Adrian Mitchell FRSL (24 October 1932 – 20 December 2008) was an English poet, novelist, and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement. His best-known poem, "To Whom It May Concern", was his bitterly sarcastic reaction to the televised horrors of the Vietnam War. Mitchell's poems ranged from anarchistic anti-war satire, through love poetry, to stories and poems for children. He also wrote librettos. In 2002, he was nominated, semi-seriously, as Britain's "Shadow Poet Laureate".
Early life and education
Adrian Mitchell was born on 24 October 1932 near Hampstead Heath, north London. His mother, Kathleen Fabian, was a Fröbel-trained nursery school teacher and his father, Jock Mitchell, a research chemist from Cupar in Fife. Adrian was educated at the Junior School of Monkton Combe School in Bath. He then went to Greenways School, at Ashton Gifford House in Wiltshire, run at the time by a friend of his mother. This, said Mitchell, was "a school in Heaven, where my first play, The Animals' Brains Trust, was staged when I was nine to my great satisfaction."
His schooling was completed as a boarder at Dauntsey's School, where he collaborated in plays with friend Gordon Snell. Mitchell did his National Service in the RAF. He commented that this "confirmed (his) natural pacificism".
Career
On graduating, he got a job as a reporter on the Oxford Mail and, later, at the Evening Standard in London. He sought in his work to counteract the implications of his own assertion, that "Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."
Mitchell gave frequent public readings, particularly for left-wing causes. Satire was his speciality. Commissioned to write a poem about Prince Charles and his special relationship (as Prince of Wales) with the people of Wales, his measured response was short and to the point: "Royalty is a neurosis. Get well soon."
thumb|upright|Heart on the Left: [[Ralph Steadman's blood-splattered cover for Mitchell's Poems 1953–1984]]
In "Loose Leaf Poem", from Ride the Nightmare, Mitchell wrote:
:My brain socialist
:My heart anarchist
:My eyes pacifist
:My blood revolutionary
He was in the habit of stipulating in any preface to his collections: "None of the work in this book is to be used in connection with any examination whatsoever." His best-known poem, "To Whom It May Concern", was his bitterly sarcastic reaction to the televised horrors of the Vietnam War. The poem begins:
:I was run over by the truth one day.
:Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way
:So stick my legs in plaster
:Tell me lies about Vietnam
He first read it to thousands of nuclear disarmament protesters who, having marched through central London on CND's first new format one-day Easter March, finally crammed into Trafalgar Square on the afternoon of Easter Day 1964. As Mitchell delivered his lines from the pavement in front of the National Gallery, angry demonstrators in the square below scuffled with police. Over the years, he updated the poem to take into account recent events.
His poem "Victor Jara" was set to music by Arlo Guthrie and included on his 1976 album Amigo.
Mitchell was later responsible for the well-respected musical stage adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a production commissioned and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company that premiered in November 1998 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and transferring to the Barbican Theatre in London.
His work for the Royal Shakespeare Company included Peter Brook's US and the English version of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade.
After his death, in 2009 Frances Lincoln Children's Books published an adaptation of Ovid: Shapeshifters: tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses, written by Mitchell and illustrated by Alan Lee.
Other activities
Mitchell was for some years poetry editor of the New Statesman, and was the first to publish an interview with the Beatles.
One Remembrance Sunday he laid the Peace Pledge Union's White Poppy wreath on the Cenotaph in Whitehall.
On one International Conscientious Objectors' Day, he read a poem at the ceremony at the Conscientious Objectors Commemorative Stone in Tavistock Square in London.
Death and legacy
Mitchell died on 20 December 2008
In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005, Mitchell's poem "Human Beings" was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space.
Awards
Mitchell won several awards, including:
- 1961: Eric Gregory Award
- 1966: PEN Translation Prize
- 1971: Tokyo Festival Television Film Award
- 2005: CLPE Poetry Award (shortlist) for Daft as a Doughnut
Appraisal and tributes
Fellow writers could be effusive in their tributes. John Berger said: "Against the present British state he opposes a kind of revolutionary populism, bawdiness, wit and the tenderness sometimes to be found between animals." Angela Carter once wrote that Mitchell was "a joyous, acrid and demotic tumbling lyricist Pied Piper, determinedly singing us away from catastrophe." Ted Hughes stated: "In the world of verse for children, nobody has produced more surprising verse or more genuinely inspired fun than Adrian Mitchell."
"Adrian", said fellow poet Michael Rosen, "was a socialist and a pacifist who believed, like William Blake, that everything human was holy. That's to say he celebrated a love of life with the same fervour that he attacked those who crushed life. He did this through his poetry, his plays, his song lyrics and his own performances. Through this huge body of work, he was able to raise the spirits of his audiences, in turn exciting, inspiring, saddening and enthusing them.... He has sung, chanted, whispered and shouted his poems in every kind of place imaginable, urging us to love our lives, love our minds and bodies and to fight against tyranny, oppression and exploitation."
The critic Kenneth Tynan called him "the British Mayakovsky".
The Times said that Mitchell's had been a "forthright voice often laced with tenderness". His poems on such topics as nuclear war, Vietnam, prisons and racism had become "part of the folklore of the Left. His work was often read and sung at demonstrations and rallies".
Personal life
Mitchell first married Maureen Bush, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Alistair (a lawyer, died 2019 aged 61), Danny and Briony.
He was survived by his second wife, actress Celia Hewitt, who owned a Highgate bookshop, Ripping Yarns, and their two daughters Sasha and Beattie.