by A. N. Wilson
(1) Those who are solely interested in getting pupils through examinations, who think in terms of marks and of clever dodges for learning dates and grammar. These people may be of no use to the soul or brain but they are useful in teaching how to qualify for Civil Service posts or to become a school master oneself. (2) People of very strong personality who are devoted to their subject and to implanting their enthusiasm for it in others. The disadvantage of this kind of teacher is that if one reacts unfavourably to his personality, he is hell. (3) Various sorts of people who go in for teaching and soon find that they are not qualified for the work, so that they become either inspectors or civil servants, or quietly take to drink.
Betjeman did not remain a teacher long enough, perhaps, to fall into any of these three categories himself. But as a personality he obviously belonged to the second category, though it was in the sphere of broadcasting, rather than of schooling, that he would demonstrate both the enthusiasm for a subject, architecture, and the strength of character. Though the more imaginative children at Heddon Court found him entertaining, and though he made friends with the headmaster – strangely enough, an Old Etonian communist, John Humphrey Hope – it was inevitable that he would be sacked.
His centre of interest was always with his Oxford friends. After only a month at Heddon Court, he was writing to Bryan Guinness – ‘Now look here, old boy. I can get away to dinner any evening. What do you say to a little meal one day with you and your authoress wife? It would by [sic] such fun after the prunes and suet of this place. I long to see Miss Mitford.’
Guinness married, aged twenty-two, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Lord Redesdale, Diana Mitford, tall, blonde, impatient, clever. He read for the Bar, but was also a poet, and they were at the centre of a clever circle – Harold and William Acton, Roy Harrod, the Yorkes, Robert Byron, Evelyn Waugh, Randolph and Diana Churchill (Diana Mitford’s cousins). When they acquired Biddesden, a beautiful brick house built in the early eighteenth century by General Webb (one of Marlborough’s generals), Diana used her precocious skills to create interiors of stunning elegance. Their best friends in the country were Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, living nearby at Ham Spray.
Betjeman was happily adopted into the set. One of the Guinnesses’ enthusiasms was for hymn-singing. Diana, as a teenager, had passed through a religious phase. Although belief left her, the religious temperament was never entirely shaken off, nor the memory of playing the organ in the tiny church at Swinbrook. (‘Holy, holy, holy’ was her favourite hymn – she chose it, seventy years later, for her funeral.) There was a piano in the dining room. Diana’s teenaged sister Unity Valkyrie Mitford liked more evangelical hymns such as
There were ninety-and-nine who safely lay
In the shelter of the fold,
And one was out on the hills away,
Far off from the gates of gold.
Betjeman’s teddy bear, Archibald, shared this religious bent as he was later to share Unity’s political views. In his letters to friends at this period, Betjeman often included drawings of the bear, sometimes mounted in a pulpit to say ‘Praise the Lord’. ‘Archibald, my bear, has accepted a call to the Congregational Church on Wansted Flats where he has been doing the duty of lay reader for some years…’ ‘Archibald looks like this and … is very interested in Temperance Work at Clacton-on-Sea…’ ‘Archibald has accepted the Incumbency of Raum’s Episcopal Chapel, Homerton, E. 17. It is a proprietary chapel and in communion with a part of the Church of England. He has always been associated with the Evangelical Party and he will have to wear a black gown in the pulpit as the Surplice is considered ritualistic…’
This was just the sort of humour which had so enraged C.S. Lewis, the troubled atheist. The parlourmaid at Biddesden, May Amende, was a religious woman who objected to the mingling of hymns with social fun. They sang them all the time, after meals, or in the car, bowling along to visit neighbours or explore old churches. ‘She thought we were scoffing’, recalled another Mitford sister, Pamela, who had a cottage on the estate at Biddesden.
She and C.S. Lewis were both right and wrong. The essence of Betjeman’s humour, running through so much of his best verse, is that it is impossible, when catching his tone, to disentangle the larkiness (different somehow from scoffing) from serious emotion. Often such seriousness had to come filtered through humour as a protective device. This was as true of profane, as of sacred love.
All his grown-up life, he was in love with people. He developed crushes and manias for beautiful faces. Many recollect his love poetry as comic verse, which of course it is –
Is it distaste that makes her frown,
So furious and freckled, down
On an unhealthy worm like me?
But like sentimental songs, pop songs or music hall, Betjeman’s poems, even these larky ones, stay in the head, and become associated with experiences and emotions which are themselves non-comic.
Her sulky lips were shaped for sin,
Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack’d,
The strongest legs in Pontefract.
