by A. N. Wilson
In his poetry, and in the architectural writings and broadcasts of his maturity, there was always humour, but there was also something more to Betjeman. Penelope could see that ‘you as it in yew ter wroite really good what is known as “worth whoile” books, probably about harchitecture and nointeenth cent harchitects and other alloied subjects’. He had it in him, too, to be one of the most astute poets of place. Nourished by his huge collection of topographical books, his watercolourist’s eye would focus on ‘Highgate Hill’s thick elm-encrusted side’, on ‘grasses bending heavy with a shower’, on ash trees in Cornwall ‘bent landwards by the Western lash’, on the ‘after-storm-wet-sky’ shining on the Avon estuary. He had it in him to write elegies for an England which was doomed and vanishing, to touch its spirit, capture its oddities and its echoes from the past. There is a vision which is pure ‘Betjeman’. The early poems had been hit and miss. Was he going to dissipate all his talent in journalism, and conversation and social life?
For so gregarious a being, the Muse of Poetry needed to take flesh in human loves and friendships. His friendship with John Piper marked the new phase of Betjeman’s life. The paintings of the one, the poems of the other, provide a highly comparable elegiac vision. There is no doubt that they were catalysts to one another and that their best work was stimulated by their friendship.
Jim Richards, Betjeman’s colleague on the Architectural Review, was married to Peggy Angus, who was putting on a show of abstract paintings for the Artists’ International exhibition, a group founded to help refugees from Nazi Germany. Piper contributed some pictures.
Born on 13 December 1903, and educated at Kingswood School, Epsom, and Epsom College, Piper had gone straight from school into his father’s firm of solicitors. Only his father’s early death in 1927 had released him from the boredom of office life. He went to Richmond School of Art, and joined London’s Royal College of Art in 1928. A year later he married another art student, Eileen Holding, but this did not last.
Like most very young artists, Piper drew his inspiration from the most admired masters of his day – in his case, Matisse, Picasso and Braque. He experimented with a variety of abstract inspirations, cubism, paper collages, and also constructions in which rods and discs of differing textures and forms would be applied to boards. With the dissolution of his marriage, Piper had fallen in love with one of his wife’s friends, Myfanwy Evans, who shared his enthusiasm not only for modern art and for music, but also for topography. ‘Send me some S. Devon lighthouses from Dartmoor and other intimations of your existence’, he said to her on a postcard during the first summer of their relationship.
Piper was a gaunt-faced, hollow-eyed, eagle-nosed man of almost monkish appearance, with short hair en brosse. Myfanwy, with her sloping shoulders and floppy short hair, had the look of a schoolboy. They were to be devoted life-companions, marrying when the law allowed on 24 February 1937 at the Marylebone Register Office. By then they had become the Betjemans’ dearest friends.
Jim Richards, at that exhibition in 1936, suggested that Piper might like to get involved in the Shell Guides. Not long afterwards Piper received a letter from Betjeman – ‘Dear Artist, Marx Richards tells me that you are good at writing guidebooks. Would you like to do Oxfordshire?’
‘We realised we liked the same things’, Betjeman recollected.
Piper’s abstract creations of the early to mid-1930s are imitations of continental giants. His desire for Myfanwy to send him postcards of South Devon lighthouses was an intimation of a much more personal desire to engage with English landscape, and architectural monuments. Still using collage to great effect, he produced some wonderful seascapes, notably in Dungeness and in Aberaeron. Lighthouses figured largely in these mid-1930s works, but also did Welsh chapels and medieval ruins. In the October 1936 issue of Architectural Review, Piper wrote an article on ‘England’s Early Sculptors’. He saw that the relief-carvings on Northumbrian and Cornish crosses, or the strange faces carved on the font at Toller Fratrum in Dorset, were forebears of much that he had admired in Picasso. The medieval sculptors had ‘immense personal conviction’. In discovering the genius of these unnamed English craftsmen-sculptors, Piper found his own style, his own immense personal conviction.
Much of this was helped by working with Betjeman on the Shell Guides, and by the journeys the two men made together, looking at churches. On one such expedition, in Much Wenlock in Shropshire, they had to wait in a hotel’s side-room before being admitted for tea, and a waitress came forward and said in a strong North Country accent, ‘Will you two men come forward please.’ When they sat down to tea, Betjeman had adopted the persona of a commercial traveller, who spoke in the same strong accent as the waitress. His ‘colleague’ was therefore ‘Mister Pahper’, a nickname which stuck.
