Vernon Scannell (23 January 1922 – 16 November 2007) was a British poet and author. He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport.
Personal life
Vernon Scannell was born in 1922 in Spilsby, Lincolnshire. The family, always poor, moved frequently: Ballaghaderreen in Ireland, Beeston, Eccles, before settling in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, 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 poem and was ‘instantly and permanently hooked’.
In 1940 Scannell enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. 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, 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 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 on 17 November 2007, aged 85.
Vernon Scannell was born in 1922 in Spilsby, Lincolnshire. The family, always poor, moved frequently: Ballaghaderreen in Ireland, Beeston, Eccles, before settling in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, 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 poem and was ‘instantly and permanently hooked’.
In 1940 Scannell enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. 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, 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 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 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
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 in 1960 and granted a civil list pension in recognition of his services to literature in 1981.[1]
He also received a special award from the Wilfred Owen 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.[2]a
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 in 1960 and granted a civil list pension in recognition of his services to literature in 1981.[1]
He also received a special award from the Wilfred Owen 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.[2]a
Death
Scannell spent the final years of his life living in Otley, West Yorkshire, where he died at his home at the age of 85 after a long illness.[3][4][5]
Scannell spent the final years of his life living in Otley, West Yorkshire, where he died at his home at the age of 85 after a long illness.[3][4][5]
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 and Ted Hughes
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
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 Lawrence 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 2000) poems
Views and Distances (Enitharmon Press 2000) poems
Of Love & War (2002)
Incendiary
The Gunpowder Plot
House for sale
Moods of rain
Nettles
A Case of Murder poems
Uncle Albert
Half Past Two
Last Post (Shoestring Press 2007), ISBN 978-1-904886-67-9
A Place to Live (The Happy Dragons' Press 2007)[9]
References
^ a b http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2007/11/19/db1901.xml Vernon Scannell (obituary), The Telegraph, 19 November 2007
^ http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2306066.ece Network your poetry, The Times, 27 July 2007
^ http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2212801,00.html News in brief, The Observer, 18 November 2007
^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7099849.stm Poet Vernon Scannell dies, BBC News, 17 November 2007
^ "Poet Vernon Scannell dies at 85". BBC News. 17 November 2007. Retrieved 27 May 2010.
^ Walking Wounded by Vernon Scannell - Poetry Archive
^ http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2213245,00.html Alan Brownjohn, Vernon Scannell (obituary), The Guardian, 19 November 2007
^ http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article3174403.ece Anthony Thwaite, Vernon Scannell Obituary, The Independent, 19 November 2007
^ "A Place to Live by Vernon Scannell". Retrieved 30 September 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Scannell
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