Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  There was a real feeling of homecoming. This was the first London base of his own which Betjeman had ever had. A Londoner through and through, he had hitherto either lived with his parents, or as a lodger in other people’s flats and houses. A pre-war poem, ‘City’, was set in the churchyard of St Botolph Bishopsgate (the church where Keats was baptised) and as the great bell booms over the Portland stone, he waits

  For the spirit of my grandfather

  Toddling along from the Barbican.

  It isn’t the greatest poem ever written, but hear him say it on one of the recordings, and you sense his exuberant love of the City of London. He was to live at 43 Cloth Fair for nearly twenty years. If Osbert Lancaster was right to say that Betjeman was married, had a mistress and was able to lead the life of a bachelor, then 43 Cloth Fair was what made this possible, and it was here that Betjeman the bachelor flourished. Without it, the rival claims of the two women in his life, and the guilt and depression which they induced, would very likely have sent him mad. In the new regime, in which he was his own master, the rival claims of wife and mistress could be set in perspective, often seeming, when they became complicated, like ‘noises off’ when compared with the central concerns of his life in this place. Number 43 Cloth Fair was his centre of operations, as a writer, as a campaigner against architectural wreckage, as a poet, as a friend of literally hundreds of people, as a broadcaster and public celebrity, as a Christian man doing good deeds by stealth. This last is worth mentioning at once in the context of his move to Cloth Fair. A few minutes’ walk from the house is the hospital, founded in 1123, of St Bartholomew. His daughter Candida tells us that on Thursdays, he would disappear and tell no one where he went. He never discussed it with anyone, and she only discovered what he was doing years later – though Penelope evidently came to hear of it.

  Soon after he moved to Cloth Fair, and started attending the Church of St Bartholomew, he asked the chaplain, Mr Bush, who was rather evangelical (JB enjoyed calling him Father Bush, though not to his face) if he might do hospital visiting. He was then introduced to Sister Mary Bland, a legendary ward sister who worked at Bart’s for more than thirty years. (‘She was madly loved by everyone’, remembers a colleague, ‘and was also a Christian.’) Mary Bland recalled,

  John used to come and have coffee in my room every Thursday morning and then go round and visit the patients in my ward. He was able to make all the patients laugh – he was a wonderful mimic. He much enjoyed the names we had for the sisters. Nobody ever knew the real names, I was in fact Sister Percival Pott which was the name of my ward and John was intrigued by this. He named the Sister who was in charge of all the cleaning ladies, ‘Sister Floors’ and the Sister in charge of the skin department in the outpatients, ‘Sister Skins’. He would say, ‘Please can I go and see Sister Skins’. I think because of his horror of death it helped him to see dying patients.

  Some of these were children. David Johnson, for instance, a patient in the Percival Pott Ward, was twelve years old and suffering from bone cancer when Betjeman started to visit him. As well as visiting the child, both in hospital and at home in the Vale, Hampstead, Betjeman also wrote him letters, full of drawings and jokes.

  This reads the same backwards and is the longest sentence of its kind to do so which I know of – LIVE DIRT UP A SIDETRACK CARTED IS A PUTRID EVIL. The secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission who is travelling with me [the letter is written in the train from Doncaster] and to whom I showed this sentence said did I know what Napoleon said when he was defeated? I expect you do. It was ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW ELBA. The skill of that one is that the words themselves fit. He also asked what was the first remark made by a man to a woman. And when I said I don’t know, he told me it was, MADAM, I’M ADAM.

  Daniel Johnson died two months after reading this letter. Betjeman continued to visit and write to his family for years afterwards.

  If his hospital visiting was one of the things he kept most private, Cloth Fair was also his home during the years of burgeoning fame as a public broadcaster. From this place he must have scripted and planned hundreds of wireless talks and television films. In 1955, he made twenty-six short films for Jack Beddington at Shell in a series called ‘Discovering Britain’, each one a brilliant piece of topographical analysis, and each one strengthening his confidence in the medium. George Barnes at BBC Television, envious of Shell for having milked so much of Betjeman’s knowledge and energy, signed him up for similar topographical and architectural programmes, while also using his larky talents as a clown taking part in entertaining quiz shows and now forgotten studio-discussions. Naturally, the studio-buffoonery, what Betjeman called ‘money for jam’, was better paid and less hard work than the filming, which insisted on long hours on a tight budget. As was always to be the case, Betjeman found his temper fraying after the very tiring business of fronting a television film. After a visit to Cardiff Castle for the BBC, Betjeman returned the contract unsigned as a protest at the mean fees and the appalling treatment he believed himself to have suffered at the hands of the producer. He asked them to send the money to his old friend Canon Freddy Hood, now vicar of St Mary Aldermary in the City, for his fabric fund.

