JOHN BETJEMAN
FIRST AND LAST LOVES
Dedicated to the memory of GERALD HAYNES Schoolmaster of Lynam’s, Oxford, who first opened my eyes to architecture
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
LOVE IS DEAD
1 WINTER AT HOME
2 BOURNEMOUTH
3 CHELTENHAM
4 ABERDEEN GRANITE
5 LEEDS—A CITY OF CONTRASTS
6 THE ISLE OF MAN
7 ANTIQUARIAN PREJUDICE
8 THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENTERTAIN MENT
9 LONDON RAILWAY STATIONS
10 NONCONFORMIST ARCHITECTURE
11 1837–1937
THE DRIFT TOWARDS UGLINESS
THE LAST DAYS OF TRADITION
THE MORRIS MOVEMENT
12 VICTORIAN ARCHITECTURE
ILLUSTRATED NOTES TO VICTORIAN ARCHITECTURE
13 THREE CHURCHES
BLISLAND, CORNWALL
MILDENHALL, WILTS
ST. MARK’S, SWINDON
14 COAST AND COUNTRY
VENTNOR
IN AND AROUND FRESHWATER, I.O.W.
HAYLING ISLAND
LYNDHURST
WEYMOUTH
SIDMOUTH
LOOE
ST. ENDELLION
PORT ISAAC
PADSTOW
ILFRACOMBE
CLEVEDON
HIGHWORTH
INDEX
About the Author
Copyright
ILLUSTRATIONS
Cheltenham Panorama by John Piper
Nonconformist Chapels by John Piper
1 Friars’ Street, Ipswich
2 Underbank Stennington, nr Sheffield
3 Unitarian Chapel, Bury St Edmunds
4 Cote Baptist Chapel, nr Bampton, Oxon
5 Lady Huntingdon Chapel, Worcester
6 Louth, Lincolnshire, Methodist
7 Blockley, Gloucestershire
8 Swaffham, Norfolk
9 Market Harborough, Leicestershire
10 Oundle
11 Donhead, Wiltshire
12 Blaenconin
13 Belgelley, Pembrokeshire
14 Between Cardigan and Aberayron
15 Kilgelley, Pembrokeshire
16 Near Cardigan
17 Mawgan-in-Meneage, Cornwall, exterior
18 Mawgan-in-Meneage, Cornwall, interior
19 Tisbury, Wiltshire
20 Louth, Lincolnshire, Congregational
21 Legbourne, Lincolnshire
22 Broad Town, Wiltshire
23 Great Yarmouth
South London, 1872, from Gustave Doré’s London (1872)
King’s Cross Station, 1851, from Fergusson’s History of the Modern Styles of Architecture (3rd edition, Murray, 1891)
York Central Station, c. 1890, from an old photograph
St. George’s Hall, Liverpool, 1841, from Monumental Classical Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland by A. E. Richardson (Batsford, 1914)
National Provincial Bank, Sunderland, 1878, from the Building News (1879)
Catholic Apostolic Church, Gordon Square, London, 1855, from The Catholic Apostolic Church, Gordon Square by J. Malcolm Lickfold (1935)
Lancing Chapel, Sussex, 1854–1870, from the Building News (1877)
The Rathaus, Hamburg, 1878, by Sir Gilbert Scott, from the Building News
Alternative Design for the Rathaus, Hamburg, by Sir Gilbert Scott, from the Building News
St. John the Evangelist, Red Lion Square, London, 1874–1878, from the Building News (1879)
University Museum, Oxford, 1852–1855, from The History of the Gothic Revival by C. Eastlake (1872)
Drawings for Cardiff Castle, 1865, from Transactions of the R.I.B.A. (vol. 1, New Series, 1885)
William Burges’s House, Melbury Road, Kensington, 1870–1881, from The House of William Burges by R. P. P. Pullan (1883)
All Saints, Margaret Street, London, 1849–1850, from The Builder
Drawing for Keble College Chapel, Oxford, 1876. A drawing from Butterfield’s office, by permission of the Warden and Fellows of Keble College
St. Columba’s, Haggerston, London, 1867–1869, from the Building News
Cuddesdon Theological College, Oxford, 1853–1854, from the Building News
Sketch of Saint-Julien, Brioude, France, by G. E. Street, from The Transactions of the R.I.B.A. (1889)
Bristol Cathedral, restored 1868–1888, from The Builder (1878)
Manchester Town Hall, 1877, from New Town Hall, Manchester, ed. William E. A. Axon (1878)
