Vernon Scannell

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty seven, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:30

Our Castaway is a poet, a novelist, and a broadcaster. Well, that's the easy description. His three volumes of autobiography tell a story as colourful, complex, and vivid as any in fiction. He is the poet who was also a prize fighter the fighting soldier who spent time in a military prison as a deserter.

Presenter0:49

Then there's the man sent to a mental institution for insisting he wanted to be a writer, who was later granted a civilist pension for his services to literature. Our castaway is Vernon

Presenter1:00

Vernon, in this extraordinary life of yours which you're about to talk about, is there any room for music at all?

Vernon Scannell1:05

Oh yes, yes, music's always been very important to me. I'm not not technically a a musical man. I can just about read music, but I c I couldn't read the a complex score. But um s simply responding to it intuitively and emotionally, I've always loved music. Well, for many, many years anyway, since my sort of very early teens, I uh music has been desperately important.

Vernon Scannell1:29

In what sense important? I mean what you fulfil in you?

Presenter1:31

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell1:32

I'm not at all sure about that. I suppose that's the k th the sort of psychologist's field, isn't it? I just know that th if I don't hear any music for for for uh uh a time, I do get a kind of almost physical thirst for it. And what about the

Vernon Scannell1:48

His record is eight records. Have you arrived? That choice? Not in a a kind of autobiographical way, because I can't quite remember in in some cases I can remember when I first heard the pieces, but simply eight records which I would find indispensable, but I could also pick another eight and

Vernon Scannell2:06

Any moment. Right, let's have the the first choice of uh music. What is it? Well, I I'd like to hear Beethoven's fourth piano concerto or or the uh opening movement or part of it.

Presenter3:20

I was part of the opening movement of Beethoven's fourth piano concerto, played by Murray Peria with the Concert Cabal Orchestra. Vernon Skinnel, let's go back to this childhood of yours. W you were in fact brought up in Lincolnshire, weren't you?

Vernon Scannell3:32

No, I wasn't brought up there. I was born there, but uh only because my father, I believe, was a beach photographer at Skegness uh in Lincolnshire, a seaside resort, and I just happened to be born there, but I have no recollection of the place.

Presenter3:45

So where was the first childhood recollection then? What what do you remember best of all about your childhood?

Vernon Scannell3:46

So

Vernon Scannell3:50

Beeston in Nottinghamshire where we lived for a time, and o only for a short time, and then Ireland, uh, county uh Ross Common, a a little place called Ballah Dreen.

Vernon Scannell4:02

Then back to Nottingham, or Beeston, near Nottingham, and then a period with my grandparents, with my paternal grandparents in Eccles in Lancashire. And that's probably the most vivid part when I was about between the ages of of seven and nine. What kind of a child were you? I mean, what kind of ambitions did you have?

Vernon Scannell4:20

Certainly at a very early age to be a writer. I don't know why quite. I suppose I do know why, because reading was my main occupation, the thing I got most uh pleasure and solace from. I suppose that's why I wanted to be a writer.

Vernon Scannell4:36

And I suppose the other interest was was boxing, which is a bit of an odd mixture, all people think.

Vernon Scannell4:43

Yeah.

Presenter4:43

Well it's not such an odd mixture, is it, of course, when you when you go back and think of the poets particularly interested in boxing. Quite that's quite that's quite a list, isn't there? Perhaps you couldn't remind us of one or two.

Vernon Scannell4:51

Well, I mean even John Keats, although he wasn't a wasn't a boxer, was a considerable fighting lad apparently, a very spirited boy with his hands. Certainly Lord Byron was. Byron had a barefist champion in his entourage and he used to spar with him with the muffles as they call them. And Roy there was a poet called Roy Campbell, who who died in the fifties, I think. He claimed to have been a boxer, though his I've never actually seen his record. T. S. Eliot too, I believe. He took up boxing, didn't he?

Presenter5:23

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell5:24

I believe I believe we did. And Bernard Shaw.

Presenter5:26

I'm not going to be able to do it.

