Historical figure · Pearson Edexcel International GCSE revision on Incandio

Vernon Scannell

Incandio publishes no likeness of Vernon Scannell: no photograph exists that is out of copyright or offered under a licence this product may use, and every candidate found was refused rather than stretched. In place of a face the app shows a deliberate cipher — a monogram set on a ruled manuscript page — because a missing photograph must never quietly demote the person. The life below is complete; only the picture is missing.

Who Found The Violence In A Garden Game · Poet & Boxer · 1922–2007

The prize-fighter who fought at Alamein, deserted twice, and wrote about the violence hidden inside ordinary life.

Defend these ideas against Scannell

Incandio is a free revision platform for the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE, and on it a topic counts as mastered only once you have learned it, proved it in questions, taught it back and defended it against the person with the strongest claim on it. Vernon Scannell is that person for one topic on the course:

• Hide and Seek in Hide and Seek — English Literature

Who was Scannell?

Vernon Scannell was born John Vernon Bain in Lincolnshire in 1922 and brought up in Aylesbury and Beeston under a violent father. He boxed professionally in the fairground booths, joined the Gordon Highlanders in 1940, and fought at El Alamein and in Normandy. He deserted twice: the first time in North Africa after watching men rob the bodies of the dead, for which he served six months in a military prison, and the second after being wounded at Caen. He lived under an assumed name for years, was picked up in 1945 and discharged as mentally unwell, and took the name Vernon Scannell from a telephone directory. He taught English at a boys' school in Hampshire and wrote poems, novels and two memoirs of the war. His subject is violence and what comes before it — the war, the ring, and the small brutalities of a boyhood — handled in strict regular metre that never announces itself. Hide and Seek is his best-known poem: a boy hides too well in a garden shed, and thirteen lines of whispered triumph are followed by one line in which he comes out to an empty garden and nobody is there. It is written in the second person and the present tense, so that the reader is the one hiding, and the reader is the one nobody comes for.

Major achievements

• Hide and Seek, one of the most taught poems in British schools
• The Loving Game (1975), which won a Cholmondeley Award
• Two memoirs of the war, including The Tiger and the Rose
• Wrote about combat without ever making it heroic
• Kept strict form alive through decades that had no use for it

Life in brief

• 1922 — Born John Vernon Bain: In Lincolnshire; brought up under a violent father.
• 1938 — Boxing in the booths: Fighting for money at fairgrounds before the war.
• 1940 — Joins the Gordon Highlanders: Infantry; North Africa and then Normandy.
• 1942 — Deserts after Alamein: Six months in a military prison.
• 1944 — Wounded at Caen: Deserts a second time and lives under a new name.
• 1957 — Hide and Seek: Published in The Masks of Love.
• 1975 — The Loving Game: Wins a Cholmondeley Award.
• 2007 — Dies in Yorkshire: Aged eighty-five.

Explore the life of Scannell — five chapters

1. John Vernon Bain — A violent father and the fairground booths
2. Alamein — What he saw, and what he did about it
3. A Name From the Telephone Directory — Caen, a second desertion, and years under another identity
4. Nobody Comes — Hide and Seek, and one line that changes thirteen
5. Fifty Years of Writing Against the Fashion — A working poet, out of step and still going

Read the five-chapter life of Vernon Scannell →

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