Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  The pianist was Lord Berners, who lived at the nearby Faringdon House. He has his followers, but even now it is remarkable that Berners is not more highly regarded. In Who’s Who, Berners recorded: ‘Recreations none’. He never made a public speech in his life, ‘except for the three short sentences with which he opened the Faringdon cinema’. Unlike the self-advertising Sitwells, he was an example of an aristocrat of genuine accomplishment in at least three spheres. He was a talented painter in the manner of the early Corot, who was exhibited at the Lefevre Galleries. He was a witty, camp novelist – the best two are Far from the Madding War and The Girls of Radcliff Hall. And he was a seriously good composer who had studied with Stravinsky and Casella. He was a brilliant parodist and could do especially clever parodies of German lieder, French and English songs. But his real music deserves much wider recognition, especially the ‘Three Pieces for Orchestra’ of 1916, the ‘Fantaisie espagnole’ of 1918–19 and his ballet music – three scores for the Sadler’s Wells Company.

  He had been brought up as Gerald Tyrwhitt, in Bridgnorth at Apley Park. His parents intended him to have a sporting country life. His aesthetic soul rebelled. In 1918, when he was thirty-five, he inherited the barony of Berners and the Tyrwhitt baronetcy from an uncle, adding the name of Wilson. He was now Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, fourteenth Baron Berners. He sold his Berners estates and bought Faringdon House where he remained for the rest of his life. His custom of dyeing his doves in bright colours immediately signalled him as an ‘eccentric’ to the locals. He also owned a house in Rome overlooking the Forum, and watched the rise of Fascism with quiet admiration, never falling for its more brutal excesses, but not being drawn, either, to the more hysterical attacks upon it by his fellow countrymen.

  Berners was one of those rare homosexuals who genuinely liked women. Penelope took to him instantly, and often had Moti harnessed to a four-wheeled dog-cart, which she had bought in the neighbouring village, Stanford in the Vale, for £12 and drove over to Faringdon. Berners painted them together: Penelope and Moti standing in his elegant drawing room. In the photographs, he sits at a low easel, wearing co-respondent shoes.

  Penelope had time on her hands to develop friendship. For the first four years of her marriage, she did not become pregnant. Her husband was away during the week. Friendships with such multi-talented figures as Berners deserve and take time. During the hunting season, she and Moti could be ‘out’ as much as they liked. She enjoyed the almost surreal chance encounters she had with her fellow riders. An elderly gentleman rode up and the following exchange took place –

  E.G. Where did you get that nice horse?

  P. Inja.

  E.G. And what were you doing in India?

  P. Staying with my father.

  E.G. And what was he doing there?

  P. Commander-in-Chief.

  Meanwhile, Betjeman had begun the routine which would be the pattern, and the eventual undoing, of his marriage, either of commuting to London each day – initially from Challow Station – or of staying up in town several days, and returning for weekends with his friends. The Vale of the White Horse was, as he recalled,

  the furthest place from London I could find which you could leave and get back to in a day. Fares were low. It was lovely getting beyond Reading in the train from London into what was true country. In Uffington people still spoke with Berkshire accents … Uffington had its own railway station then lit with oil lamps.

  And his fortunes were distinctly looking up.

