Poem of the Month

Advent 1955

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The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It’s dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver-pale.
The world seems traveling into space,
And traveling at a faster pace
Than in the leisured summer weather
When we and it sit out together,
For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound —
Journey to what? to whom? to where?
The Advent bells call out ‘Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth.’
    And how, in fact, do we prepare
For the great day that waits us there —
The twenty-fifth day of December,
The birth of Christ? For some it means
An interchange of hunting scenes
On coloured cards. And I remember
Last year I sent out twenty yards,
Laid end to end, of Christmas cards
To people that I scarcely know —
They’d sent a card to me, and so
I had to send one back. Oh dear!
Is this a form of Christmas cheer?
Or is it, which is less surprising,
My pride gone in for advertising?
The only cards that really count
Are that extremely small amount
From real friends who keep in touch
And are not rich but love us much.
Some ways indeed are very odd
By which we hail the birth of God.
We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell’d go extremely well.
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax.
Enough of these unworthy cracks!
“The time draws near the birth of Christ’,
A present that cannot be priced
Given two thousand years ago.
Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.

To help people enjoy John Betjeman’s poetry, we print the text of one of his poems (or an extract) each month.  We invite someone to choose it and say what they like about it.

Chosen by Lance Pierson, Chairman of The Betjeman Society.

This is a poem for late November and December (the dates of Advent in 2020 are Nov 29 – Dec 24). Advent is the Church’s season leading up to Christmas. Betjeman wrote this poem in November 1955, and read it on Dec 2, on the BBC West of England Home Service radio programme, ‘The Faith in the West’.

It obviously prompts comparison with the better known ‘Christmas’, first published in the magazine ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ eight years earlier in Dec 1947. But it appeared more widely in A Few Late Chrysanthenums in 1954, and was evidently fresh in JB’s mind as well as the public’s. He broadcast it and wrote about it at Christmas 1953 and 1954. Even if he didn’t plan a sequel himself, he must have been asked, ‘What are you going to write about Christmas next year?’

As a poem ‘Advent 1955’ is much less good than ‘Christmas’. He may have knocked it up in a hurry for his next date with the radio. Unlike the earlier poem’s well crafted rhyme-pattern in tight 6-line verses, this has the chatty, person-to-person style of his other ‘Poems in the Porch’ on church themes. The sentences tend to chatter on till he needs to draw breath. It’s fine for a radio broadcast, but works less well when read on the page.

Both poems are contrasting the purely earth-bound celebrations of today’s commercialized Christmas with the sensational claim that ‘God became Man’. ‘Christmas’ reaches that theological climax soon after half-way through the poem and builds up to a terrific emotional punch at the end. ‘Advent 1955’ has a much briefer and quieter dénouement in the last 7 lines. It almost fades away.

So why have I chosen it? Partly because it is so much less famous, and deserves a rare outing. Partly because the satire is sharper and it stings my sore points in a salutary way. The trenchant passage on Christmas cards leads up to the wonderful diagnosis, ‘My pride gone in for advertising’: I fear that is exactly how I have used my annual Christmas newsletter. I don’t think I have ever quite ‘charged against expenses’ the presents I feel I have to give ‘for business reasons’, but it has been a close-run thing. I confess they probably are claimed against tax. Ouch! This poem finds me out.

I even prefer the punch-line to that in ‘Christmas’. I always have to mute its famous last line, ‘And lives today in bread and wine’. Precious words to JB, I’m sure, but they don’t speak for all Christians. I remember Jesus through bread and wine; they symbolize him for me. But I don’t believe he lives in them. I am happier with the gentle hints in the later poem: ‘The Advent bells call out, ‘Prepare … if God had not given so He still would be a distant stranger’. Which is exactly what he is to many people today. One wonders why. This poem speaks to our present condition.

The poem for January 2021 was “Winter Seascape” chosen by Philippa Davies, Founder of The Betjeman Society.

 

First of all we will look at the version in Collected Poems.  Each verse is to me like an individual picture of sight and sound. It simply must be Trebetherick and Daymer Bay and the Greenaway. The magic and allure of emptiness and wind in the winter there is so accurately captured in these comparatively few lines.

 

I was a delighted to be asked to make a selection for January.  Without any hesitation I have chosen Winter Seascape.  Not only is it fitting for the season but I rejoice when I see the words of the last verse which are cut into one of the roundels at St Pancras station – that monument to Betjeman, and to Martin Jennings, the sculptor and engraver.  It happens I have in my collection the working copy and final version of the poem. This I consider to be one of my most treasured items that I have been able to purchase.

 

Bevis Hillier introduced me to Sotheran’s, the Antiquarian Bookdealer in Sackville Street, Piccadilly.  I cannot remember whether they contacted me or whether by happenstance the dealer there showed the folder to me on one of my many visits.  Once I had seen the handwritten pages, scrawls, changes, crossings out and typed and signed final copy I had to steal myself to ask “would I be more sorry to own it or more sorry not to own it”.  The answer was not long in coming.

I will share with you a few of the handwritten changes made before the final typed and published work. Then I will end with an amusing ditty on the reverse of one of the pages.

 

A few examples of changes verse by verse with a certain amount of careful reading and possible errors – plus the little extra.