One of the girls he loved in his early twenties was Camilla Russell, daughter of the chief of the Cairo police, Sir John Russell. He met her at Sezincote and for a number of years bombarded her with light-hearted protestations of love. They were even engaged until her mother got to hear of it and put a stop to the matter. Their relationship, as far as physical love was concerned, had not gone beyond a few kisses. At Biddesden, he fell in love with Pamela Mitford. She ran the farm, and he picked up the farmworkers’ habit of calling her ‘Miss Pam’.
‘I was very, very fond of him’, she recalled,
but I wasn’t in love with him. He liked me to drive him to Marlborough so he could show me his classroom, and to drive up on to the Downs to the deserted village of Snap; you could see the remains of the cottages … Of course he was highly religious and always wanted to go to Matins in Appleshaw, so we’d bicycle there together. Sometimes when I was in London we’d go off to very peculiar churches south of the river, where they sang hymns like ‘Shall we gather at the river’ and then you had to be ‘saved’ at the end of the service. Those who wanted to be saved stayed on and the other people left. We stayed and were both saved. We had to go into a cubby-hole with this parson …
She remembered: ‘He said he’d like to marry me but I rather declined. I think he would have been much too shy to have advanced on one. He wasn’t like that at all.’ Diana Mitford always maintained that ‘Woman’ (the family nickname for Pamela) would have made an ideal wife for Betjeman, and regretted not having him as a brother-in-law. The ‘shyness’, and the inability, quite, to shake free from the same-sex emotional preoccupations of Marlborough and Oxford, might have been unsatisfactory for the wife herself, however amusing it would have been to have him as a member of the family circle. As in profane, so in sacred love, there was also the disturbing sense of his spreading his favours. If not ‘like that at all’, in the sense of making physical advances, he was quite capable of having extreme crushes on several people at once. He was also able to go into a cubby-hole with a parson and be saved at the same time as being an agnostic, an Anglo-Catholic, and, for much of the 1930s, a Quaker.
From the late 1920s, he had begun to attend Meetings at the Society of Friends, and in 1931 he formally joined them in St Martin’s Lane, London, only resigning in 1937. Sir Horace Plunkett had noted in his diary on 17 February 1929, that he had to fetch John Betjeman from his Meeting House of the Society of Friends at Esher. ‘Four Quakers and he communed (mostly in silence). I have at any rate a good, honest, extremely clever secretary.’
There is nothing unusual about being afloat, emotionally and religiously, in one’s twenties. What distinguished Betjeman’s flightiness was the humour with which it was all presented, and the element of control. Friends did not merely observe his journey from afar, they were drawn into it – the Oxford waitress who was taken on ‘church crawls’ until she danced in the aisle; Sir Horace Plu
nkett in his late seventies going all the way from his house in Weybridge to Esher to collect Betjeman from the Meeting House; Pamela Mitford penetrating Balham or Tooting in search of salvation – all like Archibald the Bear, dancing Betjeman’s tune.
In these years of young bachelordom, he spent almost every weekend at Biddesden. In London, he lodged with his Oxford contemporary Randolph Churchill. Osbert Lancaster remembered Betjeman shrieking with laughter at 3 Culcross Street while Randolph Churchill telephoned a cabinet minister ‘whose wife happened to be in bed with Randolph at the time’.
Culross Street, which leads from behind the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square to Park Lane, is a smart address by any standards on the Monopoly board, and certainly a surprising one for an impoverished poet with few prospects. Betjeman lived there because the house was owned by his Oxford friend Edward James.
A year younger than Betjeman (born August 1907) James was a definite exotic. Though he liked it to be thought that he was some kind of cousin of Henry James, the money in fact came from iron. It was a lot of money, made in the mid-nineteenth century. Edward James’s mother was a Scottish aristocrat, a Forbes. Her husband, Willie James, one of three brothers to inherit the newly made fortune, was a noted sportsman and big-game hunter, who established her in West Dean Park, James Wyatt’s fine neo-Gothic house five miles north of Chichester, and in two Lutyens houses, Gullane, near Muirfield in Scotland, and Monkton on the Solent, as well as the Mayfair house where Betjeman eventually lodged. Evie James, Edward’s mother, was the natural daughter of the future Edward VII. Some believed her also, in later life, to have been his mistress – hence Belloc’s scurrilous rhyme, ‘And Mrs James shall entertain the King’. Although Edward James encouraged people to believe this story, it was without foundation, even though King Edward remained a friend of the family. Edward James had been to Eton with such fellow aesthetes as Brian Howard and Harold Acton, but he had steered clear of them. His mother’s horror of homosexuality led him to be friends with clever heterosexual boys such as Christopher Sykes and Tom Mitford (brother of the Mitford sisters). At Oxford, his friends had been Randolph Churchill, Basil Dufferin, Tom Driberg. Though obviously preferring his own sex, these tastes did not really come to the fore until the end of a disastrous marriage with the ballet dancer Tilly Losch, whose footsteps were woven, in differing shades of green, into the stair carpet at West Dean. Salvador Dali is supposed to have said of Edward James, ‘Of course, he is the most surrealist of us all.’
