by A. N. Wilson
When we assess the life of a popular writer, we are doing rather more than telling the story of their days from birth to death. We are also describing someone who made a profound appeal to their own contemporaries, and therefore we are seeing something about their generation. Byron’s subversive narrative poems were popular because they were so well made, so funny, so euphonious, and so raunchy, of course. They also, surely, owed their popularity to the fact that their author had set himself up as the opponent of all that the Tories and the British Government of his day had set out to do in fighting the war against Napoleon and supporting the continuation of the aristocratic hierarchies in Britain. In a later generation, Victorians swarmed to buy Tennyson’s In Memoriam partly, again, because of its beauty and music, but partly because it voiced their inmost fears that the new scientific learning might in fact be spelling the end of Christianity.
Betjeman’s vast popularity as a poet – over two and a half million copies of his Collected Poems have sold – is not entirely to be attributed to his skill as a television broadcaster. Nor can it be explained by the fact that the British public shared his enthusiasms. They might have thought they did, when he appeared on television saying how much he liked seaside piers, or music-hall songs, but many of his loves and obsessions – for the poetry of T.E. Brown, for the arcane rituals of High Anglicanism, for Greek Revival architecture or for the novels of Arthur Machen – were hardly calculated to appeal to the masses.
Nevertheless, he touched a chord which went very deep. No other poet, still less Poet Laureate, has spoken as he did. The reason for his popularity, in spite of the eccentricities of his tastes and the perhaps cultivated eccentricity of his mannerisms, is that at some visceral level he spoke for England. He did so more than any politician of his time, and more than any of the religious leaders either. And the confession to his wife, that he and his father were addicted to The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith, is perhaps a useful starting-point for telling the story of his life, and for celebrating it.
Goldsmith’s poem about the wrecking of rural Ireland (first published in 1770) is very far from being a gentle piece of ‘pastoral’. It is an angry poem, and at the deepest level it is a highly political one. If all you see when you read Betjeman is a few brick suburban churches, and some strapping young girls in tennis-skirts, you have similarly missed the point that his whole work, as a poet and as a broadcaster, was a protest movement against the very phenomena which Goldsmith had been attacking. Goldsmith came in at the beginning. Betjeman came at very nearly the end, to cast his deep-seeing, large, laughing but also scathing eyes upon
Dear old, bloody old England
Of telegraph poles and tin,
Seemingly so indifferent
And with so little soul to win.
Betjeman, in his celebrations and elegies for a lost England, is both quintessentially English and completely an outsider, at one with the various classes to which he pretends, or aspires, to belong, such as the Pooters of North London, or the aristocracy, and not belonging to any of them; obsessed by celebrity but hiding behind masks; utterly self-confident in his own abilities while presenting himself as full of fear and doubt, and yet, too, full of fear and doubt; a lover and a hater of what he depicted. Critics of Jane Austen’s novels, both at the time and since, have tried to extract from her work a political attitude or lack of it from her failure to address the most glaring political event of her time – the war with Napoleon. Betjeman’s attitudes to the political struggles of the twentieth century, to the two great world wars, to the class system, were so out of kilter with the stereotypical responses of his contemporaries that we can be forgiven for not seeing that he had any attitude at all. He responded to life instinctually, which is why, when his poems hit a bull’s-eye they hit so very hard, staying in the mind, and making us laugh, but also disturbing us. They are about death, and failure, and disappointment, and greed. They see an old order, of ‘men who never cheated, never doubted’, passing away, and a new one of bombers in a pointless war, of spivs and speculators after it, coming to finish off what the greedy landlords had begun in Goldsmith’s land ‘where wealth accumulates and men decay’.
In the Preface to one of Betjeman’s favourite novels, the work he says changed his life, Arthur Machen observes:
In every age, there are people great and small for whom the times are out of joint, for whom everything is, somehow, wrong and askew. Consider Hamlet; an amiable and an intelligent man. But what a mess he made of it! Fortunately, my hero – or idiot, which you will – was not called upon to intermediate with affairs of state and so only brought himself to grief.
The Secret Glory, Arthur Machen’s story, provided Betjeman with one of his earliest role-models, a man outside the general run, a man who in many ways found England with its boarding schools and class system and irreligion, hateful. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this perspective Betjeman, more than any of his contemporaries, grew up to be a writer who spoke for England.
The Betjemans were cabinet-makers who emigrated from Holland to the East End of London in the eighteenth century. The poet’s great-grandfather, George Betjeman, founded the family firm which produced writing desks, dressing cases and cabinets in Aldersgate. His son, John Betjeman, invented the Tantalus, an elegant decanter-carrier with a lockable cage-like carrier, which enabled middle-class households to prevent their servants from taking nips out of the sherry or the port.
It was this John Betjeman who added an extra ‘n’ to the name. By now, with a more-than-half German queen on the throne of England, married to a German prince, there was what poet John called ‘the craze for all things German’. Hence – Betjemann. To the actor James Fox, in an interview in the Radio Times in 1976, the poet said, ‘I’ve never talked about these things before.’ This is a typical Betjemanism, drawing both interviewer and reader into the sense that they alone are his confidants. In fact, the spelling of the name Betjemann had been described in Summoned by Bells in 1960.
