Grave Stories

John Betjeman’s passions encompassed Victorian gothic architecture; steam trains; the English countryside and seaside; provincial towns and country churches; and the cosy, banal miscellany of buttered toast, Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, Liberty lampshades, and Hillman Imps. Often sentimental and nostalgic, his accessible verses guaranteed him a place in the pantheon of National Treasures. Academics and scholars could be dismissive: he was rejected for the position of Poet Laureate in 1967 on the basis that his work was “lightweight,” * and that he was a mere “mere songster of tennis lawns and cathedral closes.” ** And as a teenager in the 1960s, eager to embrace sophistication, I was a little ashamed of liking his poetry as much as I did.

But Betjeman was not just, as he is sometimes presented, a compound of cuddly whimsy and quirky charm. He cultivated fogeyism and winsomeness, but his work can be wry, mocking and satirical. Pathos jostles with a sardonic wit in his poems. He can be very funny; he engages with misfortune and adversity. He can also be a terrible snob and rather unkind. But neither his poetry nor his campaigning can be dismissed as “lightweight.”

Listen to a few extracts from a small selection of his poems:

For exuberant joyful absurdity nothing can equal A Subaltern’s Love Song:

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-thirty, love-forty, 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 remember too the wistful and understated poignancy of In a Bath Teashop with its restrained economy of detail bearing a wealth of humanity and tenderness:

“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another

Let us hold hands and look.”

She, such a very ordinary little woman;

He, such a thumping crook;

But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

In the teashop’s inglenook.

The autobiographical blank verse poem Summoned by Bells captured the tragic brevity of childhood with a pithy:

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells

And sights, before the dark of reason grows.

Betjeman allegedly regretted the publication of Slough, feeling that he had been unkind towards the town and its inhabitants, when it was uncontrolled industrialisation not the place itself which he abhorred:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

It isn’t fit for humans now,

There isn’t grass to graze a cow

Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens

Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,

Tinned minds, tinned breath…

Moreover, two years after he published those verses real bombs fell on England giving an unintended ugly twist to the poem.

 In Westminster Abbey, written in 1940, for all its jaunty rhythm, Betjeman tackles darker themes of religious hypocrisy and racism:

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.

Spare their women for Thy Sake,

And if that it is not too easy

We will pardon Thy Mistake…

Keep our Empire undismembered

Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,

Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,

Honduras and Togoland;

Protect them Lord in all their fights,

And, even more, protect the whites.

Business Girls exhibits a tender empathy with the newly emancipated but poorly paid women of the mid twentieth century. And there is a hint that their independence came at too high a price, in part forced upon them by the carnage of the two World Wars:

From the geyser ventilators

Autumn winds are blowing down

On a thousand business women

Having baths in Camden Town…

Early nip of changeful autumn

Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,

At the back precarious bathrooms

Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions

Business women lie and soak,

Seeing through the draughty skylight

Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there poor unbelov’d ones,

Lap your loneliness in heat.

All too soon the tiny breakfast,

Trolley-bus and windy street!

How to Get on in Society is a wonderful spoof on faux genteel manners and pretensions:

Phone for the fish-knives, Norman

As Cook is a little unnerved;

You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes

And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?

The frills round the cutlet can wait

Till the girl has replenished the cruets

And switched on the logs in the grate…

(Pete Sarstedt’s 1969 hit Where do you go to my Lovely? which employed a similar technique, always reminded me of this poem. The song came out a mere fifteen years later but the list was very different, for lifestyle and societal ambitions had changed a great deal in that time.)

In 1973 Betjeman wrote and narrated Metroland, a television documentary focused on the suburbs of NW London. Between 1915 and 1933 the Metropolitan Railway had built houses adjacent to the line heading out of London through Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. They coined the slogan “Live in Metroland,” and produced a brochure promoting their Tudorbethan properties. The fulsome marketing language played on middle class aspirations, advertising spacious homes with gardens and garages in an idealised environment surrounded by trees and nature, but within easy commuting distance of the City.

Betjeman liked suburbia, and his commentary, delivered partly in verse and over an old black and white film shot from an MR train, sounds superficially like an unqualified homage to commuter towns, reflecting the MR’s own celebration of the comfortable suburban life of ladies who lunch, and their car washing, lawn mowing,  golf playing husbands. But if there is affection in his portrait, it is tinged with regret, for Betjeman is conscious of the irony that in offering former city dwellers a quasi-rural retreat, the frenzy of construction destroyed the very countryside it promoted. When he looks out at the end of the MR line he reflects, “Grass triumphs. And I must say I am rather glad.”