Vernon Scannell5:26

Yeah, what a fight.

Presenter5:27

So so that poet pugilist thing is not so as uncommon as people uh

Presenter5:34

But what about the the the the boxing uh ambition? I mean, how far did it go? Uh, were you very very good at it?

Vernon Scannell5:39

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell5:40

I was a good amateur. I mean, I was schoolboy champion and later Northern University's champion and um fairly good amateur, sort of ABA standard. You know, I box against ABA champions. Professionally, I don't think I'd have I'd have gone all that far, though I did quite well as a preliminary fine. That's all I did, six rounders.

Vernon Scannell6:00

Another choice of record, please.

Vernon Scannell6:02

The the next one I'd like to hear is is the the Cesar Franck Sonata for Violin and Piano. This is a very very haunting work which I've I've enjoyed for many, many years now.

Presenter7:15

Part of the first movement of César Frank's sonata of violin and piano, played by Shlomo Mintz and Jeffim Bronfman.

Presenter7:22

Bernard Scannell, let's just talk a little bit more about the the boxing part of your of your life. You were a factor booth fighter for a while, weren't you?

Vernon Scannell7:29

Yes, this was only a matter of a few weeks. What happened was I this starting in Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, there was a fair on and I was broke and I challenged the booth fighter. They don't expect this because they have their man planted in the crowd. He's what they call the G. But I knew about this and I was very quick to get up there and challenge the bloke. And afterwards the booth proprietor said we're moving on to I think it was High Wycombe, the next stop. And I didn't actually travel with them and live with them. I simply followed them around from there to I think it was it all in that part of the North West Midlands, but High Wycombe, Watford, we went to. Was it a tough life?

Vernon Scannell8:14

I suppose it was, but it was quite funny. I mean, virtually all the fights were fixed. I mean, unless you got somebody like me sort of who beat the G to it up onto the stand and challenger. I didn't have a genuine fight other than the first one, which the referees stopped on on on the grounds that I got a cut eye, which which I hadn't at all. He

Vernon Scannell8:33

Did you make many friends within the profession itself, with the professionals? Um not a lot of very close friends among in the professional game, because I wasn't doing it for long enough. I started in in a gymnasium which is no longer there called Bill Klein's gymnasium. All the old pros will know this in Fitzroy Square. Very good fighters trained there, but not the absolute top rank. Oh, I don't know. I mean um Arthur Danahar, these are names which uh the old timers would all know, George Odwell, uh Mark Hart trained there, sparred with him. And I once sparred with Freddie Mills all a couple of times.

Vernon Scannell9:08

Painful, painful experience. Was it?

Vernon Scannell9:11

He came to a sad end, of course, Reddy Mills, didn't he? Appalling, yes, appalling end, yes, which um who knows is I can't believe that uh that he commits suicide, I simply don't believe it. What do you believe?

Presenter9:14

Uh

Speaker 29:14

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell9:23

Gang, gang water?

Presenter9:24

Welfare, I think.

Vernon Scannell9:25

Hmm.

Presenter9:26

What about boxing now? I mean, do you have any do you retain any interest in it at all?

Vernon Scannell9:30

Yes, I take an uneasy and slightly guilty interest. So th I I find myself getting a little more squeamish than I used to be. I don't like to see the sort of terrible knockouts of Lloyd Hannigan's fight when he put his man down and down he stayed for about two and a half, three minutes and I find that very disturbing and worrying. I am worried about that that aspect of the game. Though oddly enough when I was doing it myself it it simply didn't worry me in the slightest.

Presenter9:57

side of your ex profession in any case as well.

Presenter10:01

Another choice of record, please.

Vernon Scannell10:03

I think a bit more violin, I think, this time a a violin concerto uh by Sibelis, another marvellous work.

Presenter11:07

That was part of the opening movement of Siberia's violin concerto performed by Itzak Pilman with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter11:14

Vernon Scannell, can we talk now a little bit about the the poetry? When did you first start writing poetry?