 

• The sea turns back

With barely time

 

2)   Before the next one starts to burst

The swirling gale attacking still

Smoothes it to what it was at first

Another rolling water hill/ A rolling ridge of water hill

 

3)   And everywhere its dappled waste

The overtaking breakers run

 

4)   Too noisy for the shrieking shag/Above the swirl the shrieking shag

To pierce the turbulance of foam

The shore wind ripples heave and drag

Turned back into the ocean home.

 

5)   What chance has any sort of lung

 

6)   So here/and here/ where only cliffs prevail

Before a huge consoling sea

 

Now for the bonus ditty which I trust will not offend.  It was scrawled on the back of one page of the working copy.  I may add there were one or two other risqué lines. Isn’t life a continual enjoyable adventure!

 

I want to be angry and with it

And free from the shackles of class

I want to wear jeans as though still in my teens

And tight as a drum round my arse.

 

The poem for February 2021 was “Eunice”, chosen by Dr Kevin Gardner, Professor of English, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, USA.

February may be a month for love, but in the imagination of John Betjeman love is often a comic delusion, a cause of guilt and shame, or a shattered dream. Some of his poems are rollicking, comical fantasies of marriage to women just above his station and almost out of reach. Some describe hearts and relationships broken by suspicion and infidelity, while others celebrate the momentary triumph of love (or lust) over the depredations of time. It’s hard to name a single poem by Betjeman that depicts a relationship that is both loving and lasting: even ‘Devonshire Street, W.1’ confesses love cannot overcome a cancer diagnosis. What better way, then, to celebrate a Betjemanian Valentine than with a poem about the wistfulness of lost love, fading hopes, and loneliness?

‘Eunice’ is surely not so famous or beloved as many a Betjeman poem, but that is part of its attraction to me. First published in London Magazine in May 1955, it made its first book appearance in the Collected Poems in 1958. It has seldom been anthologized since, though Hugo Williams chose it for his little Poet-to-Poet collection for Faber. Other than one notable exception, critics and biographers have given it scant attention. However, A. N. Wilson calls it ‘one of his best poems’ and includes it in his personal list of Betjeman’s thirty best poems. Though ‘Eunice’ may not be one of his well-known works, it richly rewards the thoughtful reader. We might start by noting three key words the poem deploys that characterise Eunice’s life – ‘locked’, ‘lonely’ and ‘desolation’ – and a weighty description, ‘frost has faintly umbered’. One of Betjeman’s great strengths as a poet is the ability to encapsulate an entire life in a few deceptively simple words, and this poem is no exception.

Eunice is, in the phrase attributed to Lord Byron, a woman of a certain age. A portion of the year she lives alone in a cottage in Kent, where she was born into a family of decayed gentility. Presumably dead, her parents have left her their scenic cottage, now decaying from damp and neglect. Though she devotedly maintains her gardens, the impression of beauty created in the first stanza is undercut by the references to the Elsan (a portable chemical toilet) out back and signs of mold inside. Modern upgrades and basic repairs seem out of the question. Since the declining value of whatever estate she was left with is now gone, she has few options but to abandon her rural Elysium to work as a typist in London for months at a time, living in a rented, lifeless flat and daydreaming of the man who may once have been her intended husband who is now married to a former friend of hers. Thus alone she ages, gains weight, dwells on the past, and dreams of her beloved cottage.

Eunice is a deliberately old-fashioned name, one with frumpy associations. It isn’t modern, in contrast with Joan, Pam, Wendy, or Emily, nor is it mellifluous like Clemency and Myfanwy – all better-known Betjeman females. She is no siren, like Greta Hellstrom, Moira McCavendish or his unnamed ‘Station Syren’ or Lenten mistress. But Eunice is a pretty name, euphonious even. She is, perhaps, a faded beauty who still wears a once-fashionable suit of fur-trimmed tweed; semi-retired, she can just barely afford to live in faded elegance and leisure half the year – while toiling in London obscurity for the rest. Had Elizabeth Gaskell lived into the 1940s and 50s, Eunice could easily have been a central figure in an updated Cranford. ‘We none of us spoke of money, because that subject savoured of commerce and trade, and though some might be poor, we were all aristocratic.’

Somewhat unusual for Betjeman, who is known for the metrical regularity of his verse, the metre of ‘Eunice’ is loose and the rhythms of its lines are of varying length, if you count syllables. In fact, Betjeman employs an accentual rather than a syllabic metre, in hexameter lines. But those fairly consistent six stresses per line undergird what often sounds rather like the natural cadences of speech. If you don’t hear the hexameter, try adding a medial caesura: such a pause often falls naturally at the midpoint of most lines. But the caesuræ are subtle and overshadowed by the irregular rhythms of conversation. These rhythmic choices fit the poem’s pervading sadness. Only in the final lines will you find metrical regularity, and this in turn creates a hint of hope. As the poem closes with the possibility of Eunice’s longed-for return to the cottage in Kent, and the endless ‘months of typing in the office’ stretch the final lines from hexameter to heptameter, Betjeman offers the comforts of perfect iambic metre: ‘Until the days are warm enough to take her back to Kent.’

Betjeman’s deft handling of metrical variation to enhance meaning and emotion is not the least of his many appealing characteristics as a poet. The specificity of detail in ‘Eunice’ (train lines, brand names, species of flowers, London neighborhoods) adds an appealing realism, but for me the primary appeal of the poem is how these apparently random details work together to create a portrait of Eunice and a narrative of her life – and how her life recounts the fate of a generation of women in postwar Britain, ‘One of many hundred to dread the coming Monday’.

