Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  Thomas was an Anglican clergyman, another thing which endeared him to Betjeman. When anyone asked him what Thomas was like, Betjeman would reply, ‘Like a dark-haired Stephen Spender if he was a priest.’ His career took him into deeper and deeper rural obscurity, from curacies in the Welsh Marches (border with England) to being rector of Manafon, then of Eglwys Fach (Little Church) near Machynlleth, the seat of Owain Glyndwr’s Parliament in the Middle Ages but, by the time of the 1960s, a quiet market town in Montgomeryshire. Later still, he moved to the small parish of Aberdaron in the Lleyn peninsula.

  One of Betjeman’s Wantage friends, Hester Knight, recalled:

  The happiest evenings I ever spent were at the Mead when we sang or used to read poetry together after one of Penelope’s excellent suppers. I remember the excitement of it, and how John would say, ‘Do you know this?’ And then the whole poem would come alive. And I particularly remember one morning years ago when there was a train strike on and I gave John a lift to London in my car. He had with him a copy of R.S. Thomas’s latest little volume, and all the way he read extracts from it, finishing with one called ‘Night and Morning’ which begins, ‘One night of tempest I arose and went / Along the Menai shore, on dreaming bent’. It is very short, and we learnt it by heart on the drive, and now whenever I see a seashore I remember it, and I remember that sunny morning driving into London on the old road, and John’s voice, and the marvellous feeling of having been transported into a different world thanks to his guidance.

  Thomas’s poem ‘Judgement Day’ sees himself held up in a glass, indifferent to ‘the claim of the world’s sick / Or the world’s poor’, and longs for the mirror to be misted over. ‘Oh thank you, thank you for your succinct, bleak, gloomy, soul-searching, memorable and terrifying “Judgement Day”’, Betjeman wrote.

  It was not an affectation. Judgement Day was quite real to Betjeman, and the situation in his private life now tore him between loyalty to a domestic life with his legal wife which was so often punctuated by pointless rows, or worries about the all-but-grown-up children, and the dream of peace, back in Cornwall, with Feeble.

  The tremendous success of the Collected Poems and of Summoned by Bells meant that Betjeman now had money in the bank. He had always wanted a place of his own in Cornwall, and now he was able to buy Treen, Trebetherick, a house in his childhood seaside haunts. His old friend Anne Channel, who lived at Rock, found it for him. ‘Treen of all houses I should like best’, he had told her.

  It is a typical Trebetherick house. Neither Anthony Powell, who allegedly said that one of his ambitions was to live in a house with a drive, nor Evelyn Waugh, with his love of grandeur, would perhaps have seen the point of this modest, suburban seaside house with a small beautiful garden and a view across Daymer Bay. It was Betjeman’s idea of the perfect house. He paid £8,000 for it; and he did so secretly without telling Penelope. At this period, it did not take much to make her angry, and his decision to keep her in the dark about so momentous a decision was bitterly hurtful – not least because she was finding the Mead a constant financial drain on her resources.

  ‘I absolutely understand about E’, she wrote to him, adding not altogether convincingly,

  and I am not at all jealous. But I do most deeply resent the fact that you bought the cottage in Cornwall without letting me know anything about it, just at a time when we need so much money spent on this property [the Mead, Wantage] and on the kiddies. It is all BUNK to say it is a good investment: you know as well as I do that one NEVER makes money on letting a house, especially a seaside one which one can let for at most two months in the year. However it is done and I wish to God I had sold this at the time when we were debating as to whether to stay on here or build a little ‘contemporary’ bijou residence. You said at the time that you liked this house so much you could not bear to leave it so I decided to go ahead and make it as nice as poss. But I was let in for FAR more structural work and repairs such as windowsills and repointing chimneys etc. than ever I bargained for and now I have no balance left at all. The money I got for land has just about paid for everything and the last lot I am raising from a mortgage on the house having been advised that I should stick to my ATV shares at all costs.

  I keep reading and hearing how much you have made on your collected poems tho I KNOW you have to pay huge taxes on it. But it would have been nice if you had offered to give me a dress or two for this summer. As it is all you gave me at Xmas was one book of snaps, very nice horse snaps certainly but I cannot HELP feeling resentful. However if you really cannot pay for anything here I shall most CERTAINLY sell in the autumn. Your heart is in Cornwall and you had much better go there.

