Ghastly Good Taste

by John Betjeman

  No one in the late twenties, however, with the hunger marches and the unemployed in England, could help regarding the sort of Ireland I venerated as anything but an escape. Many of my Oxford friends, and it was at Oxford, rather than at school or in later life, that I made the most, were actively engaged in politics, and of course most of my friends who were aesthetes were Left-wing. In the General Strike, under the influence of Hugh Gaitskell, Lionel Perry and John Dugdale, all of whom were interested in architecture and art, as well as politics, I felt obliged to be in sympathy with the strikers. We were organised by Mr and Mrs G. D. H. Cole. At Didcot I stood about waiting to carry messages for the N.U.R., but there were none to carry. At one of the private schools at which I taught after having to leave Oxford without a degree, as so many of us did in those days, the headmaster was an Old Etonian and a Cambridge man; he was also, surprisingly, a paid-up Communist Party member. Palme Dutt, Rust and Campbell were my new leaders. I bought Das Kapital by Marx in an English translation, but could never get beyond the first two paragraphs. I subscribed to the Worker’s Weekly and liked to be seen reading it in public transport. The world seemed to be drawing to a dawn where all men were equal, and where in some way ‘work of each for weal of all’ would be done for us by machinery, while we in happy equality pursued our private hobbies. I was, in fact, a parlour pink, and bored by politics. I was also Anglo-Catholic, and thought I had found the solution of life in the teaching of Conrad Noel, the Red Vicar of Thaxted, with his lovely incense-laden, banner-hung, marigold-decorated church, with its folk-dancing and hand weaving, going hand-in-hand with joyous religion, in what was then unspoiled country. It was also a reawakening for me of an interest in mediaeval churches. This time I visited them not just for their architecture, but also for their churchmanship. As I was earning my own living by now I was not often able to go abroad. My most rewarding experience thus was a visit to the Rhine and the Baroque Palaces of Germany and the Moravian settlement at Neuweid for its Easter ceremonies.

  The more serious-minded told me the only important book on architecture was Geoffrey Scott’s Architecture of Humanism. I did not find it easy reading. Of greater use was Christopher Hussey’s The Picturesque (1927), which was the first book to burst away from Edwardian gardening to an appreciation of the parks and prospects created in the eighteenth century by Capability Brown. Good and Bad Manners in Architecture by A. Trystan Edwards (1924) was the first book to draw attention after the Great War to Regency architecture and to deplore the destruction of Nash’s Regent Street. The countryside was being defended against spec. builders and advertisement hoardings and litter droppers by another pioneer in the appreciation of Georgian architecture, Clough Williams Ellis (The Pleasures of Architecture and England and the Octopus).

  In those merry days of the late twenties and early thirties, it was still possible to find employment without passing examinations. Old friends pulled strings. My friend Maurice Bowra, then Dean of Wadham, approached the late Maurice Hastings, who first discovered the origin of the English Perpendicular style, and Maurice Hastings spoke to his quiet brother, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, and I was accepted on to the staff of The Architectural Review. It was all I could desire, though the salary was but £300 a year. I was sent round by Christian Barman, the nominal editor of the magazine, to architects’ offices to fetch drawings and photographs to be reproduced. In this way I met Sir Edwin Lutyens, who was as welcoming as he was fascinating, and with the aid of a penny and a pencil drew the outlines of mouldings, and showed how a semicircle looked like half a tube, while a little less or a little more made all the difference. Arthur J. Davis of Mewes and Davis, was equally affable and instructive, and told me about how to make steps easy walking in hotels, and showed me his work at the Ritz. He was very dapper and businesslike and not at all the bow-tie tweedy type of architect with a pipe, which was the general run in those days. Frederick Etchells, who had recently been called in to help an architect out with the design of Crawford’s building in Holborn, became a lifelong friend. I used to go and stay with him and his wife in Berkshire. His inspired monologues on architecture at last made me realise the difference between genuine modern and moderne. Etchells had translated Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture, which was compulsive and compulsory reading for all who were slightly Left and thought that nothing was quite so up to date as the architecture of France and Germany. Etchells had worked in the Omega workshops with Roger Fry, and as a Vorticist had contributed to a paper called Blast, with Wyndham Lewis and Pound. He had a great contempt for established architects and a great admiration for surveyors and civil engineers. He was also at heart in sympathy with the arts and crafts movement. Through the Review I became friends of these older arts and crafts architects, who were then regarded as anachronisms. I came to know old Mr Voysey in his little flat over Rumpelmeyer’s off St James’s Street; George Walton, then living in a flat in Westminster; Basil Oliver and two who remained friends to me to the end of their lives, J. N. Comper and M. H. Baillie Scott as already were John Summerson, Goodhart Rendel and Osbert Lancaster.