The poem for March 2021 was “On an Old-Fashioned Water-Colour of Oxford” chosen by Andrew McCallum, Convenor, Oxford Branch of The Betjeman Society.

I chose this poem partly because it is one of Betjeman’s less well known “Oxford” poems but also because I regard it as a fine example of his ability to capture in verse a precise place and moment in time and portray it in words as an artist would in paint. It was published first in Horizon magazine in April 1943 and then in New Bats in Old Belfries in 1945 and subsequent editions of Collected Poems.

In this sonnet, in just 140 syllables, Betjeman not only paints the scene but also portrays various elements of human activity, a remarkable economy of language; arguably he does so in just eleven lines as the final three lines take us out of the picture and on our way home. I do not know whether he saw a painting of this scene or has imagined it from having come across similar paintings. Certainly it is a genre of art that he could easily have spotted in art or antique dealers in Oxford or elsewhere and of which there must be many hundreds still to this day hanging on any number of staircases, back corridors or upper landings in university buildings or private houses throughout the city or beyond.

The location of the scene, mentioned neither in the title nor the poem, is Oriel Square, a quiet backwater that lies to the south of the High Street, taking its name from Oriel College, the front of which forms its eastern flank whilst the back of Christ Church College faces it on the western side. The date alluded to by Betjeman in his title can be narrowed down to pre-First World War; Oxford’s horse-drawn trams were withdrawn from service in August 1914.

Let’s look at the picture in more detail.

An earlier shower of rain has cleared and the sun is setting over Cumnor Hill which lies west of Oxford, the highest spot of which is also called Cumnor Hurst. This would not be visible from the square but is in the right direction. To this day part of the square is still cobbled. Canterbury Gate, which dominates the south-western corner of the square, is the back entrance to Christ Church and is an impressive structure, built by James Wyatt in 1778 in a classical style with double fluted Doric columns either side of a lofty gateway. It is a measure of the wealth and size of Christ Church that this is merely their back entrance as it is grander than many a college front gate!

Corpus Christi College, more commonly called just Corpus as here, abuts the south-east corner of the square and an undergraduate with rooms in the north-west corner of the Front Quad would have views over the square. As dusk approaches he naturally reaches to lower the blind the better to concentrate on getting his head round the complexities of Hegel’s philosophical treatises.

Peck refers to Christ Church’s magnificent Peckwater Quad, built in the classical style by Henry Aldrich in 1714, the rear elevation of its east range overlooking the square. For many years there was a small cab rank in the square.

The loud athletes would have arrived in the square from Merton Street which joins it between Oriel and Corpus Christi Colleges, having walked up Merton Grove from Christ Church Meadows which would often have been partially flooded in the winter and spring months as it lies between the rivers Thames and Cherwell and indeed was flooded earlier this year and for all I know remains so as I write this.

From the square it is but a short walk to the High where “we” can board a tram for the Banbury Road in time for tea in the cosy domesticity of north Oxford, passing in the Cornmarket, Buols’ which was a well known but long since gone popular tea-room.

Betjeman has painted this scene in far fewer lines and far more effectively than I have described it here. Another much later poem about a painting, On a Painting by Julius Olsson R.A. (A Nip In The Air, 1974), is also a sonnet.

The poem for April 2021 was “Inexpensive Progress” chosen by Judy Hobson, a member of the Lincolnshire Branch of the Betjeman Society, is a journalist and health writer.

I didn’t choose Inexpensive Progress as my poem for April, it chose me.

The poem leapt off the page because it so vividly describes the decimation of the countryside we see going on all around us, robbing us of a vital organ just when we need it most in the midst of a pandemic.

Although John Betjeman wrote these words back in the 1950s they eerily foretell what continues apace in April 2021. I share his anger that so many of our villages and fields were and continue to be sacrificed upon the altar of what some perceive as progress. If the poet were alive today he would be taking up his pen to chastise those individuals and companies who thoughtlessly dump plastic waste in his much-loved hedgerows and rivers, endangering not only our countryside but the whole planet.

Betjeman’s caustic sarcasm hits the spot when he says:

“Let all things travel faster

 Where motor-car is master

 Till only Speed remains.”

In 1955, when he was composing Inexpensive Progress, the country’s first stretch of motorway – the Preston by-pass – now part of the M6, was under construction and in 1959 the first section of the M1 between Watford and Rugby was opened. There were 4.5 million cars on Britain’s roads at the time. By 2019 the number of licensed vehicles in the UK had rocketed to 38.4 million.

As someone who was particularly fond of trains, Betjeman would be the first to point out that this staggering increase is a consequence of Dr Beeching stripping away huge sections of our railway system in the 1960s and our canals, in the main, being given over to pleasure craft.

His fury is evident at the very start when he declares:

 “O age without a soul.”

Then after describing hills blighted with pylons, his rage builds to a crescendo in the second half of his poem:

“Leave no old village standing

 Which could provide a landing

 For aeroplanes to roar.”

But his scariest verse is his last one. For what Betjeman prophesies here is rapidly coming true. Noxious car fumes are leading to an increase in premature deaths from respiratory disease and heart attack among those living near busy roads and more worryingly studies show that particulate matter of which road transport is a major source is now getting into unborn fetuses.