  I am doing this as a protest against the disproportion of your television fees. If I take part in that delightful programme Where on Earth? there is virtually no rehearsing and I am given a good meal free, and even if I am asked to appear on the Christian Forum in the Isle of Wight there is virtually no rehearsing and I am offered eighteen guineas. Yet I had to make two visits to Cardiff in connection with the televising of the Castle, spend three nights in the city and rehearse almost the whole of Sunday. Between the final rehearsal at 6.15 and the programme at ten o’clock, I was offered not even a cup of tea, and only through the kindness of one of the local officials not appearing in the programme, did I manage to get a glass of beer at a club. Therefore I feel that either the standard of fees for doing things like Where on Earth? should be lower, or else that the fee for the extra work and specialist knowledge required over Cardiff should be higher.

  John Piper used to say that he had seen two of his best friends being corrupted by television, Betjeman and Kenneth Clark. There is no doubt at all that television exacts Faustian compacts of its adepts. The ‘better’ the TV personality, the more the medium will ask its price. Those of us who enjoyed Betjeman on television – and speaking for myself, I enjoyed watching him more than anything I have ever seen on the small screen – are grateful for the sacrifice. But telly fame does not come without strange personal costs, and what is sinister about TV work is that those who are successful at it do not entirely realise what it is doing to them until it is too late.

  At this time, Betjeman was often on jolly programmes with Gilbert Harding, a man who in the 1950s was probably one of the most famous broadcasters in England. Harding, a bulbous-eyed, moustachioed figure who looked like the most terrifying of headmasters, was used by the BBC as their stage ‘angry’ man. He was alcoholic, and if his producers could control the intake of drink, so that he was tight but not incapable when he went on air, entertainment could be guaranteed. The entertainment was surely morally on a par with those Bedlams in the eighteenth century who displayed the demented inmates to Sunday visitors. Harding’s pathetic autobiography tells of his modest origins, of the cleverness which took him to King’s College, Cambridge, and the piety which led him to study for the Anglican priesthood at Mirfield. It also chronicles his conversion to Roman Catholicism and his obsessive devotion to his mother. This was made clear to a wide audience in a programme called Face to Face, an interview-series in which John Freeman, editor of the New Statesman, subjected figures of the day to inquisitorial cross-examination. By reducing the normally belligerent Harding to tears at the very mention of his mother, who had just died, Freeman and his masters the Bedlam proprietors must have felt they had scored a particular triumph.

  Harding’s outbursts on radio and television were electrifying. ‘As a priest of the Churc
h of England’, began one member of the public on Any Questions? … ‘Sit down sir, you are no priest!’ yelled back Harding.

  Harding was very much Betjeman’s sort of person, a vulnerable monster haunted by demons, a kind of Evelyn Waugh without the talent. A true friendship sprang up between the two men, and it is a token of how famous Harding was at that period that Candida used to boast to her schoolfriends that ‘My dad knows Gilbert Harding’. He is forgotten now, as are almost all the men and women who ever made their name on television. In his autobiography, he of course makes no mention of his alcoholism or of his self-hating homosexuality, which led him into all kinds of humiliating scrapes. But did Betjeman, with his highly developed emotional intelligence, sense the danger of television work?

  In the year that he moved to Cloth Fair, 1954, he appeared on Desert Island Discs, the radio programme in which a distinguished person imagines himself/herself as a castaway, marooned with eight favourite records, and a luxury. It is an exercise which often reveals the inner person more startlingly than a probing interview. When Roy Plomley, the inventor of the show, approached Betjeman, he received a very characteristic refusal at first. Betjeman pointed out to Plomley that ‘Miss Howson, the stained glass artist lives in your road’ (Deodar Road, Putney) and then said that he could not appear on the show, first because he had already recently been on a records request programme on the wireless, and secondly because ‘Don’t forget I’M NOT MUSICAL … “Tea for 2” is the kind of thing I like.’ In the event, he did come on the show. Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, arranged by Myra Hess, and Weber’s Der Freischütz were the only really musical items he chose. He had country and town railway sound effects, the bells of Thaxted Church in Essex (the parish where the communist Anglo-Catholic vicar Conrad Noel hoisted the red flag on the tower), and the Padstow Obby-Oss ceremonies. His luxury was the lower half of the west window of Fairford Church in Gloucestershire.