  What made The Architectural Review a commercial success was its advertisement pages. These were for bronze doors, electroliers, paint, cement, stone and concrete. The editorial policy sometimes did not run in harness with the advertisers. In a mysterious way H. de C. Hastings, the real commander of The Architectural Press and its weekly, The Architect’s Journal, caused the modern style to prevail. A profound influence on him and on us all was P. Morton Shand, an indefatigable, disillusioned and amusing journalist from Eton and Cambridge, and as famous as a judge of wine as he was of the modern architecture of Germany, Holland, Switzerland and Sweden. In the late twenties everything Swedish was admired. By the thirties the Dutch and the German took precedence, and the Bauhaus group was the most modern of all.

  In the world of literature, I frequented the Squirearchy, as it was called, that is the group round that most generous and kindly of editors, J. C. Squire, who was the first person to publish a poem by me. His assistant was an Oxford friend, Alan Pryce Jones. Squire and Etchells, I thought so alike in appearance, that I asked them both to lunch, but when they were together they did not look quite the same, though their views on architecture coalesced.

  It was through the entourage of J. C. Squire that I met Eric Gillett, and in conversation with him he thought of the book and its title. Arthur Waugh, head of Chapman & Hall, for whom Eric worked, had the courage to publish the book. I should add in case this appears too solemn an apologia, that architecture can be extremely funny, and that Osbert Lancaster, the Fleetwood-Hesketh brothers, Fredk Etchells, Michael Dugdale and John Summerson and my colleagues on The Architectural Review, added their wit to the enjoyment.

  It was in this muddled state—wanting to be up to date but really preferring all centuries to my own—that I wrote this book, and in trying to defend myself, I seem almost to have written another.

  July 1970

  John Betjeman

  Chapter I · An Apostrophe to One of the Landed Gentry

  Pechasom gyd â’n tadau; gownaethom

  gamwedd, anwireddus fuom.—Psalmau

  This I address to you as you are sitting in the library of your country house. The gun-room is dusty and the stables are deserted, you are fond of your library although you would not think of reading many of the books in it. The library is no longer a place of learning, it has become a place of refuge. It is enough for you to know that beyond the mouldering brick walls of the kitchen garden to the west, beyond the empty stables to the east, beyond the vast and unused kitchens to the south and beyond the curving drive surveyed by your library windows is about a mile of undulating park, buzzing with bees and cluster flies. But round the park the roaring tarmac roads coil. The steady humming and distant impatient hoots get nearer every year, as you sell and sell. Soon the cars and the people will be coming up the drive.

  In your library there is no sign of the ancestors who founded your family. They lived in a
house built for convenience before architecture became a self-conscious art. Their only memorials are in the church (removed by your grandfather from the old building at the ‘restoration’ of 1863); possibly these founders of your family brought prosperity to the village which still retains its mediaeval plan and unself-conscious cottages and barns.