  Since the end of 1933, Betjeman had supplemented his income on the Archie Rev by writing articles for the Evening Standard, then a Beaverbrook paper. Even more than the Daily Express, which in those days was an influential newspaper, the Evening Standard was a vehicle for its proprietor’s whims. The ‘Londoner’s Diary’ was a gossip column, but it was much more than this. Those who wrote for it – Harold Nicolson had just resigned as one of the writers before Betjeman arrived, Randolph Churchill was a regular, Malcolm Muggeridge joined the paper about this time – were employed as mouthpieces of their Master’s Voice, able to interpret and give shape to his whims and prejudices. The ‘Diary’ was edited by a former diplomat and spy called Robert Bruce Lockhart with a natural spy’s gift for putting two and two together. Once he saw in The Times personal column that a dog was missing near Churt. Could it belong to Lloyd George, wondered Lockhart. His underlings spent the day on the telephone and, yes, it turned out indeed to be the dog of the former Prime Minister, the very terrier which had once bitten the Prime Minister of Italy, Signor Orlando, at Rapallo. Beaverbrook, who credited himself with the rise of Lloyd George to the premiership in 1916, and his removal from office seven years later, would have been delighted by this story. The ‘Diary’ and its team of clever young writers were in a way his spies, sending out signals to the world about the trivial details of great, or celebrated, people, their wives, their dinner-parties, their pets. (Stories of love affairs were not mentioned in those days.) Betjeman’s old house mate, Randolph Churchill, was a valued member of the team – as was, on occasion, his father, who edited the ‘Diary’ sometimes in Lockhart’s absence. Randolph’s colleagues would be impressed to hear him shouting into the telephone receiver to Cabinet ministers and courtiers: ‘That you, Bobbity? Duff? Fruity? Rab?’ It was Patrick Balfour and Randolph Churchill who got Betjeman to help them with an article called ‘Peers without Tears’. Then they got Betjeman the unlikely assignment of interviewing Myrna Loy. He asked her if she liked Perpendicular architecture. On the strength of this achievement, Betjeman became a member of ‘Londoner’s Diary’ with special responsibility for films. He was taken on by the editor of the paper, Percy Cudlipp, and paid the amazingly big salary of 16 guineas a week to write a regular film criticism. That meant that in only three weeks, he would have earned the entire annual rent on Garrard’s Farm, and had money left over. The Betjemans had discovered the perhaps dangerous ease with which a clever person can make money as a journalist.

  The writers on ‘Londoner’s Diary’, in addition to Randolph Churchill and Patrick Balfour, were Betjeman’s other aristocratic friends, Peter Fleming and Lady Mary Pakenham, sister of Frank. He made his mark on the paper, as he did in any new setting, by larking about. The talk of the office one day was the story of Betjeman passing the former Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, in the street, a severe stuffed-shirt sort of character, and pretending to have an epileptic fit on the pavement just in front of him. His film criticisms were hit and miss; he liked funny films, especially W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy and ‘Schnozzle’ Durante, but Bing Crosby crooning, or endless costume dramas, were not to his taste. Few, if any, of his office colleagues, except those who knew him already, had much inkling that this jokey young man was destined for fame as a poet.

  It was in another area of work that Betjeman found his métier. When he was working on the Architectural Review, Betjeman was introduced to the publicity manager of Shell – Jack Beddington. He was thirteen years older than Betjeman, a jolly, Balliol man who had served in the First World War and was now employed to promote the image of the famous oil company. ‘An old Rugbeian’, Betjeman described him, ‘very fat and full of laughter. I used to call him “the old filthy”. He liked taking pictures of nude women covered in oil. He didn’t like churches one bit.’ Impressive amounts of posters, films and other artwork were commissioned by Beddington, using artists as distinguished and varied as Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson, Duncan Grant, Rex Whistler, Edward Bawden and Richard Guyatt. Posters of beauty spots cunningly became identified with the very thing which would wreck their beauty: the growth of motoring. Writers were also enlisted by Beddington, and in 1933, when the idea of writing a series of guide books to British counties, the Shell Guides, was adopted, Betjeman became the general editor.

  In 1977, Betjeman recalled those days for his granddaughter, Endellion Lycett Green, in a very long letter. He described his railway journeys into London.

  The slowest part of the jo
urney was the underground railway from Paddington to Farringdon Street, the nearest underground station to the Evening Standard office.

  … One morning I was travelling down on the Inner Circle underground from Paddington to Farringdon Street when the train did a very unusual thing. It waited for a long time at King’s Cross Station. My father, your great-grandfather, had a factory, founded in 1820, on the Pentonville Road. (It is still there and owned by the Medici Society.) King’s Cross Underground was the nearest station. I remember thinking as the train waited at King’s Cross, ‘Shall I go out and see my father?’ A voice inside me seemed to say, ‘Yes, do go and see him. It won’t take you long and you won’t be too late for the film.’ The train went on waiting but I felt too lazy at that time of the morning to bother to get out and take a tram up the hill. Then we went on and with other film writers I saw an American musical film called George White’s Scandals.

