John Betjeman had the last laugh Forty years after his death, he still wields influence

Serendipitously, T.S. Eliot taught the young John Betjeman English at Highgate Junior School. This was 1914-15. Beyond the classroom, Eliot was writing his epoch changing “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”. “Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Nine-year-old Betjeman presented Eliot with his handwritten The Best Poems of Betjeman. Years later, the two profitable poets, the profound Modernist and the popular Traditionalist, became friends.

Where, though, Eliot received rightful and even reverential critical praise especially from schoolteachers and university tutors, Betjeman, however successful in terms of book sales and appearances on the telly, was labelled superficial by TLS readers. They worshipped Eliot, though even though he too could also be the populist, his enchanting, lyrical Old Possums’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), conjured into “Cats”, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hugely successful musical.

Betjeman’s tentative brush with Modernism was short-lived. In 1929, he was appointed Assistant Editor of the Architectural Review. To keep up with the times, and the fads of Hubert de Cronin Hastings, his mercurial and brilliant editor, he joined MARS (Modern Architecture Research Group). One of its members, Maxwell Fry, who went on to work with Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and with Le Corbusier at Chandigarh, had no difficulty seeing through Betjeman’s ill-fitting Modernist disguise.

“The key to John Betjeman’s character”, snorted Fry perceptively if priggishly, “is that he’s a journalist and a Fleet Street man – and a popularist – and vain … an enemy of Modernism… As far as I was concerned, he was a bloody nuisance.”

Or was he a complex character, brimming with contradictions? In between writing articles, among them “The Death of Modernism” in 1931, and laying out pages of the “Archie” in the most old-fashioned and shocking types he could find,, Betjeman and Hastings wrote, Fry said, “weird letters to sex papers full of Freudian hang-ups. Freudianism was all the rage then”.

Sex and Betjeman’s painful relationship with his father, Ernest Betjemann (note the double ‘n’), provided the profound sense of guilt and sadness that, insinuating its way through its so-easily-recitable verses, was to make his poetry far more than charming whimsy. Ernest had hoped John would join his cabinet-making firm and take it on after he retired. John had no intention of doing so, telling his father as much and selling the beloved family business to Puddlefoot, Bowers & Simonett & Sons, ivory and ebony merchants of Kennington Lane, in 1938, four years after Ernest’s death.

Betjeman had already hurt his father, dropping that second “n” from his surname after his bullying at school during the First World War. The double “n” was too German for comfort. “Betjeman’s a German spy/Shoot him down and let him die.” He had caused further sadness by going down to Cornwall where his parents were on holiday to tell them he had failed his degree at Oxford. He recalled his father in a fine poem “On a Portrait of a Deaf Man” and in another, “Norfolk”, which ends in “unkept promises and broken hearts”.

His relationship with women — he had a wife, a long-term mistress and a secret lover on the go late in life — produced poems that can seem absurd even to loyal fans. Those big, domineering and sometimes quite grotesque Amazonian “gels”. Those jolly hockey-stick types on bicycles and in Sussex tea rooms. The svelte “mistress” with “more than a cared-for air/ Than many a legal wife” he lusts after in church. Sometimes, though, he is more lyrical. In “A Russell Flint” he writes, “I could not speak for amazement at your beauty/As you came down the Garrick stair”, and in “Youth and Age on Beaulieu River”, of Clemency the General’s daughter, sailing on the Hampshire water, “Soft and sun-warm, see her glide -/Slacks the slim young limbs revealing, /Sun-brown arm the tiller feeling -/With the wind and with the tide”.

There is, though, something unlovable about Betjeman as he writes to Margie Geddes, a rekindled old flamem, after she invited him to a literary luncheon. He replied: “I would love to come to Jersey for the nice fee and also the pleasure of seeing you.” But there is also here despite the guilt and sadness, an indication of Betjeman’s great strength. He was motivated by place. In his poetry he embraces Bootle and Camberley, Pontefract and Cheltenham, Croydon and Slough, Trebetherick and Harrow-on-the-Hill. The “Index of Places and Counties” in Collected Poems occupies five pages of small type.

His London childhood — a densely woven tapestry of trams and tea rooms, churches, dairies, laundries, coal depots, chapels, Home & Colonial Stores and cathedral like main line stations dispatching named steam trains over viaducts and through complex junctions to all points of the British compass — fed young Betjeman’s poetic imagination. So many sensations, such a profusion of special places.

This heightened sense of place only grew as Betjeman spread his wings whether on childhood holidays to Cornwall (an abiding passion) or through the historic buildings he encountered the length and breadth of these islands, each belonging to a particular somewhere — as buildings once did — with a name, lyrical or blunt, that made place, as if inevitably, into poetry. Ryme Intrinseca, Fontwell Magna, Diss.

Betjeman could be saccharine, sarcastic, silly and snobbish. But also unexpectedly profound and passionate. And this is perfectly captured at St Pancras, where his statue gazes up at the epic span of William Barlow’s great train shed framed by George Gilbert Scott’s gloriously Gothic Midland Grand Hotel. The inscription reads: “And in the shadowless unclouded glare, Deep blue above us fades to whiteness where, A misty sealine meets the wash of air. / John Betjeman, 1906 – 1984, poet, who saved this glorious station”.