Vernon Scannell11:19

I started writing poetry. I think I'd probably be about uh fourteen, fifteen, that kind of age. Although I'd written stories and that sort of thing for for many years.

Presenter11:29

I mean, what what makes the point? It seems to me that you choose the most difficult way of of creative writing in uh the the the the radio

Vernon Scannell11:37

I think it f first of all, I think it's uh almost obsessive interest in in language itself. Words are not simply

Vernon Scannell11:47

Marks on the page or little noises for communicating information. They're living, exciting things. I think one must have this, this excitement about language. And also it's the the exploratory nature of of poetry. You can you can actually surprise yourself. You can arrive at goals that you never expected to arrive at. And this is always happening with authentic poems, are not premeditated, pre-planned, and then expressed.

Vernon Scannell12:15

The the act of writing a poem, you're using language like as tools of exploration.

Presenter12:21

I remember WH Orden once uh said that uh the the the poet had a political duty and that was to protect the purity of the language. Would you see that as being your duty as well?

Presenter12:31

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell12:31

Yeah, I think Pound actually said that because Auden's view was poetry, you know, didn't really have any social function at all, wasn't it? It said uh never made anything happen. It uh exists in the valley of its saying, was was Auden's view of poetry. To preserve the purity of the language, yes, yes. I think probably they are the the poets, and I would include of course serious prose writers here, imaginative prose writers as well, uh do, are probably the only people who do care about the purity of the language, or el everywhere else it it's decaying and being cynically misused. Well I mean you d what you include in that? Is that uh

Presenter13:08

Our everyday life is at in schools, yeah.

Vernon Scannell13:10

Yeah, some journalists with a lot of broadcasters are totally you know, very often misusing words completely, using awful sort of tattered clichés.

Vernon Scannell13:24

Yes, I think so. I think when when language gets mushy and corrupt, everything else begins to go. I mean, that that was Pound's theory. He said, Lo look you know, look at Rome uh was was a good example of that. Once the language began to decay and the literature decayed, then the empire began to crumble. And what stage are we in now then, would you would you say?

Vernon Scannell13:42

Fairly parless state. I don't want to take the sort of old blimpish attitude that things aren't like they used to be, thank God they're not. But I think we are ruled by a lot of of uh very, very Philistine people at the moment and the attitudes to education, the seeing it as a as a kind of m manufacturing of computer experts and technicians and and and so on is alarming with the arts which are the humanizing things being left out.

Presenter14:07

Not

Vernon Scannell14:08

To it.

Presenter14:08

It's a record, please.

Vernon Scannell14:09

Yeah.

Presenter14:09

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell14:09

I think I would I would like to hear now a part of Mozart's clarinet quintet in in a

Presenter15:18

That was part of the fourth movement of Mozart's clarinet quintet in A, played by Andrew Mariner, with the Schlingerian string quartet.

Presenter15:26

Vernis Cannell, you've got a book out here called The Argument of Kings, which is the third volume of your autobiography, which fascinates me because it's about your your life in the in the army. It always had a very profound effect on your life, the army service. Before we go into the general thing of it, what effect did it have being in the army on on you as a writer, do you think?

Vernon Scannell15:44

I suppose a v a very deep one and one which is with me all the time. I think quite a lot of the things I write, the poems I'm thinking of, often have military imagery in them, imagery of war, although the poems themselves may be nothing to do with war directly. On the other hand, I've also written quite a number of poems directly about the experience of war. There is that, but it is there the whole time, I think, a mixture of all sorts of things of of remembered fear, guilt. Why is it you think that war, particularly

Presenter16:12

The First Great War inspired so much remarkable poetry.

Vernon Scannell16:18

Because, as Philip Larkin said, I do know that marvellous poem of his nineteen fourteen, Never Such Innocence Again, it does seem to my generation, who were the generation the sons really, of the people who fought in the First World War, it does seem they were innocent. They were they were pre-Freudian. They didn't or so it would seem, their notions of patriotism and valour and so forth seem curiously innocent. And the sheer scale of the suffering and carnage of that war

Vernon Scannell16:50

It it it the images I was born j shortly after war, nineteen twenty two I was born. So I was brought up with the songs and with the stories of the trenches and so that war haunts my imagination in in in a way in which the Second War doesn't, which is a bit of a paradox.

