C S Lewis taught John Betjeman at Oxford – and loathed him
It is 100 years since John Betjeman went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, supposedly to read English. In 1925, he had the supreme misfortune to find that his tutor was a newly appointed young don, an Ulsterman called C S Lewis, who soon took a dislike to him. Betjeman opted to study medieval Welsh – so Lewis went to the trouble of hiring a don from Aberystwyth to trundle down to Oxford once a week by train. Needless to say, Betj either forgot to attend the tutorials, or turned up, his cheeks pale green after a night of debauch, having failed to read a single line of the Mabinogion. He got the only delta, the lowest grade, at Oxford in 1928. But, though idle, Betjeman was well-informed – about architecture, and he had a poet’s feel for history and place. The don who saw the point of him, immediately, was...
I’m afraid this isn’t one of our four free articles available in full, which are set out in the first two rows of the ‘Magazine’ page.
Please click here to find them.
To buy a digital version of this issue for just £2.99, click here