I was always rather ashamed of it all, you see, having a name with two ‘n’s which was carefully dropped by my mother during the 1914 war because I was thought to be German. I have a terrible guilt about not having any right to be in this country. My father insisted on keeping the two ‘n’s. It’s been an awful nuisance. Now I’m rather pleased when I see it with two.
In the days of his fame, Betjeman’s surname became synonymous with many people’s idea of England itself, but there always remained the paradox that it was foreign. There were those who shared Malcolm Muggeridge’s suspicion that Betjeman was really Jewish in origin, though there is no evidence for this. The fact the suspicion was voiced, however, points up the quizzical nature of our subject, the strange outsider-insider business of living in England.
Part of this is class. Edwardian England, into which Betjeman was born, was probably more class-bound than at any period in its history before or since. The social shibboleths and hierarchies were expressed in ways which were recognised as comic even at the time, but which nonetheless were not to be disregarded. ‘Before the First World War, we never met any middle-class people, except for writers like Hilaire Belloc’, Lady Diana Cooper used to say. Belloc himself, in his comical verses, spoke of the ‘ancient social curse’ becoming ‘hoarier and hoarier, And it stinks a trifle worse Than in The days of Queen Victoria’.
Belloc himself, a Member of Parliament, the descendant of Dissenting intellectuals such as Joseph Priestley, was very much in the upper echelons of the middle class. Betjeman, with the family ‘works’ in the Pentonville Road, Islington, was much lower down the hierarchy. In Summoned by Bells, he recalled adolescent rows with his father, in which Ernie Betjemann accused him of being
‘A rotten, low, deceitful little snob.
Yes, I’m in trade, and proud of it I am!’
When, in his early twenties, Betjeman had launched himself upon the world, he made no attempts to hide from his aristocratic or high-bohemian friends that he came from a famil
y in trade. Indeed, he played it up, made a joke of it. One of the themes running through all his poetry, and to which his English readers readily responded, was his awareness of the class system, both as a comic phenomenon, and as an observation of the way things were.
One of Betjeman’s closest upper-class friends and most devoted admirers, Diana Mitford, got to know him when she was about twenty. She was so bewitched by his distinctiveness that she wanted to know what his family could possibly have been like. Among her wedding presents when she married Bryan Guinness was an onyx cigarette-box, made by Betjemann & Sons. With a screwdriver, she removed one of its hinges and went along with it to 36 Pentonville Road, asking if it was possible to have it repaired. The clerk to whom she spoke said he would fetch ‘Mr Ernest’. A foreigner meeting Ernest Betjemann would probably have heard nothing in his speech patterns to suggest that he was ‘below’ a member of the upper-class. Penelope Betjeman who herself spoke a sort of cockney said that Ernie had a cockney accent. Diana Mitford said it was not especially marked. But to an upper-class girl, his courteous manners were those of a ‘shop man’. She slunk away, feeling ashamed of herself for having spied on ‘Betj’’s family with unworthy motives, and she never told him of her visit to Pentonville Road.
The tragi-comedy of the English class system, in which everyone was trying to ‘better’ themselves, is that parents gave their children upbringings and education which were calculated to make them ashamed of their origins; or, if that is too strong a word, calculated to make them at home anywhere but home. Dickens is the greatest chronicler of this phenomenon, so familiar to English readers: ‘It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.’
Betjeman’s father Ernie Betjemann was a cabinet-maker. Mabel ‘Bess’ Dawson, his wife, was a Highbury girl. Highbury was a district of North London too far out to be fashionable. Her father was an artificial flower-maker. (Like Marie Lloyd’s, though perhaps in a bigger way than her Dad.)
They were Church of England. The church in which they were married, St Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, is the subject of one of Betjeman’s finest poems, as polychromatic as the brickwork itself in this Victorian (William White, 1856–7) Anglo-Catholic shrine. In two pages – just 36 lines – a good demonstration of Arthur Machen’s doctrine that ‘poetry is the only possible way of saying anything that is worth saying at all’ – Betjeman evoked the vanished world of Edwardian tradesfolk, their prosperity in ‘solid Italianate houses for the solid commercial mind’. Into this prosaic world of broughams crunching on gravel, and gardens bright with geraniums, a little-known Victorian architect and his clerical patron the Rev. R. W. Morrice created an interior successfully designed to shock the solid commercial mind into a vision of the supernatural:
Wonder beyond Time’s wonders, that Bread so white and small
Veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see,
Is the Power which sends the shadows up this polychrome wall,
Is God who created the present, the chain-smoking millions and me;
Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all –
Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself to Thee.
Ernie and Bess were far from being paupers, but their prosperity does not appear to have been as great as that of the grandparents. Their only son John Betjeman, the subject of this book, was born in a mansion flat at 52 Parliament Hill Mansions, on the borders of Gospel Oak and Highgate. This area of London forms the backcloth to much of Betjeman’s best work. Connected by railways, underground and overground, by tram-rails and by road transport, one bricky area gives way to the next, each retaining some of the qualities of the small village it once was, and each demonstrating by its different level of size and grandeur the varying degrees of prosperity.
