Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  The financial situation had become problematic, it was true. By 1966, Betjeman was getting a fee of £200 a year.

  For this we are expected to find authors with money and time on their hands, as well as knowledge and ability. We are expected to brief them, and then go round the counties, seeing what they have left out and photographing places not obtainable in the agencies. Finally, we select the photographs at Fabers and decide which are to be big and which small, not forgetting that we read the proofs and alter them with the consent of the authors, when we think fit. This is all skilled work and we have hitherto done it for love of the thing because it cannot possibly pay us.

  This particular dither occurred because James Lees-Milne’s Worcestershire guide contained disparaging remarks about modern urban sprawl, roads, the proletariat, all of which might be thought offensive to ‘the local authorities who may use Shell petrol’. The £200 which Betjeman received in 1966 was, by the index of average earnings, the equivalent in 2002 of £4,491.29. The 2002 equivalent of his 1934 payment of an annual £800 is £68,149.19. So Betjeman is talking about the difference between payment which is enough to support a writer’s way of life, and something which is no more than a modest extra. By February 1966, he was warning John Piper that the enterprising publisher George Rainbird had, without consultation with Betjeman, appropriated the words Shell Guide for his guide-books to Scotland and Ireland. Meanwhile, the proper Shell Guides, those to the counties of England, edited by Betjeman and Piper, were altered without their permission by a combination of Faber, the publisher, and the faceless characters at Shell who wished to cut costs by reducing the illustrations, using inferior maps and even cutting the text.

  Finally, on 11 March, Betjeman wrote to Piper to cut loose from the scheme altogether. ‘The reason I can’t go on with the Guides is purely financial. My work for the Weekend Telegraph and wireless and telly have to come first with me.’

  In the nineteenth century, a figure such as Betjeman would probably have been given an adequate pension from the Civil List which would have been the equivalent of his old pre-war salary from Shell. As it was, in 1966, he had to make a living from journalism. There is something rather chilling, whatever the reasons, to read those words and realise they are written by the author of Continual Dew and Summoned by Bells and First and Last Loves: ‘My work for the Weekend Telegraph and wireless and telly have to come first’.

  He sat on so many committees that this, too, had become a burden and a chore. Many of his letters were written during meetings of the Oxford Diocesan Advisory Committee – ‘Gabble, gabble, gabble – I can hear Harry Oxon [that is, Harry Carpenter, Bishop of Oxford] and the others at the end of the room taking a cup of tea with a layman’.

  One of the many committees on which he agreed to sit was gathered at the offices of Lee, Bolton & Lee, Number One, the Sanctuary, in Westminster to discuss the future restorations of St Peter’s, Vauxhall. One of those sitting on this committee was Canon Eric James, later well known as a religious broadcaster of a peculiarly sympathetic gentleness. The seat next to James was empty until two minutes to five, when Betjeman doddered in, took his seat, and began scribbling on a piece of paper. One of the sentences which he wrote, and shoved under James’s nose, was ‘Who are the Two Chairmen?’ James wrote back, ‘It’s not two chairmen, one is the chairman, and the younger man is his secretary.’ Betjeman scribbled back, ‘Wrong. The Two Chairmen is a pub near here. If you have the courage to say that you are very sorry, but you have to leave, I’ll come with you and we can go to the Two Chairmen.’ Eric James is nothing if not courageous, and he made his excuses to the chairman of the meeting. He and Betjeman reached the pub at about 5.20 and stayed until 10 that night. It was a friendship entirely based on laughter. ‘We drank quite a lot’, James remembers, ‘and we arranged to meet again.’ ‘Why not come to Cloth Fair on Christmas Eve?’ Betjeman suggested to him. ‘I’m always lonely on Christmas Eve.’

  Opportunities to ‘assemble my ideas about Victorian architecture together with slides’ were provided by an invitation to give four lectures at the University of Belfast, but on top of all his other commitments what could have been an invigorating month, leading perhaps to a book, was merely ‘an exhausting experience. Not very rewarding either.’

