The English poet, writer and broadcaster John Betjeman was born 120 years ago on 28th August 1906.
Celebrating the English poet who went into rhyme about big, strapping girls and hot buttered toast, philistine businessmen and Victorian churches, railway stations and class distinction, might seem at odds with the modern Britain of today. But perhaps there is still a wistful appetite for what it means to be English, or perhaps beneath the characters, the place and the detail, there is a glimpse of what it means to be human.
To mark his centenary in 2006, A.N. Wilson published a typically insightful, sympathetic and elegantly written biography at the suggestion of Betjeman's daughter, Candida Lycett Green. Her collection of her father's letters was reprinted and so were his Collected Poems. Bevis Hillier, the author of the majestic, brilliantly discursive three-volume biography (Young Betjeman; New Fame, New Love; and The Bonus of Laughter) that ran to more than 1500 pages, also steeled himself to produce an abridged version.
John Betjeman was born in north London, the only child of Ernest and Mabel Betjemann. Although his father's forebears had come to England in the late 18th century, young John was still called a German spy in the playground during World War I (he would drop the second “n” in his surname in his 20s). G. Betjemann & Sons were cabinet-makers, made rich by a patented apparatus for locking decanters away from servants.
John was bullied at Marlborough but he learned to disarm his tormentors (one called Shakespeare put him off the Bard for life) by being funny.
As with his friend Evelyn Waugh, his life changed at Oxford, where he fell in love with the aristocracy (although he never dropped a friend and kept nearly all of them for life). He had a special weakness for the eccentric, decaying world of the Anglo-Irish and took to visiting country houses and parish churches; the latter was to be a life-long passion. His constant companion was Archibald, his teddy bear, which inspired Sebastian Flyte's Aloysius in Brideshead Revisited and symbolised a refusal to grow up. Young John (and Archie) were sent down from Oxford after he failed, of all things, Divinity. He then dabbled in various jobs -- a school master, a private secretary -- before joining Architectural Review. He took to reviewing and journalism and eventually, in 1932, had his first volume of poetry, Mount Zion, published. His first prose work followed in 1933.
Betjeman said that Ghastly Good Taste was written to dissuade the average man from distrusting his own taste and the average architect from continuing in his profession.
In 1933 he met Penelope Chetwode, a clever, strong-minded, odd, horsy, boyish young woman. Her father, Philip Chetwode, had been commander-in-chief of the Indian army and he and his wife were appalled at their daughter's choice. Lady Chetwode said, “We ask people like that to our houses but we don't marry them.” This recalled one of Betjeman's earliest memories: a children's party evoked in False Security:
And wasn't I proud that I was the last to go? Too overexcited and pleased with myself to know That the words I heard my hostess's mother employ To a guest departing, would ever diminish my joy, I WONDER WHERE JULIA FOUND THAT STRANGE, RATHER COMMON LITTLE BOY?
John and Penelope married in a registry office. Reluctantly accepting the inevitable, Penelope's father told his son-in-law: “Well, I suppose you had better call me Field Marshall.”
Betjeman rather liked to be dominated and Penelope was every inch a field marshal's daughter but he had what his contemporary, the novelist Anthony Powell, called “a whim of iron”, and they fought constantly. A German housemaid with little English thought John's name was “Shutup” as that was all Penelope seemed to say to him. In 1947, Penelope converted to Catholicism, which horrified and hurt her High Anglican hymn-singing, church-haunting husband, and they drifted apart. The fact that he was always falling in love did not help his marriage either, though it did no harm to his poetry.
His was the poetry of the crush rather than the grand passion.
He had a penchant for muscular, sporty gals. A Subaltern's Love Song is perhaps his best poem, certainly the most Betjemanesque:
Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun, What strenuous singles we played after tea, We in the tournament -- you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy, The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy, With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won, I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.
In 1951 he fell irrevocably in love with Elizabeth Cavendish, who was tall, strong and aristocratic to boot. She was the sister of the Duke of Devonshire and a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, and she loved and cared for him for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he could never quite give up Penelope, so they never divorced and he and Elizabeth never wed. This impossible situation fed his natural melancholia and a well-developed sense of guilt that tormented him to the grave, yet high spirits and a sense of the ridiculous kept breaking through. His enthusiasms were many. In 1961 he visited Australia and fell in love with it. He returned a decade later, and in 1972 produced four films of his visit.
Another outcome of his first Australian visit was a close friendship with Barry Humphries. Betjeman was most taken with Edna Everage but even more with Sandy Stone. As Hillier notes, the similarities between the two were spooky. Both were born in city suburbs to middle-class parents. Their fathers supplied the art deco market -- Humphries with houses, Betjemann with furniture -- and both only sons would have been the fourth generation to enter the family business. They shared a fascination for Victoriana, for Oscar Wilde and the music hall, for obscure artists and practical jokes.
They loved dated slang as much as they hated modern jargon and both had a superb ear for language and an unerring eye for the arcane. Betjeman's Collected Poems eventually sold two million copies: no one had been this widely read since Tennyson. Even his 2000-line free verse autobiography Summoned By Bells (1960) -- in which he recounted his journey, teeming with details, poignant and punchy in turn, from childhood to schoolmaster -- sold well. While academics might still argue whether he was a major or minor poet, whether his verse was lyric or light, he must be the last poet to have been truly popular.
From the early 1960s he reached a wide audience with spirited conservation campaigns and a string of documentary television series such as Pride of Place, A Passion for Churches and Metroland, pursuing his love of landscape and churches. He was a natural. The gift that endeared him to his friends (what the last of the Mitfords, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, sister of his early love, Pam, and sister-in-law of his last love, Elizabeth, called, “the blinding charm”) was also apparent to his viewers. Some friends felt he was wasting his time and energy, which would have been better spent on poetry. “I like to think they are poems,” was his reply.
Knighted in 1969, Betjeman was named poet laureate in 1972, on the death of Cecil Day-Lewis. Among other contenders, W.H. Auden's joint UK/US citizenship may have been one factor that made him ineligible while Philip Larkin was uninterested. Had he been, Larkin's poem that began ``They f--- you up, your Mum and Dad'' may have given the Queen some reservations. The Times greeted the news with the headline “Teddy Bear to the Nation”.
But the honour proved to be a curse. He had written his best royal poem, ‘On the Death of George V’, in 1936. By 1972 he had, as Penelope rather bluntly put it, “gorn orf”. His verse for the royal wedding in 1973 was as fine as the match proved to be. What fun the vintage Betjeman could have had with the equestrian pairing of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips but his health was failing, the gravitas of the role left no room for levitas, and he was not good at rhyming to order.
Although there were frequent flashes of the old Betjeman, his last decade was one of sad decline. There is a touching image of Princess Margaret and her friend, Lady Elizabeth, in Chelsea pushing the ailing Betjeman in his wheelchair to Sunday Eucharist.
He died on May 19, 1984, in his beloved Cornwall, Elizabeth holding his hand and Archie under his arm. A boy until the end but one whose work touched a chord. He had once said, “My themes are that you're all alone, that you fall in love, that you've got to die.”