Presenter17:05

Yes, in fact you've written a poem about it specifically about this, haven't you? You say that when you think of war you remember this.

Vernon Scannell17:08

Yeah, when you

Vernon Scannell17:10

Yes. I remember the war I was not involved in.

Presenter17:13

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell17:14

Another choice of record, please.

Vernon Scannell17:17

I I've known Richard Strauss's uh four lance songs now for about it was in the early fifties when I first heard it and I was haunted by it then and I still am.

Speaker 217:48

Music

Presenter18:28

That was September from Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss. It was sung by Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, accompanied by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by George Sell.

Presenter18:39

Venice Cano, let's talk now about the the army, about the

Presenter18:43

Your desertion in the army. Now, when you joined up, you weren't called Vernon Scannel, were you?

Vernon Scannell18:47

Uh

Vernon Scannell18:47

No, my

Presenter18:48

A fool

Vernon Scannell18:49

Full name on my birth certificate is John Vernon Bain.

Vernon Scannell18:53

John Vernon Bain. You joined the Gordon Highlanders. Yes, I was originally in the Argyles, transferred to the Gordons, went abroad with the Fifty first Highland Division. As a child I was always called by my second name, Vernon. I don't know why, but although my parents had christened me John Vernon, they always I was always known as Vernon.

Presenter18:54

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell19:09

And I found that my comrades in the Highland Division, when they said, What's your name? I said, Vernon. They say, Vernon, what the hell's that? And I said, John quickly, which they could handle. So I became John in the army. And what were the circumstances of your desertion? This was in North Africa, a place called Wadi Akarat, sort of well up past Tripoli, towards the end of the North African or the Middle Eastern campaign.

Vernon Scannell19:36

The battalion I was in was in support of an attack that the the fifty-first were doing, the one five three brigade. That meant we went forward under cover of darkness, dug in at the foot of these hills, and as it grew light, the rest of the brigade, Black Watch and Sea Force, if I remember rightly, came through us and and put in this attack. It was just getting light, they were going up this ridge and suffered very heavy casualties. They were easy targets for the German machine gun fire. They took the positions and we moved up, and and it was by this time light, the sun was up.

Vernon Scannell20:13

And the there were sort of corpses lying all over the place, our own people who've earlier just been going past us and exchanging insults and so on.

Speaker 120:16

Our own.

Vernon Scannell20:23

And

Vernon Scannell20:24

To my it

Vernon Scannell20:25

Unbelieving horror. I had not seen this before. My own people, my own friends, were going around looting the corpses, you know, taking watches and wallets and that sort of thing, off their own people.

Vernon Scannell20:37

Why that's so much worse than taking it off German soil hands, I don't know, but it was somehow.

Vernon Scannell20:42

And suddenly I was sick of the whole thing, just turned round and walked away.

Vernon Scannell20:47

And nobody stopped me. I s I seemed to be become invisible. I just I seemed to float away. And I even got a lift in a jeep. An officer came behind me, and plodding along, battle order, steel hat.

Vernon Scannell21:00

Rifle, and he said, Are you going back to Rio Echelon? I said, Yes. And he said, Hop in, I'll give you a lift.

Vernon Scannell21:06

And he supplied the excuse for me.

Presenter21:08

But you were later arrested by the menu.

Vernon Scannell21:10

Oh yes, I was. But I was way I can't remember exactly how long. I it was a few days and I got right back to Tripoli, which was quite a long way. Looking at the map, it's it's well o well over a hundred miles, I should think. But I was picked up almost straight away.

Presenter21:22

Yeah.