  Of course, the television work which reversed Betjeman’s priorities and gave him no time for church-crawling and friendships and leisurely reflection, was often itself of a high quality. In November 1966, he stayed in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem and made a film for the BBC about the Holy Land, visiting, as well as Jerusalem, Bethlehem and a Palestinian refugee camp.

  I cannot recommend Jerusalem too highly. But this hotel is the place – old-fashioned, huge bedrooms, flowers and endless servants and quiet and run by Anglicized Americans.

  Now this is the very odd thing about Jerusalem which makes me so glad I came. It really does make you aware that Christ (whether or not he was God is for the moment irrelevant) lived and walked here. There the devotion of centuries, despite raids by Persians, Romans, Moslems and modern conquerors, make one see that Christ was God, ie Man and God in one. And that is brought about by the churches here (Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, Syrian, Latin and the dear old C of E) all sucking honey from the rose of Jerusalem like bees. I am most surprised by how I love this city.

  The love communicates itself, and nowhere more than in the sequence where the poet attends a service at St George’s Cathedral and hears the words of the Book of Common Prayer. The programme was broadcast that Christmas.

  In addition to the broadcasts, and the journalism, and the committee work, there was also the everlasting and ever-mounting work as the nation’s most celebrated, but most exhausted, campaigner for the conservation of threatened buildings and town centres. The 1960s were a decade in which all the dreams of those early modernists, such as P. Morton Shand, were embodied in concrete, to the lasting regret of many who had supported the idea of architectural modernism in their youth.

  Most of Betjeman’s work, supported often by scores, hundreds or even thousands of those who loved the buildings or streets which he tried to save, was unsuccessful. He was closely associated with the campaign to save the Doric portico at Euston Station, though, as Bevis Hillier notes in his biography, apart from writing an article in the Telegraph about it, and speaking to the Royal Fine Arts Commission and joining a deputation to the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, Betjeman was not the leader of that particular campaign. Did he go easy about the Euston Arch for fear of embarrassing Uncle Harold? Macmillan, with whom Betjeman must have coincided on visits to Chatsworth, did nothing to save the arch. The portico came down in 1961, and for a whole generation it was not merely a loss in itself, but a symbol of what was being destroyed in the modernistic rebuild of Britain. Betjeman played a much bigger role in trying to rescue James Bunning’s Coal Exchange (1849) in Lower Thames Street. This wonderful domed rotunda was demolished in 1962. If the campaigns for Euston and the Coal Exchange were notable setbacks, that to save Bedford Park, which began with the Bedford Park Residents’ Association in 1963, was successful. Today, the work of the Arts and Crafts architects who first built and inhabited the houses in the Bedford Park estates can be seen as beautiful.

  Throughout the decade, Betjeman worked tirelessly with those who did not want to see nineteenth-century buildings replaced by modernist ones. A typical story, printed in the Daily Herald on 23 August 1961, occurred when thirteen-year-old William Norton tried to save the Victorian town hall at Lewisham, designed by George Elkington, from demolition. Accompanied by Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh, Secretary of the Victorian Society, Betjeman, with the inevitable shapeless hat and well-chewed cigarette, boarded the train from Holborn Viaduct Station (‘arriving Catford at nine minutes past three’), clutching a large brown paper parcel tied with green string. ‘A picture – a little memento for the boy’, he explained.

  It was a picture of one of the many memorials to Sir Walter Scott. ‘This memorial to Sir Walt
er Scott was never put up. Let’s hope that a memorial as great and impressive will one day be put up to William Norton in gratitude for his effort to save Elkington’s work, the Lewisham town hall.’ It was another unsuccessful campaign – Lewisham town hall was demolished in May 1962. William Norton, as well as being a thirteen-year-old boy with a passion for Victorian architecture, had another claim on Betjeman’s affection. He was an Irvingite, a member of that diminishing band who belonged to the Catholic Apostolic Church. It had been founded by Carlyle’s friend Edward Irving, and its most notable architectural shrines are in Albury Park, Surrey, and in Gordon Square, London where their cathedral has become the Anglican chaplaincy to the University of London. With his love of out-of-the-way Christian sects, Betjeman had a special fondness for the Irvingites, and, for example, went to visit his fellow North Londoner Helen Gardner when she was living outside Oxford at Eynsham for one last chance to see the small Irvingite church there before it was closed. He asked to visit not only the church, but also the Pym family who had been its chief pillars until some of them were converted to Roman Catholicism by the parish priest, Father Lopez (himself a convert from Anglicanism). ‘Oh but you are the one true church!’ Betjeman insisted when he met the Pyms, who ran the local shop-cum-post office. Young William Norton rose to become the Metropolitan of the Catholic Apostolics.

