Vernon Scannell - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Vernon Scannell was a British poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. He was at one time a professional boxer

Boxing

Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...

, and wrote novels about the sport.

Personal life

Vernon Scannell was born in 1922 in Spilsby

Spilsby

Spilsby is a market town and civil parish in Lincolnshire. England. The town is situated adjacent to the main A16 Trunk Road at the southern edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds north of the Fenlands, east of the county town of Lincoln, north east of Boston and north west from Skegness.The town has...

, Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire is a county in the east of England. It borders Norfolk to the south east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south west, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire to the west, South Yorkshire to the north west, and the East Riding of Yorkshire to the north. It also borders...

. The family, always poor, moved frequently: Ballaghaderreen in Ireland, Beeston, Eccles, before settling in Aylesbury

Aylesbury

Aylesbury is the county town of Buckinghamshire in South East England. However the town also falls into a geographical region known as the South Midlands an area that ecompasses the north of the South East, and the southern extremities of the East Midlands...

, Buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....

, where his father, who had fought in the First World War, developed a reputation as a good portrait photographer and the family’s severe financial difficulties began to ease. Scannell left the local council school at fourteen and got a job in an accountant’s office. His real passions, however, were for the unlikely combination of boxing and literature. He had been winning boxing titles at school and had been a keen reader from a very early age, although not properly attaching to poetry until about aged fifteen, when he picked up a Walter de la Mare

Walter de la Mare

Walter John de la Mare , OM CH was an English poet, short story writer and novelist, probably best remembered for his works for children and the poem "The Listeners"....

poem and was ‘instantly and permanently hooked’.

In 1940 Scannell enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 5th Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland is an infantry battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland....

. The war took him into action in the North African desert and then the Normandy invasion, where he was wounded near Caen and shipped back to a military hospital before being sent onto a convalescent depot. Scannell had always very much disliked army life, finding nothing in his temperament which fitted him for the part of a soldier. So ‘on impulse’, after V.E. Day

Victory in Europe Day

Victory in Europe Day commemorates 8 May 1945 , the date when the World War II Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany and the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. The formal surrender of the occupying German forces in the Channel Islands was not...

, with the war over as far as he was concerned, he deserted and spent two years on the run, earning his living with jobs in the theatre, professional boxing bouts and tutoring and coaching, all the while teaching himself by reading everything he could. During this evasive time Scannell was writing poetry and was first published in The Tribune and The Adelphi. He was also boxing for Leeds University, winning the Northern Universities Championships at three weights. In 1947 he was arrested and court-martialled and sent to Northfield Military Hospital, a mental institution near Birmingham. On discharge he returned to Leeds and then London, where, supporting himself with teaching jobs and boxing, he settled down to writing.

Scannell won many poetry awards, including war poems such as ‘Walking Wounded’. A.E. Housman said that ‘the business of poetry is to harmonise the sadness of the universe’ and Scannell quoted this with approval. Scannell’s poems, with their themes of love, violence and mortality, were shaped and influenced by his wartime experiences. His final collection 'Last Post' was published in 2007; he had been working on it until not long before his death.

Vernon Scannell died at home in West Yorkshire England on 17 November 2007, aged 85.

Teaching

In the late 1950s he was a teacher of English Literature and poetry at Hazelwood School, Limpsfield, Surrey, teaching 8 to 12-year-old pupils. See this for a comment by Sir Simon Jenkins on Scannell as a teacher: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/23/comment.poetry

Awards

He received the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1961 and the Cholmondeley Poetry Prize in 1974. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Royal Society of Literature

The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...

in 1960 and granted a civil list pension in recognition of his services to literature in 1981.

He also received a special award from the Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War...