“When all our roads are lighted

 By concrete monsters sited

 Like gallows overhead,

 Bathed in the yellow vomit

 Each monster belches from it,

We’ll know that we are dead.”

At an inquest in 2020 a coroner ruled that cumulative pollution from traffic on London’s busy South Circular inner ring road was implicated in nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah’s fatal asthma attack and the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan declared air pollution to be a public health crisis in the city.

Interviewed on Panorama in 1955, Betjeman declared he would never allow anyone to drive anything except a horse and cart in the centre of Oxford, not even a bicycle, adding cars ruined the place.

“They absolutely make it simply hideous as they make every old town in England hideous.”

Somewhat belatedly – 67 years to be exact – on February 25, 2021, following a study that shows being in that city’s centre equates to smoking 60 cigarettes a day, the Oxford Civic Society has begun to debate whether cars should be banned.

Those new to Betjeman may not realise how much poorer our surroundings would be without his forthrightness. After the war, free rein was given to planners and there was a distaste for anything Victorian. As a result the country was starting to be stripped of its heritage. In 1958 the poet was among a group of concerned individuals who founded the Victorian Society and he became its first secretary.

In the 1960s it was largely due to his influence that St Pancras railway station and hotel in London were saved from demolition and given Grade 1 listing.

It is a tribute to him and his role as a conservationist, that in 2012 the Campaign for Rural England, the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds adopted the title of this very poem for their framework for assessing the costs and benefits of planning reform. By doing this they ensure the poet’s words of warning will continue to be heard throughout the 2020s and beyond.

The poem for May 2021 was “East Anglian Bathe” chosen by Sheila Morris of the Shires Branch.

This poem, first published in ‘Old Bats for New Belfries’ (1945), about a morning sea-swim in Norfolk, has none of the comic elements, or contemporary references, that normally appeal to me in Betjeman’s poetry.  Nor is it considering any deep and serious issue, apart from reminding you of how appallingly hit and miss the weather can be on an English holiday.

 

It has a kind of purity and timeless authenticity that exactly evokes a sense of place and atmosphere: the sounds, sights, smells and weather patterns of the Norfolk coast.  Betjeman, writing from personal experience*, stimulates memories and feelings from my own childhood of shivering and dithering on a windswept beach, pretending it was warm enough to swim.  And of the ubiquitous, stranded jellyfish straddling the sea line after the tide turned.

 

I first encountered this poem at the age of 16, when it formed part of my GCE English study, and I really liked

it even then.  Maybe because I could make the connections between it and my own early holidays with cooked breakfasts being prepared in the open-air and being dried off after sea swimming with a sand–ridden towel.  I also now understand why it was deemed suitable for study: nothing racy and plenty of poetic techniques to pick out for analysis.

 

A couple of years or so later, when still only in my late teens, I actually visited Horsey Mere. My then boyfriend, Baz, and I were in Norfolk with a couple of friends, and on one of those gently warm and sunny September days, at my suggestion, we drove to the Norfolk Broads in our friends’ Morris Minor, to visit Horsey Mere and climbed up to the top of the wind pump.  It could have only been the reference in the poem that made me aware of it, because it was hardly a rock and roll suggestion for a day out, but I just wanted to see it.  From memory, the place was fairly deserted, and we sunbathed in the sand dunes after a pub lunch.  Today, there is a designated 8-mile Horsey walk that takes in the most easterly point of the Norfolk Broads National Park, the wind pump, the sand dunes, and the beach. The village of Horsey itself being entirely separate. The wildlife there is amazing, as it is along most of the wild Norfolk coast.

 

Our love of Norfolk has only increased over the years and so has my appreciation of the imagery, the alliterative sounds and beautiful phrases capturing Norfolk skies and landscapes in this poem. Any Norfolkphile today would immediately understand the almost portmanteau-style phrases such as ‘table-land’ when referring to the absolute endless flatness of the sandscape.  In recent times, during walks between Wells-Next-The Sea and Holkham, you could be forgiven for thinking you were actually on the surface of the moon rather than on an East Anglian beach.   It’s as if the earth has sucked the sea back inside itself when the tide goes out and as far as the eye can see is smooth and yellow.

 

The other abiding memory of seaside holidays from childhood for me, is the difference between dull

cloud and warm sunshine.  Everywhere looks and feels better when the sun shines, and on any British beach holiday, that fast-changing sky that covers the sun with cloud and then blows it away again was something we watched with great anticipation and some degree of tension, because it totally changed our chances of a good beach day.  The uncertainty of our weather must be one of the main reasons for people choosing to fly off to foreign parts for summer holidays.  Betjeman’s lines:

 

And sudden dark a patch of sea was shaded,

And sudden light, another patch would hold

The warmth of whirling atoms in a sun-shot

And underwater sandstorm green and gold.

 

deliciously convey the power of the sun to immediately amplify any beauty in the landscape.  However, this can be switched off as suddenly as it can be switched on and we humans are entirely powerless to change it.

