Obituary: Brian Patten
Brian Patten 7 February 1946 – 29 September 2025
In Morag Styles’ top ten of poets, Brian Patten’s children’s poetry had fun in abundance – daft puns, groan-making rhymes, kids getting one over adults but explored the sensitive side of life too.
Roger McGough remembers his friend and fellow poet.
The first time I met Brian was in Liverpool in 1961. In a jazz venue that hosted weekly poetry readings. Streates was to poetry what the Cavern was to rock n roll.
At the time, I was a 23-year-old teacher by day, who morphed into a Beat poet at night, and during the interval of a reading in November of that year, I was told that there was a journalist from the Bootle Times who wanted to interview me.
So I went upstairs expecting to meet this hard-bitten 40 year old, and instead met this hard-bitten 15-year-old not wanting an interview but to show me his poems, which were surprisingly good. More Tennyson than Ginsberg. More Nature than City.
Whereas I seemed to have stumbled upon poetry in my late teens and was still weaving it into my life, poetry seemed to have taken hold of Brian as a boy, and was already his whole life, and would remain so.
I mean he seemed to have few other interests…Hobbies? Nah. Evertonian or Liverpudlian? He wouldn’t know the difference. Politics? No idea. Poetry? Ah, now we’re talking.
And it was this purity of vision, this sense of his own talent that drew me to him. Not that we became mates then, because of the age difference we moved and grooved in different circles.
What brought us back together was The Mersey Sound, Penguin Modern Poets number 10, an anthology of poems by Brian, myself and Adrian Henri, which to everybody’s surprise became a best seller. So successful in fact that very soon, the three of us were on the road both here and abroad, courtesy of the British Council. How well we remember our first show in Aachen and the posters all over town welcoming ‘The Little Poor Poets’.
Later we teamed up with Willy Russell and Andy Roberts to tour with ‘Words on the Run’, and again with The Scaffold, Neil Innes and Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo- Dah band as GRIMMS. Great fun…although it has to be said that Brian was happiest alone on stage. Or on his own writing poems and stories for children.
The last time I saw Brian was in March (2025) this year in a pub across the bridge from Hammersmith where Brian and his wife Linda had a small flat with a balcony overlooking the river. He wasn’t well, that was obvious, but he was chirpy, as ever, and we reminisced, had a laugh, took the piss, showed our poems to each other and discussed doing a few gigs later in the year. Although, to be honest I don’t think either of us thought that was going to happen. He had been fighting cancer in various cruel forms for many years and I told him I always thought of him as a good book… unputdownable. (He liked that).
I know that Brian’s happiest years began after meeting Linda Cookson and moving down to Dittisham, a beautiful little village in Devon. He never looked back. A lovely house, an orchard, the occasional badger dropping in, more poems and the memoir he continued to work on …and Linda, who was at his side to the very end. The End.
Poet, performer and broadcaster, Roger McGough has published over 100 poetry books for adults and children. His recent books for children, include Over to You, Crocodile Tears and Money Go Round.
