John Betjeman

John Betjeman was, and is, a well-loved twentieth-century British poet. He represented nostalgia for a way of life and architecture that was rapidly disappearing from England in the years after the Second World War. He became an expert on English architecture and landscape and was very influential in popularising Victorian and Edwardian buildings, as exemplified in his successful attempt to preserve the nineteenth-century St Pancras railway station in London. English people, in the aftermath of war, responded in droves to his celebration of the past and he became increasingly popular, both as a campaigner and as a writer and poet. That popularity remains to this day.

His beginnings as a writer were not auspicious; he did not complete his degree at Oxford University, but in 1933 he published his first books: Ghastly Good Taste, his first prose work, and Mount Zion, his first book of verse. In both books, churches, railway stations and townscapes feature as significant themes that were to recur throughout his writings. One of his best known works is Summoned by Bells, which can best be described as a sustained example of narrative verse and tells the story of Betjeman’s life; Philip Larkin praised it in the following words: ‘Betjeman has an astonishing command of detail, both visual and circumstantial’.

In his own words he told the interviewer Willa Petschek that he was most interested ‘in saving groups of buildings of towns that can be ruined by “a single frightful store that looks like a drive-in movie. The only way to prevent more and more ugly buildings going up … is to draw people’s attention to what’s good in all periods.”’

Jocelyn Brooke in Ronald Firbank and John Betjeman wrote that Betjeman could best be described as ‘a writer who uses the medium of light verse for a serious purpose: not merely as a vehicle for satire or social commentary, but as a means of expressing a peculiar and specialized form of aesthetic emotion, in which nostalgia and humour are about equally blended.’

His books of prose included several guidebooks to English counties, including Devon, Cornwall and Shropshire (the Shell guides). In recognition of his work and contribution to English literature he was knighted in 1969 and he became Poet Laureate of Britain in 1972.

Finally, Barry Humphries, in his introduction to the book The Best Loved Poems, summarised John Betjeman’s appeal when he wrote that his poetry ‘with its hint of melancholy, survives because it is imbued with the humour, humanity and above all with the love of its author’.