Return to Betjemanland

There was sun enough for lazing upon beaches

There was fun enough for far into the night

But I'm dying now and done for

What on earth was all the fun for?

For I'm old and ill and terrified and tight.

30 years ago on May 22nd, a hero of mine

was buried here at St Enodoc's churchyard

on a very wet and windy Cornish day.

He was John Betjeman, the poet and broadcaster.

During his lifetime, Betjeman had come to speak to,

and for, the nation in a unique and remarkable way.

There was Betjeman the poet, writing verse for the many

and not just the few.

One after one rise these empty consecutives

Now we have come to the uppermost floor

Where in the car park are Jags of executives?

Where, far behind them, the bikes of the poor.

There was Betjeman the broadcaster, explaining his passions and bugbears,

and doing so with infectious enthusiasm.

And there was Betjeman the campaigner, fighting to

preserve the national heritage from developers, planners and

politicians, and railing against their abuse of power and money.

For here, once were pleasant fields and no-one in a hurry

Behold the harvest Mammon yields of speed and greed and worry.

With all of this he created both a real

and an imagined place that, as his biographer, I call Betjemanland.

I'm going to travel back to Betjemanland to understand

the complexity and contradictions of the man.

Where Betjeman, the snobbish lover of beautiful country houses, is just

the same person who gains pleasure from the Great British seaside.

Where he is haunted by memory, faith and doubt, love and infatuation.

And where Betjeman has real enjoyment of life,

but also suffers great melancholy and guilt.

Please join me as I revisit Betjemanland

to ask, 30 years on, whether it is a far away and forgotten country,

or whether, as I would argue, it is still a place

that can sustain us today.

I am going to begin my exploration of Betjemanland

high above London, where Betjeman was born in 1906,

and spent a childhood of bittersweet experience.

Betjeman's was an Edwardian upbringing in Highgate,

close to Hampstead Heath.

Betjeman was, in his own words, an only child deliciously apart.

His best friend was Archibald the teddy bear,

his surrogate brother until old age.

And Archie's best friend was Jumbo the elephant.

Betjeman the boy would come out of his back garden over

there on Highgate West Hill onto Hampstead Heath, climb up

Parliament Hill, clutching his pencil and his pad, as he said,

awaiting inspiration from the sky.

And he had a vision of the future.

A little neighbour of his on West Hill once asked him

what he wanted to be when he grew up and he replied,

"I want when I grow up to grow long hair and to be a poet."

The young boy lived with his bickering parents

first at 52 Parliament Hill Mansions, before they went

up in the world, to this house at 31 West Hill.

Although they were well off and coming up in world,

in the snobbish distinctions of the time,

the family were "in trade".

His forbidding father, Ernest, ran a business on the Pentonville Road

that made luxury products, sold in the West End

to the upper classes, and young John was expected to inherit the family firm.

His mother, Bess, was all smothering and alarm.

But in this tense and nervous household

the truly terrifying figure was his nanny.

She is chillingly evoked in Betjeman's autobiographical poem,

Summoned By Bells, in unflinching detail.

Maud was my hateful nurse

Who smelt of soap and forced me to eat chewy bits of fish

Thrusting me back to babyhood

With threats of nappies, dummies and the feeding bottle

She rubbed my face in messes I had made

And was the first to tell me about hell

Admitting she was going there herself.

And there were other painful memories from his childhood.

At school, Betjeman was bullied

because of his German sounding name, that led him to later drop

the second N in Betjemann so as to appear more reassuringly English.

# Betjeman's a German spy Shoot him down and let him die

# Betjeman's a German spy A German spy, a German spy... #

They danced around me

And their merry shouts brought other merry newcomers to see.

The cruelty of children, the cruelty of adults,

summoned up in verse that speaks to all

who have suffered similar wounds.

There was escape from all this misery

during family holidays in Cornwall.

Betjeman once said that his sense of beauty was

quickened for the very first time

when he came here to Daymer Bay and the village of Trebetherick.

And this is our first sight of a Betjemanland that can be

beautiful and pleasurable.

Long, hot Cornish days of childhood rapture were later

evoked in his television series Remembering Summer.

And I remember that garden...