Wherever they went – and they collaborated on the Shropshire volume of the Shell Guides – Piper photographed or sketched churches. ‘He drew absolutely certainly with a quill pen’, Betjeman recalled, ‘and you could tell at once from the line whether it was decayed or Victorian … I don’t think I’ve ever felt so confident as I did with Mr Piper. I remember once in Salop I suddenly lost my temper and then I felt I had wounded a tame animal.’ For Piper’s part, it was directly through browsing in Betjeman’s huge library of topographical books that he discovered his métier. The abstract phase had come to an inevitable end, and Piper had begun to ask himself, ‘Where do we go from here?… I found I was English and Romantic, so I looked at Cotman, Turner, Blake, Palmer and painters in that tradition and tried to draw the things I seemed born to love.’
The friendship between Pipers and Betjemans was very much one of four, and not just of two people. Myfanwy had known Penelope Chetwode as a girl. They had been at school together for a short spell at Queen’s College, Harley Street, though Myfanwy, more academic, transferred to North London Collegiate, and then went on to St Hugh’s College, Oxford. (In the Betjeman poems about her, he makes her a student at St Hilda’s, presumably for reasons of easier scansion.) Betjeman had no sooner met her than she had joined the reredos of his goddesses, ‘Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak’. In ‘Myfanwy’, she is nanny (‘Black-stockinged legs under navy-blue serge’), treating him to Fuller’s angel-cake and Robertson’s marmalade, and possessing a ‘fortunate bicycle’ which makes another appearance in ‘Myfanwy at Oxford’, this time laden with ‘Kant on the handle-bars, Marx in the saddlebag’ while the willowy figure of Myfanwy Evans blends in the incense-choked shrines of St Paul’s and St Barnabas’s with the Celtic Myfanwy of Arthur Machen’s The Secret Glory. The ‘Lonely Hearts’ columns of newspapers sometimes advertise for companions who will offer ‘Friendship at First’. Betjeman offered most of his women friends Courtly Love at first which cascaded through laughter into friendship.
Myfanwy was immensely impressed by her first visit to Garrard’s Farm, and by the fact that Penelope had trained up two village girls to cook and serve excellent meals. Because she had known Penelope and been to her girlhood home in St John’s Wood, the Pipers could also supply that not always easy category – friends who could help entertain family. The Betjemans brought the field marshal and Lady Chetwode over to the Pipers’ house at Fawley Bottom (Fawley Bum) near Henley. ‘What’s that?’ asked the field marshal pointing at a custard marrow on the table. When told, he replied, ‘Were you ever in Kashmir?’
Betjeman’s friends, Osbert and Karen Lancaster, also took an instant liking to the Pipers, so there were many happy meals together. As his amusing memoirs show, Lancaster had been exposed to so much mumbo-jumbo throughout his childhood, when his mother tried out one branch of Hidden Wisdom after another, that he remained immune as an adult to the wilder reaches of religious enthusiasm but he was a practising Anglican. Both Betjemans as a married team had found a deep bond in the Church. It soon became clear that it was much more than a thing of hymn-singing round the harmonium, or wanting to join in with village life, and so offering to help at church. Visitors to Garrard’
s Farm would find themselves subject to various forms of persuasion, not always subtle. Peter Quennell, who had been engaged to write the volume on Somerset for the Shell Guides, went to stay at Uffington on a particularly cold winter weekend. After an excellent Sunday luncheon he retired to his bedroom in the hope of burrowing beneath the blankets for warmth. Half asleep, he realised that someone was joining him, and he turned his body to find Penelope Betjeman, well-swathed with cardies, snuggling down to join him. A keen amorist, Quennell had noted Penelope’s charms and felt flattered by her directness of approach. But he had mistaken the reason for this visit. ‘Naow, Peter’, she said in her loud Cockney, ‘what is orl this about not believing in the Divinity of Chroist? Woi don’t yew believe?’
