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Vernon Scannell
Vernon Scannell

Vernon Scannell (23 January 1922 – 16 November 2007) was a British poet and author. Events 393 - Roman Emperor Theodosius I proclaims his nine year old son Honorius co-emperor Year 1922 ( MCMXXII) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. Events 534 - A second and final revision of the Codex Justinianus is published Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. A poet is a person who writes Poetry. Etymology From the Ancient greek: ποιέω, poieō: "I make or compose" An author is defined both as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport. Boxing (sometimes also known as English boxing or pugilism) is a Combat sport in which two participants generally of similar weight,

Contents

Personal life

Scannell was born John Vernon Bains in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, and brought up principally in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Spilsby is a Market town and Civil parish in Lincolnshire. England. Lincolnshire (abbreviated Lincs) is a county in the east of England. See also Aylesbury Urban Area Aylesbury is the County town of Buckinghamshire in south east England. Buckinghamshire (abbreviated Bucks) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. He left school at 14.

During World War II he served in the British Army in the Gordon Highlanders, in France and North Africa. World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including The British Army is the land armed forces branch of the British Armed Forces. The Gordon Highlanders was a British Army Infantry Regiment from 1881 until 1994 This article is about the country For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic France topics. North Africa or Northern Africa is the Northernmost Region of the African Continent, separated by the Sahara from Sub-Saharan He was imprisoned for desertion, but released early to take part in the Normandy landings, was wounded near Caen, and once more deserted after VE Day and spent two years on the run. In Military terminology desertion is the Abandonment of a " Duty " or post without permission from one's Government or superior Normandy (Normandie Norman: Normaundie) is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. Caen (kɑ̃ is a commune in northwestern France. It is the Prefecture of the Calvados department and the capital of the Victory in Europe Day ( V-E Day or VE Day) was May 7 and May 8, 1945, the dates when the World War II Allies It was during this time that he changed his name to Vernon Scannell. [1]He wrote about these experiences in An Argument of Kings (1987).

Scannell subsequently worked as a boxer, and later studied at the University of Leeds, encountering Bonamy Dobrée and G. Wilson Knight. The University of Leeds is a major teaching and research University in Leeds, West Yorkshire; one of the largest in the United Kingdom with Bonamy Dobrée ( February 2, 1891 &ndash September 3, 1974) British academic was Professor of English Literature at the University George Richard Wilson Knight (1897-1985 was an English literary critic and academic known particularly for his interpretation of mythic content in literature and his He was arrested as a deserter in 1947, and sent to a mental hospital. A psychiatric hospital (previously called insane asylum, mental hospital; or derogatorily looney bin, nut house or Funny Farm) is He returned to Leeds in 1948, and put together a first poetry collection, Graves and Resurrections,[1] published by the Fortune Press. Reginald Ashley Caton ( 1897 - 1971) was an English publisher variously described as 'eccentric' 'raffish' a ' Miser ' and a 'rogue publisher' He subsequently worked as a teacher and for BBC Radio, while developing his range as a writer. BBC Radio is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927 He wrote poems such as "Apple Raid", "Nettles" and many others. [2]

Among his recreations in Who's Who, Scannell listed "drink, boxing (as a spectator), learning French" and "loathing Tories and New Labour. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people In the political tradition of some English-speaking countries, the term Tory has referred to a variety of political parties and Creeds since it was The Labour Party is a Political party in the United Kingdom. Founded at the start of the 20th century it has been since the 1920s the principal party of the " Vernon Scannell married, in 1954, Josephine Higson; they had four sons and two daughters. [3] His long marriage to Jo Higson eventually broke down: of their six children, one handicapped son died as an infant (movingly written about in The Tiger and the Rose), and another son much later died in a motorcycle accident. [4] In 1979, while poet-in-residence at Canterbury, Kent, he met Angela Beese and they moved first to Filkins in Gloucestershire then to Leeds and finally Otley. Canterbury ( ˈkæntəbɹ̩i is a City in eastern Kent in the South East region of England. KENT (1400 AM) is a Radio station broadcasting a Adult Standards/MOR format History See also History of Gloucestershire Gloucestershire is a historic county mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the 10th century Leeds ( is located on the River Aire in West Yorkshire, England Otley is a Market town in the Metropolitan borough of the City of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, by the River Wharfe. Although the relationship foundered in 1986, Angela remained a close friend for the rest of his life. His final relationship of more than 15 years was with Jo Peters who cared for him in his long, final illness. He continued writing fine poetry almost to the day of his death. His final publication was a small collection of poems Last Post (Shoestring Press) which came out in September 2007.

Teaching

In the late 1950s he was (from the personal experience of this contributor) a gifted teacher of English Literature and poetry at Hazelwood School, Limpsfield, Surrey, and instilled a lasting love of Shakespeare, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and Byron in a good many of his 8 to 12-year-old pupils. William Shakespeare ( baptised Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 &ndash 15 April 1888 was an English Poet, and Cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

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. The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain " [5]

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). Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC (18 March 1893 &ndash 4 November 1918 was an English Poet and Soldier, regarded by many as one of the leading 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. [6]

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. Otley is a Market town in the Metropolitan borough of the City of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, by the River Wharfe. West Yorkshire is a Metropolitan county within the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England with a population of [7][8][9]

Memorable lines

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

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. [10]

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. . . [11]

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. [12]

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. The Chiltern Hills are a Chalk Escarpment in Southeast England. Wendover is a Market town that sits at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, England.

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.

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. [13]

Works

References

  1. ^ a b "Telegraph, London" obituary, published in The Sydney Morning Herald [n. d. ]
  2. ^ http://www.bryantmcgill.com/World_Poetry/~V/Vernon_Scannell/ Sixteen poems by Vernon Scannell at McGill University
  3. ^ Daily Telegraph Obituary.
  4. ^ http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article3174403.ece Anthony Thwaite, Vernon Scannell Obituary, The Independent, 19 November 2007
  5. ^ 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
  6. ^ http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2306066.ece Network your poetry, The Times, 27 July 2007
  7. ^ http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2212801,00.html News in brief, The Observer, 18 November 2007
  8. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7099849.stm Poet Vernon Scannell dies, BBC News, 17 November 2007
  9. ^ BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Poet Vernon Scannell dies at 85
  10. ^ Walking Wounded by Vernon Scannell - Poetry Archive
  11. ^ http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2213245,00.html Alan Brownjohn, Vernon Scannell (obituary), The Guardian, 19 November 2007
  12. ^ http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article3174403.ece Anthony Thwaite, Vernon Scannell Obituary, The Independent, 19 November 2007
  13. ^ 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

External links

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