Betjeman, Sir John

Betjeman, Sir John (1906-1984), British Poet Laureate, architectural historian, and broadcaster, born in London. He was once famously described by The Times as “a teddy bear to the nation”, but this played down his sharper side. He was loved by the public and influenced many as an eloquent nostalgic, a tastemaker, a man of religion in an age of irreligion, and a poet who found it more rewarding to “play by the rules” than to break them.

As an only child, Betjeman seemed destined to enter the family firm, but, in his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, he wrote, “I knew, as soon as I could read and write, That I must be a poet”. After the Dragon School, Oxford, Betjeman went to Marlborough College. He did not shine there. He was regarded as an amiable clown; but he did win a poetry prize. In 1925 he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read English. There, too, he achieved no academic success, falling foul of his tutor C. S. Lewis and eventually being sent down for failing a then-compulsory divinity examination. But he bloomed at the university, editing the magazine Cherwell, performing in the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and making friends for life. After Oxford, he took work as private secretary to an Irish politician, Sir Horace Plunkett; as a prep-school master; and as assistant editor of the Architectural Review.

Betjeman’s first book of poems, Mount Zion, was published in 1931. Ghastly Good Taste, a jokey prose book about architectural styles, followed in 1933. In that year, too, Betjeman clandestinely married Penelope Chetwode. In 1934 Betjeman became film critic of the (London) Evening Standard. After two years, he found work writing advertising copy for Shell and editing the Shell Guides to the English counties. Another book of poems, Continual Dew, was published in 1937. When war broke out in 1939, he tried to get into the armed forces, but was rejected. However, his Oxford friend Sir Kenneth Clark gave him a post in the films division of the Ministry of Information. Later in the war, Betjeman served as press attaché to the British Representative in neutral Ireland, Sir John Maffey; was transferred to a top-secret post with the Admiralty in Bath; and became head of the books division of the British Council.

He was enhancing his reputation as a poet. In the 1940s two slim volumes appeared—Old Lights for New Chancels (1940) and New Bats in Old Belfries (1945). In 1948 his Selected Poems were issued, with a largely admiring preface by John Sparrow. But poetry did not pay the bills, and throughout the 1940s and for most of the 1950s Betjeman’s main income was from journalism. He was also becoming well-known as a broadcaster.

In 1958 John Murray published Betjeman’s Collected Poems, which became a bestseller. The publication of Summoned by Bells in 1960 set the seal on this success. Another book of poems, High and Low, appeared in 1966. In 1969, Betjeman was knighted, and in 1972 he succeeded Cecil Day-Lewis as Poet Laureate. Many thought he would be ideal in the role; but his health was failing with the onset of Parkinson’s disease, and, in any case, he insisted, “I cannot write to order”. During his last years, he was devotedly cared for by Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, with whom he had had a love affair for over 30 years. He died in May 1984 and was buried in the graveyard of St Enodoc, Cornwall.

Betjeman’s friend Philip Larkin, who greatly admired his work, wrote that the easiest way to provoke a literary punch-up was to start a discussion of Betjeman’s poetry. Some critics—among them John Bayley, George D. Painter, and A. N. Wilson—consider him “great”. Other critics, including A. Alvarez and Robert Nye, despised him for what they saw as his deliberate archaism at a time when the school of Eliot and Auden was predominant.

As a poet, Betjeman is best known for his semi-humorous and often satirical verses, such as “A Subaltern’s Love Song”, “Hunter Trials”, “How to Get On in Society”, and “Slough”, though he did write more profound poems, such as “Devonshire Street, W.1”; and many of his poems are infused with his Church of England religious beliefs. Auberon Waugh, son of Evelyn, pointed out that Betjeman had contributed “four or five poems to that undefinable and extremely limited anthology which every educated Englishman carries in his memory—more than any of his predecessors as laureate since Lord Tennyson”.

As an architectural historian, with an acutely evocative prose style (shown at its finest in the 1952 collection First and Last Loves), he revolutionized British taste in favour of the previously ridiculed Victorian neo-Gothic style. He was an ardent conservationist, a leading light in the Victorian Society, and one of the “old masters” of television. As with Dr Johnson and Oscar Wilde, Betjeman’s significance derived not just from his merits as a writer, but from the impact of his personality on his times.