New Zealand Chambers, London, 1872, from the Building News (1873)
Design for Devonshire Street, E.C.2, 1877, from the Building News
Charlemont House, Dublin, c. 1773, from Views of the most remarkable Public Buildings, Monuments and other Edifices in the City of Dublin by Robert Pool and John Cash (1780)
“Wispers,” Midhurst, Sussex, 1875, from Transactions of the R.I.B.A. (vol. 1, 1885)
House in North Oxford, 1870, from the Building News (1870)
Hostelry, Bedford Park, London, 1878, from the Building News (1880)
Cottage at Rochdale, 1895, from Academy Architecture
St. Agnes, Kennington, 1877, from The Builder
Mission Church, 1875, from the Building News
Church of the Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, 1877, from The Builder (1877)
Church of the Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell, 1888, drawing by Gerald Horsley from In Memoriam J. D. Sedding (1892)
Design for a Church by Edgar Wood, from Architecture (1897)
St. Wilfrid’s, Harrogate, 1909, from the Building News (1910)
Westminster Cathedral, designed 1895, drawing by J. F. Bentley from the Librarian of the R.I.B.A.
Examination Schools, Oxford, 1876, from the Building News
Royal Holloway College, Englefield Green, Surrey, finished 1886, from the Transactions of the R.I.B.A. (vol. 3, New Series, 1887)
Design for “A West End Club House,” 1880, from the Building News (1882)
The Hill House, Helensburgh, 1906, drawing by C. R. Mackintosh from Academy Architecture
Design for a Market Hall, 1901, from the Architectural Review
St. Cyprian’s, Baker Street, 1900, photograph by Dell and Wainwright
St. Philip’s, Cosham, 1937, photograph by J. Bucknall
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM greatly indebted to Myfanwy Piper for making this collection of essays and talks about architecture and places. She read through many pages of dead papers, yellowing typescripts and periodicals, and with her sure critical perception weeded out much that was topical, sentimental, journalistic, pretentious and dull. Even so she has left you with plenty to complain about. But that is my fault, not hers. On reading through the page proofs, I was horrified at the patronising way I have written about Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, some of whose work I am only just beginning to appreciate. I must explain too that the overlapping which occurs in the articles “Victorian Architecture” and the “Illustrated Notes” which follow was not an oversight. It was not possible to cut either without altering what little meaning they have. So readers should read one or the other, but not necessarily both.
I am very grateful to my friend Mr. Piper for doing the illustrations for the Nonconformist Chapels and for making a drawing of his lithograph of Cheltenham, both tasks specially undertaken for this book. The Editors of the Architectural Review, Signature, The Studio, Vogue and World Review kindly gave me permission to reprint certain articles. The Hogarth Press most generously let me reprint the whole of the rather dated piece “Antiquarian Prejudice”. I am also indebted to Ma
x Parrish Ltd., Denis Dobson Ltd., the Librarians of the B.B.C., the Curator of the Manx Museum, for permission and help. The following other individuals have also helped me: Mr. David Verey, Captain H. M. Raleigh, Miss Cregeen, Miss Eileen Molony, Mr. P. Morton Shand, Mr. Frederick Etchells, F.R.I.B.A., Sir Ninian Comper and many others who will I hope take this the only intimation of my sincere gratitude.
