Remembering Betjeman

In what would have been his centenary year Sir John Betjeman has been breaking records in Oxford. The Bodleian Library exhibition about the poet, broadcaster and conservationist is attracting record numbers of visitors, as people flock to get an insight into his life, work and relationships. 

Among the exhibits, material from the University archives documents Betjeman’s academic career and the infamous ‘Failed in Divinity’ quote. Here, Canon David Winter recalls fond memories of broadcasting and bubbly with the poet and finds, after all, a ‘genuine sense of the divine’.

I worked with Sir John Betjeman in the 70s on a series of radio programmes about hymns, called Sweet Songs of Zion. There were about 30 programmes in all, over a period of two or three years. So the centenary of his birth in August , with a lot of media coverage, brought back many memories.

Sir John was an enthusiast for hymns, the older the better, just as he was an enthusiast for almost everything else. His wicked grin, loud guffaws and public school slang - ‘swank’, ‘golly’, ‘making whoopee’ and so on - enlivened the dullest editing sessions.

He was a particular admirer of Fanny Alexander, the wife of an archbishop of Armagh in the mid-nineteenth century, who wrote some of our most popular hymns - ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, and Sir John’s particular favourite ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’. He claimed it was perfect, because you couldn’t change a single word in it without spoiling it, both as poetry and as Christian teaching.

These were hymns for children - actually written to help her nephews cope with their confirmation instruction, which they had claimed was above their heads. But their survival and constant use is testimony to their appeal to adults as well.
Sir John gave my daughter - then about 11 - a lovely book of Mrs Alexander’s home-spun moral verses for children, all about how they should treat the village idiot and welcome tired daddies home from work and needing their slippers quickly.

I had always had a soft spot for Betjeman’s idiosyncratic poetry - in fact, as time passed I realised that I knew some of his poems better than he did. But I was still bowled over by his charm and infectious enthusiasm.

Even the onset of Parkinson’s disease, which made some of our final recording sessions difficult for him, could not dim his joie de vivre, especially if there were a few glasses of bubbly ‘when the sun had gone below the yardarm’ to relieve the symptoms. I never quite understood the time qualification, but as the bottles came from the fridge in his Chelsea house the producer and crew were in no position to be fussy .

Recently, in the contemporary style of things, some critics - notably A. N. Wilson in his biography of the poet - have sought to question the reality of Betjeman’s Christian faith.

It’s true he was rather a tortured soul, conscious (like most of us) that his life didn‘t always match his profession. And he had a long-standing and morbid fear of death.

That particular phobia is evident in many of his poems. He wondered in which Cottage Hospital he would be lying when they ‘range the screens around’ as he groaned in dying, ‘twisting the sweaty sheet’.

There was also the night-club owner, a faded madame, ‘old, and ill, and terrified, and tight’, who knew she was ‘dying now and done for’ and wondered ‘what on earth was all the fun for?’ There is something of Betjeman in all of that.

He also recognised, and told me so, that such fear was inconsistent with a strong Christian faith. So I was very gratified to get a letter from him in July 1976, completely out of the blue, to tell me that he had just read a paperback book I had written called Hereafter, about life after death. I blush to offer the full version, but the last sentence read, ‘It really is excellent and answers questions I continually ask’. Mind you, being an author I was most pleased by the statement that he had ordered four more copies for various friends of his!

His was an essentially sacramental faith. Sights and sounds were at the heart of his understanding of things. He would speak nostalgically of the great Anglo-catholic congresses of the 20s and 30s - ‘but you wouldn’t have appreciated them, David’, he would say, ‘because you’re Low Church’ (a description he knew I hated) ‘while I’m a SPIKE!’

‘Spike’ or not, he was for me a man who, while living in the tension described by St Paul in Romans 8, had a genuine sense of the divine.

When I heard of his death, during his afternoon nap, slipping quietly into eternity from a deck-chair in the garden of his cherished Cornish home, clutching his beloved teddy bear, it all seemed utterly right.