The family, always poor, moved frequently, including Ballaghaderreen in Ireland, Beeston, and Eccles, before settling in Buckinghamshire.

He had been winning boxing titles at school and had been a keen reader from a very early age, although not properly attaching to poetry until about 15 years old, when he picked up a Walter de la Mare poem and was "instantly and permanently hooked".

Following an assault on an Axis-held hill near Gabes he watched as his Gordon Highlanders moved through the recently taken position, looting the dead, both Allied and Axis.

Day) he deserted again and spent two years on the run, earning his living with jobs in the theatre, professional boxing bouts and tutoring and coaching, all the while teaching himself by reading everything he could.

Scannell, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,[3] won many poetry awards, including for war poems such as his collection Walking Wounded.

[9] Seamus Heaney in a letter to Andrew Taylor said he admired Scannell's poems "not only for their sturdy metrical pace and structure, but for their combination of mordancy and a sense of mortality".

[7] John Carey, the critic, commented: "Scannell nearly always works on two levels, one realistic and external, the other imaginative, metaphorical, haunted by memory and desire.

The title poem recollects a column of men returning from battle: "No one was suffering from a lethal hurt, They were not magnified by noble wounds, There was no splendour in that company."

The first recipient of the Owen Award, Christopher Logue, author of some of the best war poetry of the past half-century (in the form of versions of the Iliad), spent two years in a military prison, on a charge of handling stolen passbooks.

He argues that its depictions of reactions to a black boxer illustrate the diversity of racial attitudes, including outright racism, better than contemporary sociological studies where private assumptions and thoughts were hidden.

[13] Scannell spent the final years of his life living in Otley, West Yorkshire, where he died at his home at the age of 85 after a long illness.