Love is Dead
ENGLAND though not yet so ugly as Northern France and Belgium, is very nearly so. The suburbs which once seemed to me so lovely with their freckled tennis girls and their youths in club blazers have spread so far in the wake of the motor car that there is little but suburb left. We are told that we live in the age of the common man. He would be better described as the suburban man. There is a refinement about him which pervades everything he touches and sees. His books are chosen for him by the librarians, his arguing is done for him by Brains Trusts, his dreams are realised for him in the cinema, his records are played for him by the B.B.C.; the walls of his rooms are in quiet pastel shades, he has cereals for breakfast, and he likes everything in moderation, be it beer, religion or tobacco. He has a wife, a motor car and a child. He is the Borough Engineer, the Listener, the Civil Servant, the Town Clerk, the Librarian, the Art Historian, the Income Tax Inspector. So long as he is not any sort of creative artist he can be assured of an income and a pension at the end. He collects facts as some collect stamps, and he abhors excess in colour, speech or decoration. He is not vulgar. He is not the common man, but the average man, which is far worse.
He is our ruler and he rules by committees. He gives us what most people want, and he believes that what is popular is what is best. He is the explanation of such phenomena as plastic tea-cups, Tizer, light ale, quizzes, mystery tours, cafeterias, discussion groups, Chapels of Unity, station announcers. At his best he is as lovable as Mr. Pooter, but he is no leader. He is the Lowest Common Multiple, not even the Highest Common Factor. And we have put him in charge of us, whatever his political party at the moment.
His indifference to the look of things is catching. We discover it in our attitude to the horrors with which the delicate variety of our landscape has been afflicted. We accept without murmur the poles and wires with which the Ministry of Fuel and Power has strangled every village, because they bring electric light and telephones to those who have been without these inestimable benefits. We put up with the foully hideous concrete lamp-standards for which the Borough Engineer and the Ministry of Transport are jointly responsible—each playing off the other—because the corpse-light they spew over road and pavement makes it safer for kiddies to cross and easier for lorries to overtake one another round dangerous corners. We slice off old buildings, fell healthy trees, replace hedges with concrete posts and chain-link fencing, all in the name of “safety first” which is another phrase for “hurry past”. We accept the collapse of the fabrics of our old churches, the thieving of lead and objects from them, the commandeering and butchering of our scenery by the services, the despoiling of landscaped parks and the abandonment to a fate worse than the workhouse of our country houses, because we are convinced we must save money. Money is even more important than health or road-widening, so it is obviously infinitely more important than something so indeterminate as beauty. He is a foolish man who in a letter to a paper, or at a local council meeting or in Parliament dares to plead for something because it is good to look at or well made. He is not merely a conservative. He is a crank. He is unpatriotic and prepared to sell the country for an invisible asset. We have ceased to use our eyes because we are so worried about money and illness. Beauty is invisible to us. We live in a right little, tight little clinic.
Oh come, come, Mr. Betjeman, aren’t you allowing your eloquence to run away with you? Things are not so bad as you imagine. I doubt if there has ever been a time when the desire for culture has been so widespread among our menfolk and womenkind. The interest in ballet, in opera, in chamber music and documentary film is something phenomenal. Museums have never had better seasons, and even picture galleries are widely patronised. Then you must admit that in your field of architecture the government housing schemes, particularly for our rural dwellers, have shewn a taste and reticence unknown in the evil days of private speculation by the jerry builder.
I doubt whether this interest in culture is more than an expression of restlessness. It is reaching for something that cannot be explained in terms of economics. It is a desire for the unworldly. It is a search for religion and it is far smarter than Christianity. As for the taste and reticence of government control, it is certainly easier on the eye than the brutalities of the speculator. By looking only at well-laid out municipal estates and averting one’s eyes from the acres of unimaginative modern housing, by forgetting those terrible pipe-dreams come true of thick-necked brutes with flashy cars, elderly blondes and television sets—those modernistic, Egyptian, beaux-arts and other façades of the new factories outside every large town, by ignoring all these and much more, it is possible to live in a fool’s paradise of imagined culture, a sort of Welwyn Garden City of the mind.
