Birthday: John Betjeman loved old names, old things, old places

Sir John Betjeman, CBE, KB (1906-1984)

Companion of the Royal Society of Arts and Literature, 1968

Poet Laureate of Great Britain, 1972-84

Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1973

A statue of Betjeman at London's St Pancras Station, a Victorian structure he helped save from demolition

He was born “Betjemann” because one of his immigrant Dutch forebears added an ‘an’ to deflect anti-Dutch prejudice during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780-84. As a young man, John Betjeman dropped the extra ‘n’ to deflect anti-German prejudice in World War I.

An indifferent student despite having good luck with teachers- in middle school T.S. Eliot was one of his masters- Betjeman barely scraped through his the Oxford entrance exams. He landed a place at Magdalen College, under C.S. Lewis. Betjeman found Lewis unfriendly, unreasonably demanding, and an uninspiring teacher. Lewis called Betjeman “an idle prig.” Their antipathy remained enthusiastic and mutual till Lewis died in 1963.

Betjeman was sent down without a degree in 1928, having failed to clear all his exams. The experience rankled, though he retained a fondness for the university. He titled one of his poetry collections Summoned by Bells, and a teddy bear he brought to Oxford became Sebastian Flyte’s Aloysius in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Besides Waugh, he became friends with Louis Macneice, W.H. Auden, and other bright young things of the era, friendships that stood him well over the decades to come. Oxford granted Betjeman an honorary degree in 1974, and by 2011 the poet’s star had risen to the point of his being named one of the university’s 100 greatest graduates in the previous ten centuries.

You might not have thought it would would end that way as the Depression hit in 1929. Betjeman went to work in London as a journalist, rising to assistant editor of Architectural Review in the 1930s. A fan of Victorian design (his family made their money manufacturing clutter for the parlors of the era), Betjeman won some renown as a writer and editor of the Shell Guides to British architecture. During the second war he worked in the Ministry of Information’s film branch, and other, murkier things besides.

Writing poetry on the side, Betjeman published a new collection every five to seven years for decades. He became very popular- a sort of happy version of Philip Larkin (though Larkin, rather archly, wrote, “wrote of his work, "how much more interesting & worth writing about Betjeman's subjects are than most other modern poets, I mean, whether so-and-so achieves some metaphysical inner unity is not really so interesting to us as the overbuilding of rural Middlesex")- for his sturdy, unornamented verse about ordinary British topics. In the 1960s he became a champion of history preservation as the rage for Modernism swept the land clear of many monumental Victorian structures. He was a natural on television, and enough the ham to play to his bumbling, fogeyish manner. A journalist once said Betjeman looked “like a highly intelligent muffin — a small, plump, rumpled man with luminous soft eyes, a chubby face topped with wisps of white hair and imparting a distinct air of absentmindedness.”

The Queen appointed him poet laureate in 1972, succeeding Cecil Day-Lewis (best-known today as father to the actor, Daniel). Betjeman’s media savvy made him a popular and effective advocate for the arts.

Betjeman converted to High Church Anglicanism as a teen, and through his life his verse reflected a struggle between faith and a nagging doubt it might be misplaced. His wife one-upped him, converting to Catholicism in 1948; they separated a few years after and Betjeman found a happy, unmarried relationship with one of the Duke of Devonshire’s daughters that lasted the rest of his life.

Related sites:

Betjeman, in a 1963 BBC documentary on the small British rail lines being wiped out by Transport Minister Dr. Beeching's "rationalisation" of the industry: