Alan Brownjohn
Prolific poet who skewered the banality of office life and wrote ‘We’re Going to See the Rabbit’
ALAN BROWNJOHN, who has died aged 92, was a poet, novelist and critic whose writing could darkly mock the modern world; he produced an astonishing range of poetry, from the formal and elegiac to freer, more experimental work.
He met TS Eliot, WH Auden and Louis Macneice, and his work can sometimes seem in easy dialogue with them, as well as with WB Yeats and Browning. Philip Larkin was a strong influence and, later, a good friend.
Although Brownjohn could share Larkin’s withering scorn for a growing network of roads around nondescript shops, politically the two men could not have been further apart. In 1962 Brownjohn was elected as a Labour member of Wandsworth Borough Council, and he stood as a Labour candidate for Richmond (Surrey) in the general election of 1964, coming second. Later, he would say of Tony Blair: “That man has been a tragic disappointment”, and complained of his “vacuous rhetoric”. In 2016 he contributed to a volume of poems for Jeremy Corbyn.
He was especially keen-eyed on the banality of office life, and some of his most memorable poems are revealing sketches of staff such as the “Old Fox” who “Questions the Apologies for Absence, he/ Questions the Minutes, including/ The accuracy of the amendments in these Minutes…”
The Old Fox appears in another poem: when he becomes aware that his retirement collection will contain little more than small change, he finds a way to fill it with £5 notes.
It was a mark of Brownjohn’s depth as a poet that these were characters rather than caricatures. Although the poem “Bastard” begins by ridiculing a preening CEO, who “plans to walk into an Organisation,/ To stir things up inside an Organisation” , we soon see that he is not the only bastard: “it’s safer/ To talk than to act, the smaller bastards/ Know the truth of that from long experience” – and anyway there are “faxes slithering out from other bastards/ In other penthouse suites all around the world...”
Brownjohn showed little empathy for his subject on that occasion, but elsewhere, as in “Office Party”, he could write his own persona into the piece . A woman is blowing a party “squeaker” into people’s faces, although not quite everyone’s: “All I know was: she passed me,/ Which I did not expect/ – And I’d never so craved for/ Some crude disrespect.”
This humanity was even more evident in Brownjohn’s later work. Ludbrooke & Others appeared in 2010, when he was nearly 80. Ludbrooke is a bumbling sensualist whose doomed pick-up lines animate a sequence of 60 13-line poems. Brownjohn remarked of the character: “He represents things which, if I detect them in myself, I don’t really like and I’m not really proud of.”
Someone more like Brownjohn appears later in the collection: having “had too much”, he wonders if he should “speak to the similarly binge-drunk girls”? Instead, he maintains “a most gentlemanly reserve” while they “Seemed tolerant of tie-wearing patrician elders”.
Brownjohn developed his characters further still in novels which overlapped with his own experience. Windows on the Moon (2009), for example, is set in a bitterly cold, lower-middle-class south-east London of 1947. The Long Shadows (1997) draws on the author’s own travels to Ceausescu’s Romania.
But his ability to enrich situations with different perspectives marked even his earliest poetry. Alongside Brownjohn’s railing at cityscapes was a plea to respect the countryside, not least from those who profess to love it. Not all of this was subtle, such as a dialogue when a fussing gardener repeatedly asks a visitor to “Go away”, but “Farmer’s Point of View” is more intriguing: the speaker expresses shock that couples are “conducting sexual liaisons – on my land”, but he is much more concerned about what love actually is.
Alan Charles Brownjohn was born in Catford, south-east London, on July 28 1931. His mother, Dorothy (née Mulligan) was from a large Irish family; his father, Charles, was a printer, as his own father and grandfather had been. From an early age Alan wanted to see his own name on the spine of a book, and this, combined with his father’s encouragement, and his mother reading him poetry, provided the climate that would lead him to write. He wrote and read aloud precociously from an early age, and always valued the sound of verse; in 1969 he edited First I Say This: A Selection of Poems for Reading Aloud.
He attended Brockley County School, and then read history at Merton College, Oxford. He recalled that his room in college was the oldest and perhaps the coldest in the university: “I started writing serious poems one night to leave something behind if I died of flu in my first winter at Oxford.”
Brownjohn was affiliated to the group of poets that called themselves the Group, while admiring the work of a slightly earlier school, the Movement, a loose labelling that covered Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. The Group was brought together by Philip Hobsbaum for weekly discussions and readings; Hobsbaum had been a student of FR Leavis at Cambridge, and Leavis’s criticism made a profound impact on Brownjohn. He praised Leavis’s close reading of texts, as well as the emphasis on social progress, and would later say, with characteristic self-deprecation, “I write nothing without hoping it might make the world one grain better – a pompous statement which, I suppose, makes me a moralist as a writer; a humanist one.”
A poem of the time, “William Empson at Aldermaston”, shows Brownjohn’s admiration of the poet Empson’s moral stance – and also his striking beard – while commenting on people in houses along the way peeping at the CND protesters through curtains.
Among the Group’s members, Brownjohn made particularly strong friendships with Peter Porter and Elizabeth Jennings. He also met Shirley Toulson there; her work was to appear in the Group anthology of 1963. Brownjohn and Toulson married in 1960, and she was elected as a Labour councillor alongside him in Wandsworth.
His poems began to appear in the mid-1950s, and he would look back with special fondness on the publication of his first collection, The Railings (1961). From 1958 until 1965 he taught at Beckenham and Penge Boys’ Grammar School. He left to lecture at Battersea College of Education (now London South Bank University), and later taught creative writing at the Polytechnic of North London (now London Metropolitan University).
For someone who could make such fertile fun of meetings, he spent a lot of time in them, as chairman of the Poetry Society (1982-1988); as a member of the Arts Council’s Literature panel; and as the patron of Humanists UK. He was conspicuous for the time that he gave to literary, political and charitable causes.
Brownjohn made his debut as a novelist with The Way You Tell Them: a Yarn of the Nineties (1990), set in a slightly futurised London among the world of alternative comedians (stand-ups failing to land their jokes would remain a feature of his poems). The first of four novels, it won the Author’s Club prize. He was an energetic anthologist, an astute reviewer of other poets, and an obituarist.
Besides this, he wrote for children. One of his most acclaimed, and declaimed, poems is “We’re Going to See the Rabbit…” in which children seek “The only rabbit, the only rabbit in England” – “Sitting behind a barbed-wire fence/ Under the floodlights, neon lights,/ Sodium lights, Nibbling grass/ On the only patch of grass/ In England.” The piece ends as the rabbit goes underground and remarks, “It won’t be long, they are bound to come,/ They are bound to come and find me, even here.”
Alan Brownjohn married Shirley Toulson in 1960; they divorced in 1969. In 1972, he married Sandra Willingham; they separated in 2005. He is survived by a son and two stepchildren from his first marriage.
Alan Brownjohn, born July 28 1931, died February 23 2024