 

Although the above descriptions are, I think, achingly evocative of how Norfolk can appear in sunshine, Betjeman does not idealise his subject, and, for the most part, it’s the windy chill that invades his lines:

 

‘whistling bent-grass’, ‘jellyfish in quivering isolation’, ‘breeze’, ‘gooseflesh’. ‘wavelets morning-cold’

‘How cold the bathe, how chattering cold the drying’

 

But, the rhyme that moves ‘drying to frying’ creates the promise of an exhilarating reward for the suffering.  In fact there is a brisk sense of that exhilaration throughout, driven by the rhyme scheme.  As often, there is a mix of high and low register: mighty adumbration/quivering isolation being one in point.  Once you’ve looked up ‘adumbration’ in the dictionary, you appreciate how exact a description of the over-shadowing clouds this provides. The rhyme between breeze and knees brings us nicely back to earth once more.

 

The complete sensory experience of what it is to risk a wild swim in early-morning Norfolk, running

from the Mere to the sea and back for an alfresco fried breakfast is here to share, giving a kind of vivid magic to an unassuming corner of Norfolk that continues to draw us back to this place of largely unchanged natural beauty.

 

*  My grateful thanks to our Society Sage, Horace Liberty, to whom I turned to check background details, who has been able to furnish me with relevant bibliographical and biographical information.

Although written in 1945 when John was 39, Betjeman was remembering a boating holiday spent with his father, Ernest, on the Norfolk Broads, when the poet himself was a teenager and attending

Marlborough College.  Ernest Betjeman owned 2 boats at different times, which he moored at Coltishall.  Dates suggest that this holiday was most likely to have been spent on the second yacht ‘Morning Calm’, commissioned by Ernest and owned between 1920-1923.  The vessel is apparently still in use.

The poem for June 2021 was “Before the anaesthetic or A Real Fright” chosen by David Nodder of the Southern Branch of The Betjeman Society.

So often poets paint vivid scenes and in this, as in so many things, JB excels.  Every detail of the ward is at once burnt into your brain. As so often too, bells are both his theme and background.  If I was lying in a hospital bed, the surroundings would be few, dull and discordant noise would prevail.

 

In contrast, JB benefits not from drizzle but from ‘slanting summer rain.’ The very leaves receive the belfry song.  The bells just ring?  No, they ‘charge the evening light with sound.’  The subtle  hymn extract from ‘ages past’  follows and doubts flood into his mind ‘Is it extinction when I die?’  We do not know how many times JB asked himself this unanswerable question but we can guess it was thousands.

 

He describes himself as so many philosophers have done as ‘this I.’  The prone patient hears the bells of course, but they in turn, hear ‘this I’ call!

 

JB refers in passing to an area in which he is a leading expert, church architecture and contents, but now wonders if in this pursuit he was successfully acquiring merit for eternal life.

 

‘With every gust the chestnut sighs, With every breath a mortal dies.’  Did Shakespeare, Tennyson, Yeats, anybody , write better lines than that?

 

Characteristically he descends instantly from the profound to the banal – ‘Will you give my wife this letter . . . ‘

 

Once again, he doesn’t shrink from describing the earthly body after death and the details are as stark as in ‘On a Portrait of a Deaf Man’.

 

He finishes here with unresolved doubt as he does in ‘Aldershot Crematorium’ and ‘Goodbye.’  He cannot arise from the bed with the positive thought he finds, after his earlier doubts, in ‘Christmas.’

 

I think the poem is a great one but late in life, it worries me . . . . . I have too much empathy with it.

The poem for July 2021 was “On Leaving Wantage 1972 chosen by Pat and Bernard Mattimore of the Wantage Branch of The Betjeman Society.

This is one of our favourite poems by John Betjeman.  On Leaving Wantage is the obvious choice for our Wantage Branch poem of the month.  We know exactly everywhere that JB mentions in the poem and the lines ‘From this wide vale, where all our married lives we two have lived’ are very poignant and personal – for John and Penelope but also for Bernard and I.  We decided in 2003 that although we loved Oxfordshire, part of the wide vale, we loved Cornwall and moved there , near to all the places JB had loved and where he is buried in St Enodoc Churchyard.  At our last annual dinner before we moved away, Fr John Salter read the poem and it did make us question what were we doing leaving this place that we loved so much and so many friends?  And we were back within a year!

 

But very sadly, those words brought the marriage of John and Penelope to a close and they went their separate ways.  Although they never divorced, they still had a love and high regard for each other.  Their marriage had been difficult long before they left The Mead in 1971 but they did have lots of friends in Wantage and I feel that Penelope loved her home and her animals. John cannot have ever been an easy person to live with, he had so many interests as well as the obvious relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish.

 

We are so fortunate to live near all the places JB mentions. We know the ‘old brick garden walls that unevenly run down to Letcombe Brook – now known as Betjeman Lane and run down to the Betjeman Millennium Park   We know the Brook although I have to confess we have rarely seen any fish in there but there are lots of ducks and John would have walked alongside the Brook hundreds of times from the Mead to the Church.

 

The poem reinforces the importance of religion and the Church and the bells in JB’s life.

He mentions the Church bells in this poem and he also wrote Wantage Bells and gave a handwritten draft to the bellringers on the marriage of his daughter Candida to Rupert Lycett Green. In 1999 the Wantage Branch had the poem restored and framed and it is in pride of place in the Bell Tower and brought down and on view for special occasions.

 

John and Penelope moved to Garrards Farm in Uffington in 1934 when they were first married and they did indeed live in this wide vale (Vale of the White Horse) for all their married lives, moving to Wantage in 1951.  After 20 years at the Mead, there is no doubt that JB did love Wantage and leaving must have been very painful.