In 1937, while on holiday with Penelope in Rome, Betjeman had read a book called Elements of the Spiritual Life. He had felt his faith renewed as he absorbed its pages. Its author was the Rev. Francis Harton, vicar of Baulking only four miles from Uffington. Both Father Harton and his wife Sibyl became Betjeman friends. Indeed, it was through Sibyl that the Betjemans met the Hartons. Mrs Harton found herself on a train with a couple who were in the middle of a row. ‘They were quite oblivious of being in public.’
Before long, Father Harton had become Betjeman’s and Penelope’s confessor. ‘Thank you for making our marriage so happy again’, Penelope once wrote to him.
Father Harton, as well as being vicar of Baulking, was a keen diner at the Mercers’ Company in the City of London, of which he was the Master. When he became Dean of Wells in 1951, Betjeman exclaimed – ‘We thought he was just a humble country priest, and all the time he was eating his way into the most comfortable Deanery in England.’ When Harton died in 1958 ‘while walking near Wells Cathedral’, Betjeman wrote:
He was a much-loved parish priest in the little village of Baulking, where he is to be buried. He was a staunch Catholic but did not believe in putting country people off with too much ritual. By constant visiting, unruffled example, the effective use of the Book of Common Prayer, and by preaching plain doctrinal sermons, he built up a loyal following.
Father Harton was a boring man, and, much as they revered him, the Betjemans mocked him behind his back, calling him Father Folky and Mrs Harton the Abbess. Bowra treasured the letter he wrote to Penelope to dispense with her services as an organist at Evensong in Baulking. It is quoted in full both by Bowra and in subsequent studies, but it does deserve its immortality:
Baulking Vicarage
My dear Penelope,
I have been thinking over the question of playing the harmonium on Sunday evenings here and have reached the conclusion that I must now take it over myself.
I am very grateful to you for doing it for so long and hate to have to ask you to give it up, but, to put it plainly, your playing has got worse and worse and the disaccord between the harmonium and the congregation is becoming destructive of devotion. People are not very sensitive here, but even some of them have begun to complain, and they are not usually given to doing that. I do not like writing this, but I think you will understand that it is my business to see that divine worship is as perfect as it can be made. Perhaps the crankiness of the instrument has something to do with the trouble. I think it does require a careful and experienced player to deal with it.
Thank you ever so much for stepping so generously into the breach when Sibyl was ill; it was the greatest possible help to me and your results were noticeably better then than now.
Yours ever, F.P. Harton
He gave her a copy of H.V. Morton’s In the Footsteps of the Master inscribed ‘With grateful thanks from the Vicar and Churchwardens of Baulking’.
Although the Pipers considered Father Folky ‘a pompous old trout’, it was at his hands that they sought the sacrament of baptism, followed by confirmation, by the Bishop of Oxford, in Uffington Parish Church.
Am very annoyed with the folky’s [sic] for thinking the atmosphere in this house is not Holy enough for you to have lunch in before the laying on of hands. You could easily bring Edware [sic] over for the day and leave him with Betty but I suppose he would be miserable without you. Anyway you must come and have tea afterwards. Much love to you both and I am showing the Folkys J. Piper’s Listener articles which should put them in their places about Georgian.
The Pipers were intimidated by the service partly because there were ‘hundreds of kiddies’ present. After Confirmation they received Holy Communion and then, in Piper’s recollection, they were ‘married’. Presumably, by ‘married’, Piper meant ‘received a nuptial blessing’ since their actual wedding had already taken place.
For the remaining few years of peacetime, the Betjemans and the Pipers were constantly in one another’s company, quite often joined by the Lancasters (‘What a service you did us the day you brought the Pipers into our lives’, Osbert Lancaster was to write to Betjeman). Piper’s enthusiasm for ‘church crawls’ was insatiable. He remembered Betjeman complaining, ‘I can’t do more than ten churches a day, old boy.’
As their friend David Cecil once remarked, ‘it is only second-rate minds which reject the obvious’. The churches of England are its glory. This seems an obvious fact today, to unbelievers as well as to the faithful. But at the moment Piper and Betjeman became friends the German air force was being built up and would, after the outbreak of war, bomb English cities, destroying many of the finest churches. A less obvious threat came from within. This was from the Church itself, the clergy who could not see, what was obvious to the rest of the population, that each parish church, even the duller ones, is a gospel in stone. Each tells us much more than most sermons or uplifting books. And it is also a link with our forebears, with the past. (The very reason why some of the more power-mad clergy hate church buildings.)