..which we used to have for treasure hunts, had a haunted cottage.

At least we thought it was haunted. It was an old Cornish cottage,

a bit of old Cornwall, and seemed to us full of ghosts.

Of course, what we really came here for was the sea.

I so enjoy watching the sea like this that I wouldn't mind if all

television programmes were just of breaking waves and sea noises.

And living inland makes me so long for the sea,

sometimes, that I find the longing becomes unendurable.

Enchanted from this early age, Betjeman would come back to

Cornwall every summer for the rest of his life.

In the excellent phrase of his daughter, Candida, Cornwall was

"the healer of all wounds" for Betjeman.

The sight and sound of the sea in Daymer Bay always brought him

peace of mind.

His Shell Guide To Cornwall is a hymn to the

beauties of Cornish landscape and architecture.

And in the poem he wrote about this place, Trebetherick.

What I find so moving about it and so typical of Betjeman - it's

not just an evocation of the place but of the people he's known here,

the friendships he's enjoyed since childhood.

Blessed be St Enedoc

Blessed be the wave

Blessed be the springy turf

We pray, pray to thee

Ask for our children

All the happy days you gave

To Ralf, Vasey, Alastair, Biddy, John and me.

The Natural beauty of the Cornish landscape always captivated Betjeman.

But so did the buildings he discovered there.

Cycling off on his own, the young Betjeman began to visit

churches and found what would be a lifelong

favourite in the village of Blisland.

An older Betjeman conveyed the delight

he experienced here to television viewers.

Now get ready for a surprise.

See the outside, all rough,

huge stone blocks of granite from the moor.

Now wait.

There's going to be a contrast.

Betjeman would also write about what he saw and felt

here at Blisland in his 1958 Guide To English Parish Churches.

"This screen..." He's talking about this marvellous structure behind me.

"..gives to this weather-beaten village building,

"with its 15th century southern arcade of granite,

"sloping this way and that, an unforgettable sense of joy and mystery."

ORGAN MUSIC

Of course, that was a trick of television.

I can't play a note, organ or piano.

At the age of 11, Betjeman was sent away to board,

at the Dragon School in North Oxford.

# England today's in a terrible way

# Well, so every artist declares

# No-one enthuses or cares for the muses

# And every poor actor despairs

# Art hasn't any support

# Everyone's crazy on sport

# Sport, sport, sport... #

Here amongst the hearty fun and compulsory games he both feared

and loathed, the sensitive and solitary boy began to learn

skills for survival.

"Making myself popular, siding with

"the majority, telling lies to get out of awkward situations."

After the Dragon he went to Marlborough College where

he further blossomed becoming the school character - charming and witty,

keen on pranks and practical jokes.

Betjeman also began to show a talent for quite extraordinary friendships,

often oblivious to their consequences.

One correspondence the teenager started was with the now

middle-aged but still notorious Lord Alfred Douglas - Bosie, the lover of Oscar Wilde.

But when his father Ernest found out about these letters,

he proceeded to give the shocked young man a forthright

and graphic lecture on the practice of buggery.

It was when Betjeman went up to Oxford in 1925 that

the budding aesthete found the most congenial place to

nurture his ambition to live a life of beauty and pleasure.

Naturally, he came to the college of Oscar Wilde and Bosie,

during what he called the Silver Age of the Aesthetes,

when clever, camp undergraduates were in thrall to the 1890s.

"Oh, I do like a bit of decadence," he once said wistfully.

Betjeman was now 18.

Already he had the infectious toothy grin, the slightly seedy air

of a defrocked clergyman, the sharp knowledge and the ready wit.

Here at Magdalen College, gilded youth fed deer with sugar lumps soaked in port.

And the boy from London Trade eagerly joined the smart set

of clever but fey young men that populated the salons of Oxford.

Betjeman had much sought after and expensively panelled rooms

on the second floor of New Building, overlooking the college.

Here they are, a little more Spartan than before it seems,

but we do live in more prosaic times, do we not?

Privacy, after years of public school

Dignity, after years of none at all

First college rooms, a kingdom of my own

What words of mine can tell my gratitude?