The poem for August 2021 was “Death of King George V”, chosen by Richard Crouch of the Ridings Branch of The Betjeman Society.

This poem is a remarkably mature piece for a young man who was only thirty at the time of its composition. It was first published in a slightly different version in JB’s Continual Dew in 1937. It was inspired by a headline in the Daily Express for 21st January 1936 which described the new King, Edward VIII, arriving at Hendon aerodrome following the death of his father, King George V, the previous day.

As a commemorative poem, it is far better than any of the commissioned ‘official’ poems JB was later to write as Poet Laureate. He found it difficult to write ‘to order’. He was not alone among Poets Laureate – even the great Tennyson wrote some pretty mediocre ‘official’ poems. (How wise it was of Rudyard Kipling to let it be known that he would never accept this particular honour.)
JB’s poem beautifully encapsulates the changes that were occurring in Britain at the time– including a change in the style of our monarchy. The irony was, however, that between the poem’s composition and its publication, the new King, Edward VIII, abdicated to be replaced by his brother, George VI, whose style, emphasising tradition, duty and, dare we say it, dullness, was something of a reversion to that of their father.

Returning to the content of the poem, it is full of contrasts, both manifest and implied. The first ten lines paint a picture of the ‘old’ King and the British Empire in its twilight – of old men, decent, dull and dutiful and living in dusty, musty Victorian country mansions. The last two lines encapsulate ‘modernity’ in the shape of the ‘new’ King with his disregard for convention, and, as it turns out, disregard for ‘duty’, arriving casually dressed and hatless, by air, into new-built suburbia.

These last two lines, in remarkably few words, contrast with the first ten. In lines one and two, the old King’s spirit is borne upwards to Heaven by the spirits of the game birds he has shot. In the last line, the new King descends to Earth in an aeroplane. Line five refers to ‘big blue eyes which saw wrong clothing’. Line twelve refers to the new King arriving ‘hatless’. This most certainly would have been ‘wrong’ in the eyes of the old King, so deeply conservative in his attitude to clothing that he wore his trousers with creases ‘port and starboard’ rather than ‘fore and aft’. He insisted that his wife, Queen Mary, always wore ankle length skirts and he told his eldest son and heir, the future King Edward VIII, “You dress like a cad” (and added “You behave like a cad……You are a cad!”)

In an unpublished early version of the poem written by JB in a letter dated 1st January 1937, to his friend Edward James, the penultimate line reads ‘At a red suburb ruled by Mrs. Simpson’. Here, he refers specifically to the new King’s American, double-divorcee mistress and future wife, Mrs. Wallis Simpson, who was in every imaginable way the complete opposite to the ‘old’ King’s wife, Queen Mary.

We are not alone in thinking that this is one of JB’s best poems. Even some of his detractors appreciated it. For example, Simon Heffer, commenting on ‘Death of King George V’, wrote in the Daily Telegraph in January 2020 that “John Betjeman was a mediocre poet, but he wrote one brilliant poem.”
We would beg to disagree with the first part of this sentiment but not the latter.

The poem for September 2021 was chosen by Patricia Mann of the Canterbury Branch of The Betjeman Society.

This poem was first published in 1954 in A Few Late Chrysanthemums. However, I read it in the 1960’s when I was given a copy of John Betjeman’s Collected Poems as a present. It was so different from the jocular poems I associated with him and I was very touched by his compassion towards the couple.

Although the poem has only four short verses John Betjeman has finely observed architectural details, cloud formations, the business of an everyday London but most of all has made his readers aware of the hopelessness of the elderly couple who have received bad news from the specialist whom they have just visited.

Horace Liberty writing in Volume 31 of The Betjmanian says that the inspiration for the poem came when Betjeman was receiving osteopathic treatment and he saw the couple come out of a building opposite, the man carrying a large brown envelope full of X-ray photographs; then the poet lets his imagination build up a story about them.

The first verse describes the eighteenth century building in detail: ‘the heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen and the faience ornaments’, this all indicates a certain respectability.

From architecture to the weather which is such a part of everyday life, Betjeman mentions a ‘mackerel sky’ as an indicator of changing weather and change will be coming to the couple as Betjeman starts two of his verses with ‘No hope…’.

Although there is sadness in the poem, we the readers are not left feeling too depressed, for the wife, as many women do, tries to lighten the moment by putting her fingers in his and then addresses the practicalities of getting home by catching ‘a nineteen or a twenty-two’.

I think this is certainly one of my top ten favourite poems, one that I return to time and again.

 The poem for October 2021 was “Indoor Games near Newbury” chosen by Bevis Hillier, Past president of The Betjeman Society.

‘Indoor Games near Newbury’ is a Betjeman poem that has a special resonance for me. In the early 1970s I often used to have lunch with JB in an Italian restaurant near his home in Chelsea. After one fairly bibulous meal, we were walking back to his house in Radnor Walk – he on the pavement, I in the gutter – when I began reciting ‘Indoor Games ….’, which I had memorized. I think JB was tickled that I had bothered to learn it – and he joined in.

…   Rich the makes of motor whirring,
Past the pine-plantation purring
Come up, Hupmobile, Delage!
Short the way your chauffeurs travel,
Crunching over private gravel
Each from out his warm garáge.

(In my biography, I compared that with the ‘lulling cadences’ of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ – ‘Tirra lirra by the river’.