Presenter21:24

And then of course she was given a sentence and and that was suspended because she went to Normandy for

Vernon Scannell21:28

Yes, yes. I I did serve six months. And then Normandy was coming up. So a committee of officers were were going around, or was going around at various places, like military prisons, picking out people who they thought, well, might be relied on to soldier on if they were released. And of course I'd promised to be a human torpedo or anything to get out. And so I was released and sent back to home to to the battalion for the Normandy invasion. How long did you live with this with this secret part of your life?

Vernon Scannell21:59

Many, many years, many years. I mean, I've never really talked about that desertion in in actually w it w what not in the face of the enemy, it's called desertion in in a forward area, and because the actual battle was over and the Germans were on the run, so it was slightly less shameful than than than in the face of the enemy. But I felt ashamed.

Vernon Scannell22:21

Do you still? Well, I didn't at the time, that's odd. I didn't feel any shame whatsoever uh that because it seemed utterly, to me, inevitable and out of my control. I talked to a psychiatric worker once about this uh not so long ago uh and uh he said I this sounds like a fugue, which apparently is a psychiatric term for a sort of flight from reality and and and you ju I suppose like bomb happy, shell shock or whatever they would have called it in the First World War.

Vernon Scannell22:50

But that's excuse thinking of it.

Presenter22:52

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell22:52

Uh

Presenter22:52

Another choice of record, please.

Vernon Scannell22:54

The one work I think I couldn't do without w would be the Bach, St. Matthew Passion.

Presenter23:58

That was part of the opening chorus from Bach's The Matthew Passion performance conducted by Karl Richter.

Presenter24:05

Bernard Scannell, can we just talk a little bit more about that episode in the war? Because it does fascinate me. And the book is a really extraordinary document of one man and I suppose his battle with his conscience and himself in that awful situation. You went to Normandy, you were wounded there and sent back to England. And then you deserted again, didn't you? I deserted out yes.

Vernon Scannell24:29

Yeah. Well, when the war was over, at least the war was with w in Europe, V E Day as they called it in in in 1945, and I'd had enough. I really loathed the army, I wasn't cut out for that for that sort of life, and I just upped and went because I couldn't hang around. It would have probably meant waiting something like six months, possibly to six months to a year, waiting for my de mob number to come up.

Vernon Scannell24:50

And I th thought, well, I joined up for duration, th th it's over, so I'm off. And how long before they they found you ag Quite a long time. I was away for for over two years, about two and two and a quarter years. What happened when they found you? I mean, what? Well, I was at Leeds University when they caught up with me and I was taken back to the depot, the Gordon Highlanders' depot at um Aberdeen and court-martialled.

Presenter24:59

It's about

Presenter25:03

Well

Vernon Scannell25:13

And I defended myself. You can elect to do this, but but most chaps accept uh a defending officer. I didn't. I decided to d to do a dramatic defence of myself. And when I explained to the board, the court martial board, there's a president and two junior officers, a couple of captains and a colonel, I think he was lieutenant colonel, that I wanted to be a writer and I knew that if I stayed in the army even another month, I'd be finished. I was sort of turning into a brown machine and so on. And I said I had to get out. And he said, well, what sort of writing? I said, well, poetry. And they looked at each other with a wild surmise and said, send him to a psychiatrist. That was clearly mad.

Presenter25:57

And what happened the psychiatrist say? Did he say

Vernon Scannell25:58

Support their theory.

Presenter25:58

Dweller.

Vernon Scannell26:00

I don't think so. I think he was being compassionate, rarely, because the alternative would have been prison. I don't think they'd have had I had a suspended sentence from the desert, you see, of two and a half years when they let me out for Normandy. I'd have had to serve that.

Vernon Scannell26:13

So he went along with it, I think, and and sent me to a a military uh mental hospital near Birmingham, Northfield.

Vernon Scannell26:22

And from there I was discharged medically as incurably insane, presumably.

Presenter26:28

I went on to be a poet. Another choice of record, please.

Vernon Scannell26:30

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell26:33

Well, I'd I'd like to hear Elgar's cello concerto.

Presenter27:35

There was part of the slow movement from Elgar's cello concerto played by Jacqueline Dupre with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbaroli.