  In 1600 the old manor house disappeared and an ancestor built a fine building and called it The Hall. He ceased to care so much about the church, and thought more of travel and learning. His son bought books on travel, which saved him the trouble of going on long journeys. His fervent imagination was fired by poetical descriptions, mostly in verse, of Ind and Far Cathay. Possibly some of these books were removed from the old house when the library was built. If so, you have probably had to sell them. When your royalist seventeenth-century ancestor collected books, religious pamphlets were flying—by Penn and Muggleton, Whiston and Stillingfleet. There was more prose, and poetry was of a different sort. So in a few years your family had changed from one in Christendom to one in a nation. Once it had taken to buccaneering. Later it had preferred reading about buccaneers.

  At the beginning of the eighteenth century the library in which you are standing was probably built. The heavy cornice with its fine plaster, the well-proportioned book-cases of carved oak and convenient shelves, the Italian marble mantelpiece and the long Venetian windows, were designed by some local architect who had studied Palladio and who had even met Inigo Jones. The plaster panel in the ceiling was left white until Sir James Thornhill should be passing that way, to lie on his back on a scaffold and paint a nice representation in it of your ancestor’s wife, surrounded, in her semi-nudity, by cupids holding cream-like streamers. Meanwhile, more books were filling the library. Dogmatic, mystic or prophetic books on religion were being displaced by exquisitely printed folios of the classics. Curious and abusive pamphlets of Royalists and Puritans were put in the small shelves up near the ceiling, and in the lower shelves, level with the wainscoting were books on perspective and the drawings of Michael Angelo neatly engraved upon copper, and printed on fine thick Dutch paper which to this day preserves its consistency. The title-page was no longer cramped with ruled lines and a crowded summary of the contents of the book wedged in between them; the page contained few words and those large and exquisitely printed; after this would follow a second title page, this time engraved with some scene or patron’s coat-of-arms. The books were becoming lavish, objects of beauty in themselves as well as repositories of information. Meanwhile the Puritan, with all this conscious art going on at the Hall, would murmur from his industrious farmhouse or forge ‘Pagan … Pagan’.

  By 1730 the son of the Hall is ready to go on his Grand Tour, and to come back with cloudy impressions of the new buildings of Italy and a detestation of the disorder of his own countryside. The village can remain where it is, with the cottages huddled round the church, although the church itself might do with a little improvement. That mutilated chancel screen can disappear; those old uncomfortable oak benches can be replaced with neat high boxes, in which one can sit at one’s ease instead of being under the languorous eye of one’s cousin the parson. One will even add a bit of art to the church and, when the old father dies, commission Roubiliac or Rysbrack up in London to carve a fine tomb for him, representing Death with a javelin aiming a blow at his old heart. Since the village is untidy, this son of the Hall can at least set an example by clearing up his own park. Those yew hedges which obscure the garden front must be removed, and now that they are down, how mean appears the front of the old house itself. The architect who had met Inigo Jones is in his grave, your ancestor’s father is in his dotage, so what harm can there be in adding a new front? An architect from London who has published one of those fine books that there are in the library comes down to stay and suggests even further improvements. The new front is finished, but it must look on something equally lovely. Remove those trees, and clear away the home farm to some place further from the wall, so that the ploughed field over there may not interrupt the prospect. Now at the end of that long vista, which will in forty years be neatly interspersed with beech clumps, place a Roman temple. At the end of the lawn, where the grass seems scarcely to change in quality with that below the ha-ha, place some statue of Diana to catch the eye, and that will add to the classic beauty of the place already created by the herd of red deer. Near the red brick walled-in kitchen-garden, whence that view of a bend in the river can be secured, let us place a gazebo. And add on to this elevation of Clotworthy’s farm the two dimensional semblance of an arched colonnade. Clotworthy will not mind. But the Puritan, who himself owns a neighbouring farm to Clotworthy’s, the Muggletonian blacksmith, the Calvinistic linen-draper in Tetbury, the Methodistical grocer in the same town and the enthusiastical parson in the village church itself who has replaced the aged cousin will preach quite openly on ‘The Paganism … the Wickedness … the Vanity of Riches at the Hall’.