It is a poem about the love-minus-sex that young children can feel for each other. JB remembered what it was like to be a child. His only rival in that gift was L.P. Hartley in novels such as Eustace and Hilda and The Go-Between.

But ‘Indoor Games…’ is also a perfect evocation of the 1920s, demonstrating JB’s genius for capturing the Zeitgeist of any decade (just as he does of the 1960s in his satire of the thrusting young ‘Executive’.)

The ‘funny uncle’ (probably one of the gay, bachelor uncles cherished by their families) urges the children to dance. I must admit, with shame, that when I was writing my biography of JB, I did not trouble to look up ‘the game of Clumps’ mentioned in the poem. Enlightenment has come in the last two weeks through reading the new, unexpurgated volume of the diaries of Henry “Chips” Channon, admirably edited by Simon Heffer. On 17 January 1938, Channon writes: ‘…Forty of us played a frenzied game called “The Game”, a mixture of “Clumps” and charades.’ Heffer’s helpful note on ‘Clumps’ explains: ‘Rather like Twenty Questions, a game in which one “clump” of people decide on a word or phrase and another “clump” ask questions to discover it.’ Incidentally, Channon’s diaries have much on the drunken decline of Basil, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, beloved of JB when young.

In Young Betjeman, the first volume of my biography, I compared ‘Indoor Games…’ to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ (‘But we loved with a love that was more than love…’) Both poems, I suggested, gave ‘an impression of a platonic love more rewarding than carnal love’.

‘Indoor Games…’ ends with a glorious burst of bathos-

Wendy bending gives a blessing,
Holds me as I drift to dreamland, safe inside my slumber-wear.

It’s the sort of Betjeman verse that repels Modernists, but enchants us Betjemaniacs.

The poem for December 2021 was Sun and Fun, chosen by John Diffey, Treasurer of The Betjeman Society.

If you really want to enjoy John Betjeman’s poetry – take my advice.  Listen to him reading his verse set against the background mood music of Jim Parker.  The two of them collaborated on four albums in the 1970’s with Jim Parker composing and performing the music. This poem appears on the album ‘Late Flowering Love’.  The results of each of these collaborations were amazing; Jim Parker is such a brilliant musician that really sets the mood for Betjeman’s voice.

As a public performer of Betjeman’s poetry I would have given my high teeth to do so with Parker’s music backing. Unfortunately Jim’s band used many different instruments to create the special effects.  For this poem, ‘Sun and Fun’ however, the spoken word is set against piano music (the full band comes in later on the track).

Jim Parker very kindly sent me the piano score which I took to the pianist who would accompany me in Glenlivet Hall in Banffshire.  She said “that’s good when can we rehearse?”.  I thought to myself, rehearse ?  What’s that about ?  If she could play the piano and I knew the words what was there to rehearse ?  But I was wrong.  As far as I know this lady had no predisposition towards Betjeman, but she coached me (nay bullied) me to get it right.  She seemed instinctively to know about emphasis and timing and so on, and the final performance was very well received.

My accompanist seemed to love the ethos of the poem- the bygone age that is lost for ever.  I hope you do too.

 

The poem for January 2021 was Wantage Bells chosen by the Wantage Branch (Pat Mattimore and Roy Burton).

 

The poem was apparently written for the occasion of the wedding of his daughter Candida to Rupert Lycett Green in Wantage Parish Church in 1963 and a rough handwritten draft, on cardboard, complete with all scribbled corrections, was given as a gift to the Bell ringers of the Church. In 1999, 15 years after the death of JB, Wantage Branch hosted our ‘Summoned by Bells’ event which included a Requiem Mass led by Fr John Salter, our Founder and vicar. To celebrate this event, Wantage Branch had the poem professionally restored and framed and it lives in the belltower of the Church. It is brought down into the body of the Church on Special Occasions. For example when the Bust of Betjeman was unveiled outside Wantage Museum by Rupert Lycett Green and his daughter Endellion in August 2016.

The metre of the poem can be read as though it is Church bells ringing. When JB lived at the Mead in Wantage (1951 – 1972) he would walk along the Letcombe Brook path. There would always be an abundance of wild flowers and trees and bird song and this is now the site of the Betjeman Millennium Park. He would hear the Bells summoning everybody to Morning Service and then walk up, what is now known as Betjeman Lane with the ‘brick walls of rose’ to the Church.

There was at that time a very thriving Anglo-Catholic Convent Community in Wantage, hence the reference to the Nuns. The Convent is still there as a ‘working Convent’ (search Convent of St Mary the Virgin, Wantage) It is very beautiful and certainly a place for a peaceful retreat.

The poem is a history of the town at the time and celebrates John Betjeman and his close connection and love of Wantage.

The poem of the month for February 2022 was

Reproof deserved or After the Lecture     chosen by Steve Jackson, Hon. Secretary of The Betjeman Society.

If you have ever given a lecture to a local society —literary, local history or arts-related you should be familiar with the peculiar set of terrors this event can unleash on your feelings. Apart from finding out when and where it is and then forgetting, confirming details for projector/computer if illustrated and then getting the script right for the intended audience, once at the appointed place and roughly on time there is the audience and the ‘reception committee’. Who has been designated to look after you will set the tone for the evening and of course you will stay for refreshments afterwards won’t you…Well I have done something of this circuit and experienced the refreshments so well-meant but put out without benefit of clingfilm. I chose this because it makes me laugh (and JB is laughter personified) and is classic JB self-deprecation with a devastating sting at the end of the poem. I also suffered some of the indignities JB references, often at the mercy of Women’s Institutes and literary societies!