  When I got back to Uffington that evening the telephone rang. It was my father’s managing clerk Mr H.V. Andrew, and he told me that my father had died that morning while talking to him. Do you think my father was trying to get through to me? Do you think he knew he was going to die so swiftly? I don’t know. All I can tell you is that it happened and Gramelope [i.e. Penelope] will remember it.

  She offered me a strawberry that we had grown in our garden at Uffington when I heard the news and I remember being too upset to want to eat it.

  7

  MR PAHPER – THE DEFINING FRIENDSHIP

  Ernest Betjemann died on 22 June 1934. On 27 August of the same year, probate was complete, the sum of £1, 699 os 3d had been paid in death duties to the Inland Revenue, and the will was legal. The bulk of his estate was left to his wife – namely the freehold of the two houses, 53 Church Street and ‘Undertown’, Trebetherick, all the furniture, plate and personal effects, and the sum of £2,000 – which converts to £315,923.44p in inflationary terms in 2002, using the index of average earnings. Two thousand five hundred fully paid ordinary shares apiece in G. Betjemann & Sons Limited (free of duty) were left to Philip Rolls Asprey, who sold so much Betjemann ware in Bond Street, and Horace Victor Andrew, the managing director of the firm. They were in effect to have control of the firm from now onwards. Ernie left his sporting guns to his godson Hugh Francis Macklin de Paula, and, rather mysteriously, he left ‘to Miss Norah Kennedy of “Cappagh”, Kilrush, Co. Clare, Ireland’, the sum of £300.

  Alan Pryce-Jones (‘Bog’) tells a remarkable story in his autobiography, The Bonus of Laughter, published in 1987. ‘John’s funeral’, he wrote,

  was less sensational than that of his father, which took place in Chelsea Old Church. John was an only child, and while he and his mother were waiting for the ceremony to begin a scene occurred like that in the second act of Der Rosenkavalier. A second, unknown Mrs Betjeman suddenly erupted with a second family, and it turned out that for many years Mr Betjeman had lived a second and hitherto secret life.

  It is hard to know what to make of this very striking claim. I have been through the registers of marriage for the period of Ernest Betjemann’s life and it is simply not true that he was a bigamist in the legal sense of the term. He contracted no marriage either before or after his marriage to Bess, in Scotland, Ireland, England or Wales. (The marriage of Mabel Bessie Dawson is recorded in the Hendon registration district in the September quarter of 1902.) Nor do any of the registers of birth record Ernest Betjemann as the father. So there was no second Mrs Betjemann or second family in any sense which can be traced. This does not rule out the possibility that Ernie kept a common-law wife the paternity of whose children is unrecorded. There is no record in Ireland that he married Norah Kennedy, bigamously or otherwise, and indeed my pursuit of Norah Kennedy herself reached a dead end though I think her parents were probably John Kennedy, labourer, and Mary Partill, servant, who were married in the Roman Catholic chapel of Kilrush, Co. Clare on 12 July 1904. Whether this Norah had illegitimate issue, by Ernest Betjemann or by another, I have been unable to establish.

  There is, however, some anecdotal evidence for Ernie’s having had mistresses. Pierce Synnott, the Oxford friend who invited John Betjeman to stay in Ireland in the summer of 1926, told Billy Clonmore that Ernest Betjemann had spoilt the holiday by arriving in Ireland himself

  and is tearing the son to Galway to hold his [fishing] line while he jokes with Ranjitsinghji [a cricketer who had bought the 30,000-acre Ballynahinch estate]. Selfish and incongruous pursuits. He must be the vilest man who ever lived, v. rich, gives his son nothing, forbids him to read poetry, kicks his wife, brings mistresses into the house, spends all on keeping shoots and fishing, makes his son go with him, makes scenes in public, and spends his spare time in persecuting people.