  Probably, most of those who read these words would be on his side, nearly half a century after Betjeman’s campaigns to save this and to preserve that. Most of the town planning in England during the 1960s was unimaginative, and many good Georgian and Victorian buildings were needlessly destroyed only to be replaced by nondescript lumps. In 1970, he accompanied Candida to Oving, to take part in a huge public protest against the building of a new airport at Wing, North Bucks, near the village of Olney where Cowper lamented the fallen poplars in his famous poem. Using the same rhythms, Betjeman declaimed –

  The birds are all killed and the flowers are all dead

  And the businessman’s aeroplane booms overhead;

  With chemical sprays we have poisoned the soil,

  And the scent in our nostrils is diesel and oil.

  The roads are all widened, the lanes are all straight

  So that rising executive won’t have to wait.

  For who’d use a footpath to Quainton or Brill

  When a jet can convey him as far as Brazil?

  Was there a danger, as some said at the time, that by lending his voice to so many conservationist causes, Betjeman devalued the currency? ‘Often’, wrote Bernard Levin,

  the name of John Betjeman was attached to those appeals, and eventually Mr Eric Lyons, himself an architect, coined the phrase ‘Betjemanic depressives’ to stigmatise collectively those who would preserve at all costs everything from the past, be it a wrought-iron lamp-post due for replacement in Chelsea, a Victorian church in Essex complete with its ‘blue-jowled and bloody’ stained glass, or the celebrated Doric portico at Euston Station.

  Those words were written in 1970. From the perspective of this generation, Betjeman seems like a pioneer. So much has been wrecked, so much heedlessly destroyed that – yes, the old lamp-post in Chelsea probably is much better than anything which a modern designer could come up with, and yes, we do love the Victorian glass of a church in Essex. This shift in attitude towards conservation, as well as the incorporation of Victorian architecture into the canon of buildings which we all regard as worth saving, is part of a whole change in taste over the last generation; but if Betjeman did not achieve this shift single-handedly, he certainly was a major factor in it. To that extent, he was surely right to use the ephemeral medium of television to get the message across, even if sometimes telly is a crude weapon.

  In those days, the 1960s, BBC television commissioned dozens of new plays to be performed on air each year. In 1965, Betjeman collaborated with Stewart Farrer on a satire called Pity About the Abbey, a play in which Westminster Abbey itself was sold stone by stone to Texas, so that the site could be redeveloped for traffic and offices. It was, Betjeman said, ‘a very serious argument disguised as a comedy’. While architects and committee-bores protested to Betjeman about that play, millions of viewers saw the truth of what it conveyed. There was much about Betjeman, as he had emerged in his verse autobiography, and frequent television appearances, which must have jarred or seemed odd to ‘the man in the street’, especially in the 1960s. Few shared his wish that he could believe more fully in Christ’s presence in the Eucharist; few – including apparently the bishops – believed in the divinity of Christ. Betjeman’s love of peers, and grand houses, while striking a chord in some bosoms, would have been out of kilter with the egalitarian spirit of the times. But in the matter of architecture, he spoke for England. While politicians such as Harold Macmillan stood silently by and allowed such desecrations as the demolition of the Euston Portico, and while the architectural ‘establishment’ contrived to ridicule Betjeman’s views, representing them as a sort of camp joke, millions of television viewers felt that he spoke for them. They loved their Church, even if they did not pretend to believe its doctrines and did not wish to attend many of its services. They preferred Victorian railway stations designed by great architects to the brutalist 1960s alternatives designed by the fourth-rate. They liked their old corn exchanges and town halls more than multi-storey car parks and they could see that much of the demolition and rebuilding was done not because it was necessary but because it was going to make some unscrupulous planner, or borough engineer, or councillor a quick and dishonest buck. Many could see this. But it often seemed that Betjeman, in pointing it out, was a lone voice. For that, even if we do not love his poetry, the English will always be grateful.

