Name Frank McEachran Role Author | Died 1975 | |
Books Spells for Poets: An Anthology of Words and Comment, More Spells: A New Anthology of Words and Comment | ||
Frank McEachran (1900–1975), sometimes known as Kek, was a British schoolmaster and author. He taught at English public schools and the University of Leipzig and wrote on philosophy, but his most commercially successful books were his anthologies Spells for Poets and More Spells which appeared in the 1950s.
Contents
Life
The son of an engineer from Wolverhampton, McEachran was educated at Manchester Grammar School and then at Magdalen College, Oxford. After taking the degrees of BA and BLitt, he began to teach at Gresham's School, Holt, in September 1924. Among the boys he influenced while there was the future poet W. H. Auden, and one writer on Auden detects traces of McEachran's "humanist world-view" in Auden's poetry until it was overtaken by the existentialism of Kierkegaard in the 1940s. McEachran also taught the future communist James Klugmann, and the writer Alan Bennett used him as the model for the character of the schoolmaster Hector in his play The History Boys. He also taught now Salopian House Master Richard Hudson.
He was also a lecturer at the University of Leipzig and a master at Shrewsbury School. There he taught Martin Wainwright, who has recalled that "Frank McEachran stood us on chairs at school reciting poetry we’d learned by heart. Probably child abuse these days, but he called it Spells and I can still remember them all." He is remembered in Shrewsbury School through the McEachran room in the English faculty where the student-run Creative Writing Society meets, some still influenced by his writings.
McEachran's anthology Spells (1953), later re-issued as Spells for Poets, is divided into eight parts: 'Sheer', 'Queer', 'Fear', 'Love', 'Death', 'Odd', 'God', and 'Postscript'.
When he died in 1975 McEachran's address was Kingsland House, The Schools, Shrewsbury, and he left an estate valued at £15,062.