  Those who met Betjeman during these early years at Cloth Fair were struck by his air of perpetual business, his ‘constant rushing here and there’. This wasn’t surprising, since television work is demanding of time, and he was still doing a great deal of written journalism, as well as continuing his ever-expanding and ceaseless socialising. He was hyperactive, throwing himself fully into every enthusiasm which took him, whether it was developing a new friendship, saving a building, or finding a new place which excited him.

  The rootedness in England which all this suggests was completely real. The fact that he loved Cloth Fair and the heady excitement of living in the middle of London with its opportunities to meet hundreds of new people, did not diminish the delight he took in Wantage.

  Some new Wantage friends were a married couple called the Martins. Peter was a failed actor who dealt in antiques and his wife Dorothy, who aspired to be literary, ran a small lending library (sixpence a book to borrow). In imitation of the Catholic bookshop in Oxford which doubled as a café, Betjeman suggested that the Martins open a sort of C of E rival in Wantage, and rented an upstairs of a chemists shop on a traffic island. Dorothy took over the ground floor; the chemist went upstairs. The Martins’ bookshop-cum-café was named King Alfred’s Kitchen.

  The business was a failure. Neither of the Martins could really cook, and Penelope, occupied with a duck farming venture which she had started at the Mead, was asked to help them train up someone to provide meals. The Martins were buying nut-and-date loaves at the baker’s opposite, removing the labels and selling them in King Alfred’s Kitchen as ‘Home Made’. Melodramatically, Penelope told Betjeman that if the truth leaked out it would destroy his career as a professional Anglican. She held before him the terrible example of Professor Joad, a philosopher who had shot to fame during the war as a broadcaster on a programme called the Brains Trust and who had then been disgraced when it had been discovered he used to forge his railway season ticket.

  By the time the Martins had drifted off – Mr Martin to do a job at Culham, the atomic research station – Penelope was left with responsibility for the café. She found that Betjeman had signed a ‘repairing lease’ for the property and was liable for the cost of refurbishment when the floor of the upstairs café collapsed.

  In 1956, when the whole place had been rebuilt, King Alfred’s Kitchen was reopened by Father Trevor Huddleston, CR. Huddleston must have begun his career as a monk at Mirfield in Yorkshire at about the same time that Gilbert Harding was studying for the priesthood at the theological college there. Haunted by demons, as so many of Betjeman’s friends and heroes were, this Anglican monk had written an unforgettable exposure of the South African regime in his book Naught for Your Comfort. Back in England he was restless, never particularly happy as confessor and spiritual director to Anglican nunneries and devout upper-class ladies, though this was one of the roles thrust upon him – hence his presence in Wantage as a spiritual director at the convent. His obsessions – with Africa, boys, the insufficiency of his Church’s sympathy with him, religious doubt – make Huddleston the subject of, to date, at least two fascinating biographies and at least one fictitious exploration of his complicated nature.

  Undoubtedly with the unhappiness went a profound spirituality and a near-sanctity. Betjeman would have been especially attuned to all this. As the lantern-jawed, skinny monk, with his deep-set eyes and his hypnotic voice, blessed King Alfred’s Kitchen, many who crowded in to witness the spectacle must have felt little lower than the angels in the teashop’s ingle-nook.

  Inevitably, Penelope had painted ‘Burnt cakes a speciality’ on to the signboard for King Alfred’s Kitchen. The enterprise lasted until 1961, when Penelope sold the ‘caff’ as she and Betjeman always called it. She was a good cook, and prided herself on giving value for money, offering four-course lunches for 3s 6d, in 2002 terms, by the standards of the retail price index, £2.69 per head. By this means, she could soon have the caff running at a loss, which, together with the cost of the repaired floor, guaranteed that more money would be wasted.

