Vernon Scannell, WW2 poet, infantryman and boxer

[Adrian Roberts]

A slightly unusual obituary; only a fraction of those who served were the medal-winners, leaders, aces etc

Vernon Scannell, who died on Saturday 17th November 2007 aged 85, was at one time a professional pugilist but found his true metier as a poet and writer.

Scannell wrote memorably of love and war, about childhood and the pains of growing into manhood. The intensity of his own experience of life was also memorably conveyed in a series of autobiographical memoirs, including Drums of Morning, a searing yet ultimately optimistic account of an abused childhood redeemed by poetry, love and an adventurous spirit.

Vernon Scannell was born John Vernon Bains at Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, on January 23 1922. His father, James, a photographer, was a brutal domestic tyrant who darkened the lives of Vernon and his elder brother Kenneth throughout their childhood and adolescence and drove his ineffectual wife into the arms of the Christian Scientists.

In Drums of Morning Scannell (who divested himself of the family surname during the war) recalled the sheer terror he experienced, aged three, when his father, laughing wildly, threatened to drop him over a ship's rail in a heavy sea. Later, aged 12, he was punched to the ground after predicting (correctly) that his father's favourite boxer, Jacky Brown, would be knocked out by Benny Lynch.

When his sons were too big to thrash, James Bains replaced physical chastisement with a regime of spying and interrogation. Returning to Aylesbury after a gap of 40 years, a "feeling of dejection" began to weigh on Scannell's spirit as soon as he reached the town's outskirts.

Yet his adolescence remained an odyssey of innocence; for years it puzzled Scannell why a trainer needed to measure him quite so intimately — "when it's big and when it's normal" — for a jock strap.

He and his brother discovered the joys and disappointments of poetry, literature and love. Vernon lost his virginity during a night of "priapic versatility" in Rickmansworth Station Hotel.


Their father hated the fact that the boys read, mistrusting books as instruments of emasculation. His passion was boxing and when the two boys joined the Aylesbury and District Boxing Club he attended their training sessions "watching us with an expression that we knew so well but could never confidently interpret, a faint smirk, almost a sneer, entirely humourless and obscurely menacing". Despite his father's baleful presence, Vernon did well and became a schoolboy champion.

After leaving Queen's Park Boys' School, Aylesbury, aged 14, Scannell worked briefly as an accountant's clerk. But longing for adventure, in 1940 he stole a cache of money hidden by his father as a tax-dodge and, eventually, he and Kenneth, down to their last shilling, enlisted in Glasgow with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He served with them and with the Gordon Highlanders in North Africa and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy.

It was a period he recalled in such elegiac pieces as Walking Wounded:

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.

In Remembering the Dead at Wadi Akarit, the fallen become elements in an artistic creation:

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.

Yet Scannell's war was not the conventional story of heroism and loss. In Argument of Kings (1987) he revealed that during the fighting at Wadi Akirit, he had "deserted in a forward area". Caught soon afterwards, he was court-martialled and sentenced to three years in prison. He was prematurely released on a suspended sentence to take part in the Normandy landings, but was invalided out after being shot in the leg and once again went on the run. For months he lived on his wits, drifting from job to job, earning money as a fairground boxer, strutting around the ring ready to fight anyone who challenged for the purse, shacking up occasionally with some resourceful girl and rarely having enough money to indulge a passion for boozy evenings in Fitzrovia pubs. It was during this time that he changed his name to Vernon Scannell.

Eventually caught again, he avoided prison through the intervention of a sympathetic psychiatrist. Later he attached himself to Leeds University as a sort of unofficial student and captain of the boxing team.

But as he recorded in 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.

Yet, as he confessed in The Tiger and the Rose: "A roll-call of the great champions can still stir me like a rough heroic poem. I have experienced the Aristotelian catharsis as powerfully in the boxing stadium as in the theatre."

There followed a succession of jobs, mostly in the underbelly of teaching, much drinking and several casual affairs, before he became established as a poet and novelist. In 1948 the first slim volume of his verse, Graves and Resurrections, was published by the Fortune press.

Scannell continued to develop his craft, surviving most of the time as a freelance critic, broadcaster, reviewer and occasional resident poet. Over the next 50 odd years he published novels, books of criticism, children's books, four autobiographical memoirs and more than a dozen books of poetry, most recently Last Post, published last month.

He received the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1961, 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.

Among his recreations in Who's Who, Scannell listed "drink, boxing (as a spectator), learning French" and "loathing Tories and New Labour".

Vernon Scannell married, in 1954, Josephine Higson; they had three sons and two daughters.

[Kyt]

I've read "An Argument of Kings" which was his war-time based autobiography. He did spend a lot of time either desrting or trying to. However, he was probably the most incompetent deserter ever. Some of stories of being caught are hilarious.

Actually, when I read the book a couple of years ago I had no idea he was such a renowned poet.

[Antipodean Andy]

Very good post, AR, thanks.