Early life and career

Adrian Mitchell was born 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. He was educated at Monkton Combe School, "a school full of bullies, whose playground he characterised as 'the killing ground'". He then went to Greenways 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, after which he did his National Service in the RAF. He commented that this "confirmed (his) natural pacificism". He went on to study English at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was taught by J.R.R. Tolkien’s son. He became chairman of the university's poetry society and the literary editor of Isis magazine. On graduating Mitchell got a job as a reporter on the Oxford Mail and, later, at the Evening Standard in London.

"Inheriting enough money to live on for a year, I wrote my first novel and my first TV play. Soon afterwards I became a freelance journalist, writing about pop music for the Daily Mail and TV for the pre-tabloid Sun and the Sunday Times. I quit journalism in the mid-Sixties and since then have been a free-falling poet, playwright and writer of stories."

Career

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."

In "Loose Leaf Poem", from Ride the Nightmare, he wrote:

My brain socialist

My heart anarchist

My eyes pacifist

My blood revolutionary

Mitchell 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 above 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.

"He never let up. Most calls—'Can you do this one, Adrian?'—were answered, 'Sure, I'll be there.' His reading of "Tell Me Lies" at a City Hall benefit just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was electrifying. Of course, he couldn't stop that war, but he performed as if he could."

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.

Fellow writers could be effusive in their tributes. John Berger said that, "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 he was "a joyous, acrid and demotic tumbling lyricist Pied Piper, determinedly singing us away from catastrophe." Ted Hughes: "In the world of verse for children, nobody has produced more surprising verse or more genuinely inspired fun than Adrian Mitchell."

Mitchell died at the age of 76 in a North London hospital from a suspected heart attack. For two months he had been suffering from pneumonia. Two days earlier he had completed what turned out to be his last poem, "My Literary Career So Far". He intended it as a Christmas gift to "all the friends, family and animals he loved".

"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."

Family

Mitchell is survived by his wife, the actress Celia Hewitt, whose bookshop, Ripping Yarns, is in Highgate, and their two daughters Sasha and Beattie. He also has two sons and a daughter from his previous marriage to Maureen Bush: Briony, Alistair and Danny—. There are nine grandchildren: Robin, Arthur, Charlotte, Natasha, Zoe, Caitlin, Annie, Lola and Lilly.

• 1961 Eric Gregory Award
• 1966 PEN Translation Prize
• 1971 Tokyo Festival Television Film Award
• 2005 CLPE Poetry Award (shortlist) for Daft as a Doughnut

Obituaries

• To the memory of Adrian Mitchell World Socialist web site
• The Independent obituary by Michael Horovitz
• The Guardian obituary by Michael Kustow
• Daily Telegraph obituary
• Times obituary
• New York Times
• Camden New Journal
• Michael Rosen: Passionate poet unafraid of the big stuff

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