Peter Scupham
Poet who explored memory and tradition and spent 25 years restoring a manor house in Norfolk
PETER SCUPHAM, who has died aged 89, was a poet whose poems captured a world in change. He was a year younger than Geoffrey Hill, and although he shared Hill’s concerns to some extent, Scupham offered calmer, less apocalyptic, less judgmental meditation on tradition and memory. And he was six years older than Seamus Heaney, with whom he shared an ability to evoke landscape and the deep past to reflect on the world around him.
His first collection, Small Containers (1972), looks at the world of children, and wonders what they make of the grown-up world, and the world of our ancestors: the title poem concerns the random objects that end up in little containers which spill out their contents after we have gone.
Here also, the damage that war does to humanity, the landscape and the soul emerges as a preoccupation that would pervade Scupham’s oeuvre.
It is possible to read his poems as a coming to terms with the world’s flux, and even of making peace with it. In his early work, he could remind himself sharply that his surroundings had a life of their own, and wrote: “I walked by ruins but I did not hear/their sinews twist and crack, their wooden hearts/tumble and burn.”
That comes from a sequence called “A Wartime Childhood”. The memory of the Second World War, and what he would learn about it, alongside his own experience of National Service, gave Scupham a way into exploring the horrors of the 20th century. The thrills, terrors, grotesqueness, and excitement of the sound of bombers, and of collecting fragments of shells, were a haunting presence throughout his life.
He was alive to humanity’s uneasy relationship with the environment and nature, and found the ancient Greeks and Romans just as ready to disrupt their world as we are. He took this idea to its natural conclusion, thinking of the palaeolithic cave paintings at Rouffignac as a nursery frieze, or writing “Kilroy was here”.
But his approach was not gleefully anachronistic. At his finest, when evoking the inevitability of change and loss, he could be as evocative and elegiac as Geoffrey Hill in The Orchards of Syon, or even the TS Eliot of Four Quartets. A sequence of 15 sonnets called “The Hinterland” (1977) combines exquisite pastoral writing with a rigorous form, so that the first 14 sonnets conclude with lines that make up the last sonnet.
Such writing made him a poet profoundly attentive to the environment before that became obligatory; but he would always record the human presence in it, usually with affection. In “The Hinterland” he wrote: “Let the tree lie where tree is felled,/and there our conversations must be held.”
Scupham was able to draw on his own experience of preserving the past in the face of change. In 1990 he and his wife Margaret bought an Elizabethan manor house in the village of South Burlingham from Norfolk County Council, for what he called “the price of a bungalow”.
They spent 25 years restoring it, intending to run creative writing courses there – but when the hurdles of Health and Safety proved too high, Margaret staged Shakespeare in the garden instead.
During work in the attic, they peeled off some plaster when unblocking a fireplace to reveal a Tudor mural. It took specialists from the Courtauld to expose the work, an allegoric hunting scene in monochrome.
Little by little the house was furnished and painted out with rich colours, books and art, until it appeared in Simon Jenkins’s England’s Thousand Best Houses, and in the poet’s collection The Ark (1994).
Just as characteristic was the purchase in 1974 of a printing press with the help of his friend, the poet John Mole. When publishers were adopting computerised ways to print their texts, Scupham relished going in the opposite direction: “It cost us less than £700 to buy a rather glamorous 1930s machine press, a flatbed press, a little treadle press and everything else that we needed to set it all whirring and clanking in the cellar of my house.”
Founding the Mandeville Press, he printed the work of established poets such as Geoffrey Grigson, John Fuller and Anthony Hecht alongside newer writers, including Freda Downie, Neil Powell and David Scott.
He relinquished this when he bought the Norfolk manor house, and instead sold antiquarian books, under the name of Mermaid Books, after one of the statues at the house’s entrance. His catalogues became collectable items in their own right.
Peter Scupham was born on February 24 1933 in Bootle, Liverpool; his family moved to Derbyshire shortly after. His father, John Scupham, was a scholarship boy who began as a schoolteacher but progressed to be controller of educational broadcasting at the BBC. After his retirement, he helped to set up the Open University. Peter’s mother Dorothy came from a family of drapers.
Both parents were the subject of long poem sequences over the years, as was Scupham’s wartime childhood. He attended the Perse School, Cambridge, and
St George’s School in Harpenden, before doing National Service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.
He then studied English Literature at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In a lecture, FR Leavis said of a minor Victorian poet: “Well, I don’t think we need bother with him”, and Scupham would remember thinking: “I was 21 and had seen a bit of life; I did not want to be told by an academic what to like and dislike.”
After graduation he became an English teacher, first at Skegness Grammar School and then at a Quaker School,
St Christopher’s in Letchworth – independent, progressive, vegetarian – where he was head of department.
His manner of teaching is well remembered by former pupils who recall him sitting on the front desk, closing his eyes and talking brilliantly, entertainingly, from a profound depth of knowledge that inspired many, including future writers.
Scupham’s first wife, Carola, taught Greek and Classics at St Christopher’s, and it was there that he also met his second wife, Margaret, who directed a wide range of plays at the school. He had four children with Carola: Kate, Roger, Chris, and Giles, who was a talented poet and artist, but died in his late thirties. It would be 10 years before Scupham’s next book appeared in 2011.
His collections gained increasing renown while he worked as a teacher. The earliest appeared when he had small children of his
own, and this gives the poetry’s concern with future generations a sense of urgency.
His first collections, Small Containers and
The Snowing Globe (both 1972), reveal a poet already fully formed: he was self-critical, with high standards, and reflected on his early progress: “The best education for a poet is simply to read as much poetry of all kinds as you can, and just to work away at it. I wrote poems for 10 years without writing a good one. Eventually you feel that you might have written something worth a try on the public.”
In subsequent collections, he became increasingly specific about the people he was remembering: these included his father, whose bold voice he brought back to life in
Watching the Perseids (1990).
Scupham’s final book, Invitation to View, appeared this year, and he recorded readings of the poems on his wife’s telephone in his last days. Here, too, there is a sense of the fleeting world, and his own place in it, as he imagines unexpected guests looking at him and Margaret: “We’ll watch you puzzle at us from the lawn/until the faces hidden by our names/turn into whispers, rustles, all forlorn/as maidens, crumpled cows and played-out games./don’t tell us who you are – we needn’t know. The dark will tell you when it’s time to go.”
Peter Scupham’s first marriage ended in divorce and he is survived by his second wife Margaret and by a daughter and two sons.
Peter Scupham, born February 24 1933, died June 11 2022