But at Oxford he was idle, mannered and precious and extremely tiresome

to his tutor, the austere Ulsterman CS Lewis, later of Narnia fame,

who had no patience with Betjeman, failing a simple

Divinity exam, and had him sent down at the end of his first year.

The sense of rejection was awful.

But here he had learnt the aesthete's credo which shaped

Betjemanland, the everlasting pursuit of beauty in people and in places.

It was Betjeman's eager pursuit of beauty that prompted him

to seize on an invitation from an Oxford chum to

stay at the country house of his family at Sezincote.

Grand, imposing and exotic in its imitation of an Indian Palace,

this was a kind of heaven on earth.

Down the drive, under the early yellow leaves evokes

One largest Tudor, one in Indian style

The bridge, the waterfall, the temple pool, there they burst on us

The onion domes, chudgers and chutries made of amber stone

Home of the oaks, exotic Sezincote

Stately and strange it looked, the Maybob's house,

Indian without and coolest Greek within

Looking from Gloucestershire to Oxfordshire

Crackle of gravel.

Throughout his life, Betjeman loved great houses.

But this place isn't your average stately home of England.

It's fantastic. It's as if somebody has taken the Brighton Pavilion

and set it down in the middle of the Cotswolds.

It's so Betjemanic. The owner was Colonel Dugdale.

He was married to Ethel, a keen socialist.

Betjeman wrote that Mrs Dugdale was "mother to us all".

But he must have found in this place, with its large rooms

and its civilised atmosphere, such a contrast to the pinched,

quarrelsome suburban world from which he came.

And in his first book, Mount Zion, or In Touch With The Infinite,

he wrote a dedication which is in effect a kind a love letter to Sezincote.

"Constantly under those minarets I have been raised from the deepest depression

"and spent the happiest days of my life."

Great country houses like this captivated Betjeman, not only

because they were lovely to look at but because here

he gravitated to people who shared with him a tendency to eccentricity.

"Oh, Ethel!" Loudly Colonel Dugdale's voice boomed sudden down the table,

"That manure, I've had it shifted to the strawberry beds."

"Yes, Arthur, Major Atley, as you said.

"70 million of the poor Chinese eat less than half a calorie a week."

Of course the country house set was made up of the titled,

the well-connected and the rich.

And how Betjeman craved their acceptance!

He had heard, and been deeply wounded,

by snide remarks directed his way,

that really he just a little, middle class upstart with bad teeth

and a foreign sounding name.

So, to protect himself, humour became his shield.

His contemporary, the novelist Anthony Powell

made two brilliant observations about Betjeman.

One was that Betjeman has a whim of iron.

The other was that the key to Betjeman's success as a social climber was buffoonery.

He became a kind of court jester to the upper classes.

He loved to be loved

and clowning about was his making himself feel that he fitted in.

But I feel that behind all the clowning there was

a sense of insecurity.

Country houses like Sezincote would always bring out

the snob in Betjeman.

But there another important part of him

that was far from being snobbish.

Betjeman believed that what was beautiful should not be

narrowly defined, and the preserve of elites.

He was quite able to see beauty and gain pleasure

and share that in very different kinds of places.

And here I am at Clevedon built by the Victorians for a spot

of gentle and genteel holiday-making.

A quiet respectable place,

Betjeman described it, unspoilt.

In a radio broadcast he said that if would appeal to the

sort of people who liked peace and mistrusted progress.

One of his favourite songs was Tea For Two - a very Clevedon

sort of song, don't you think?

Betjeman once remarked, "Isn't abroad awful?" Which is

why he could celebrate with genuine feeling

the pleasures of the Great British seaside that he found

at the more raucous Weston-Super Mare,

just along the Somerset coast.

Let's see what the guidebook has to say about it.

"Here, the grown-ups can relax happily in deck chairs

"while the kiddies build sand castles."

That's a guidebook sentence well worth reading twice.

"Here the grown-ups can relax happily in deck chairs

"while the kiddies build sand castles."

Betjeman especially loved a good seaside pier,

and none comes better than this finely proportioned and elegant

structure opened to the Victorian public in 1869 here at Clevedon.

He called it "charming, the finest of its kind in the country".

And who could argue with that?

