First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  The rest of the High Street diminishes London-wards into what are little more than stone cottages, some of them bulging with bow-windowed shop fronts or standing apart to admit a glimpse of the meadows to the south and the elm-clad hills to the north of the town. Down one of these alleys is the Quaker Meeting House, a simple affair in limestone with scrubbed benches and white walls within and nicely graded tiled roof distinguishing its plain exterior. The Independent Chapel is also a plain building (1794) resembling, with its two storeys of round-headed windows, a thin private house. It is a little more obtrusive than the Quaker Meeting. House, since it was put up after the persecution of Nonconformists and dares to show itself in the High Street.

  The ancient Parish Church will attract the traveller’s antiquarian but not his æsthetic attention. It is an irregular building in the late-pointed style. It stands a little distance behind the Town Hall and is surrounded by alleys between cottages, some of which are built of clunch and clearly very ancient, though scarcely genteel. The church, indeed, stands in the old centre of the town and the cottages round it are a survival, built in the haphazard medieval way of growing, of the village which Boggleton was before it became an agricultural centre, for Boggleton was never a planned medieval city within walls. The citizens objected to their Common being used for sales, so a site north of the church was used for bargaining, where the road entered the village. This was built round and gradually became the market place and new centre of Boggleton life.1

  The interior of the Parish Church presents a venerable appearance. An elaborately carved wooden screen runs across the chancel and north chapel. The walls are whitewashed and form a handsome gallery of hatchments and mural monuments. Some of the latter were done by a talented stonemason in the town from a book of engravings for mural monuments published by I. Taylor in 1787. The pews are of good deal and comfortable, being of excellent joinery with well-fitting doors. The cushions in them are of watered silk and one pew at least has a stove in it which warms Mr. Awdon and his family, merchant and Mayor of the town. There is a west gallery for the choir whose instruments are kept there out of the way of the ringers below. The three-decker pulpit is used by the now ageing incumbent who celebrates quarterly Communion.

  Having inspected the church and refreshed himself, the coachman and horses, the traveller, will pass on towards Adamsbecton, the large country house of the Adamsbec family. About a mile out of the town, the ruins of Godley Abbey, rise up among the willows and elms of the valley. The pile is a monument to superstition but, at the same time, it has much of the sublime, seeming to draw towards it the surrounding hills.

  A row of genteel houses looks on the abbey from the further side of the road. These are airy and cheerful, having been built in 1820. They are in a variety of styles. One in Grecian with a wide verandah commanding the prospect, the other is something like it but plainer and of three storeys with a balcony of elegant ironwork on the first floor. The third is called the Oratory and is in the Gothic taste with pointed windows and an octagonal parlour, a veritable monkish cell. This is nearer the abbey than the other two houses, and is calculated to blend in with that structure. The houses are inhabited by a retired merchant, a retired naval captain, the younger son of a family whose fortunes have declined and two maiden ladies, daughters of a former rector of Boggleton.

  Our traveller will now have little to attract him after this glimpse of the picturesque until he comes to Adamsbecton. There he will be permitted to see the gallery which contains a Salvator Rosa, a Lawrence, a Reynolds, three Lelys, a Murillo, a Canaletto and a Guido Reni, as well as several paintings of the Dutch school and even more of the Italian schools.

  The people of Boggleton take their town for granted, just as our traveller takes the hospitality of Adamsbecton for granted. Carpenters, masons and builders are good craftsmen and an architect building in the district can rely on them to do their work well and supply the appropriate mouldings in the specified places. Merchants are unhampered by undue rivalry and the farmers are prosperous. The gentry are, many of them, liberal. Only some, the meaner sort of persons, have cause for complaint.

  The Last Days of Tradition

  The most significant thing about the arts of this time was not the usual clash between classic and romantic, but the tradition of craftsmanship which pervaded everything from the mouldings round the lintel of a door to the title page of a book.