But look for a moment at what is really there, and the suburban man is before us again. The old High Street just peeps above the shop façades. The well-known chromium and black gloss, Burton the Tailor of Taste, Hepworth, Halford, Stone, Woolworth & Co., Samuel, Bata, The Fifty Shilling Tailor, the Co-op, have transformed what was once a country town with the characteristics of its county into a home from home for the suburbanite, the concrete standards adding the final touch. When the suburbanite leaves Wembley for Wells he finds that the High Street there is just like home, provided that he does not raise his eyes from the pavement to see the old windows and uneven roofs, or go so far off the beaten track as to wander down a side-alley and see the backs of the houses and their neglected Somerset craftsmanship. Enterprising brewers, backing culture for all they are worth, have turned the old inns into “pubs” and “locals”. They have made a virtue of the solemn drinking of their chemicals. They have had Izal and porcelain put in the gents, and made the bar similar to it, save that they have added little tables and a counter. Sawdust and oil lamp or engraved glass and gas light, all the subtle distinction between private, jug and bottle, public and saloon, are being merged into the cleanly classlessness of the road-house. The local crudely-painted inn sign is replaced by the standardised sign with the big brewer’s name. And inside, the old photographs of local teams and the framed picture from Pears’ Annual are put in the dust bin, the walls are painted a light biscuit colour and reproductions of favourite artists of a brewers’ publicity board are hung in their place. Nationalised or not yet nationalised, the gradual suburbanisation of enterprise continues, the killing of local communities, the stamping out of local rivalries and the supplying of everything by lorry from industrial towns. By luxury coach and local bus the villages are drained of life. Jealous of the misery created by too much road transport, the railways are trying to standardise themselves too. Those colours by which we were wont to know the part of England we were in—red for Midland, brown for Great Western, grained oak for East Anglia, green for Southern—have disappeared. For the convenience of suburbanites who like everything uniform and call it Administration, the trains are one of two colours.
Oh prams on concrete balconies, what will your children see? Oh white and antiseptic life in school and home and clinic, oh soul-destroying job with handy pension, oh loveless life of safe monotony, why were you created?
I see the woman with a scarf twisted round her hair and a cigarette in her mouth. She has put the tea tray down upon the file on which my future depends. I see the man on the chain-belt feeling tired, not screwing the final nuts. In a few months I see the engine falling out of the motor car. I see eight porters, two postmen and an inspector standing dazed for forty minutes on a provincial station, staring into space and waiting for what was once the Great Western which is now forty minutes late. I see those sharp-faced girls behind the buffet and the counter
insulting the crowds who come to buy. Too bored to think, too proud to pray, too timid to leave what we are used to doing, we have shut ourselves behind our standard roses; we love ourselves only and our neighbours no longer. As for the Incarnation, that is a fairy story for the children, if we think it healthy for children to be told fairy stories. We prefer facts. They are presented to us by the thousand and we can choose those we like. History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side. We know how many tons of coal are produced per week, how many man-hours there are in a pair of nylons, the exact date and the name of the architect and the style of a building. The Herr-Professor-Doktors are writing everything down for us, sometimes throwing in a little hurried pontificating too, so we need never bother to feel or think or see again. We can eat our Weetabix, catch the 8.48, read the sports column and die; for love is dead.
O Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth; Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee. Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. [BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.]
The Mead,
Wantage
April, 1952
1
WINTER AT HOME
Now comes the time when gardeners have given up trying to sweep away leaves. We have taken the honesty out of the top shelf in the linen cupboard and stuck it in the brass altar vases of the village church. Last Sunday the last of the Michaelmas daisies were too frost-bitten to be conducive to public worship. Now England, having got rid of tourists and those who feel they must seek sunlight, settles down to be herself. With any luck there will be fogs in November and December so that the sky will not be poisoned with aeroplanes and a quiet of eternity will be about us, just the drip drip from wet branches and smells of wood-smoke and fungus in the lanes. The Women’s Institute will take on new life with a revival of basket-making; more leather-work purses will be made than there is money to put in them; even Mrs. Hutchinson’s talk on her visit to Rhodesia will seem interesting although the magic lantern is certain to fail.
First and Last Loves Page 1