Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  I love the Bog villa and also the people

  Whose elegant brogues have the gravel to crunch on

  As sedately the bells from St Cyprian’s steeple

  Will summon them northward to share the bog luncheon.

  When Poppy Pryce-Jones died of cancer, in February 1953, Elizabeth Cavendish proposed marriage to the mainly gay Bog within a few months. By then, the strain and guilt of her affair with Betjeman had made her feel that she must find someone else. Pryce-Jones himself explained her motives as ‘just an escape from JB whom she loved but didn’t want to complicate his life’.

  On his way down to have his annual family holiday in Cornwall in August 1953, Betjeman asked Bog, ‘Do I stand between you and our loved Elizabeth? I sometimes feel I do. And by doing that I stand away from you and am no use to us and I would like to be of use. For I love you, my dear old Bog, and your little house and its trim garden and your interest in electric razors and Rilke. Don’t give up the TLS. It really is frightfully good. The only interesting paper. And it is you that makes it so.’

  As so often when Betjeman’s emotions were deeply engaged, he made a joke of the situation and spoke of it openly. Since Oxford days, he had made his loves the subject of general conversation, so that anyone who met him would be told of his love, now for Little Bloody, now for Billa, now for Woman, now for Propeller, now for Freckly Jill. Antonia Pakenham, daughter of Betjeman’s old friends Frank and Elizabeth, was at Alan Pryce-Jones’s flat in the Albany in the early-to-mid-1950s when Betjeman seized her arm. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ he said, pointing to Elizabeth Cavendish, and began reciting a poem he had made up about Bog and Paddy Leigh Fermor fighting a duel for Feeble’s sake.

  Being the secret consort of a married man had not been Elizabeth Cavendish’s prime ambition in life. She was still a very young woman, with all her life before her, and she could have had no idea at this stage quite what a momentous thing had happened to her when she fell in love with Betjeman.

  Her grandmother Alice, Marchioness of Salisbury (by birth a member of the Gore family, who produced Bishop Gore, founder of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, and a Christian pastor committed to the Social Gospel) had advised Elizabeth that she must see how other people in England were living. From the age of ‘eighteen or so’, Elizabeth had spent most of each week in the East End of London in Poplar and Stepney as a social worker. She would go on to become a frequent prison-visitor, becoming chairman of the Board of Visitors at HM Prison, Wandsworth.

  Finding herself in love with a married man, and in the midst of what was turning out to be not simply an affair but something much more serious, overturned her entire existence. Having lived with her mother in Cheyne Walk, she now bought the small house in Radnor Walk, Chelsea, which was to be her home for the rest of her life. Betjeman visited when he could, never staying at that address much more than once a week in the first ten years. Elizabeth recalls,

  At the beginning when John stayed at Patrick Kinross’ house he was probably only up for a night or two a week, but that was only for a fairly short time until he moved to Cloth Fair when he was around a lot more, and of course as well we stayed a lot with the Pipers at Fawley Bottom and with Osbert and Karen [Lancaster] in Henley and others, and went just the two of us for two, three or four days looking at houses and churches all over England and staying in hotels or sometimes with friends of John’s. We also stayed a lot with Peggy and Lynam Thomas in their nice house on the cliff at Trebetherick, sometimes with them and other times they lent us the house. We also travelled abroad quite a bit.

  From 1951 onwards, there was another, quite different element in her life. She accompanied Princess Margaret on her first official visit abroad, to Jamaica. The princess was a friend, but when she asked Elizabeth to accompany her she had said that since it was an official trip, she could come as her Lady-in-Waiting. She maintained this role until the Princess’s death, following her on official visits, making sure that the Princess was kept comfortable on her journeys, and not monopolised by the over-talkative at receptions, official openings, and the like. ‘The job involved answering queries, writing thank you letters and all sorts of other letters on her behalf, and generally being a background of commonsense to whom Princess Margaret could turn for friendship and advice.’

