Clive Sansom

Clive Sansom was a British-born Tasmanian poet and playwright. Sansom was born on 21 June 1910 in East Finchley, London and educated at Southgate County School, where he matriculated in 1926. He worked as a clerk until 1934, and then studied speech and drama at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the London Speech Institute under Margaret Gullan. He went on to study phonetics under Daniel Jones at University College London, and joined the London Verse Speaking Choir. He lectured in speech training at Borough Road Training College, Isleworth, and the Speech Fellowship in 1937-9, and edited the Speech Fellowship Bulletin (1934-49). He was also an instructor in the Drama School of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Sansom married the poet Ruth Large, a Tasmanian, in 1937, at the Quaker Friends Meeting House in Winchmore Hill, and subsequently joined. Sansom was a conscientious objector during the Second World War. He was also a committed conservationist. The couple settled in Tasmania in 1949, where they were both supervisors with the Tasmanian Education Department, in charge of its Speech Centre. Clive Sansom died in Hobart, Tasmania in 1981. A commemorative volume appeared in 1990. As a poet, Sansom was best known for his performance poetry and his verses for children. He also wrote a number of plays. His Passion Play was a novel based around the Oberammergau Passion Play of 1950.)