But more than anything else he liked this place was

because it gave pleasure and delight to the many not just to the few.

It was part of that popular culture which he cherished

just as deeply as he loved country houses.

He once quipped, "I like all piers whether they are seaside piers,

"or peers of the realm."

So Betjemanland contained the seaside and all its fun.

It contained cinemas which he once said were the churches of our day.

And it contained the music hall, who's blue humour

and songs he so much loved, and whose stars,

like George Robey, Max Miller, the Crazy Gang, were his heroes.

# The undenied and loving couple courting close to me

# She was just turned 21 He was 83

# The rain came down they'd got not gamp

# They both sat down The grass was damp

# He couldn't get up He'd got the cramp

# Passing the time away. #

I know exactly what you're saying to yourself.

You're wrong. I know what you're saying.

You wicked lot!

You're the kind of people who get me a bad name!

Now this is a funny thing.

There were other cherished places that Betjeman revered.

There was Berkshire, The Ridgeway, Upper Lambourne,

and the White Horse of Uffington, with the village of the same name

nestling in the valley below.

This is where we can understand that Betjemanland is more than

just a physical place, it is also an emotional landscape, where the

loves and infatuations of Betjeman's adult life were played out.

Garrards Farm in Uffington, the first real home that Betjeman

lived after his marriage to Penelope, daughter of Field Marshal Chetwode,

former Commander in Chief of the British Army in India.

Here are the stables where Penelope kept her favourite horse,

Moti, which she took absolutely everywhere.

But the man his friends called Betj never liked equine pursuits.

He and horses never really got on.

Because Betj wasn't really the horsey type, because his father

was in trade, don't you know, the Chetwodes looked down on him.

Betj's way of coping with the snubs and snobbery of his parents-in-law

was to exaggerate them make them into jokes and anecdotes.

Then there arose the terrifying question - how was

the father-in-law to be addressed?

"Well, I'm not having you calling me Philip.

"And you can't call me father. I'm not your father.

"I know - you can call me Field Marshal."

In the village museum, there are copies of the many letters

that he and Penelope exchanged during their long marriage.

And my, what a fiery one it was!

Look at this one.

"Darling Plymmie." That's Penelope. He had nicknames for everybody, and

for her he had lots of nicknames - Plymmie, Ugly, Beastly, Filthiness.

And there's the children, Paul, Candida,

and flanking them on either side the two most important

members of the family, perhaps, Archie and Jumbo.

Gosh, Penelope looks cross in this drawing.

It was a very stormy marriage, like his parents' marriage.

People often witnessed the most furious rows between the Betjemans.

Cyril Connolly, the critic, was once staying at a country house party.

He was having a bath. It was a bathroom with two doors.

One of the doors flew open.

The Betjemans came running through the room, one shouting hate

and abuse at the other, and out through the other door,

neither of them noticing that there was a naked man sitting in the bath.

During the time they lived in Uffington, Betjeman and Penelope were not the least stand-offish.

Betj did his bit for village life by becoming church warden at what

he called the Cathedral of the Vale - St Mary.

Here he learnt and loved the very English art of bell ringing.

The peal of bells is the very soundtrack of Betjemanland.

Indeed when he was on Desert Island Discs one of his choices was

a record of English Change Ringing.

It resonates and echoes throughout his work and indeed is

the inspiration for the poem he wrote about this place, Uffington.

Tonight we feel a muffled peel

Hang on the village like a pall

It overwhelms the towering elms

That death reminding dying fall

The very sky, no longer high

Comes down within the reach of all

Imprisoned in a cage of sound

Even the trivial seems profound.

What is poetry? I think it is recollected emotion.

It's a sort of shorthand, and it's saying things simply and clearly.

An admiring friend once remarked that

the poems of Betjeman are simple but deceptively so.

In form they are traditional and accessible in their language.

But they deal with universal themes of love, loss and death

and have great emotional depth.

And it was these qualities that ensured an appreciative and

growing readership for his poetry collections during his lifetime.

So when the collected edition of his works came out it was

a publishing phenomenon - a poetry best seller!

On the surface, the much-loved writer appeared the picture of respectability -

the family man, wife, two children, dog, the house in the country.

