GHASTLY GOOD TASTE
Or, a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture
by John Betjeman
To Penelope Chetwode
Why, child, the only hope thou hast
Lies in they master’s want of taste;
For shou’d his ling’ring stay in London
Improve your taste, you must be undone
William Whitehead
Poems on Several Occasions, 1784
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Introduction: An Aesthete’s Apologia
CHAPTER I An Apostrophe to One of the Landed Gentry
CHAPTER II The Argument of the Book
CHAPTER III Christendom
CHAPTER IV The Upper Classes Take Over from Holy Church
CHAPTER V Educated Architecture
CHAPTER VI Regency Architecture
CHAPTER VII Middle Class Architecture
CHAPTER VIII Revolt in the Middle Classes
Conclusion
About the Author
Copyright
Preface
The author is indebted to so many persons and friends for so much conversation and advice that he can but specify some whose direct influence and help make it possible for him to express particular gratitude. First, his host and hostess in Westmeath have caused this book to exist. Next, Mr Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh’s brilliant drawing at the end of the book is far clearer and far more important than the text. Next, from de Cronin Hastings came much help, though not as much as in former times. Mr Frederick Etchells, F.R.I.B.A., kindly played Batty Langley to the author’s Lord Ongley. Mr Arthur Waugh gave valuable assistance. The author acknowledges the interest of his father in looking over the proofs, for his advice, coupled with that of a friend of high position and peculiar appearance, did much to rid the text of some of its prejudices.
Mr E. W. Hamilton and Mr W. E. Levear, of Messrs Chapman & Hall, and Mr A. E. Doyle, of Gravesend, and Lady Mary St Clair Erskine, of Horsham, have been of great assistance over the format and typography. Finally, the author is indebted to Mr C. S. Lewis, of Oxford, whose jolly personality and encouragement to the author in his youth have remained an unfading memory for the author’s declining years.
Introduction · An Aesthete’s Apologia
I wrote this book thirty-eight years ago. I was twenty-six, in love, and about to be married. When Anthony Blond said he would like to reprint it, I thought I had better read it, and he kindly sent me a copy. I am appalled by its sententiousness, arrogance and the sweeping generalisations in which it abounds. The best things about it are the fancy cover, which I designed myself from display types found in the capacious nineteenth-century premises of Stevens, Shanks & Sons, 89 Southwark Street, type founders. In their collection they discovered for me the little railway train and the founts which in descending order are Ultra Bodoni, Argentine, Bodoni, Rustic. I have an idea that the sans-serif outline capitals in which the word ‘Illustration’ is written, is a Grotesque. The black letter for ‘Mr Fleetwood-Hesketh’ is Westminster. The text of the book is in a modern face, because most books on architecture in the early thirties were printed in a sans-serif a long way after Gill, and to print a book of this size and to use an italic running commentary at the top of each right-hand page was hopelessly old-fashioned.
Display types were generally sans-serif and title-page and cover had to be pure and empty-looking, and nothing quite in the middle, so as to show that it was up to date.
The real point of the book was the Street of Taste, or the March of English Art down the Ages, specially drawn by Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh, with traffic to match. This pull-out was also an old-fashioned thing to do, and the style of architectural caricature was deliberately based on Pugin’s caricatures in his book Contrasts (1836). This pull-out was what caused people to buy the book, and looking back at it, I regard it as far less modish and much more balanced than the text. Mr Fleetwood-Hesketh has kindly continued the depressing theme up to 1970.
I thought it might be helpful to attempt an aesthetic autobiography up to the date when this book was published. Most people who were small children when the 1914 war started and with an interest in buildings, will have had similar aesthetic experiences. I have thought it best to be extremely personal at the risk of seeming egotistic, because I can see no other way of explaining the state of mind which enabled me to dash out this book in something like a white-hot fury.
My own interest started in seeking out what was old. When the guide told me that this was the bed in which Queen Elizabeth slept, I believed him. When owners of country cottages in Suffolk told me their cottage was a thousand years old, I believed them too. I thought that this or that church was the smallest in England, and that secret passages ran under ruined monasteries, so that monks could get to the nearest convent without being seen. The older anything was the lovelier I thought it. I was quite uncritical, as are hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens in the same happy state of childlike innocence about architecture.