Pleasure, laughter, aesthetic delight led them on their ceaseless church crawls. But in its inexhaustible and encyclopaedic scope, their obsession would allow them to build up a huge store of personal knowledge and visual memories, which would be put, not only into the Shell Guides, but also into the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches (illustrated by Piper) as into hundreds of Piper pictures and dozens of Betjeman poems. Their journeys together also laid the ground-work for many of Betjeman’s best topographical films. Just as John Ruskin with sketch-pad, pencil and brush (later, with camera) felt himself to be immortalising the last vestiges of Gothic Europe before it was destroyed by industrialisation, there is a strong sense in both Piper and Betjeman, instinctual at first, and later taught by experience, that their love of churches had an elegiac tinge. But it also, without being solemn, had a serious purpose and effect. Most people in England would not choose to put into words what they ‘believe’, and few are regular churchgoers. But to the 75 per cent or more who always answer on censuses and questionnaires that they believe in God, as indeed to the 25 per cent who take a different view, the buildings, with their peculiar atmosphere, and encrustations of historical memories and associations, are deeply treasured. Betjeman’s and Piper’s much younger friend Richard Ingrams rightly observed that this was ‘a partnership which did more to teach Englishmen to love their churches and their Church than anything or anyone in modern times’.
How profoundly seriously Betjeman regarded religious questions is shown in the remarkable letter he wrote on 25 March 1939 to Roy Harrod, the economist who had married Billa Cresswell. Evidently Harrod had written to Betjeman asking him whether he really seriously believed in ‘all that’. Harrod had said that the theists he had met were all bores and that they did not tell us anything of interest. Religion leaves the problems of the world ‘unsorted’. Betjeman replied by asking: ‘What are the problems? For you, economic ones? That someone is worse off than someone else?… That people are tortured and unhappy mentally and physically…?’ Then he put into words why he went to church.
I choose the Christian’s way (and completely fail to live up to it) because I believe it is true and because I believe – for possibly a split second in six months
, but that’s enough – that Christ is really the incarnate Son of God and that Sacraments are a means of grace and that grace alone gives one the power to do what one ought to do. And once I have accepted that, the questions of atonement, the Trinity, Heaven and Hell become logical and correct. Of course my attitude to them is different from that of an Italian peasant, but that is because words can never explain mysteries, my knowledge of them is the same as that of the peasant. By knowledge I mean knowing with more than the intellect. You would not hold this possible. You believe that the intellect is our highest faculty and that mind and body are all we have. If you throw in spirit, then even a thing like positive, tangible evil becomes possible. Then one’s spiritual life becomes the activist of one and we are racing in an arena of witnesses living, dead and unborn into the world.
I feel this will shock you, you dear Liberal intellectual old thing … I know that you are a negative force but may even do some service by immunising people against worse creeds such as Fascism. I believe it is positive and that can alone save the world, not from Fascism, or Nazism, but from evil. If I did not believe that I should live in the present and squeal at death all the time, instead of most of the time.
Even before the bombs began to fall, the destruction of England was well under way. Betjeman became a preservationist by instinct. So many good buildings, of whose history and architecture he had built up an intimate knowledge, were the victims of human greed and stupidity. An obvious example was All Hallows’ Church, Lombard Street, in the City of London, which the ecclesiastical commissioners proposed to remove, so that the site could be sold to a stock bank. Betjeman wrote to The Times reminding readers of the fate of St Katherine Coleman, ‘one of the few unspoiled Georgian interiors in the Country’, demolished in 1919, its magnificent fittings distributed here and there to quite inappropriate settings. C.R. Ashbee, the Arts and Crafts designer (an erotomaniac) wrote congratulating Betjeman on his letter. ‘Till we all get a unified & intelligent constructive policy on which there is agreement between (a) Architects and Engineers, (b) The L.C.C., (c) The Church, (d) The City, (e) The Crown Estates in London, I place them in this order of importance, we shall have no chance for any London Plan that is worth the name.’ Only the post-war scene would demonstrate quite how true this was. Ashbee, like Comper, became one of those older designers, craftsmen and artists whom Betjeman befriended, fairly often making a visit to Godden Green, Sevenoaks, to see him.