But this was never enough for Betjeman. I think

he also needed an element of fantasy in his life.

He enjoyed the thrill of infatuation,

the pleasure of the crush,

craved impossible yearning and longing, admitting that,

"It was insecurity that made me fall in and out of love so often.

"I think by nature I am masochistic."

And Betj made no secret of his liking for the girls.

Everywhere you go in London in public transport,

you can't get away from the beauty of the girls.

The sort of girl I like to see

Smiles down from her great height at me

She stands in strong, athletic pose

And wrinkles her retrousse nose

Is it distaste that makes her frown

So furious and freckled down

On an unhealthy worm like me?

Or am I what she likes to see?

It was infatuation on the tennis court

that created poetic perfection.

Anyone who has heard the name Betjeman is likely to know

A Subaltern's Love Song, inspired by his infatuation

for a Surrey doctor's daughter - a tennis champ, of course.

I think it's his most perfect lyric, where every word counts.

Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn,

Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun

What strenuous singles we played after tea

We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-30, love-40 Oh, weakness of joy

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy

With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

But there was much more to the writing of Betjeman

than this seeming levity.

His poems also reflect darker, more adult preoccupations.

There was always lots of sex in them, for example.

In Betjemanland, there's a strong tolerance

and understanding of our sexuality, which was way ahead of its time.

For instance, in that poem Invasion Exercise On A Poultry Farm,

a lesbian trusses up a paratrooper

while verbally abusing the object of her lust, a Land Girl.

In Senex, there are some pretty kinky erotic goings-on out of doors.

And in that tender poem Monody On The Death Of A Platonist Bank Clerk,

we see Betjeman's sympathy with homosexuals.

He himself had a gay life as a schoolboy and an undergraduate.

He had many gay friends

and he was always made furious by their persecution.

One love affair was a constant thread throughout his life,

and that was with London.

Betjemanland always had a cockney heart to it.

After the Second World War,

attempts by what he called the "plansters of the new slave state"

to finish what the bombing of the Luftwaffe had begun

made Betjeman very angry indeed,

and he fought back to protect the city of his childhood

against what he saw as pure and simple vandalism.

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station

Toiling and doomed from Moorgate Street puffs the train

For us of the steam and the gas-light, the lost generation

The new white cliffs of the City are built in vain.

But it wasn't just words that were Betjeman's weapons.

Now there were deeds, as a very public role

as a campaigner for conservation began.

One celebrated battle was to save what had proudly stood

here on the busy Euston Road for over 100 years.

In 1838, outside the old Victorian Euston station,

they built a 70-foot high Doric Arch of iron and brick

and faced it with stone.

It was one of the glories of the Greek Revival,

truly one of the great buildings of London.

Nearly 100 years later in 1933, the young John Betjeman wrote,

"If vandals ever pulled down this lovely piece of architecture,

"it would be as though the British Constitution had collapsed."

In 1961, British Rail wanted to do just that,

and demolish the arch as part of their plans to create

a new Euston Station, fit for an age of electrification.

But Betjeman disagreed, arguing there was no worthier memorial

to Britain having built the first railways.

He lobbied vigorously to save it.

It could be, if it were moved forward in front of the new Euston Station,

it would be the most magnificent public monument in London.

And how do you hope to find this money, sir?

We could start a public fund, and I have no doubt,

we've got so many sympathisers - we've had letters in already,

hundreds of them - that we could easily raise a large part of it,

but I think, really, it should be a public monument.

Do you think this is a good use of public money?

It would look marvellous. It would be beautiful, you see.

And of course, people always think if you have anything beautiful,

it's wicked, nowadays. It has to be cheap.

In the end, money talks.

British Rail decided it was cheaper to demolish the arch

than to reconstruct it in a slightly different place,

and the Prime Minister of the day, Harold Macmillan,

I think to his eternal shame, agreed with them.

The battle was lost, the Euston Arch was demolished.

Five minutes down the Euston Road, another building was under threat.

The Midland Great Hotel, a work of Gothic-inspired genius,

was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott

and finished in 1873.

This had been one of the grandest hotels in Europe,

serving St Pancras Station next door.