  The machine was getting into its stride, but the British tradition of thoroughness had not yet died out. The knowledge of detail inherited from a system of apprenticeship appears in the exquisite bindings of books, the high standard of engraving, the chaste layout of the typographer. No work was skimped. Even the speculative builder had a civic conscience and laid out several stuccoed estates round our larger towns which for spaciousness of planning and æsthetic beauty have yet to be improved upon in our own era of town-planning.

  The classic and romantic clash must certainly be considered. The classic comes first and there is no doubt that its greatest exponent was Sir John Soane, who invented a severe style of architecture which is the envy of every European country except its own. Artists of all sorts still went on the Grand Tour and those who could not afford it made careful drawings of classical sculpture, notably the Elgin marbles. There were certain dogmatic rules laid down for art. Traditional forms and compositions pervaded everything. Art criticism was, mercifully, in its infancy and had not yet reduced many a talented craftsman to a state of gittering self-consciousness.

  Literature was almost entirely in the hands of the Romantic school. Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth were established poets. Byron was a hero. Sentimental Keepsake annuals flooded the bookshops. Thomas Moore and Alaric A. Watts were drawing-room idols. Sir Walter Scott gave an impetus to reviving Gothic architecture which was far greater than that given by the whimsicalities of Walpole and Beckford. The popular style for the newest fashionable architecture was Perpendicular. In painting, this taste is expressed in the works of Cattermole and Joseph Nash and Prout. Scholars were taking to British antiquarianism.

  1867

  Just when it looked as though Boggleton was going to become one of those decayed market towns which would have been no credit to an age of progress and prosperity like the mid-nineteenth century, fortune saved it from oblivion. The Great Junction Railway decided that a site near Boggleton was a suitable place for its works. So in 1850 a town was built called New Boggleton. This consisted at first of several rows of workmen’s dwellings with a central green space, a church, an institute and some shops.

  Enterprising Boggletonians from the old town erected an arcade of shops at the edge of the new town. A farmer sold off his land to a speculator who proceeded to erect as many houses on it as he could fit in. Then there were no town-planning laws to stop him. New Boggleton spread until it met Old Boggleton and the small houses at the London end of the High Street came down under the onward rush of the new town.

  The new works were a magnificent sight: a glimpse into the engine rooms showed vista upon vista of machines with men toiling happily at them. The G.J.R. built a huge viaduct across the valley outside the town. The old naval captain in one of the genteel houses by the Abbey—he was the last survivor of the original inhabitants of the group—thought that the viaduct was magnificent, comparable to the Abbey itself, symbolising the strength and beauty of engineering in cast iron and brick against the architecture of the Middle Ages. But he was a sensible man always in touch with the times.

  The new rector (High Church: instituted a weekly Communion instead of the old quarterly administration of the Sacrament) was deeply opposed to the building of the viaduct. He tried to agitate with the Mayor and Corporation. But they were all for humouring the railway since big profits were to be made out of it. Only a few landowners sympathised with the rector and agreed that the viaduct ruined the venerable and picturesque appearance of the Abbey. So the rector had to content himself with medievalising his Parish Church. The old box pews were ta
ken down and nice sticky pitch-pine ones of a Christian shape substituted. The windows were filled with coloured glass from Hardman’s works. The screen across the chancel and north chapel was removed because it blocked the view of the new chancel. The high pulpit was destroyed and a new one made out of the remains of the screen. The hatchments were removed and the plaster stripped from the walls.

  The Nonconformists were no less active. But since the Established Church liked Gothic, they preferred the Italian style. The new Independent Chapel, now called Congregational, was of white brick with red brick dressings and in an ornate but inexpensive Romanesque manner.

  The Adamsbec family had long ago sold Boggleton House to a prosperous shop-owner who gutted the interior and built warehouses in the garden. Plate glass took the place of the old square-paned windows and only a few of the more old-fashioned tradesmen who were unable to keep up with the new influx and increased competition regretted the passing of old Boggleton.