  Yewrs very trewely and sadly Plymstoine.

  To this letter, Lady Betjeman has added the note in old age, when she was widowed, ‘JB bought TREEN, Trebetherick, 1960 for £8,000. He eventually made it over to E. It is now worth circa £80,000 so I was quite wrong saying it wasn’t a good investment!’ That was written shortly after his death. Although she threatened to sell the Mead in 1960, in fact they continued to live there, with Betjeman coming for weekends, for over a decade more.

  What Osbert Lancaster had called Betjeman’s capacity to live as if he were a bachelor continued in Cloth Fair throughout this period, in the intervals of more and more TV work, with its attendant travel, lecturing and speaking engagements.

  In 1961, travelling commitments gave both Betjemans the excuse to spend time apart. Penelope, her children finally off her hands, could indulge the feet which, from her very first meeting with Betjeman, had been itching to travel. With a mule given her by the Duke of Wellington, she rode across Andalusia, partly in the hoof-steps or footsteps of that staunch anti-Catholic George Borrow whose Bible in Spain was a favourite book. The resultant volume from Penelope’s pen was the highly distinctive Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia, a book which Betjeman genuinely and quite unpatronisingly admired. In November 1961, Betjeman visited Australia for the first time.

  One reason for going was the natural desire we all have to escape … besides that I was asked for November which was springtime down under. Another reason was that I would not have language difficulties which make the continent of Europe so difficult for one who has had the advantage of a public school education. The overriding reason was to see what it was like.

  The visit, organised by the British Council, was a tremendous success. He visited New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania; he was taken on tours of Sydney, Canberra, Orange, Newcastle, Armadale, Brisbane, Mount Tambourine, Melbourne, Corio, Adelaide and Perth. The British Council afterwards reported that ‘Mr Betjeman was the ideal visitor to Australia. He aroused in his audiences and acquaintances that pleasant sensation of nostalgia for “home” which is a feature of the old Australian character.’ He did broadcasts on television and radio, public readings, lectures and talks. He marvelled at the beauty of the women. ‘Yes’, a girl in ABC make-up said to him as they were ‘tarting him up’ for a programme, ‘we’re the longest-legged English-speaking race.’

  To Penelope, he wrote from New South Wales that it was like ‘old Cornwall’. Orange, New South Wales was ‘like Polzeath laid out on a grid system’ – ‘I’m loving Aussieland’. He loved the wild life – ‘weird palm-like plants, no leaves and as big as sycamores’. He loved the exotic, ‘most amazingly noisy’ birds. He loved the fact that when you run the bath water out it whirls away in the opposite direction from that which it does in England. He loved the jokes, and developed a taste for a then unheard-of young comedian called Barry Humphries. He loved the religion, and found time to make a two-day retreat with the Kelham Fathers (Society of the Sacred Mission, founded Vassal Road, Kennington, 1894) in Adelaide. ‘Aussieland is much nicer than America. The people are not boring.’ Penelope wrote back to him about the infernal conditions in modern Spain. He replied, ‘It’s odd that I should travel thousands of miles to find Golders Green by the sea and you should go only a few hundred and find yourself back ce
nturies.’

  He told R.S. Thomas he felt

  ten years younger as the result of seeing such beautiful scenery, flowers, insects, birds, buildings and such kind and amusing people. Perhaps the best thing of all was the success of the dear old C of E there (except in Sydney which is very low church) it is full & thriving & very friendly with R.C.s and Presbies. In fact I found my faith renewed.

  Then he returned to England, and the divided life, trying to keep up the routine of weekends in Wantage, and with as many visits to the new house in Trebetherick, to Moor View, Edensor, Derbyshire, as were feasible.