But by the 1960s, it showed a faded glory,

had gone down in the world and was now the offices of British Rail.

Though it might seem incredible to us today,

this crowning glory of Victorian architecture

was faced with oblivion.

In 1957, Betjeman and others had founded the Victorian Society

to preserve jewels of the age like this.

Betjeman wrote of his fear that the whole building was simply

"too beautiful and too romantic to survive".

But after losing the Euston Arch, Betj and his allies were determined

to save Scott's masterpiece - and they did.

In 1967, it was given a protected Grade I listing.

The fight then continued next door,

where the railway station was also in danger of demolition.

Great Victorian termini like St Pancras

were for Betjeman secular cathedrals.

They were part of the lives of the nation,

where he saw the smile of welcome and the sadness of goodbye,

so they must be saved too.

Betjeman admitted he was a romantic for a railway network

of charming branch lines that were soon to disappear forever.

I say, I hope you're enjoying this journey as much as I am.

But if we listen to his views about the value of rail,

spoken at the moment when the car was becoming the star,

he seems so common-sensical - prophetic, even.

You know, I'm not just being nostalgic and sentimental

and unpractical about railways.

We all of us know that road traffic is becoming increasingly hellish

on this overcrowded island and that in ten years from now,

there will be three times as much traffic on English roads

as there is today.

When the moment came to fight for St Pancras,

Betjeman was able to engage both his head and his heart,

and this combination was highly effective.

We can still enjoy what he campaigned for today

and, here, a statue commemorates his victory.

"John Betjeman, poet,

"who saved this glorious station."

But it was not only shared public places that Betjeman wanted to save.

He feared that a dull concrete conformity and ugliness

was being imposed on the very homes that people lived in.

There's the little house, with its chimneypots.

That's what they were replacing with these improved industrial dwellings.

The beginning of flats, the beginning of the end of street life,

and over there on the horizon,

a still greater inhumanity - the tall towers,

and not a tree and no grass anywhere.

Ah, what a change.

Breadth, leafiness, space.

The struggle for a humane architecture was the reason why

Betjeman came here, to Bedford Park in West London.

# We are the Village Green Preservation Society

# God save Donald Duck vaudeville and variety

# We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society

# God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties... #

Here was the first ever garden suburb.

Built in the 1880s, Bedford Park was designed

by the architect Norman Shaw and his disciples

on the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement,

that emphasised simple, traditional forms.

This became the example for all the Metrolands that followed.

When, in 1963, houses in this remarkable architectural development

faced demolition, Betjeman readily agreed

to become president of the Bedford Park Society

that was formed to rescue them.

What so appealed to Betjeman about the Arts and Crafts domestic style

was it was architecture for real people to live in.

These were houses with warmth,

with distinctive, quirky features, even with a bit of humour.

He thought that was worth fighting for.

So when they were threatened, he fought

and, with John Betjeman as a figurehead,

the Battle for Bedford Park was decisively won.

# Preserving the old ways from being abused

# Protecting the new ways for me and for you

# What more can we do?

# We are the Village Green Preservation Society... #

By the 1970s, Betjeman was receiving 50 letters a day

from all around the country,

begging for his help for this or that campaign of conservation.

"I was made to be a writer,

"and I'm being turned into a Post Office", he said with a sigh.

Some of these appeals were for churches

that faced the wrecking ball.

One was for Holy Trinity, close to Sloane Square.

It was designed by John Dando Sedding

and, for Betjeman, it was a late Victorian masterpiece.

As he wrote: "Holy Trinity is a celebration

"of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

"It only lacks a bishop's throne to be the Cathedral of West London."

He loved this great stained glass window by Burne-Jones,

he loved all the metalwork in the choir,

the carved angels by Pomeroy,

the great hammered screens by Henry Wilson.

For Betjeman, this was an "irreplaceable church".

In June 1971, it was announced

that the Sedding Church would be demolished

and its works of art destroyed or dispersed

to be replaced by a more modest place of worship.

The proposal made a rather chilling reference to Holy Trinity

as "obsolete plant".

Betjeman thought all this the "height of irresponsibility"

and, with the architectural writer Gavin Stamp,

once again went to war, and once again won.

