Betjemanesque Memories

Dylan Thomas tried to introduce Betjeman poems to an audience of bobby soxers in the 1940s; later, Philip Larkin, a poet often compared to Betjeman, also tried the experiment. Neither was wholly successful, and they are hard acts to follow; but I’ll have a go.

I first met him, through a happy accident, in 1971, when he was 65 and I was 31. My mother–who had some of the more benign attributes of a witch–would have said our encounter was “meant.” In 1969 I had been invited to a boardroom lunch at the Times, on whose staff I had served for six years. I found myself sitting next to the wine correspondent of the newspaper, Colonel Andrew Graham. He was rather like a colonel in an Agatha Christie whodunit; ramrod back, clipped accent, neat isosceles moustache. After awhile, I noticed that he was brushing the wine waiter aside.

“Is Lord Thomson’s wine so filthy?” I asked, referring to the Canadian proprietor of the Times.

Graham replied: “You’re meant to know something about pottery and porcelain, aren’t you?” (I had had a book published on those subjects the previous year.) “How would you like it, if every lunch you went to, you were asked to turn the soup-plate upside down and pronounce on the quality of the ware? Well, that’s the sort of thing that happens to me with wine. So I’m having beer instead.”

That broke the ice. We chatted and in the year that followed became friends. One day, in 1971, Graham said to me: “Look, I used to be comptroller of the British Embassy in Paris–in charge of catering–under both Duff Cooper and Gladwyn Jebb. As a result, I know virtually everyone who’s anyone. What I propose to do is this: I shall invite you, and any two people of your choice, to lunch at my flat in the Charterhouse [London]. Whom do you choose?”

After some careful thought, I chose Sir John Betjeman and Lady Diana Cooper–the celebrated beauty and wit whom men had already been clambering on to tables to look at when she arrived at parties in 1912.

Because Graham was wine correspondent of The Times, he received superb samples of wine–I think there was even a Pétrus. Those lubricated the conversation, and we all got on. That summer, I had organized a big exhibition of Art Deco in Minneapolis. I presented Betjeman with the catalog. He riffled through it enthusiastically, then declared that I had totally converted him to the jazzy 1920s Hoover Building in London. I may be giving myself airs, but I have a feeling that, in some sense, he saw his mantle falling on my shoulders–in that he had championed the despised Victorians; and now here was I, trying to do much the same for the then-abominated Deco style.

After that I met him quite often: first in his flat in Cloth Fair, near Smithfield Market in the City of London; later, for lunch, in a little Italian restaurant near his new home in Chelsea. It could be a bit of an ordeal, having lunch with Betjeman. He would insist on making remarks about other people in the restaurant, in a stentorian stage whisper: “I say, you see those chaps over there. Do you think they’re executives? I expect they’re discussing profit margins and feasibility surveys.” And of one man: “That girl with him, do you think she’s his secretary? Are they going back to his flat afterwards?” You could see the man’s ears reddening.

Betjeman loved jokes. I remember three in particular. One day, the salmon-like fish called smelt was on the restaurant menu. He ordered it. Bringing the dish to our table, the waiter asked, “Are you smelt, sir?”

Betjeman: “Only by the discerning.”

In 1972, he had been appointed Poet Laureate–poet by appointment to the Queen. When we met, I was living in Soho in a flat owned by Miss Christina Foyle, the bookseller. She had persuaded John Masefield, when he was Poet Laureate, to lay the foundation stone of the block of flats. The stone was engraved “LAID BY THE POET LAUREATE.”

“Every nice girl’s ambition,” Betjeman commented.

He had been at Magdalen College, Oxford, with a man called Bede Griffiths, who became a Roman Catholic monk. One day I told Betjeman that Griffiths was going out to India to try to reconcile Roman Catholicism and Hinduism.

“Oh, I see,” said Betjeman, “combining mumbo and jumbo in roughly equal proportions.”

But it was not all jokes. I found with Betjeman–as I have found with only one other great writer I have known (Iris Murdoch)–that he wanted to know everything about you; and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to tell him what you believed, whom you loved, or what was worrying you. And always he gave you that complete empathy that informs most of his poetry.

We tended to drink quite a lot at lunch. One day, after a specially boozy session, we were walking back to his Chelsea flat–he on the sidewalk, I in the gutter. There was just one of his poems that I had learned by heart–“Indoor Games near Newbury.” It is about the kind of love you can feel for another child at a children’s party, in this case set in the 1930s. As we walked along, I began by reciting the poem. I think he was tickled pink that I had bothered to memorize it; and he joined in–

In 1976 I resigned from my job as editor of The Connoisseur, an art-and-antiques magazine, because my salary was less than that of a New York dustman. I wrote my boss what I will call my “double or quits” letter–“Double my salary, or I quit”–and he said, “Quit.” Betjeman wrote to me, “Are you suffering from Angst?” (his favorite word of the moment) and invited me to lunch, that sovereign remedy for all ills. At lunch I asked whether I might become his authorized biographer; and after some obstacles had been rolled out of the way, he agreed to that.