  In 1790 the son of the improver, the grandson of the builder of the seventeenth century house, is ready to go on the Grand Tour. He has already developed a taste for antiquarianism. In the library may be found books on numismatics alongside the editions of Mr Pope. And his father has regretted the money spent on improvements in his youth. He has become friendly with the enthusiastical parson, and the library is filled with books on the Calvinistic and Arminian controversy by Top-lady, Wesley, Whitefield, and he has even had a visit from the Countess of Huntingdon, who has appraised his old age and heaped coals of fire upon his youth. But the son is never out of the library. There is one book which attracts him more than any. It is a two volume work on the antiquities of Athens by Messrs Stewart and Revett, architects; on his Grand Tour he will go beyond Rome to Greece, to the Parthenon, to Halicarnassus itself. He goes, and when he returns his father is dead and there is room for plenty of improvement in the Hall. A taste for the Gothic he has lately acquired through a slight acquaintance with William Beckford when on a visit to Spain, and Gothic is clearly the style for the English landscape. That temple can be replaced by a ruined Gothic arch which may be mistaken for the remains of a monastery. That wall of Clotworthy’s farm, which looks so ridiculous with a colonnade, can be made to resemble a monument in the castellated style by the addition of some buttresses and crenellations. Clotworthy will not mind. But the congregation of Baptists, which was founded round the family at the farm, neighbouring on Clotworthy’s, the large congregation of the Calvinistic Chapel in Tetbury, and the Methodist Chapel in the same town and the few atheists in the village itself; in fact, many people, except the parson and the churchmen, preach and pray against ‘The wastefulness and the paganism … and the vanity at the Hall’. And they preach and pray to some purpose too about Paganism, because did not your ancestor at the Hall spend the last years of his life on an ingenious archaeological history of the county, in which he showed that the Druids who had set up the stones at Barbury Camp were the very same as the Ancient Greeks themselves? To this purpose he collected those unsaleable antiquarian books which fill more than half the shelves around you.

  By 1830 the son of the Hall is not ready to go on the Grand Tour. What a disappointment this is to his old antiquarian father! The boy had been up in London. He had got into the set around the King. He preferred drinking, though his father did not grudge him that; he preferred gambling, though his father did not grudge him that; he preferred witty conversation, though his father did not grudge him that; but he had taken to politics and had no use for taste. Quite rightly he was opposed to the passing of the ridiculous Reform Bill. To add to the old man’s trouble a merchant family had seen fit to come and live on the next estate. They had taken down the old farmhouse which had once been the manor of the next village. They had set up in its place an enormous yellow stucco mansion which, although he had to confess he admired the Greek detail and simplicity of the exterior, and the spacious and somewhat heavy furnishing within, was yet a little vulgar, a little too much ‘all-of-a-piece’, a littl
e too devoid of learning to be entirely to his antiquarian taste. Moreover, his son took to these people, and even went so far as to marry the daughter. ‘One knows people of that sort but one does not marry them.’ The old man died.

  His son, who had been an honest, open-hearted fellow, more given to politics than to education, was sorry about this. In 1840 he saw that the country was breaking up over the democrats. He joined the Oxford movement. That is why those quantities of tracts, somewhat ill-printed and badly bound, occupy the dusty shelves up at the top, alongside the earlier religious pamphlets. That is why the old church, too, was removed and that lavish structure, designed by Sir Gilbert Scott, put up in 1863 when the political son became old. Its prussian blue and light-red stained glass, its brass lectern, glistening encaustic tiles, reflected in the sticky pitch-pine benches, its hand-chiselled, yet conveniently mediaeval appearance was more suited to a ritualistic service than had been the inconvenient older building. Besides, the Vicar was a relation again. But the Atheists in the village, the Quakers at Clotworthy’s neighbour’s farm, the Ranters, who had supplanted the Calvinists in influence at Tetbury, and the Wesleyan New Connexion in the same town, the political club and the Benthamites all shouted against ‘the ritualism, the class distinction, the idleness and the waste of money at the Hall.’