  The railway brought with it newer manufactories, and more chapels and churches sprung up. On the hills outside the town a smartish suburb was built for the foremen and higher clerical people connected with the factories. The richest people of all built themselves huge country houses near the town: houses in the Jacobean style and the Italian style with high walls and iron gates with lamp-posts on either side of the drive and a crest on the top of each. One of the most prosperous of these rich men founded the Boggleton Art Gallery, which has some of the largest pictures in England on its walls depicting Crimean scenes, Highland cattle, historical occasions and various other subjects calculated to turn the minds of Boggleton mechanics from the contemplation of the machinery and urban scenery by which they were surrounded.

  Old Boggleton and New Boggleton became a large town of 100,000 inhabitants and the only remains of Old Boggleton were the Town Hall and the Quaker Meeting House, while some cottages near the church still survived in a derelict condition as a memorial to the oldest Boggleton of all.

  The Machine Gets into its Stride

  The tradition of craftsmanship was supplanted by the machine. The Great Exhibition of 1851 had shown that many objects could be made by machine at a quarter the cost and just as well as those made by hand. The set rules of colour and design pervading in 1836 had not been forgotten and the exhibits of 1851 in the late-lamented Crystal Palace were still worthy of the study of the fastidious. It is fashionable now to laugh at the Great Exhibition. It is a pity that this humour does not extend to the exhibits displayed today in the windows of the multiple stores.

  While the machine was still a symbol of progress (whatever progress might be) to the majority, it was terrifying to many intellectuals. The Oxford Movement in the Church had given Gothic architecture official approval. Gothic was medieval. The Middle Ages were the days of craftsmen and Christianity. Therefore the machine was un-Christian. Classical architecture was pagan. Individuality was sacred. Pugin and, later, Ruskin supported this reaction from the machine. The pre-Raphælites, now established, were the men of the moment. Art had caught up with literature. Even railway stations were built in the medieval style. The Grand Tour was supplanted by a visit to Belgium and the Gothic cathedrals of France. Venetian Gothic was imitated even in the main streets of London.

  1907

  About this time the Radicals in the town decided to improve the lot of the workers in the packed streets down by the railway works and other factories. An Evening Institute was founded, built in the New Art Style of Gothic (by the architect of the new Wesleyan Church). Lectures were given on the ruined Abbey (which was carefully patched up and the grass round it mowed and planted with beds of geraniums, a small admission fee being charged), on Italian painting, socialism, eugenics, eurythmics, hygiene, economics and other important subjects. The old cottages near the church were rebuilt in an even more ancient style than they had been in before.

  The Conservatives decided to improve the civic dignity of Boggleton. The plain town hall was pulled down and a handsome edifice in Portland stone and in the Viennese Baroque manner arose in its place, surmounted by a tower with illuminated clock faces.

  Ivy was planted along the buttresses of the railway viaduct to make it harmonise with the Abbey. The false stucco villas by the Abbey were at last taken down: a terrace of houses was put up by a speculator on a site nearer the Abbey itself, so that they would have commanded no view, anyway. The tram service was extended to the Abbey gates.

  The rector’s wife was an artistic woman and taught blob work (water-colours) in the Institute and sent her daughters to Bedales. The Municipal Art Gallery made her and her daughters laugh.

  Boggleton had changed the colour of its buildings, just as it had changed the colour of its politics, to pink. Only the Quaker Meeting House remained the same.

  The Morris Movement

  The Classical tradition never died. Greek in 1837, Italianate in 1867, “Queen Anne” (Norman Shaw) in 1897, neo-Renaissance (Blomfield, Sir Ernest George, Belcher, Alfred Drury and various other sculptors of public monuments) in 1907.

  The Gothic revival transmogrified itself. There could be too much medievalism. William Morris realised that the movement needed a political as well as a religious background. Guild socialism was the result. But Morris’s insistence on hand processes, though often admirable for those rich enough to afford the price, led to various repulsive imitations. Sham beams, sham lanterns, sham Morris wallpapers spread rapidly. The productions of the Kelmscott Press, never legible, did little good to the few lingering traditions of English printing and typography. To counterbalance these bad effects, the Morris movement really did stimulate reaction to and criticism of many machine-made products, particularly furniture. The movement simplified designs and insisted on the simple life. From it sprang the Garden Cities, the C. F. A. Voysey, early Lutyens and Baillie Scott small houses, and later the Art Nouveau Movement. Daring radicalism, fresh air, the works of H. G. Wells, unstained oak, white nurseries, child welfare work. There was no hint of the Oxford Movement about the new Gothic revival. Much more a hint of free thought.