I also had to meet his formidable wife Penelope, Lady Betjeman, the daughter of the Field-Marshal Lord Chetwode, who had been commander in chief of the army in India. She eyed me up and down.

“Do you ride?”

“Well, I never have done, but perhaps you could teach me.”

She snorted: “It’s awfully hard on the ponies, teaching beginners, but you’d better come and stay.”

I went to stay with her in the spartan cottage near Hay-on-Wye, Herefordshire. The moment I arrived, I was put on the back of a pony and she shouted “Trrrrot!” When the creature came to a juddering halt, with steam coming out of its nostrils, I was still, miraculously, in the saddle. I had passed muster, and that evening we made the first of many tape recordings. She was entirely candid about everything. She also cooked an excellent dinner.

Back in London, I began tape-recording Betjeman, too. He told me, among other things, how as a schoolboy he had begun a correspondence (about literature) with Lord Alfred Douglas, the former lover of Oscar Wilde. Betjeman’s father had discovered one of the letters and had told his son he was to stop writing to Douglas immediately. Betjeman also told me about his early visits to Ireland, when an Oxford undergraduate, to stay with the aristocrats like Lord Clonmore and Basil, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.

I think he enjoyed that recording session. But there are usually difficulties in writing the life of a living or recently dead person (Betjeman died in 1984). If you write, say, the biography of Oliver Cromwell, you first read the books on him that already exist, and begin to form an opinion or two; then you go to the libraries and houses that hold the original source documents–there is no one to say you nay. But in the case of Betjeman, my main problem was his girlfriend, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, sister of the then-Duke of Devonshire. She told me politely that she would not cooperate, that she wanted her privacy, and one could not quarrel with that: There is no law that says a woman has to cooperate with her boyfriend’s official biographer.

However, it was clear to me that she was against any biography appearing, and that she was naturally influencing Betjeman’s own thinking on the subject, as (though still married to Penelope) he lived with Lady Elizabeth, and whatever she had been to him in the early years of their relationship, she was effectively his nanny, too, ministering to his comfort and needs.

I saw that Betjeman was getting a “chilling of the feet.” So I made the decision to desist from tape-recording him. I thought that if I went on doing so, Lady Elizabeth would ask him to tell his publisher, John Murray (who was also to be the publisher of the biography): “Stop this work.” And if he did tell Murray that, Murray would stop it, because as a bestselling poet Betjeman was the goose that laid golden eggs for the firm.

Therefore, instead of going on recording Betjeman, I went to see all his friends and acquaintances, starting with the oldest, who might pop off first. I’m sure, as a result, I lost some priceless Betjeman anecdotes from the horse’s mouth; but at the same time, by getting other people’s opinions of him, I ended up with a much more objective portrait. I was even able to interview some of the old workmen who had worked for Betjeman’s father, Ernest, who made high quality dressing tables, game boxes, and other furniture to be sold in top London stores like Asprey in Bond Street.

It was Ernest’s great ambition that John, his only son, should enter that business as the fourth generation to do so. But, as Betjeman records in his long autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells (1960), when taken to the company’s workshop as a child, “I dug the chisel deep into my hand.” He was hopelessly impractical, and could never have made a success of the family business; but one of his father’s old employees said to me, with bitterness, that by not becoming chairman and continuing it, “John Betjeman allowed a great firm to go to rack and ruin.”

By “targeting” Betjeman’s old friends, I met famous and, in most cases, delightful people whom otherwise I might never have encountered. One was the artist John Piper, perhaps Betjeman’s closest male friend, and his wife Myfanwy, a muse to the poet who figures in two of his best poems. Piper loved to paint ancient buildings with a stormy sky in the background. During the Second World War King George VI asked him to paint a picture of Windsor Castle. While Piper was painting, in Windsor Great Park, the king came up behind him and said, “I’m sorry, Piper, it looks as if we’re in for a fine day.”

I also interviewed the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, who had been at Oxford with Betjeman, and the art historian Anthony Blunt (later unmasked as a Soviet spy), who had been at school with him at Marlborough College. Betjeman had hated Marlborough, which was more like a concentration camp than a school in the 1920s. One terrible torture was practiced on boys who became unpopular. They were stripped of almost all their clothing, had ink and treacle poured over them, and were hoist up to the ceiling rafters in a huge wastepaper basket. (They then had to leave Marlborough forever.)

Betjeman lived in mortal fear that he would be “basketed,” but as Blunt explained to me, “He made the bullies laugh, so they never victimized him.”

Oxford for Betjeman was champagne after water. It was like the Ugly Duckling discovering he was a swan. At Marlborough he had been considered a bit of a dunce–no good at Greek and Latin, which were the subjects that mattered there. (The writer Beverley Nichols, who had been at the school not long before Betjeman, said that those two languages were taught “not just as if they were dead, but as if they had never lived.”) At Oxford, too, he did not shine academically and began a long vendetta against his English tutor, C.S. Lewis, who is satirized in more than one of his poems. Lewis objected to Betjeman’s attending his one-on-one tutorials in carpet slippers, or missing them altogether with feeble and clearly mendacious excuses when, in reality, he was out lunching with the smart set. But Betjeman was a star at parties.