Presenter27:44

Beniscano, you've you've published four books this year alone, I think I'm right in saying.

Vernon Scannell27:48

Yes, I think two of them were reprints of books previously published, and one was an anthology of sporting literature, which was not written by me, it was being compiled by a selected with an introduction. Yeah.

Presenter28:01

Is there a lot left?

Vernon Scannell28:02

What to do?

Vernon Scannell28:02

Oh, I hope so, yes, yes.

Presenter28:04

Yeah.

Vernon Scannell28:05

I'm I'm working at present on a sequence of of poems all about military li I think it was through writing argument of kings that got my mind running on military matters and I thought I'd do a kind of n uh nineteen eighties version of the barrackroom ballads where poor old Kipling I mean marvellous Kipling, God that sounds patronizing, but I mean poor in the sense that he couldn't use the real language of the barrack room and so he used the kind of punch cartoon caption cockney and that kind of thing.

Speaker 228:30

Mm.

Vernon Scannell28:30

I mean, nobody was better at the vernacular than Kipling, but the conventions of the time. But now, in the post Chatterly climate, I I can use the real language.

Presenter28:40

And what about what about the other poetry? I mean, are are you still do you still have a sort of sense of mission about about that aspect of your work?

Vernon Scannell28:47

No, I don't think I've ever had that. It's just the most exciting way of using language. I mean, I I think I read more poetry than prose and um

Vernon Scannell28:56

I'm also doing a a a book of of children's poems, which will be out in March, all about food, all about eating and

Vernon Scannell29:04

That's sort of supposed to be funny, most of them.

Presenter29:08

Final choice of record, please.

Vernon Scannell29:10

The Brahms auto wraps it in. I would like to hear Kathleen Ferrer singing this because she does seem incomparable.

Presenter30:15

Brahm's Altra Rhapsody sung by Kathleen Ferrier, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Clemence Krause.

Presenter30:22

Vernas Cannell, you're now on your desert island. Now are you going to be any good on this desert island in the sense I mean, are you a practical man? I'm afraid not. No, I am hopeless. I I hope to find a cave. I mean, could you look after yourself in the sense of catching food and that sort of thing?

Presenter30:37

Vegetarian, yes, I can catch plants. You can catch plants. What about escape? Could you?

Vernon Scannell30:42

devise a means of escape, or would you want to, do you think?

Vernon Scannell30:45

I suppose sooner or later I would want to, but I think I just wait to be rescued because I don't mind solitude. At present, now I I do in fact live on my own and rather enjoy it.

Presenter30:53

Uh

Presenter30:55

And what about the

Presenter30:56

Records, you know, you've got to imagine that seven are washed away by some sort of tidal wave, and you're left with just one of your eight choices. Which one would it be?

Vernon Scannell31:05

Why? That's immensely difficult. I think it would be the the St. Matthew Passion, because one thing, it's such a massive work, uh and also it seems to satisfy everything, all needs, spiritual and and and sensuous, and it always seems to me uh a mistake to think of Bach, as some people do, as a kind of cold intellectual composer. I find him very warm and and romantic in in some ways.

Presenter31:29

And what about the book? Assume that you've got the works of Shakespeare and the Bible on the island. What would your book be?

Vernon Scannell31:35

If it's permitted to have a multi-volume thing, I would like the WH Orton and a man called Holmes, an American professor, compiled an anthology of English poetry from Chaucer to the twentieth century in five volumes. If that could all be put into one, that's what I'd take. That's allowed, certainly.

Speaker 231:43

Yeah.

Presenter31:52

What about the uh luxury object, inanimate?

Vernon Scannell31:55

Just a a mass of of uh an enormous amount of A4 writing paper, I think. And uh

Vernon Scannell32:02

Something to write with, I suppose. I'd probably have to improvise that.

Vernon Scannell32:05

Quill.

Vernon Scannell32:07

Yeah.

Presenter32:07

For the scanner, thank you very much indeed.

Speaker 132:17

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.