William Empson: When do you clap?

I was listening to a performance by PK Page in Toronto. After each poem the audience clapped. When she said something especially funny they clapped again. She said she’d wanted to be an actor so was undoubtedly pleased. But even in Canada these days people don’t clap when famous actors appear on stage or a scene ends. Only in opera.

Phillip Hobsbaum, Francis Berry, William Empson, G. Wilson Knight and Influence

In special memory of Barry Callaghan and Pauline Lester
Phillip Hobsbaum is famous for starting writers groups, but the one he started between leaving his London Group and his new one in Belfast is unheard of -- the one in Sheffield. He was there working on a PhD with William Empson.  He did not bring on the Peter Porters, Seamus Heaneys, and Liz Lochheads there, but for those of us who belonged to it, it was vital.

Here I present a student’s-eye view life at Sheffield University in the early 60s, that John Haffenden’s describes in his magnificent biography of Empson. Here, though, you will read how  Empson, Berry and Wilson Knight narrowly escape a mangled death in a rusty old Morris Minor, and see pictures of Christopher Bigsby and Sir Harry Kroto on Rag Day.

How they were seated in the Morris Minor... Narrow back seat: Wilson Knight and William Empson crushed into a very narrow doorless back seat, Janet Hill (in NF Simpson's Resounding Tinkle) is crammed between them. Front seats: Barry Fox, with Francis Berry in the passenger seat.

Vernon Scannell: Teacher

Vernon Scannell (right) on Sports Day, 1960. The bar is not level

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In the late 50s, to pay the bills while he wrote poetry in the summer, Vernon Scannell was a prep-school English teacher. The Daily Telegraph snidely called the school “part of the underbelly" of education. Sir Simon Jenkins, on the other hand, a former pupil of Scannell's, with the precision of personal experience, simply points out: "clearly it had some wildness in its veins"  and there were "oddities." These  included Scannell himself, who did not teach poetry, but rather read it aloud to the class. When (at 17) I taught with Scannell, I saw no signs of an underbelly, just oddities. Here I describe them and Scannell's place as colleague, poet, boxing instructor.