Association, "in recognition of his contribution to war poetry:" Scannell's best-known book of war poetry is Walking Wounded (1965). The title poem recollects a column of men returning from battle: No one was suffering from a lethal hurt, They were not magnified by noble wounds, There was no splendour in that company. Scannell is also the author of a delightful and candid memoir, The Tiger and the Rose (1983). The delight derives from the unadorned narrative, taking in five years' military service and a brief boxing career. The candour lies in Scannell's willingness to write about the conclusion to his Army life: "Twenty-five years ago, 1945...was the year I made what might seem like a desperate decision and performed what might appear to be an act of criminal folly, manic selfishness, zany recklessness, abject cowardice or even, perhaps, eccentric courage. I deserted from the Army. The first recipient of the Owen Award, Christopher Logue, author of some of the best war poetry of the past half century (in the form of versions of the Iliad), spent two years in a military prison, on a charge of handling stolen pass books. What would Owen say? He'd say: Never trust the teller, trust the tale. a

Death

Scannell spent the final years of his life living in Otley

Otley

-Transport:The main roads through the town are the A660 to the south east, which connects Otley to Bramhope, Adel and Leeds city centre, and the A65 to the west, which goes to Ilkley and Skipton. The A6038 heads to Guiseley, Shipley and Bradford, connecting with the A65...

, West Yorkshire

West Yorkshire

West Yorkshire is a metropolitan county within the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England with a population of 2.2 million. West Yorkshire came into existence as a metropolitan county in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972....

, where he died at his home at the age of 85 after a long illness.

Memorable lines

His obituarists heap praise on Scannell's verse and give their readers some examples of his most memorable lines:

From Walking Wounded (1965):

A mammoth morning moved grey flanks and groaned.

In the rusty hedges pale rags of mist hung;

The gruel of mud and leaves in the mauled lane

Smelled sweet, like blood. Birds had died or flown,

Their green and silent attics sprouting now

With branches of leafed steel, hiding round eyes

And ripe grenades ready to drop and burst...

Then into sight the ambulances came,

Stumbling and churning past the broken farm,

The amputated sign-post and smashed trees,

Slow waggonloads of bandaged cries, square trucks

That rolled on ominous wheels, vehicles

Made mythopoeic by their mortal freight

And crimson crosses on the dirty white...

The mist still hung in snags from dripping thorns;

Absent-minded guns still sighed and thumped.

And then they came, the walking wounded,

Straggling the road like convicts loosely chained,

Dragging at ankles exhaustion and despair...

Remembering after eighteen years,

In the heart's throat a sour sadness stirs;

Imagination pauses and returns

To see them walking still, but multiplied

In thousands now. And when heroic corpses

Turn slowly in their decorated sleep

And every ambulance has disappeared,

The walking wounded still trudge down that lane,

And when recalled they must bear arms again.

From Missing Things:

I'm very old and breathless, tired and lame,

and soon I'll be no more to anyone

than the slowly fading trochee of my name

and shadow of my presence ...

There's something valedictory in the way

my books gaze down on me from where they stand in disciplined disorder, and display

the same goodwill that well-wishers on land convey to troops who sail away to where great danger waits...

From A Note for Biographers:

What captivates and sells, and always will,

Is what we are: vain, snarled up, and sleazy.

No one is really interesting until

To love him has become no longer easy.

From The Long and Lovely Summers recalling idyllic times walking on the Chilterns above Wendover
Wendover
Wendover is a market town that sits at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, England. It is also a civil parish within Aylesbury Vale district...

:

And yet we still remember them - the long

And lovely summers, never smeared or chilled-

Like poems, by heart; like poems, never wrong;

The idyll is intact, its truth distilled

From maculate fact, preserved as by the sharp

And merciful mendacities.

From Remembering the Dead at Wadi Akarit:

Disposed in their scattered dozens like fragments of a smashed whole, each human particle

Is almost identical, rhyming in shape and pigment,

All, in their mute eloquence, oddly beautiful.

From The Loving Game (1975):

A quarter of a century ago

I hung the gloves up, knew I'd had enough

Of taking it and trying to dish it out,

Foxing them or slugging toe-to-toe.