The next stage of interest started at about the age of twelve. This was a preoccupation with the different styles of mediaeval parish churches. It goes with detective fiction, for it is great fun discovering a half-hidden Norman arch or a blocked-up squint or a banner-stave locker (whatever that may have been). Saxon was crude and rude and scarce, Norman was strong and bold like William the Conqueror and easy to recognise, because the arches were round. The next style, Early English, was the purest, because it was the beginning of Gothic, and things are always pure when they begin. The next style was the curvilinear and geometrical tracery and foliated capitals of Decorated, the middle style and generally regarded as the perfection of Gothic. For when things are in their middle they are perfect. After this came the debased but omnipresent Perpendicular style, which was to be found in all the churches I knew, particularly in those of Norfolk and Cornwall.
Uncritically in these days I loved every Tudor manor house and thatched cottage on a green and every timber-framed tile-hung farmhouse with brick chimney stacks. Doubtless many a church which I admired as the perfection of Gothic, that is to say, Decorated, was really Victorian, while most of the thatched and tile-hung houses and Tudor manor houses were Victorian too. I could not tell the fake from the genuine.
I think a sense of architecture in the round comes with puberty. It is then that one begins to appreciate proportion and shape and lines of construction. At my private school, Lynam’s, at Oxford, I was lucky enough to be allowed to go off with friends bicycling in the limestone villages of Oxon., and also to visit the colleges in the University itself. By the time I had reached my public school at Marlborough in Wiltshire, the absence of limestone, the comparative paucity of parish churches within bicycling distance, the bare chalk downs, beechwoods, brick cottages and thatched barns, did not have the appeal of either Oxford and the Cotswolds, or the tall flint wool churches of Norfolk, or those granite and round-roofed boat-builders’ jobs, the churches of Cornwall. Life was rougher, food was worse, and fears were greater.
Architecture was hardly mentioned at Marlborough and it was not until I was over sixteen that I became aware of it as part of the school surroundings. Then there were two influences working in contrary directions. There was that good, delightful and hospitable man Colonel Christopher Hughes, the art master. He treated us as adults and led us off on sketching expeditions to villages which were then remote, down chalky and flinty lanes rarely invaded by the motor car. Here we would sit in front of a thatched barn, a haystack or a row of summer elms and make a rough outline in pencil of what we saw, before applying the watercolour. ‘Wet the whole surface for sky, apply cobalt an
d ultramarine but no prussian blue, and if you want a grey cloud add light red to the ultramarine while the surface is still wet. Now apply blotting paper or a handkerchief to get the patchy effect of clouds. The sky should be a deeper blue at the top, paling as it reaches the horizon.’ When the paint dried the effect was indeed often quite remarkable. After that one painted the rest of the picture using a light yellow first where it was needed, either on its own or as a background to greens. ‘Never use artificial greens, like green bice, but make your own out of combinations of yellow and blue.’ All this industry was accompanied by talk about anything except sex. Then there was tea in a cottage with Wiltshire lardy cake. I was never much good at watercolours. John Edward Bowle, the historian, was much the best, and won the Art Cup in 1924. He could paint the downs, big elm trees heavy with shadow and thatched cottages, worthy of an R.S.W. or even an R.A. These sketching expeditions taught me to appreciate the importance of the setting of a building, the shapes of trees, and the effects of light in different weathers, and at different times of day. I still secretly thought that if anyone had invented colour photography—and they had not invented it then—there would be no need for us to do watercolours. Constable and Arnesby Brown, my father’s two favourite landscape artists, I thought had they known about colour photography, would have used the camera instead of going to all that trouble with oil paint. As for the pre-Raphaelites, obviously they would have used colour cameras.