The paradox is that I don't suppose there's anyone in Britain today

who does not support Betjeman in the preservation debates.

But while we all want to save lovely old buildings,

do we understand why Betjeman so violently objected to the vandals?

It was their greed.

It was their pernicious belief in progress, in growth,

in worshipping economic good as the highest of all human ambitions.

And if we understand that about Betjeman

then he's a prophet who speaks to us more vividly today than ever.

We humbly beseech thee most mercifully

to receive these, our prayers,

which we offer unto our Divine Majesty.

An act of vandalism against Holy Trinity hurt Betjeman deeply.

Not only was it was a place of aesthetic beauty,

but he worshipped here as well.

The body of our Lord Jesus Christ...

So now we can understand another part of Betjemanland -

one that was a place of deep faith.

-CONGREGATION:

-Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil

For thine is the kingdom

The power and the glory

For ever and ever, amen.

Throughout his life, he described himself as a religious maniac

under the command of the "Management",

at whose mention he would gaze piously heavenward.

You see, even God had a nickname.

But for John Betjeman, this was serious.

CHORAL SINGING

His formal religious life began when, as an undergraduate,

he was confirmed into the Church of England

here at Pusey House in Oxford.

This religious establishment had been created in the 19th century

to promote the beliefs of the Anglican High Church,

at that time believed to be under threat.

Here in this chapel, Betjeman began to understand

the importance that the High Church rituals of the sacraments,

liturgy and the act of confession had for him.

They became central to his spiritual life.

And, though he always had doubts about his faith

that greatly tortured him, sacred places like this

were a sanctuary against the arbitrary cruelties of this world.

One of his friends once asked him how he could possibly believe.

And this is how Betjeman replied in a wonderful letter:

"I choose the Christian's way

"(and completely fail to live up to it)

"because I believe it 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.

"I feel this will shock you,

"you dear Liberal intellectual old thing".

By the 1960s, Betjeman the snob

must have taken immense satisfaction in the fact

that he was now a friend to royalty, the great and the good.

# Well, sir, all I can say is if I were a bell, I'd be ringing... #

He was soon to be knighted,

and the mantle of Poet Laureate placed on his shoulders.

So naturally, as part of the Establishment,

Betj lived it up in Clubland - the Garrick, the Athenaeum,

and here at the Royal Automobile Club.

# Well, sir, all I can say is if I were a gate, I'd be swinging... #

And how Betjeman enjoyed good company and conversation,

wining and dining.

# Or if I were a bell, I'd go ding-dong, ding-dong, ding... #

He had literally hundreds of friends.

And what fun to have been one of them

and have lunch with John Betjeman.

Because he so enjoyed his food, and he loved getting drunk

and he loved a good claret - not that he was a wine snob.

And they would have enjoyed all the jokes

and the mimicry and the self-deprecating stories,

and the laughter, which they said

rose to a high pitch like a dog whistle.

And sometimes, when greatly amused at the table,

he would throw back his head and cover his face with his napkin

and literally howl with mirth.

Such warmth of character, I think.

Betjeman used to say he didn't like people without fingertips,

by which he meant people without sensitivity or empathy.

By now, his television appearances

had made this affable side to Betjeman's character

very familiar indeed.

The performer who had entertained drawing rooms since his Oxford days

was now doing the same for millions watching in their living rooms.

How beautiful the London air

How calm and unalarming

This height about the Archway where

The prospects round are charming.

And Betj was a television natural -

warm, accessible and, unlike so many presenters then and now,

not in the least condescending to viewers.

Let's mount the 16 bus with care

It's empty, wide and free

It will take us out of everywhere

To the days that used to be.

So here was the public persona.

Yet there was a different, private side, revealed off camera.

After Betj had made all his friends laugh

and they saw him walk away,

they watched the shoulders slump down,

and the melancholy madness take over.

He was very sensitive in the face of criticism.

He was thin-skinned, he was paranoid, he was full of fears.

He thought he was a failure.

And Betjeman fretted and agonised.

Was he really that good a writer?

Was he just a little too frivolous and fun-loving,

really just not serious enough?

