireland at the time.

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