Meanwhile there was an anti-art master and sketching movement in the school. This was headed by Ellis Waterhouse (now Professor of Fine Arts and Director of the Barber Institute, Birmingham) and Anthony Blunt (now Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art). It was through them and Anthony’s elder brother, Wilfred, that we art enthusiasts learned of the existence of the French Impressionists and particularly the painting of Cézanne, which Christopher Hughes thought little of. I do not think Ellis or Anthony ever drew or painted anything themselves, certainly they never went on Christopher Hughes’s sketching expeditions. But they told us about Clive Bell and Significant Form and Roger Fry. They were much cleverer boys than the rest of us, and early became members of the sixth and of the entourage of ‘Gussie’, that is to say Mr G. N. Sargeaunt, a remote, distinguished figure, whom it was never my privilege to know. To Christopher Hughes these original and useful Marlborough aesthetes were pretentious. He did not think that they understood about perspective and technique, and he had anyhow little sympathy with Impressionism. He was at heart a pre-Raphaelite. His father was the Hughes of Ward & Hughes, stained-glass artists, and his father had trained him. His father died, aged 100, in the late 1940s. Meanwhile Anthony Blunt bought for us reproductions of Italian primitives and Renaissance painters, which we hung in our studies. These paintings made me realise I could never be an artist myself, I would never master the technique. I began to believe that English painting was provincial and not ‘great’. The Italians and the French are the only good painters. This made Christopher Hughes defend the Dutch. We were much pleasurably torn by this aesthetic dispute. When I say ‘we’ I mean the aesthetes at Marlborough, for it was at that time a Philistine and hearty school, where games were worshipped and the O.T.C. was compulsory. The courage and influence of Anthony Blunt, and the continued tolerance and kindness of Christopher Hughes, and most important of all the formation of an Art Society gave us hope and happiness. The Art Society was inspired by two distinguished housemasters, Clifford Canning, later Headmaster of Canford, and George Turner, later Master of Marlborough, and finally Headmaster of Charterhouse. They lent us their rooms, their books and their hospitality.
Hitherto architecture had been a pleasure only for the holidays. Holidays in London were the most rewarding. My father was fond of Georgian silver and furniture. I liked Georgian books for the smell of their cream-coloured paper, their wide margins, brownish black type and the use of the long ∫ for s. I read, without fully understanding them, most of the poems in Dodsley’s Miscellany. Part of the joy of this was that eighteenth-century poetry was not considered good by English Literature standards at school. It was thought artificial. Thereafter the artificial became my hobby. The more artificial it was the more I liked it. An uncle gave me a copy of Austin Dobson’s ‘Ballad of Beau Brocade’, with illustrations by Hugh Thompson. Dobson seemed to me a better poet even than the eighteenth-century ones themselves.
Phyllida my Phyllida
She dons her russet gown
And runs to gather maydew
Before the world is down.
Goodness knows what gathering maydew was, I didn’t question such beauty. In the Mound on which had stood a castle at Marlborough, Lady Hertford had in the eighteenth century caused a grotto to be built and a spiral path to ascend the mountain’s brow. The grotto was used as a potato shed and kept locked. Through a wire grating I could just espy the felspar and shells with which its walls were adorned and, I delighted in the words of Stephen Duck, Lady Hertford’s tame Wiltshire poet:
Calypso, thus attended by her train,
With rural palaces adorns the plain.
On sketching expeditions I now spurned the old cottages and sought out eighteenth-century buildings. The most beautiful I saw in the neighbourhood was Ramsbury Manor House, a more sophisticated version of Lady Hertford’s dwelling at Marlborough. It stood in a landscaped park and could be seen from a bridge across a lake, a gravel drive curling elegantly up its front door. No words can express my longing to get inside this house, and to see its furniture and library. What the Louvre was to Anthony Blunt and the Parthenon to the boring master who taught us Greek, Ramsbury Manor was to me. I think the mystery of its winding drive gave me a respect for the system of hereditary landowning which I have never shaken off. Christopher Hughes understood this interest in eighteenth-century buildings, and sympathised with my inability to draw Ramsbury and Classical symmetry to my, or his, satisfaction. It also set him, and eventually the aesthetes, into discussing the merits and demerits of the Victorians. Christopher Hughes regarded Landseer as a ridiculous artist, and his picture ‘Dignity and Impudence’ of two dogs, as a debasement of art. Thenceforward with the natural contrariness of my nature, I became fascinated by Victorian art and architecture. I extended the fascination to poets, and read long epics like Israel in Egypt by Edwin Atherstone. I bought at second-hand bookshops Keepsakes and similar annuals with steel engravings and Byronic lyrics. I bought Victorian anthologies of poetry with wood engravings by Birket Foster and Pinwell. These could then be purchased for sixpence or a shilling and in mint condition. I read a paper to the Art Society ridiculing, while half admiring, Victorian poets and artists. Their architecture I thought then was not to be taken seriously, as it was purely imitative and rather vulgar.
