Sandy Brownjohn obituary
My sister-in-law Sandy Brownjohn, who has died aged 78, was a greatly admired poet, teacher and writer. During the 1980s, she published a trio of books that transformed the teaching of poetry-writing in British schools.
The first of these, Does It Have to Rhyme? (1980), was inspired by a conversation with the poet Ted Hughes, whom Sandy had met while on a short course at the Arvon Foundation in 1972. Five years later, Sandy – by then a trustee of Arvon – invited Hughes to talk to her pupils at Fitzjohn primary school in Hampstead, north London. “Ted was absolutely wonderful,” she recalled. “He treated them as equals.”
They became friends, along with her then husband, the poet Alan Brownjohn, and it was over dinner that Ted suggested that Sandy should write about her theories on how to coax poetic creativity out of children. The first book was followed by What Rhymes With Secret? (1982), and The Ability to Name Cats (1989), with the trio published as a collection, To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme, in 1994.
Born in Chiswick, west London, Sandy was the child of Margaret (nee Francis), a secretary, and Leslie Willingham, an electrical engineer. At the age of eight, she moved with her family to Stevenage, Hertfordshire, where she later attended the girls’ grammar school. In 1964 she became the first person in her family to enter higher education, when she went to Reading University to study German.
She remained in Reading after graduation to train as a teacher, then worked at primary schools in Henley-on-Thames and Stevenage. It was during this time that she met Alan, along with the poet Seamus Heaney, when they were guest speakers at a local teachers’ event. She and Alan married in 1972, at which point she found a teaching job in St John’s Wood, north London, and moved into his Belsize Park flat. Following the premature deaths of her parents, it also became her 14-year-old sister Jo’s home.
Marriage introduced Sandy to a poetry-dominated social circle encompassing Robert Lowell, Charles Causley, Ivor Cutler, Kit Wright and Vernon Scannell, as well as Hughes and Heaney. She collaborated with Alan on his adaptation of Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, providing the translation from the German, and the script was broadcast first on Radio 3 (1982), then performed at the National Theatre (1985).
In the mid-80s Sandy had a regular slot presenting a programme called Word Games on BBC Schools Radio, which spawned two books of the same name co-written with her producer, Janet Whitaker. She continued to write books for teachers, and in 1989 left her teaching job at Fitzjohn primary, where she had been since 1973, to become first an advisory teacher for Barnet education authority, and then, in 1991, a freelance educational consultant.
Her poetry was published in the New Statesman and other publications, and in three collections, Both Sides of the Catflap (1996), In and Out of the Shadows, and A Norfolk Year: A Poem Sequence (both 2000).
Following her separation, and later divorce, from Alan, in 2002, she settled in west Norfolk.
She is survived by her sisters, Ann and Jo, and three nieces.
