Frank McEachran

Frank McEachran (6 June 1900 – 4 October 1975), sometimes known as Kek, was a British schoolmaster and writer.

He was there in 1923, during the period of hyperinflation, of which he had vivid memories.

Finally, McEachran took a Diploma of Education, for which he spent a term of teaching at Sedbergh School.

In September 1924, McEachran began to teach at Gresham's School, Holt, where he remained for ten years.

McEachran left Gresham's in 1934, which a biographer attributes to a difference of opinion with the headmaster, J. R. Eccles.

He was then out of work for several months and spent them on a walking tour of Greece and a journey from Odessa in the Ukraine to Leningrad, travelling with Intourist.

In 1935, McEachran was appointed as a schoolmaster at Shrewsbury School, where he spent the rest of his career.

At Shrewsbury 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 at Shrewsbury School through the McEachran Room, where the Creative Writing Society meets, some still influenced by his writings.

Beyond his main job, McEachran also taught Italian, English, and philosophy, at other schools, including Shrewsbury High School, where one of his pupils was Mary Beard.

She remembered him as eccentric and inspirational.

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 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.

He was an active proponent of Georgism.

The son of an engineer from Wolverhampton, McEachran was educated at Manchester Grammar School and then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he held a scholarship in modern languages.

After graduating BA, he gained the further degree of BLitt, with work on Johann Gottfried Herder, whom he researched at the University of Leipzig.

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'.

McEachran died in October 1975 at Kingsland House, Shrewsbury.

These resulted in two diaries, "A Walk Round Greece" and "A Russian Diary", which were published in 1979.