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.”