  The art nouveau people are responsible for contemporary architecture at its best. George Walton and C. R. Mackintosh, who came from the famous Glasgow School, built in a style which was soon taken up in Germany. Only in its decorative features, such as ironwork and stencilling, did their architecture seem any different from the truly modern architecture of today.2 It is ironic that the simplicity of the Crystal Palace should have been reached out of a movement indirectly inspired by that Gothic revival which was, in its inception, inimical to the machine age which the Palace glorified.

  1937

  Boggleton’s period of prosperity was nearly over when orders for armaments brought temporary relief to some of the factories. The Adamsbecs have sold their country house as a building estate: their pictures fetched very little. The trams have been replaced by buses. Two of the Nonconformist Chapels have been sold to chain stores. The Bedalian daughters of the late rector have opened an “olde” tea place in one of the cottages near the church. The big merchants’ houses outside the town have become a lunatic asylum, a hospital and municipal offices. Their grounds have been turned into a public park.

  The population is being moved out of the crowded streets near the station. Some are being moved into council houses put up on a nice but rather waterlogged site near the Abbey. Others who can afford it are going into some of the lovely new villas which are being erected all round the town. Each one is different, the beams being very cleverly arranged. Stained-glass windows may be found in all of them, parlour or non-parlour type. True the walls are thin, the wood of the doors is unseasoned, the foundations are bad, the chimneys smoke, there is not enough accommodation, but, on the other hand, every garden has a low wall and crazy paving, and the interior fittings are in an up-to-date jazz modern style.

  There are hardly any prosperous local tradesmen as the big shops are all run by London combines. Motors have brought prosperity to the Georgian Dolphin
Hotel, which has rebuilt itself in the Tudor style in order to keep up with the times.

  The Institute is not doing so well now that culture comes via the wireless and cinema.

  I am afraid we have not much time for art in Boggleton, though art criticism is quite popular with some of us. A Frank Brangwyn of a steel works was bought out of trust money by the Committee of the Municipal Art Gallery, but it was thought a little old-fashioned. Several young artists have been painting the viaduct for their Commercial Art course. The Boggleton Surrealist has found the large canvases in the Art Gallery interesting. Art, like the rest of the town, is controlled from London; there is no distinctive native talent, just as there is now no native craftsmanship.

  Boggleton itself takes up much more room than it should do. In 1837 you could see the meadows and elms between the houses in the High Street, now you will have to go at least a mile in any direction to see a tree at all—and even then the fields will have a municipal appearance and the burnt grass will be bright with pieces of paper.

  1 This is by no means the only reason for the market place being here. Mystery plays, and later fairs, were held near this space.

  2 I now see that this is not true. L’art nouveau was a romantic escape into simplicity. Mackintosh’s beautifully drawn houses are Beardsley-esque Scottish Baronial.

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  VICTORIAN ARCHITECTURE

  VICTORIAN BUILDINGS will never become as smart as Georgian ones are today. Georgian architecture is the last product of a settled agricultural civilisation when craftsmanship was understood and enjoyed, and rules of proportion were widely known among builders. The jerry-building of Georgian industrialism has hardly survived, and where it does exist, as at Coalbrookdale and here and there in the older industrial towns of the North and in the Stroud valley in Gloucestershire, people who look at it do not think of it as “Georgian” but as simple and dateless. Most of what is Georgian that survives is well-made and easy to look at. Our minds carry in them a coloured aquatint, be it landscape or street, to form a suitable background to a Georgian building. Then Georgian is nicely and cheaply faked. Blocks of flats, all London over, have Regency beds and Brighton-Pavilion curtains, out of scale with the cupboard-like rooms in which they are placed, no doubt, but unmistakably Georgian. Even an estate agent knows what Georgian means, and I have seen the word used in terms of praise of a house in a serial in The Symbol, the paper that is bound up with our parish magazine.