  A number of people, including close members of Elizabeth’s family, have found the friendship between the two women puzzling, but it was a deep one. It was forged at a house party of Lord Glenconner’s. Those who knew both women at this period could see that one very obvious thing which they had in common was the love for men who, in the eyes of the church at least, were married to someone else – in Princess Margaret’s case her father’s former equerry Group Captain Peter Townsend.

  Betjeman, in many ways a natural courtier, took to the friendship with the Princess and became part of it. Inevitably, given the difference in height between ‘Feeble’ and Princess Margaret, the Princess became ‘Little Friend’.

  An early outing, one of many walks, church-crawls, holidays and expeditions which Betjeman shared with his new love, was spiritually far from royalty. He took her to Willesden Churchyard, and wrote,

  Come walk with me, my love, to Neasden Lane.

  The chemicals from various factories

  Have bitten deep into the Portland Stone

  And streaked the white Carrara of the graves …

  In this spot, so deeply ‘Betjeman’, he showed Elizabeth the grave of Laura Seymour, ‘So long the loyal counsellor and friend’ of Charles Reade, the Victorian writer who is buried with her. Reade, author of the long fifteenth-century historical romance The Cloister and the Hearth, was a prolific writer in his day and he was also, what Betjeman would have loved to have been, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. The relationship between him and his life-long companion remains mysterious, which is one of the subjects of Betjeman’s poem ‘In Willesden Churchyard’.

  Did Laura gently stroke her lover’s head?

  And did her Charles look up into her eyes

  For loyal counsel there? I do not know.

  Doubtless some pedant for his Ph. D.

  Has ascertained the facts …

  In this sometimes neglected, and very fine poem, which is both witty and moving, it is almost as if Betjeman in the 1950s saw the whole story – his long companionship with Elizabeth stretching forward through the future to his death, and the prurient curiosity which their friends, and posterity, would show in the relationship. It does not end with pedants, nor intrusive biographers. Very characteristically, he imagines himself dissolving, as Laura Seymour and Charles Reade have dissolved in the Willesden churchyard, and he feels, ever close, but not always consoling, the sacramental presence of Christ –

  I only know that as we see her grave

  My flesh, to dissolution nearer now

  Than yours, which is so milky white and soft,

  Frightens me, though the Blessed Sacrament

  Not ten yards off in Willesden parish church

  Glows with the present immanence of God.

  Osbert Lancaster, one of Betjeman’s closest friends in the second half of his life, used to say that he was the only person he knew who managed to be married, have a mistress and live the life of a bachelor all at once. From the year 1951, this needs to be borne in mind. Home life went on in Berkshire. His gregarious social life in London, and his travelling around England, partly for broadcasts, partly in search of architectural delight, continued as if he were a young unmarried man.

  It was obvious to both Betjemans, after a particularly cold winter, when the boiler broke in the Rectory, that they would move. In October 1951, Penelope wrote to him at length about their shared hopes and plans.

