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