James’s importance in the story of Betjeman is that he, together with Bowra, saw him primarily as a poet. Like Bryan Guinness, James wanted to be a poet himself.
‘I dreamed of being remembered for being as great a poet as John Keats’, he said. In 1930, James worked briefly as an honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Rome, with a job deciphering coded telegrams. He liked to claim, improbably, that one day he recorded that the Italian Navy was about to build 900,000 new submarines, when he meant nine – a mistake which caused Ramsay MacDonald to summon an emergency Cabinet Meeting.
The next year, 1931, he published Betjeman’s Mount Zion. The poet himself had wanted a cover designed by Camilla Russell, but this was rejected by James. So too was the idea that each poem should be set in a different typeface.
The cover depicts an Edwardian woman holding a primitive telephone or speaking tube to her mouth. The title above her is MOUNT ZION OR, and beneath her, it is IN TOUCH WITH THE INFINITE. It is a self-consciously surreal volume, especially the page illustrating ‘A Seventeenth-Century Lyric’ –
The blewish eyeballs of my love
Are so enormous grown
The muscles, which the pupils move
Won’t twist ’em round alone
– lines which appear opposite a pink page adorned with the close-up drawings of over a dozen eyes, together with a few lips and nostrils. This poem was evidently thought to be too odd to be reprinted in any subsequent collections of Betjeman’s verse. Nor, too, would he reprint ‘The Garden City’, with an illustration by himself –
Hand-woven be my wefts, hand-made
My pottery for pottage
And hoe and mattock, aye, and spade,
Hang up about my cottage.
In the light of his later feelings about the Roman Church, it is not surprising perhaps that ‘St Aloysius Church, Oxford’ should also be a poem which did not get included in his Collected Poems.
Aloysius, rich and poor,
Must enter by Thy grain’d oak door
To realise with unreal eyes
Reality and paradise.
There is a fatal irony, perhaps, in the fact that his wife would one day, to his deep grief, enter this very church in order to become a Roman Catholic.
Gathered here, however, there are also some of the distinctive Betjeman rhymes which would enter the canon of his well-known mature work – ‘Death in Leamington’ and ‘The Flight from Bootle’ being perhaps the best. The Bootle poem is especially original, and distinctive.
Lonely in the Regent Palace,
Sipping her ‘Banana Blush’,
Lilian lost sight of Alice
In the honey-coloured rush.
Settled down at last from Bootle,
Alice whispered, ‘Just a min,
While I pop upstairs and rootle
For another safety pin’…
Lilian is left sitting a very long time, daydreaming while in the pavilion the band plays from the Immortal Hour and her friend Alice has done a runner, one presumes with a man. Strangely, one of the things which the poem conveys is not merely the loneliness of Lilian, but also – a novelistic ability this – the slight sense of menace which hovers over the fate of Alice who will not ‘be quite the same again’. These two women are to be joined eventually by a whole array of characters brought to life in vivid Betjemanic vignettes – the overweight don’s wife, dying at a bus stop, the anxious upper-middle-class woman praying in Westminster Abbey, fair Elaine, the bobby-soxer – that is, adolescent – or the ‘thousand business women / Having baths in Camden Town’. There is an element of mockery in his perception of their lives, and a whiff of snobbery. But there is a much greater element of sympathy and empathy. Such women had never, quite, been hymned in English poetry. The whole book was dedicated to Mrs Arthur Dugdale of Sezincote ‘under whose minarets I have been raised from the deepest depression and spent the happiest days of my life’.
After the statutory false start of school teaching, and the generalised sense, all but universal among creative people in their twenties, that they would never find anyone to pay them for what they wanted to do with their lives, rather than force them into uncongenial work for cash, Betjeman was lucky enough to find a job which was ideal. Bowra and a young man called Maurice Hastings were the catalysts. ‘I can’t teach. I can’t get on with my father. If ever I earn two hundred a year I shall be extremely lucky. I’m absolutely sunk’, Betjeman complained to them. Hastings felt sure that his brother Hubert de Cronin Hastings could get Betj a job on The Architectural Review, a periodical which de Cronin Hastings effectively controlled.
Patrick Leigh Fermor was a boy at King’s School Canterbury in 1931 when Betjeman came there to give a lecture.
He was twenty-five and nothing about this slim, dinner-jacketed figure, with his dark, rather floppy hair, his chalky pallor and his vivid and mobile mouth, in the least resembled any of our previous lecturers … His discourse was light, spontaneous, urgent and convincing, and it began with a eulogy of the spare and uncluttered lines of the Parthenon and this led on, astonishing as it may sound today [Leigh Fermor was speaking in 1985 at the unveiling of the memorial plaque to Betjeman in Westminster Abbey] to a eulogy of the spare uncluttered lines of the modern architecture of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus School … And the merits of ferroconcrete and the simplicity of tubular steel furniture were rapturously extolled.
‘If anyone asks me who invented modern architecture’, Betjeman himself wrote in 1974, ‘I answer,
“Obscurity Hastings”.’
Obscurity Hastings was the nickname of Hubert de Cronin Hastings, ‘not because he was indefinite but because he liked hiding in the background’. After Percy Hastings’s death the Architectural Review, which he owned and which was edited by the architect to St Paul’s Cathedral, Sir Mervyn Macartney, a pupil of Norman Shaw, changed direction. ‘Mr Hubert felt it was a little old-fashioned and I don’t think he thought that Christian Barman was modern enough for the new world of glass boxes and concrete which Mr Hubert foresaw as the future of England. And how right he was in his foresight’… ‘Obscurity always thought that foreigners were better than English people at architecture. Why he employed me was because my name is foreign.’
Clearly, the Betjeman aged twenty-five, expounding the beauty of the new world of glass boxes, is a very different figure from the Betjeman who in later life would love the St Pancras Hotel and All Saints’, Margaret Street, and campaign so ceaselessly not merely against the destruction of old buildings, but also against the construction of town centres which were directly inspired by those very architectural ideas which had so excited Obscurity Cronin and his friends. There is no law against changing one’s mind in matters of taste, and there is no doubt that Betjeman fell under the spell of Obscurity Cronin. Some Betjeman admirers are shocked to discover that their idol admired Le Corbusier in 1931. It has been suggested that there is a link between the simple Quakerism embraced by Betjeman in the 1930s and his love of clean lines and architectural simplicities. (See Timothy Mowl’s Stylistic Cold Wars: Betjeman Versus Pevsner.) It is not to be denied that Betjeman, while working for the modernist Architectural Review under the tutelage of Obscurity Cronin, was converted to modernism, and that this doctrinal approach to architecture was something which he subsequently abandoned. But on the other hand, unlike some of his younger groupies, Betjeman was never opposed to modern architecture per se. He was opposed to ugliness, and the aesthetic bad manners of erecting modern architecture out of scale with existing older buildings in its immediate vicinity, and against architecture which seemed to express enmity of the human race. The truth is, they were heady days in which to live, and anyone with an aesthetic awareness would be bound to be excited by modernism in its various forms, simply as a form. Where this form does not clash with an existing townscape, the effects of such innovatory work are still, eighty and more years on, thrilling. It has to be said that most of the Archie Rev writers of those clean-cut days who lived to see English towns dominated by blocks of flats and offices, modern road systems and multi-storey car parks changed the views which they had held in the early 1930s, so Betjeman was not alone. Most conspicuous, and articulate, of these was an extraordinary man called Philip Morton Shand, always known, and addressed, by friends as P. Morton Shand. By the strange tricks played on the whirligig of time, P. Morton Shand will probably be best known to history as the grandfather of Camilla Shand, destined, having been Mrs Parker-Bowles, to become the second wife of the Prince of Wales. In his day, P. Morton Shand was known, privately, as a womaniser on the heroic scale, with four marriages to his credit, and on the printed page as one of the most outspoken defenders of the Bauhaus, and of architectural modernism. It was P. Morton Shand who converted Betjeman to the British Arts and Crafts architects who were the pioneers or fore-runners of Le Corbusier and Gropius – an idea which made its appeal to a young German student of English architecture, one Nikolaus Pevsner. (Tim Mowl speculates interestingly that Pevsner actually derived this idea from reading Betjeman in the Archie Rev, and this fuelled Betjeman’s subsequent dislike of Pevsner.) Shand’s most distinctive characteristic was the certainty with which he attached value-judgements to his praise or denunciation of buildings. It is not unique to architectural historians to make such strident judgements, of course, but ever since Ruskin, it has been a feature of English architectural taste that it should have excited such passion that those who wrote about it – Betjeman included – should do so with rapture or vitriol. Shand described the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, as ‘one of the most supremely parvenu buildings in the world’. The Marble Arch Regal ‘looks as if it had been dressed for the part as a flash gigolo by some Alexander the Great of the Edgware Road’.