  Darlin Tewpie, oi AVE got confidence in yer earnin and writin powers, oi thinks yew earns a tremendous lot boot oi know it is in er soul-destroyin way and that nearly arf is removed in taxes. Oi also KNOW and ave always known 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 oother alloied soobjects. The point about mee is oi henjoy teaching catechism more than anything else at all and oi looves livin ere where oi can indoolge that whim fairly fully and also roide and ave paonies fer the children BOOT QUOIT HAPART from yer disloike of ther place oi KNAOW it is mad ter continue ere naow Woad is dead as hapart from the clear £1250 per year PLOOS overead expenses for repairs required per year the kiddies hexpense apart from school fees will HINCREASE as ther years go boi saow we joost mooost not live in sooch an hextravagant wa. There seem to me ter be two alternatives: oone ter live in tartish stiole [sic] in er mooch smaller oause with toini garden and no land and sell er lot of our furnityre. Then we would ave quoite er lot of cash ter spare for hentertaining and travelling haboaut and when both kiddies is at school oi could go abroad soomtoimes which would make oop fer los of paonies and caows. HOR, TWOOOOO ter ave er small dairy farm. I honestly ave confidence that I could make this pay well, doozens hof hinexperienced people ave sooceeded [sic] since the war and the chief qualification required is er real interest in cowns [sic] and er willingness ter spend toime hon their proper care. This would mean yew would ave ter continue yer reviewing fer one year after we sells this and goes tew er farm hafter which I am pretty certain yew could give it oop and do more serious wroitin sooch as oi KNOW and ave habselute confidence yew is still capable hof. Personally oi thinks we should go AWAY from so many friends fer a bit till we is both settled into our new way of loife oi am sure it would be easier ter get down ter work that way, boot if yew is bent on being near Hoxferd we will certainly gaow there. There poi t [sic] is hoi know we is both on each oothers nerves very badly and at the same toime hoi quoite hagree that we moost keep ther family tergether BOOT hoi am sure that when we AS faound her property hit woyld bee MOOCH better hif yew remove and stay with eg ther Colonel fer a month as hoi quoite honestly could not stand ther move with yew in er continueal state of nerves, whereas if yew soopervoises ther packing hof yer best books and pictures, then gaows off and wrtoites [sic] somewhere I n [sic] soom friends aouse oi can easily tackle ther move hom me hown and settle in with ther cows and get heverything goin and get the place coasy ready ter reeceeeveyew [sic] … Then when all is settled and heaps of gold is pourin into their milk pails we can all reunite in our noice little loove nest and be appy. It seems ter me idiotic not to dew more with moi capital than leave it in Himperial tobacco shares etc. Hoi know oi is er very bad woifie boot oi looves yew very mooch hoonderneath and oi know we can get hon very noicly when we loikes as we ave many friends hin common.

  In the event, she cleverly found something which was a good compromise between tartish stoile and a dairy farm. Some Roman Catholics met by Penelope at church offered to sell her their house in Wantage. Betjeman went to see it, and said, ‘We must have this.’ The Mead, set in seven acres, was a seventeenth-century farmhouse to which had been added a tile-hung, red-brick Victorian villa. It looked across fields to the middle of the old market-town of Wantage, and the parish church of St Peter and St Paul, whose bells chimed the quarters and played a hymn every third hour.

  Wantage was a great centre of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. The church had been one of the first in England to move to the ritualistic ceremonials which so shocked nineteenth-century Protestants. There was a daily recitation of Morning and Evening Prayer, and a daily Mass. In the inter-war years, there were over half a dozen curates attached to the church, and even in 1951 it was a lively concern. There was also a convent in the town, the Community of St Mary the Virgin, with nearly a hundred nuns, which ran a girls’ boarding school. It was the ideal place for Betjeman, pillar of the Church, to have taken up residence. For all the chaos of his emotional life, his public persona was certainly that of Defender of the Faith. T.S. Eliot, himself a churchwarden of St Stephen’s, Gloucester Road, one of the Highest churches in London, had been unwilling to sign a protest, centred around the Church of the Annunciation, Bryanston Street, Marble Arch, against the Christian rally in Hyde Park accompanying the opening of the Festival of Britain in the summer of that year, 1951. These purists objected to the rally on the grounds that it was ecumenical, and that Church of England bishops would share the platform with Nonconformist ministers. They objected to ‘the misleading identification of the Church of England with those bodies which do not accept the traditional Faith of the Church’. The Roman Catholics were not taking part, ‘and we feel that such an act can but give the non-Christian spectator a false idea of the religious life of this country. We also think that the participation of the Church of England may give the additional impression that Roman Catholics are the only religious body which defends the full Catholic Faith.’ Betjeman admitted to Eliot that he found the tone of the protest somewhat ‘extreme’. ‘But I have nailed my colours to the mast & cannot let down my co-signatories.’