One of his best friends was Lord Clonmore, later Earl of Wicklow. Unfortunately, Wicklow died before I could get to Ireland to record his recollections; but I met his widow, in Dun Laoghaire, a seaside suburb of Dublin where I had spent many holidays with my parents in my childhood. I told Lady Wicklow that I remembered an aged Lady French who lived in the Royal Marine Hotel, Dun Laoghaire, where we stayed. I asked her if by any chance she was the widow of the First World War field marshal Lord French.

“Goodness, no,” she replied. “She had been a Miss Nixon; but I’m afraid we all called her ‘Miss Knicks-off’!”

After Oxford, Betjeman had held various posts with not much success. He was a master at two preparatory schools. He would enter a classroom by the window and lie on the floor while teaching. He was an inefficient secretary to Sir Horace Plunkett, an Irish politician obsessed by the concept of “cooperative creameries.” And he worked for a few years on The Architectural Review in London. While he got on well with the editor, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, he did not really fit in because Hastings was passionate about modern architecture, by Le Corbusier and others, while Betjeman liked arts-and-crafts and was gradually developing his taste for Victoriana.

In 1933 he married Penelope Chetwode. Her parents disapproved of him because he was a penniless, scruffy journalist and they would have preferred their daughter to marry an aristocrat with a pheasant shoot. “We ask people like him to our houses but we don’t marry them,” Lady Chetwode told her daughter.

The field marshal thought he had better get to know Betjeman, so he invited him to a grand white-tie dinner at the Savoy Hotel. Betjeman arranged to have a bow tie attached to a piece of elastic–something only a waiter would wear. During the course of the meal, he pulled the tie outwards and let it twang back into position, just to annoy his future father-in-law.

When the couple did finally marry, one of Chetwode’s servants made the mistake of calling the young lady “Miss Penelope.”

“She’s not Miss Penelope,” the field marshal barked. “She’s Mrs. Bargeman.”

The couple lived first in a London flat, then moved to a Berkshire farmhouse. They loved each other, but quarreled frequently. Their German maid long thought John’s first name was “Shutup,” as Penelope said that to him so often. But his financial prospects were improving. His father died in 1934, leaving him some money. In the same year, Betjeman became film critic of the Evening Standard. When he was asked to interview Myrna Loy, who was visiting London, he asked her, “Do you mind if I say you like English perpendicular [a style of medieval architecture]?”

“Fine by me, honey,” Loy replied.

His first book of poems had appeared, in eccentric binding, in 1931; and from then on he made a name for himself, partly as a poet, but also as a broadcaster on radio and on television. He was already making television programs before the war. During the war he worked at the Ministry of Information in London and later as press attaché to the British ambassador, Sir John Maffey, in neutral Ireland. (I was able to prove that, besides being what his wife called “a bogus diplomat,” he also acted as a spy–for Britain, of course.)

After the war there were more poems, culminating in the huge commercial success of his Collected Poems (1958), and a lot more broadcasting, including one of the classics of television filming, Metroland (1973), directed by Edward Mirzoeff. In that film, Betjeman visited places on the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground–finding, among other curiosities, a man who had moved a cinema Wurlitzer organ into his small suburban house.

He was also renowned as an architectural conservationist. He failed to save the Euston Arch in 1961–a great classical portico which stood in front of Euston Station in London. He also met defeat when he tried to rescue the cast-iron London Coal Exchange, which the City of London criminally demolished in 1962. But in 1963–having learned from these debacles–he managed to save the 1880s artistic settlement of Bedford Park in west London. Thereafter, no conservation campaign was considered valid without his illegible signature on the petition.

He was appointed poet laureate in 1972. Everyone thought he would be ideal in that role–with the Queen asking him to pen poems on the marriages of her children, and so on. But for two reasons he did not shine in it. First, he was suffering increasingly from Parkinson’s Disease, and second, as he told me, “I simply cannot write to order.” For him, inspiration came “from the Management” (as he referred to God, looking heavenward). It was not something he could turn on like a faucet.

Towards the end of my 28 years’ work on the biography, I had to try to work out what his future standing might be in English literature. Enough time had elapsed since his death to attempt a fair assessment. I think that when you are writing someone’s biography, there is a danger of claiming too much for him or her. I rather hedged my bets with Betjeman, writing, in pastiche of Gilbert and Sullivan: “He was the very model of a major minor poet.”

Some people think he will survive by his more serious poems. But Keats does love better, Wordsworth and Milton are more profound on death. To my mind, it is Betjeman’s humorous verse that will survive. His satires of the English middle class in the 1950s have a historical, as well as poetical, value. He was also a fine topographical poet. His friend Sir Harold Acton wrote to me: “He was the genius of the genius loci” and I wrote in the final volume of the biography, “If England stays much the same, it will be delightedly recognized in Betjeman’s poems; if ruined, it will survive in them.”

Perhaps I may also be allowed to quote the peroration of the biography which became a labor of love and almost a life’s work:

Bevis Hillier is the author of the three-volume authorized biography of Sir John Betjeman.