Holidays were spent exploring churches. Those in London pleased me most as I had outgrown most parish churches of mediaeval date in East Anglia and Cornwall. All I wanted to see was the Renaissance. I visited every London church attributed to Wren and his successors. I read the criticisms of George Godwin Junior in The Churches of London (2 vols.), C. Tilt, 1839, and of James Elmes in Metropolitan Improvements, or London in the 19th century, London, Jones & Co., 1827. Through these books I learned architectural terms, Greek, Roman and Gothic, structural and detail. I also read every Edwardian book on architecture I could find. By the time I reached Oxford in 1925, I had become bored by Gothic, whether it was genuine or false. This may have been largely due to the still unforgivable technological terms people will use when describing mediaeval buildings—the wearisome footnotes and the anxiety not to be caught out by being wrong in an attribution or a date. The letters F.S.A after a name have always, since those days, caused me to shudder. I realise now that antiquaries have become more liberal in their opinions and that the new profession of architectural history has done what was hardly attempted in the 1920s, it has discriminated between the shoddy and the solid and it has even admitted the present century into its consideration. But in the l
ate twenties and early thirties the heralds of that discrimination were few and little heard. At Oxford, where I could buy books from Blackwell’s and had no conscience about running up bills which I hoped my father would eventually pay, I bought Professor Richardson’s Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland, Batsford, 1912. With its large sepia photographs, measured drawings, and informed text, it opened to me a world more exciting even than that of Hawksmoor and Vanburgh. I had never before heard of anyone admiring the British Museum for its architecture, or Somerset House or St George’s Hall, Liverpool, or Waterloo Bridge, which was then still standing to Rennie’s design. I started to look at the Romano-Greek and Banks by C. R. Cockerell and Euston Great Hall and Portico by P. C. Hardwick. The Professor became my hero, and has always remained so.
There were, of course, the officially approved books on officially approved architecture, that is to say Jacobean and early English Renaissance and the work of Lutyens and the gardens for early Lutyens houses laid out by Miss Jekyll. These, however, were less interesting to me than what could then be bought for five or ten shillings at the many suburban and provincial second-hand bookshops which then abounded. Here I found late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century books of designs for lodges, villas, and country mansions, illustrated with sepia and sometimes with coloured aquatints. These gave me a vision of Georgian England which was utterly different from those seen in the big Batsford books or in the books of watercolours of different counties and towns published by A. and C. Black. It was a different England too from that so romantically illustrated in the drawings by F. L. Griggs in the ‘Highways and Byeways’ series published by Macmillan. These Georgian aquatinted books added to my respect for the landed proprietor, with his gate lodge, park, walled garden, pinetum, icehouse, library, saloon, home farm and spreading stables. I had already had a taste for this sort of thing when staying in the houses of Oxford friends. Nowhere though could the eighteenth-century country house as shown in the aquatint more perfectly be seen than in Ireland. Oxford friends of Anglo-Irish descent asked me to their castles, abbeys and halls in the quiet Midlands of Ireland. The leisurely train journey from Harcourt Street or Kingsbridge, the locked Church of Ireland church in a Gothic only one removed from the Gothick of Strawberry Hill, the winding avenue and sheet of water, the fine outward show and the inward damp splendour slightly dried by burning logs in some marble-surrounded hearth, made me think Ireland the most beautiful country in the world, and its inhabitants the most learned and poetical. Nor have I ever ceased to admire the Anglo-Irish race, which has produced so many great sailors, soldiers, revolutionaries and writers.
Ghastly Good Taste Page 1