  He accepted huge numbers of speaking engagements in different parts of the country, sometimes at schools, sometimes in settings where he could rally support for the causes of architectural conservation or for the Church, if possible both. The patronal festival of the church at Staunton Harold, Ashby-de-la-Zouch in the autumn of 1953 provoked a typical response from the patron of the living, Earl Ferrers. The letter speaks of the attractions which drew the crowds –

  The Archbishop – Ice creams – John Betjeman. In this part of the world few of us are Church of England, some of us are R.C. And the rest of us, Baptist, Anabaptist, Wesleyans, Utilitarians, Unitarians, Hot Gospellers, Blue Domers, or even of the Lady Huntingdon Persuasion. So, you see, even an Archbishop has his limitations. And that is why, in the first instance, I asked you to come down, and address us. I was both amused and amazed by your prompt reply, combining as it did, extreme humility with an unusual capacity for human friendship. Those are qualities we love and admire. ‘And behold we were not disappointed’. I know that that lecture cost you a pint of blood. You would feel, I fancy, somewhat rewarded had you heard some of the comments upon it. ‘Mr Betjeman was inspired’… ‘John Betjeman’s brilliance’ etc. Fair comment? Anyhow freely given.

  It was one of two visits to Derbyshire that autumn – Derbyshire being the county of Chatsworth, and the dukes of Devonshire, and Hardwick Hall, the great Elizabethan house, at present being occupied by Elizabeth’s mother (Moucher), the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (David Cecil’s sister). ‘When I asked the Dowager Duchess’, Betjeman told Patrick Kinross, ‘whether she had ever used Chiswick House she said, “Only for breakfasts. But people don’t have them now. We went there by barouche. In those days everyone had a villa – there was Syon, Osterley and the Buccleuchs had that place at Richmond.” When I asked whether she used Compton Place, Eastbourne, she said, “Always at Whitsun”.’

  Nooni nooni nooni noewke

  wrote Betjeman to Penelope,

  Er ooby went off to stay with a duke

  Nibberly Nobberly nibberly nob

  Er ooby was clearly a bit of a snob.

  While David Cecil’s friends such as Rowse or Evelyn Waugh, who did not really know ‘Moucher’, could see her almost as a symbol of the vanishing aristocratic caste they idolised, for Betjeman, she was to become a real friend. True, she was of the old school, who called her servants, male or female, simply by their surnames. She was through and through an aristocrat. Like her brother Lord David Cecil, however, she was one of those unusual people who was equally at ease in the company of anyone. According to Rowse, meeting her had inspired him to change his manly working-class West-Country voice into that of a flutey dowager. Rowse had been at Christ Church at exactly the same time as David Cecil. When Lord David introduced his friend to his sister, she had impressed the young Cornish socialist by saying, ‘When I’m depressed, Mr Rowse, I plant an avenue.’

  Despite Rowse’s apocryphal story about planting an avenue, Moucher was not especially addicted to living in grand houses. As they gathered round the wireless to hear the news of the outbreak of war at Cha
tsworth, the duke said, ‘Well, one good thing about this news. It gives us the excuse to move out of here.’ This, the tenth Duke, Eddy, had succeeded his father in 1938, and he and Moucher had only ever lived in Chatsworth for a few months. (It became a school, attended by Elizabeth Cavendish.) Their firstborn, who would have succeeded as the eleventh Duke, was killed in action in 1944 and thereafter Eddy Devonshire never entered Chatsworth. When the tenth Duke died, in 1950, he was succeeded by his second son, Andrew, married to the Hon. Deborah Mitford, youngest sister of Nancy, Diana and Co. Moucher eventually moved in to Moor View, Edensor. It had been the head gardener’s house. As any visitor to Chatsworth knows, the gardens are spectacularly large, and head gardeners did well for themselves – it has six bedrooms. Nevertheless, Moor View is probably less ‘grand’ than Combe Florey (Waugh’s last house) or Trenarren, where Rowse lived for the last forty years of his life. Admittedly, it was only her holiday house, and she lived for most of the year in London.

  Moucher took to Betjeman immediately, and not merely as a friend. If it is true that Lord David Cecil and his wife expressed misgivings about their niece’s liaison with their old friend, Moucher, churchgoer as she was, embraced Betjeman as if he were her son-in-law. To those in the family it was clear that she was all but in love with him herself. She was destined to live into deep old age, and to outlive Betjeman himself. In the first stages of his love for Elizabeth, it was for much of the time a threesome. There was never, as far as Elizabeth’s family was concerned, anything furtive about her life with Betjeman. He was taken whole-heartedly into that family and loved by all of them until death.