Scannell,pugilist and poet

8:32am Thursday 22nd November 2007

Writer Vernon Scannell, a former boxer who was once tried for desertion, has died at the age of 85.

Born John Vernon Bains in Buckinghamshire, he was a poet, novelist and broadcaster. As well as a boxer he was a soldier who saw action in North Africa in the Second World War.

Court-martialled for desertion, he served six months in a military prison in Alexandria. Asked to choose between staying in prison or fighting he chose the latter, was drafted back and suffered a leg wound during the Normandy landings.

He deserted for a second time and got back to Britain where for two years he lived on his wits without papers or an identity. He called himself Vernon Scannell.

On the run he scraped a living as a Gee', a fighter planted in crowds who volunteers to take on fairground boxers. The fights were fixed, of course. In London he earned £1 a round sparring with the likes of Freddie Mills.

The police caught up with him in 1947. He was reading Crime and Punishment when they arrived at his flat. He was taken to Aberdeen for court martial, and was sent to a mental institution in Birmingham after he told his judges that he had run away to preserve what was left of his humanity and imagination for writing.

"What kind of writing?" he was asked.

"Poetry," he said.

A sympathetic psychiatrist managed to engineer his release. He came to Leeds, attached himself to the university and began the task of turning himself into a stylish and classy poet. He lived in Otley for many years.

Over the next 60 years he was also a judicious reviewer, broadcaster, writer of children's poetry and poetry performer.

His work was acknowledged by the Heinemann Award for Literature, the Cholmondley Poetry Prize, election to the Royal Society of Literature and a civil list pension in recognition of his services to literature.

However he became unfashionable among modern literary circles. People either do not know or have forgotten that Vernon Scannell, always an adept and skilled poet, was once ranked with the best - a considerable achievement for someone with no academic qualifications.

He was dismissive of faddy trends that swept through British poetry in the last quarter of a century, starting with the short-lived Martian School popularised by Blake Morrison in the early 1980s and the current craze for performance poetry.

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