John Betjeman

John Betjeman: The Laureate Who Saved a Station

In 1967 the Merton Professor of English at Oxford, Dame Helen Gardner, was asked whether John Betjeman should be Poet Laureate and pronounced him "a lightweight, amusing but rather trivial." Downing Street's appointments secretary agreed, dismissing him as a "backward-looking choice," the "songster of tennis lawns and cathedral cloisters," and the job went to Cecil Day-Lewis. Betjeman got it five years later anyway. Today his statue stands under the roof of St Pancras, a building that would have been rubble without him — which is a strange fate for a lightweight.

Betjemann, With Two Ns

He was born in London on 28 August 1906 into a prosperous family of Dutch descent. His father Ernest and mother Mabel ran a firm making silverware and ornamental furniture on the Pentonville Road. The surname had already been fiddled with once — an extra "-n" added during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War to deflect anti-Dutch feeling — and during the First World War the family dropped it again, the doubled consonant now sounding embarrassingly German. That small anxious history of a name is oddly Betjemanesque: English respectability as something worked at, not inherited.

He went to Byron House and Highgate School, where a young T. S. Eliot was among his teachers, then to the Dragon School and on to Marlborough. There he joined the secret Society of Amici alongside Louis MacNeice, and founded *The Heretick*, a magazine devoted to mocking the school's worship of games.

The Oxford Failure

Oxford was a disaster he never got over. He failed mathematics in Responsions but was admitted to Magdalen as a commoner to read the newly created English school. His tutor was C. S. Lewis, who thought him "an idle prig." Betjeman loathed the philological grind, preferred cultivating friends and ecclesiastical architecture, failed the compulsory Divinity examination twice, and left in Michaelmas 1928 without a degree after failing the Pass School. He passed Divinity on his third try and was sent down anyway. The humiliation rankled for the rest of his life, and he never forgave Lewis, "towards whom he nursed a bitter detestation."

His True University

What he got instead was better suited to him. After stints as a private secretary, schoolmaster and film critic for the *Evening Standard*, he spent 1930 to 1935 as full-time assistant editor of the *Architectural Review* — a job one scholar called his true university. He joined the MARS Group of young modernists, wrote the Cornwall and Devon volumes of the *Shell Guides*, and in 1937 became churchwarden at Uffington. He was assembling, without quite meaning to, an unmatched practical knowledge of English buildings.

Rejected for military service in 1939, he worked for the Ministry of Information's films division, then served from 1941 to 1944 as British press attaché in neutral Dublin — where he was reportedly marked for assassination by the IRA until an old IRA man, impressed by his work, cancelled the order. He befriended Patrick Kavanagh and wrote poems out of the Irish years.

A Hundred Thousand Copies

The verse came steadily: *Mount Zion* (1932), *Continual Dew: a Little Book of Bourgeois Verse* (1937), *Old Lights for New Chancels* (1940), *New Bats in Old Belfries* (1945), *A Few Late Chrysanthemums* (1954). Then *Collected Poems* (1958) sold a hundred thousand copies — a figure that in modern poetry is not a success but an anomaly — and turned him into a public personality. *Summoned by Bells*, his verse autobiography, followed in 1960.

The subjects were unfashionable and deliberately so: Victorian churches, suburban railway lines, seaside lodgings, golf clubs, the physical clutter of ordinary English life. W. H. Auden admired his ease "with the provincial gaslit towns, the seaside lodgings, the bicycle, the harmonium." Philip Larkin defended the subject matter as more nourishing than metaphysical abstraction. "Slough" (1937) — "Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!" — remains his most quoted line and the one he came to regret. His marriage to the Hon. Penelope Chetwode in 1933 produced two children and drifted apart after her conversion to Catholicism in 1948; from 1951 he had a lifelong attachment to Lady Elizabeth Cavendish.

Criminal Folly

Meanwhile he was fighting. Victorian architecture in the 1950s was regarded as an embarrassment to be cleared, and Betjeman almost single-handedly made it lovable again. He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and of the Friends of Friendless Churches (1957), first president of the Hackney Society, and Secretary to the Oxford Preservation Trust. He wrote *First and Last Loves* (1952) and *London's Historic Railway Stations* (1972), and edited the *Collins Guide to English Parish Churches* (1958), whose preface the *TLS* called "pure gold."

He lost the Euston Arch. He won St Pancras, calling the plan to demolish it "criminal folly" — and when the station reopened as the Eurostar terminus in November 2007, Martin Jennings's statue of him, hat in hand, was installed at platform level.

Metro-Land

Television made him a national figure. From the 1960s he broadcast constantly; in 1973 came *Metro-Land*, directed by Edward Mirzoeff, a journey up the Metropolitan Railway through the suburbs it invented, and one of the BBC's most admired documentaries. *A Passion for Churches* followed in 1974. He was appointed CBE in 1960, took the Queen's Medal for Poetry the same year, was knighted in 1969, and became Poet Laureate in 1972 — the first Knight Bachelor appointed to the post.

Why John Is Called a Genius

The word sits awkwardly on him, and he would have enjoyed that. The claim is not for intellectual power — he failed his degree and called himself a poetic hack — but for two rarer things.

The first is technical. Betjeman handled traditional English metre with what critics have called the utmost dexterity and taste, manipulating nineteenth-century verse models so fluently that readers mistake the result for artlessness. Writing light verse that carries genuine feeling, in strict form, without curdling into doggerel is one of the hardest tricks in the language, and he did it repeatedly. It won him the respect of Auden and Larkin while a hundred thousand ordinary readers bought the book — a combination almost nobody in twentieth-century poetry managed, and one that had critics reaching for the comparison with Tennyson.

The second is a genuinely original faculty of perception: he could see beauty and meaning in things his entire educated class had agreed were worthless — a Gothic Revival station shed, a Metroland cul-de-sac, an unvisited parish church — and then make everybody else see it too. That is not a poet's skill so much as a curator's, and it changed British conservation permanently.

The counter-case was made in his own lifetime by serious people. Gardner's "lightweight, amusing but rather trivial" is not stupid; his range is narrow, the nostalgia can go soft, and one critic noted his intimacy produces miniature worlds that sometimes yield poor work. He is not a difficult poet and made no formal innovations. Genius, in his case, means doing a modest thing supremely well and shifting a nation's taste while doing it.

Legacy

Parkinson's disease took his last decade. He died at his home in Trebetherick, Cornwall, on 19 May 1984, aged 77, and lies at St Enodoc's church nearby. The memorials are as suburban and specific as his poems: a park at Wantage, Betjeman Close in Pinner, a locomotive he named himself at St Pancras eleven months before his death, blue plaques in Highgate and Uffington and Cloth Fair. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings gives an annual John Betjeman Award for church conservation. Oxford, which threw him out, made him an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1974 and in 2011 listed him among its hundred most distinguished members of ten centuries.

Achievements

• Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• King’s / Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry
• Albert Medal — 1973
• Knight Bachelor