  A somewhat unwonted development in Betjeman’s life during this period was that Elizabeth persuaded him to take holidays abroad with her mainly clergymanly friends. The exuberant Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark, was usually of the party. So was Harry Williams, formerly the Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, and later a monk of Mirfield. ‘I am very surprised I like abroad so much’, he wrote to Penelope from Simon Stuart’s villa in Italy in August 1966. Stuart was a wealthy man, related to Guggenheims and Rothschilds, and it was a far cry from Trebetherick and Uffington. Betjeman called him ‘bad Simon’ to distinguish him from Simon Phipps, later a bishop, and because of his candour about homosexuality. Bad Simon always enjoyed Betjeman’s euphemism for gay – ‘I say, he was a bit unmarried, don’t you think?’ Stockwood was an amusing, bibulous and very unmarried companion, and there was no doubt that Betjeman had some fun with the Church of England Ramblers. The nickname had been first applied by Osbert Lancaster, who came upon them one year in Greece. Then, when they were in Calabria, and the manager of a restaurant where they had all been especially appreciative came forward with a visitors’ book to sign, Betjeman signed it ‘The Church of England Ramblers Association’. Thereafter the joke stuck.

  These jaunts abroad, however, were not really Betjeman’s idea of fun. Staying in expensive villas with the very rich, or, come to that, visiting Chatsworth, was on one level Betjeman’s idea of heaven, since he loved to be comfortable. But he would also have seen the point of Penelope’s manifesto, ‘DOWN WITH GRACIOUS LIVING … I am all for Council estates and I want to live in one. Yew know yew said ow noice it was when yew stayed with G. Irvine.’ In one of the sketch-books which he began in a desultory manner in Apulia in 1966, he did a sketch of Elizabeth looking anxious, pale and freckly. He also doodled what never quite turned into a poem, but which has a powerful eloquence of its own.

  I wish I were in England

  The country that I come from

  It’s hells bells and Jolly Hotels

  And aqua minerale

  But when will I be [illegible illegible] in a faithful [?]

  Place where I can get a bun from?

  He really had more fun visiting the Jarvises in Nottinghamshire – ‘I didn’t half enjoy myself in Claremont Road and neighbourhood. It is so qui
et, so comfortable, so calm and the garden is so long and food and drink are so good and plentiful.’ He went on to praise the church, ‘the 1847 bit which needs a roof lift and the 1877 (or later) bit which is grand simple proportion whose effect is magnified by that glorious uplifting cross and candlesticks’. Typically, he also valued ‘the niceness of the people up there’ which ‘restores my faith in mankind and God’.

  Faith, always difficult to hold on to, had been shaken up by the Church of England at large during this decade. One of Mervyn Stockwood’s suffragan bishops at Southwark, John Robinson, a Cambridge don turned Bishop of Woolwich, had caused great controversy with his book Honest to God, summed up in a famous newspaper headline, ‘Our Image of God Must Go’. Harry Williams, another Cambridge don, had begun his ministry as a conservative Anglo-Catholic, but following a nervous breakdown and a course of psychoanalysis, he had ‘come out’ as a homosexual, and written a series of powerful sermons, which still enjoy a cult following to this day, with the titles The True Wilderness and True Resurrection. They do not specifically deny the objective truth of the old faith, though they do so implicitly, suggesting that the events of the Gospels make sense to us when they have become interiorised, and we have ourselves experienced the desolation of spirit of being in the Wilderness, when we have wrestled in our own Gethsemane. Both Betjeman and Elizabeth were much impressed.