  Meanwhile, in London, passing the showrooms of the Utility Vehicle Centre in Great Portland Street, perhaps on his way to admire the underground station designed by C. W. Clark in 1920, he spotted a Peugeot shooting-brake. ‘My dear, dear Beddy’, wrote Penelope in despair to Jack Beddington, ‘PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop Johnny getting a Peugeot shooting brake. It is a real luxury car and FAR ABOVE OUR STATION. It may as he says only cost £800 [£12,281.26 in 2002 by the retail price index] but there is £300 purchase tax on top of that: total £11,00.’ She meant £1,100. They bought the car, even though she had wanted a Morris Traveller. She was always worried by what she perceived as her husband’s extravagance. ‘John, in his new role as nouveau riche ordered, to my horror, 100 rock plants from Sutton’s with two men to plant them. Among them were some frightful dwarf trees which I struck at and have dug up again’, she complained a couple of years after the Peugeot purchase. As someone whose favoured tipple was ginger beer, she was always dismayed by Betjeman’s generosity with alcohol. ‘Loovely weather fer yer films’, she wrote when he was out and about during the late 1950s. ‘Yew as poured 1 doz bottles of Manzilla down the throats of the clergy since you got it 2 months ago. There was not a drop anywhere for Major Dent. He & she came to dinner last night to see my slides.’ One can be sure that the Dents were not offered any alcohol with their well-cooked meal in Betjeman’s absence.

  They were the parents of Anita Dent, who worked as Betjeman’s part-time secretary until she was married in 1957. She asked Betjeman to propose her toast at her wedding, which he did, but not before warning her, ‘Penelope says it is very middle class to have a toast at a wedding. If you must make this mistake I will be honoured to commit the solecism for you.’ In 1958, he took on another young secretary, Victoria (Tory) Dennistoun, a beautiful mischievous-faced person aged a little less than twenty, who lived with her parents at Antwick Stud House, Letcome Regis, Berks. She came on the recommendation of Molly Baring, promising, ‘I am pretty hot on ecclesiastical affairs but
am afraid I have forgotten most of my horse knowledge and know absolutely nothing about geese!’

  It was a winning job application, guaranteed to appeal to her employer. They soon became friends. ‘Have you done it yet?’ he asked several times, and when the answer was ‘Yes’, he took her out to lunch at Coltman’s, near Cloth Fair, to celebrate. She confesses to being a ‘hopeless’ secretary. ‘Sometimes he would sigh and gaze wistfully at a photograph on the mantelpiece of a pretty girl, saying, “Oh, for Freckly Jill.”’ Archie the teddy bear gazed down on their work, and, she recalls, probably saw her forget to turn off the Stenorette tape-recording machine which Betjeman used to dictate letters. ‘I always suspected it was the cause of the fire which nearly destroyed the house’, she says, ‘but John never blamed me.’ The fire caused such damage that Betjeman had to move out of Cloth Fair until it was put right. He was offered temporary accommodation by the son of one of his oldest friends, Anne, Countess of Rosse.

  She was the sister of the designer Oliver Messel, and she will always be associated with beautifying or preserving two outstandingly interesting houses – Nymans, the estate in Sussex acquired by her Darmstadt-immigré stockbroking grandfather, and 18 Stafford Terrace, which had been the home of her other grandfather, Linley Sambourne, a celebrated Punch cartoonist. Her bachelor uncle Roy Sambourne kept this place entirely untouched by twentieth-century tastes or conveniences, so that when he died in 1946, she decided to keep it exactly as it had been since the mid-Victorian period. She and Betjeman, on the strength of this experience, founded the Victorian Society, with the aim of preserving and celebrating the best of Victorian taste and architecture, at that period wholly out of fashion. Anne Messel, whose character perhaps suggested something of Rosie Manasch in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time – ‘the lively, gleaming little Jewess in a scarlet frock’ – was very much part of the London social scene when Powell, Betjeman and friends were coming down from Oxford in the late 1920s, early 1930s. Her marriage to Ronald Armstrong-Jones, a barrister of Welsh gentry background, was dissolved in 1934, and thereafter she married the sixth Earl of Rosse, who belonged to that category most beloved of Betjeman, the Irish peerage. (When she was being shown a tumbledown cabin where one of her husband’s peasant tenants eked out a lowly existence, the man apologised for its rude simplicity. She exclaimed, ‘My dear, don’t change a thing!’)