  For much of the time, in Cloth Fair, he was a bachelor, and could enjoy entertaining in his quite modest way. (Tins of Heinz tomato soup would be opened for guests at lunch.) He liked capricious acts of generosity and social surprises. For example, he was friends with all the Hornby brothers, who, as he knew, were fond of one another, but seldom met because they were so busy. He telephoned his stockbroker Sir Antony Hornby and asked him to lunch to meet ‘someone who has wanted to meet you for some time’. And then he did the same to Michael Hornby, his Berkshire neighbour, and to the third brother, Edward Hornby, who stayed at White Horses, Trebetherick, each year. The lunch party consisted of just the four of them, Betjeman and the brothers Hornby, who were delighted, each in turn, coming into his room and finding their brothers waiting there.

  ‘I realise’, he wrote to Edward Hornby, ‘how important all our companies are to each other.’

  Dr Johnson said a man should keep his friendship in constant repair. For someone who was in constant demand as a public figure, presenting television programmes, travelling, giving public readings and making speeches, Betjeman’s devotedness to his friends is impressive. It is only in the last decade of his life, when sickness and tiredness wore him down, that the friendships became frayed.

  An example of the time-consuming activity in which he let himself be involved was the Festival of the City of London in 1962, in which he wrote and helped stage a masque, performed before the Queen at the Mansion House, starring John Gielgud, Tommy Steele and – typical of Betjeman to have included him – Randolph Sutton, a veteran of vaudeville. A newspaper reporter who attended rehearsals noted, ‘Betjeman’s nostalgia for his youth was immediately apparent in the advertisements from the 1920s which were flashed on a screen – Nestlé’s chocolate, somebody’s haircream, a poster for Noël Coward’s Vortex.’ ‘And we’ll throw in some Blitz noises as well’, said Betjeman. ‘Now what was the name of that music hall in Shoreditch High Street, Ran?’ Randolph Sutton put on a topper with a flourish, answered Betjeman’s question, and broke into ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’.

  Randolph Sutton was a link with the fast-vanishing world of the music hall, one of those figures Betjeman especially cherished because they belonged to a very nearly vanished past.

  The television interview Betjeman did with Randolph Sutton is one of the most memorable, giving the poet the chance to explore old Bristol (Sutton’s home town) as well as indulge in his passion for the music hall. The film of Sutton in Bristol was one of a series which Betjeman made of West Country towns, including his old school of Marlborough, with ‘a very nice Old Harrovian called Jonathan Stedall’. Stedall, together with Edward Mirzoeff and Patrick Garland, was one of the principal television directors with whom Betjeman did his best work.

  The film about Sutton revealed that the old music-hall star had developed his singing talent as a choirboy (not surprisingly) at All Saints’, Bristol, a famous Anglo-Catholic shrine – the church of which, incidentally, Betjeman’s great friend Mervyn Stockwood was later the vicar. Sutton’s father was a shopkeeper.

  ‘And did you’, asked Betj, ‘when you were a small boy, slide down that gulley’ – cut to Tuke-like boys sliding down a gully in the Downs, beneath Clifton suspension bridge – ‘which has been worn smooth by a million Bristol bottoms?’

  Ran was ‘discovered’ in a talent contest during a two-week summer holiday at Burnham-on-Sea. His most famous turn in the Halls was ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’. It was a song composed by George Stephens, a man who made his living by hauling coal by day and who sat down in the Horn’s Tavern, Kennington of an evening and wrote songs for which if he was lucky he got a fiver. (‘There weren’t royalties. A fiver was a godsend then.’)

  Although Betjeman is kind to the old singer, who says he has more offers of work than he can cope with, the haunting thing about the interview is that the old stager, and the tradition of entertainment he represents, is obviously as doomed as the old Bristol terraces from which he sprang. The two men, one mid-seventies, the other mid-fifties, stare down at a wrecked Bristol from the top of a fourteen-storey block. Randolph Sutton in his day was one of the most famous singers on the bill at the Theatre Royal, Bristol in the 1920s and 1930s. By the time the programme was made he was all but forgotten except by very, very old people. When he comes on the screen in top hat and tails to sing, with a flourish, the old song ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’ the audience they have assembled to listen to him all look old enough to remember the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria; or even the first performances of Gilbert and Sullivan. Betjeman has once again pulled off the trick of cultivating an eccentric oddity (Kolkhorst, Bosie, Comper) and taking a snapshot of a lost England, that of the Halls.