I can only say how very thankful I am to have survived so long

and how very thankful I am that people still haven't seen through me.

I always feel rather a fraud.

And there was yet more darkness

that came from Betjeman suffering tremendous guilt.

Betjemanland is full of it.

To understand this, I'm back to the defining place of his childhood,

Highgate, and the lush beauty of its cemetery.

Here is the family plot of the Betjemanns.

This is where his grandfather John and father Ernest are buried.

Betjeman wrote this granite obelisk

points an accusing finger to the sky.

He had a very stormy relationship with his father,

and when Ernest Betjemann died,

Betjeman snobbishly refused to go into trade

and take on the family firm.

He wound up the works in Pentonville Road,

the workers were put out of their jobs and he felt immense guilt.

Perhaps the only way he could reconcile himself with his father

after the death of Ernest

was through the remembrance that poetry offered.

..Of maggots in his eyes

He liked the rain-washed Cornish air

And smell of ploughed-up soil

He liked a landscape big and bare

And painted it in oil

But least of all he liked that place

Which hangs on Highgate Hill

Of soaked Carrara-covered earth

For Londoners to fill.

But there was a guilty secret Betjeman harboured

that might have greatly damaged

the relationship he had with his adoring public,

if it had become public knowledge.

By the early 1960s, he was so busy that he needed a London pad.

So while his wife Penelope remained behind in Berkshire,

he came to live here at number 43, Cloth Fair,

just next to Smithfield Market.

He'd always loved this part of the city.

And it seemed as though this was the scene

of a happy, carefree bachelor life.

But since the early 1950s, he had begun a love affair

which was something much more serious

than his usual flirtations and infatuations.

And this love would last until his dying day.

The affair was with Lady Elizabeth Cavendish,

lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret.

Typically, they met at an exclusive London dinner party.

Betj wrote excitedly to a friend, "She's just our kind of girl.

"She is bracing and witty and kind and keen on drink."

Out of this relationship with Elizabeth came

some of his greatest love poems.

Applaud the tenderness of In Willesden Graveyard,

or the agonies of The Cockney Amorist,

and appreciate how Betjeman beautifully captures

the everyday ecstasy and pain of our own love affairs.

Betjeman was living a double life,

but this was no secret to his wife, who knew all about Elizabeth.

But Penelope early in their marriage had converted to Roman Catholicism

so, for her, divorce was out of the question.

Betj himself simply couldn't face it.

For Penelope, the pain and humiliation were dreadful.

For Elizabeth, his refusal to leave his wife

and give her a baby was painful in the extreme.

The situation never resolved itself,

and however happy Betjeman seemed on the surface of things,

for the rest of his life, he was in a torment of indecision.

John Betjeman spent the last days of his life with Elizabeth,

not Penelope, in Cornwall.

Once again by Daymer Bay, the one place in Betjemanland

that could guarantee him solace and peace.

The money from many verses sold had allowed him

to buy a holiday home of his own.

And this is it -

Treen.

Here, Betjeman died on the 19th of May, 1984.

He'd always feared death,

and he wrote about it constantly in his poetry.

He also had a lifelong dread,

instilled in him by his Calvinist nursemaid,

of going to hell to be punished for his sins.

But Elizabeth recalled that in the last two months of his life

he was calm and serene, and she was at his side

when he died quietly here at Treen,

with Jumbo and Archie in either arm.

Here in the churchyard of St Enodoc, amidst the Celtic crosses,

Betjeman is buried with a headstone of Cornish slate.

So why is it worth commemorating John Betjeman

30 years after he died?

First, because he was a poet. I would say a highly original poet.

Unlike most poets, he had the capacity

to communicate with the needs and the griefs

and the pleasures of millions of his fellow human beings.

And Betjeman helped us to see beauty in railways, in buildings,

in landscapes that the money men

and the politicians don't see the point of.

And Betj the emotional chaotic helped us -

helped me at any rate -

come to terms with our own muddled lives and loves.

But let the last word be his.

This is the last poem in his final published collection.

It's called The Last Laugh.

I made hay while the sun shone

My work sold

Now, if the harvest is over

And the world cold

Give me the bonus of laughter

As I lose hold.