Moreover, though Betjeman is broadly comfortable with semi-detached houses and golf courses, he cannot resist a snobbish aside worthy of Nancy Mitford when he describes Neasden as “The home of the gnome and the average citizen.”  There was an acidity never far below the surface in Betjeman’s work; he had previously parodied the aspiring inhabitants of suburbia in Middlesex:

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

Runs the red electric train,

With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s

Daintily alights Elaine…

National Treasure maybe, but Betjeman is neither lightweight nor cuddly. He is too self-consciously clever and sharp for that. Yet those very attributes make him a better poet than he is sometimes credited with being.

Then alongside Betjeman the poet is Betjeman the campaigner, and again his work is far from that of a good natured, bumbling dabbler.

A founding member of the Friends of Friendless Churches, he edited and wrote part of the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Simon Jenkins in his own England’s Thousand Best Churches recalls Betjeman’s tireless campaigns to save redundant churches, and reminds us of our debt to

Three ghosts (who) inhabit all English churches. They linger in every arcade, peep from every gallery and flit across every monument. They are those of John Betjeman, Alec Clifton-Taylor and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Betjeman’s enthusiasm extended to secular architecture. A railway enthusiast and champion of Victorian architecture when it was unfashionable, he led the unsuccessful fight to save the Euston Arch, the doric entrance to the station which was demolished in 1961.But his influence and determination were instrumental in saving the most spectacular of all the Victorian railway stations – St. Pancras and its adjacent Midland Grand Hotel.

The work of George Gilbert Scott, 207 metres long and seventy metres wide, supported by 850 cast iron pillars and covered by an arched glass ceiling, the train shed at St. Pancras station is the acme of high Victorian secular architecture. When it opened in 1876 the hotel was the first to have electric lifts, “ascending chambers”, flushing lavatories, and revolving doors. In the 1890s the Ladies’ Drawing Room became the first Ladies’ Smoking Room in London. But when it closed in the 1930s it still had only five bathrooms for three hundred bedrooms. It became railway offices, then after bomb damage during the war it stood empty. In the 1960s both the station and the hotel were scheduled for demolition.

Their survival was ensured after Betjeman led the fight to prevent their destruction and they became grade 1 listed buildings in 1967.But the station was in decline as more of the north bound trains made Euston their terminus, and the hotel remained empty. In the 1990s English Heritage restored the exterior, and organised tours enabled us to see the magnificence which lay within beneath the layers of dust and dirt.

Salvation came in the form of Eurostar which since 2007 has operated out of St. Pancras. The station was renovated, and in 2011 the hotel reopened with 244 rooms – en suite – and sixty-eight apartments. The breathtaking grand stair once again curves up beneath the cerulean ceiling spangled with gold stars.

Betjeman died in 1984, too soon to see the magnificently restored station and hotel, but his statue stands, gazing up in delighted wonder at the glass ceiling of the train shed – and conveniently located for the champagne bar. Raise a glass to him when you travel this way; he saved something splendid for us all.

And you can visit his grave in Saint Enodoc’s churchyard in Trebetherick, Cornwall. Both St. Enodoc and Trebetherick, where he had spent childhood holidays, feature in his poems.

The fine lettering and decoration on the black slate are the work of the stone mason Simon Verity. In his introduction to English Parish Churches Betjeman praised the elegance of the stone carver’s craft, ubiquitous in graveyards until the middle of the nineteenth century, with letters and decoration deep cut into local stone. Sadly he contrasted it with the modern “machine made letters inserted into white Italian marble.”

It’s a beautiful location, near the sea, the old church partially sunk into the sand dunes, but… church and churchyard are surrounded by a hideous golf course. To reach them you must cross the sterile links, pass golfers in their pastel leisure-ware, and risk being hit by their flying balls. But Betjeman would not have minded; he loved golf and particularly liked to play on a seaside course.

*Helen Gardner, Merton Professor of English, Oxford

**Lord Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council.

 Betjeman was appointed Poet Laureate when the position fell vacant again in 1972.