South of the River Thames, even before the bombs and the developers engulfed so much of it, the old London of Dickens and Charles Lamb had been covered with new building. The chokingly overcrowded ‘Great Wen’ which had given abruptly and refreshingly into meadows and woodland was now sprawled over for ever, with old Croydon and Deptford lost beneath identical stockbuilt streets. In the north, however, the extraordinary phenomenon of Hampstead Heath, acres of hilly woodland, retained, and retains, its life. When they moved house from 52 Parliament Hill Mansions, it was to one of the steepest streets in London, West Hill, which borders the section of the heath where supposedly parliaments met in the Middle Ages, Parliament Hill Fields. In Kentish Town, until the 1970s, there existed, abutting terraced houses, tenements, trafficky streets and railways, a copse of trees and a field looking much as it must have done when this part of London was still rural, as painted by Constable. The North London Railway, Tottenham Branch, had acquired the land in the nineteenth century, but in the end only used part of it for engine sheds. So it was that an area of pasture, covered in wood violets, survived in a crowded area of North London until the late twentieth century. Betjeman’s London was a rural London under threat. His later pattern of life, dividing time between living in country villages and in London, was not really a break with childhood. This part of London quickens that sense, so acute in Betjeman the poet and Betjeman the conservationist, both of how close we all are to the pre-industrial, unwrecked England of Constable and Keats, and how easily, by a piece of careless planning and ugly building, that England can be lost, destroyed for ever.
‘Parliament Hill Fields’, a poem in which he remembered childhood rides by tram through North London, is one of the best topographical evocations in the language, ending as it does with
my childish wave of pity, seeing children carrying down
Sheaves of drooping dandelions to the courts of Kentish Town.
To a member of the Camden History Society in 1971, Betjeman gave a detailed commentary on the poem:
The tram was a number 7 and it was brown when it was LCC … Hampstead Heath then had buttercups and dandelions and daisies in the grass at the Parliament Hill Fields end. Daniels was a kind of Selfridges and it was on the corner of Prince of Wales Road, or very near that corner. There was a cinema higher up on the same side and there I saw my first film, very early animated pictures; it was called the ‘Electric Palace’… The Bon Marché was an old fashioned draper’s shop … Opposite Kentish Town station was a Penny Bazaar and next to that was Zwanziger which always smelt of baking bread. Then there was an antique dealer and a picture framer and a public house … Then there was some late Georgian brick houses with steps up to their front doors, then the always-locked parish church of Kentish Town (that was the one I referred to in the poem. It was rebuilt in Norman style in 1843 by J.H. Hakewill and seems to have no dedication). It was very low. Then there was Maple’s warehouse, always rather grim, then some squalid shops and a grocer’s shop called Wailes which was very old-fashioned. Then came Highgate Road station with a smell of steam and very rare trains which ran, I think, to Southend from a terminus at Gospel Oak. Then there were some rather grander shops with a definite feeling of suburbia … I remember thinking how beautiful the new bits of Metroland Villas were in the newly built Glenhurst Avenue and my father telling me they were awful. Then there was the red brick gloom of Lissenden Gardens and Parliament Hill Mansions …
This letter tells us so much of Betjeman. One can be fairly sure that he did not look anything up in a book in order to write it. His childhood world was totally vivid to him aged sixty-five. Vivid as a topographical entity – the names of the shops, the architecture old and new. We note, too, his father’s ‘good taste’ in hating the new mansion blocks, and Betjeman’s perverse desire to like some architecture which a sober judgement considered awful. And we note too the fact that he must have often tried the door of the parish church in order to know that it was ‘always-locked’.
Behind 31 West Hill stretched miles of thick woodland, rolling hills. On the other side of the road, beyond a well-planned neo-Tudor housing development called Holly Lodge, is the rambling Highgate Cemetery where so many great figures from the n
ineteenth century – Christina Rossetti, George Eliot and Karl Marx among them – lie buried. Betjeman himself, and his mother, were destined to be buried far away in the west. But it was in this London necropolis that Ernie would one day lie.
2
CORNWALL – AND THE DRAGON
From quite early manhood, Betjeman gave lantern lectures, which were previews, really, of his later much more famous, televised, self. The slides would take the audience through the range of his enthusiasms for architecture and for places. The first of them would be a picture of a young man and a woman lolling in a punt, and across the screen, in gothic lettering, would be the single word PEACE.
This yearning for PEACE was fundamental to him as a child. A poem he wrote when he was aged nine, and dated 23 August 1915, is entitled PEACE.
I [sic] was a quiret [sic] eve when I went out
No people to see not a call nor a shout
I thought of the places I had not seen
As I sat upon the village green
I sat & listend [sic] to the church bell chime
And thought in my head this comferting [sic] line
O God be with me
Yet wretched I maybe [sic]
And I sat by the village stocks
And saw the waves dash over the rocks