  Viewing the programme now, nearly half a century on, we can see that there is an artistic kinship between Betjeman and his hero. Telly like the Halls is an ephemeral medium. Betj was top of the bill on TV in the 1960s just as Ran was top of the bill at the Theatre Royal, Bristol in the 1920s. Such achievements get lost. You forget how very good Betj was until you see him again on DVD. Between him and music hall there is a deep bond. It is one of the sources, hymns being the other, for his poetry. He hardly drew from books, which is what make the verses so immediate. The lyric, the joke, comic monologue, all stand-bys of the music halls, these are all forms on which Betjeman drew in his poems and even if some of them are not easily imagined as ‘turns’ in the music hall, such poems as ‘Felixstowe, or The Last of Her Order’, about an Anglican nun living in a seaside boarding house because all the other Little Sisters of the Hanging Pyx have died out, are in fact ‘monologues’ in the music-hall formula.

  And he continued to make new friends. (Before telling Sir Joshua Reynolds that a man should keep his friendships in good repair, Johnson had remarked, ‘If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone.’) John Osborne, the playwright who transformed the London stage with Look Back in Anger, became a friend. It is not hard to see why when one reads Osborne’s memoirs and diaries. Osborne’s celebrated play, much of it happening on a dingy Sunday afternoon in the 1950s, has much in common with the Betjeman who hymned ‘dear old bloody old England’. Osborne, the shabby-genteel Fulham boy, bisexual, thrust by success into a much higher social milieu, while never losing his clear eye and his sardonic anger, had much in common with Betjeman. When the master of the double entendre, Max Miller, died in 1963 – a music-hall star whose acts consisted entirely of jokes and songs about sex, but in which he never said a ‘dirty word’ – Osborne noted, ‘There’ll never be another, as old John Betjeman says, an English genius as pure gold as Dickens or Shakespeare – or Betjeman come to that.’ ‘What did Trollope say – muddle-headed Johnny? It’s deep honesty that distinguishes a gentleman. He’s got it. He knows how to revel in life and have no expectations – and fear death at all times.’

  Osborne had initially been Elizabeth’s friend, but he and his wife Penelope Gilliatt soon formed a friendship à quatre with Betjeman and Elizabeth. They came to stay in Cornwall, and on the Sunday morning, they all four went to St Endellion’s, the church where Betjeman always worshipped when down in Trebetherick. Perched on the hilltop above Port Quin, looking down into Port Isaac bay, it is a medieval collegiate church, pale grey granite, filled with light, and a potent, numinous atmosphere. The religion is Anglican Catholicism at its most un
affected. There is incense, the priest wears vestments, and the devotion of the church is focused on the Eucharist. ‘I suppose you could say’, one of the farmers who worships there once remarked to me, ‘that I’m a perfectly straight down the line’ – he paused, and one expected ‘Church of England man’; but he said, ‘Anglo-Catholic’. But it is an unobtrusive, unshowy Catholicism. It is not a place, to use Osborne’s brilliant phrase, for Walsingham Matildas. When they entered their pew, Betjeman and Elizabeth were surprised to find they had not been joined by their friends. Osborne and his wife sat in the pew behind. Afterwards, Betj and Feeble realized it was because they were not sure when to stand up or sit down, and wanted to take their lead from their friends. Before that Mass, John Osborne was an unbeliever. Thereafter, he developed a religious seriousness, and the Church of England and its services were important to him.

  When Osborne’s play Inadmissible Evidence was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in September 1964, anyone who knew the private circumstances of Betjeman’s life immediately recognised that this play was a version of it. Bill Maitland, a married man with two children, is tormented with guilt because he loves both his wife and a mistress called Liz. ‘I have always been afraid of being found out’ – a line which in real life Betjeman repeated like a mantra. Bill Maitland is a solicitor, obsessed by the ruination of English architecture. Of a developer he says, ‘I’m always seeing his name on building sites. Spends his time pulling down Regency squares – you know – and putting up slabs of concrete technological nougat. Like old, pumped-up air-raid shelters. Or municipal lavatories.’