Works

Graves and Resurrections (1948) poems
The Fight (1953) novel
The Wound and The Scar (1953)
A Mortal Pitch (1957) poems
The Big Chance (1960) novel
The Masks of Love (1960) poems
The Face of the Enemy (1961) novel
The Shadowed Place (1961) novel
A Sense of Danger (1962) poems
New Poems 1962 : A P. E. N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (1962) editor with Patricia Beer
Patricia Beer
Patricia Beer was an English poet and critic.She was born in Exmouth, Devon into a family of Plymouth Brethren. She moved away from her religious background as a young adult, becoming a teacher and academic...

and Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
Edward James Hughes OM , more commonly known as Ted Hughes, was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until...
The Dividing Night (1962)
Edward Thomas (1963)
The Big Time (1965) novel
The Loving Game (1965) poems
Walking Wounded - Poems 1962-65 (1965)
Pergamon Poets 8 (1970) with Jon Silkin
Jon Silkin
Jon Silkin was a British poet.-Early life:Jon Silkin was born in London, in a Jewish immigrant family and named after Jon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga, and attended Wycliffe College and Dulwich College During the Second World War he was one of the children evacuated from London ; he remembered that...
Epithets of War - Poems 1965-69 (1969)
The Dangerous Ones (1970)
Mastering the Craft (1970)
Selected Poems (1971)
Company of Women (c. 1971)
The Tiger and the Rose (1971) autobiography (i)
Incident at West Bay, a poem (The Keepsake Press 1972)
The Winter Man (1973)
Wish You Were Here (1973) broadsheet poem
Meeting in Manchester (1974)
The Apple-Raid (1974) poems
Three Poets, Two Children: Leonard Clark, Vernon Scannell, Dannie Abse, Answer Questions by Two Children (1975)
A Morden Tower Reading (1976) poems, with Alexis Lykiard
Not Without Glory: Poets of the Second World War (1976) editor
A Proper Gentleman (1977) autobiography (ii)
Of Love And Music (1979)
A Lonely Game (1979)
New & Collected Poems 1950-1980 (1980)
Catch the Light (1982) poems, with Gregory Harrison and Laurence Smith
Winterlude (1982) poems
How To Enjoy Poetry (1983)
Ring of Truth (1983) novel
How to Enjoy Novels (1984)
An Argument of Kings (1987) autobiographical, World War II
Funeral Games And Other Poems (1987)
Sporting Literature (1987) editor, anthology
The Clever Potato A Feast of Poetry for Children (1988)
Soldiering On. Poems of Military Life (1989) poems
Love Shouts and Whispers (1990)
A Time for Fires (1991) poems
Travelling Light (1991)
Drums of Morning - Growing up in the Thirties (1992) autobiography (iii)
The Black and White Days (1996) poems
Collected Poems, 1950-93 (1998)
Feminine Endings (Enitharmon Press
Enitharmon Press
Enitharmon Press is an independent British publishing house specialising in poetry.The name of the press comes from the poetry of William Blake: Enitharmon was a character who represented spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. The press's logo "derives from a Blake woodcut".-History:The Press was...

2000) poems
Views and Distances (Enitharmon Press
Enitharmon Press
Enitharmon Press is an independent British publishing house specialising in poetry.The name of the press comes from the poetry of William Blake: Enitharmon was a character who represented spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. The press's logo "derives from a Blake woodcut".-History:The Press was...

2000) poems
Of Love & War (2002)
Incendiary
The Gunpowder Plot
House for sale
Moods of rain
Nettles
A Case of Murder poems
Uncle Albert

Hide and Seek
Last Post (Shoestring Press 2007), ISBN 978-1-904886-67-9
A Place to Live (The Happy Dragons' Press
Happy Dragons' Press
The Happy Dragons' Press is a non-profit private press in North Essex, UK, which publishes limited edition volumes of poetry using letterpress printing methods. There are currently two series produced by the press, the Dragon Poems in Translation series and the New Garland series...

2007)

External links

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