John Betjeman: The Biography by Bevis Hillier's

John Betjeman was the Poet Laureate succeeding C Day Lewis in 1972 and continued in this role until his death in 1984. His life spanned most of the 20th Century but he was in no way a modernist although he was a close acquaintance of W H Auden, T S Eliot and Philip Larkin to whose poetry, his own was most akin. He was a poet of place who captured quintessentially English landscapes, buildings, customs and atmospheres. His poetry looked back to the 19th Century and poets such as Tennyson in its structure and use of rhyme and to earlier 18th Century poets such as Gray and Cowper in its evocation of the rural idyll. As a person Betjeman was an eccentric and much of this book is very funny and endearing in its recounting of this extraordinary personality who, through the medium of television, (he was an early exponent) made poetry popular and something to which the ordinary man and woman in the street would readily turn.

Betjeman’s father was an upholsterer but his son, John Betjeman, mixed with royalty, was a friend of Princess Margaret and deserted his own wife, whom he never divorced, for Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, Princess Margaret’s Lady in Waiting. The book is full of surprises, as Betjeman was, and is full of scandal, as parts of his life were scandalous, even by today’s standards. He was outspoken, outrageous, conservative, sensitive, hedonistic, sensual, melancholic, a brilliant mimic and he mixed with some of the great literary and political figures of the 20th Century. The book is worth reading as much for an insight into the social history of that era as for the poetry of Betjeman himself. Oh and he loved churches – and visited hundreds of them as part of his crusade as a conservationist. Indeed in this respect he was very modern and was largely responsible for our thinking that we should preserve and cherish our environment and the beauty which it contains. If you love culture, and people, you’ll love this book.

This review is by Mr Gray, Principal at SMC.