  It is safe to assume that this unflattering portrait of old Ernie comes from his son. It is presumably how Betjeman saw his father when, in his twenties, he was getting on badly with the old man. Some of it, we know to be untrue. This book began with a recollection by an older Betjeman, of Ernie reading Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village to his son ‘almost daily’. So much for his forbidding him to read poetry. That Ernie was coarse and bad-tempered, we need not doubt. If he brought mistresses to the house, then Alan Pryce-Jones’s story loses some of its edge, since neither Bess nor John would have been much surprised by the appearance of ‘another woman’ at the funeral. Given the development of Betjeman’s own life, an appalling relationship with his son, leading to all but total estrangement, and an all but bigamous life with two women, the death of Ernest Betjemann seems all the more poignant. Ernie left nothing directly to John Betjeman, his only son, though the will specifies that ‘after the death of my wife my Trustees shall stand possessed of the Trust Fund in Trust for my son John Betjeman absolutely’. This fits with the testimony of Summoned by Bells about his relationship with the father –

  My dear deaf father, how I loved him then

  Before the years of our estrangement came!

  He recalls his ham-fisted attempts at shooting and country sports:

  ‘Shoot!’ said my father, helping with my gun,

  And aiming at the rabbit – ‘Quick, boy, fire!’

  But I had not released the safety-catch.

  I was a poet, that was why I failed.

  My faith in this chimera brought an end

  To all my father’s hopes. In later years,

  Now old and ill, he asked me once again

  To carry on the firm, I still refused.

  G. Betjemann & Sons continued as a working firm until the war, but Betjeman the poet had little or nothing to do with it, and the business was eventually wound up. In Summoned by Bells, Betjeman reproached himself for disappointing his father, and the workforce, by not taking over the running of the firm –

  I see

  His kind grey eyes look woundedly at mine,

  I see the workmen seeking other jobs.

  The correspondence which he had with his mother in the aftermath of Ernest’s death shows that he did not abandon the business in a hurry, nor was it sold off until Horace Anderson, the works manager, and the rest of the staff were at least offered the possibility of work by Asprey’s, who had their own factory making goods similar to those sold by G. Betjemann & Sons Ltd. On 20 November 1937, for example, he wrote a long letter to ‘Darling Bessie’ – which was what he called his mother, not Mother or Mummy – explaining that he had had his own solicitor look over the terms of Ernie’s will, and discovered that he was actually a shareholder of the company. The lawyer advised against going into liquidation, because the chief assets of the firm were the land on which the works stood, and the men who worked there. Horace Anderson was very pleased with this development. Betjeman shows himself throughout this long protracted business to have been much more conscientious and unselfish than his self-reproach in Summoned by Bells would warrant. He wants Bessie to get some capital to live on – and the sale of the company appears to have brought her in about £4,000, quite a lot of money pre-war.
Nor was it done in a hurry. As late as 27 June 1938, Horace Anderson was still writing to ‘Dear Mr John’ about cocktail glasses. Betjeman suggested calling a new design ‘The 19th Hole Cocktail Glass’. Anderson did not like the title and suggested that ‘the Club House Glass would be a little better understood by the trade than Dormy Glass, the latter being appreciated by Golf Players only’. Perhaps, who knows, if war had not come, Betjeman might have warmed to the idea of taking some part in the firm. In August 1940, Bessie’s solicitor told him that she alone had the power to wind up G. Betjemann & Sons, and this eventually happened without consulting Betjeman. Though a shareholder, he did not have shares which entitled him to a vote in the matter.

  The death of Ernest Betjemann put a definite seal on his son’s life as did the birth of John’s son Paul Betjeman on 26 November 1937. The lives of father Ernest and son John were both intertwined at the deepest level, and fiercely at odds; they were both utterly different, and yet the younger man, formed by the elder, was destined to follow his patterns of life. Betjemann père had his life at the works, when he pursued his career as a businessman and manufacturer, and his rather grander life with shooting friends in Hertfordshire. Likewise, Betjeman the broadcaster and hack journalist also had higher-class aristocratic friends. Betjemann père had, in effect, two wives and two families. This too – though not yet – was to be the pattern of the mature Betjeman’s emotional journey. Through the lives of both men ran Church of England piety (High) combined with irascibility and sensuality. But with the death of Ernest Betjemann, there had come the rounding-off of one end of the story.

  With Ernie dead and the Islington works with all its history and emotional baggage now in other hands, Betjeman junior was now free to become Betjeman. The Guinnesses had seen he was ‘a genius of a very unusual kind’. Bowra had admired his poems from the start. But, as the experience at the Evening Standard showed, there were still many who saw Betj primarily as a comic turn. And much of the time he was in danger of seeing himself entirely in this way.