 

JB did many lectures in his lifetime and once an established writer and poet in the fifties he was much in demand. When he became Poet Laureate in 1972 he severely curtailed these commitments such was his popularity.  This poem first appeared in Punch on 5 January 1955 but was omitted by mistake from Collected Poems in 1958 and finally appeared in High and Low in 1966. JB had recorded his own reading as early as 1955 too, in The Golden Treasury of John Betjeman (Argo) so he was quite aware of its value and I think enjoyed reading it.

 

Many would be inclined to dismiss the poem as one of his ‘light verse’ poems, the sort of whimsical rather dated ‘stuff’ he churned out to earn a living. This fits the box some critics like to place JB in. But look at it closely. The metre is precise, the rhythm regular and enjoyable and rhyming pleasing and internal in the first and third lines of each verse and not at the end. Who else but JB would rhyme ‘thinner’ and ‘Pinner’? Of course the latter is a favourite suburb and former country village in JB’s ‘rural Middlesex’. There are early reproofs in the poem preparing us for the last line: a rather pompous attendee asks about Charles Morgan, a novelist who is scarcely read now but was all the rage in the thirties and forties, counterbalanced by a verse play by Christopher Fry popular in the fifties but hardly exciting for soldiers doing National Service at that time! There is also reproof from the person who asks if he has written a novel (JB being an established critic in The Spectator and Time and Tide for example) and “You haven’t?” is the disdainful reply along with but I have so I’m better than you… And so the agonies pile on. A military man perhaps notices the changes in his physical appearance since Pinner suggesting his lectures are but money spinners and implying second rate fare.

 

The most cringe-making experience is then to hope a kind face will provide relief but most devastating of all she missed the lecture, hasn’t heard of JB and would like to know all about architecture in a few minutes! JB’s confidence would be zero by then – his spirit totally flat and he’d be desperate to slip away resolving ‘never again’. But there is the grapefruit awaiting its victim…

The poem for the month of March 2022 was

“Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican”     Chosen by Stephen Sealy (Rev.) Chaplain to The Betjeman Society

For anyone who doesn’t know the poem, or is not a JB fan and just happens to see this title – Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican, there might be the expectation that it was an essay focussing on the Christian season of penitence and abstinence. However, if I mention that the poem was originally entitled ‘The Mistress’ they may revise their expectation of something deeply spiritual! With tongue in cheek, I have selected the poem for this month in which Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, 2^nd March.

At one point in his life, JB regularly worshipped at the Grosvenor Chapel in Mayfair. The poem was inspired by an elegant woman John admired amongst the regular congregation there. For a long time, he did not know her name. But she proved to be Joan Price, the beauty editor of Harper’s Bazaar (later Harper & Queen). Joan was married to a sidesman at the Grosvenor Chapel – Michael Constantinidis.

A.N. Wilson describes JB as ‘the poet of the crush – the form of love Englishmen learn at their boarding schools’, and ‘the Mistress’ was by no means the only object of JB’s crushes during his life. There was Peggy Purey-Cust; ‘Pam’ of Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden, Miss J. Hunter Dunn, of course, and you may well think of others. Nor should we overlook his wandering eyes in another place of worship – the chapel of Marlborough College. In response to the Old Marlburian bishop’s call to worship (as related in Summoned by Bells) John recalled “…all I worshipped were the athletes, ranged in the pews opposite.”

Many and varied are the reasons people go to church, I have discovered during my ministry. These would include appreciation of the building, the music, the company, the flowers, the incense, the sense of continuity with what parents did; a force of habit; an hour of contemplation or stillness in a busy life. But I suspect no a few have gone to church for the opportunity of gazing on another – somebody about whom they may know nothing, not even a name.

Many people, if asked to write a poem about such an experience, may offer a hint of guilt or penitence. After all, most of us would say that our intention in going to church is to worship the almighty; and building, music, company, flowers etc. would all be part of that. But to gaze on somebody probably unobtainable and ‘forbidden’ (she is called ‘the Mistress’) may seem unworthy and disrespectful – or even immoral! Indeed ‘The parson said that we shouldn’t stare/ Around when we come to church/ Or the Unknown God we are seeking/ May forever elude our search.’

But, as is often the case, Betjeman takes us deeper into human emotions, and reaches the point of the poem in the last line (again, as he often does). He glimpses in the Mistress ‘a hint of the Unknown God’. She is, in fact, a visual symbol of spiritual mystery. It’s certainly true that those over whom we develop a crush often have an air of mystery about them. This lady is elegant; she wears a glance of amused surprise; the sound of her voice is soft and deep – all alluring features! But JB admits he does not know her way of life, though calls her ‘the Mistress’ because she has more of a cared-for air than many a legal wife.

There seems to be an added value to this particular attraction because it takes place in church. Kevin Gardner’s comment on the poem suggests “Though clearly we are meant to laugh at Betjeman’s mock-blasphemy, we are still reminded of the idea that the incarnation of God is mysterious and inexplicable.”  He also quotes Geoffrey Harvey, “Betjeman suggests we learn the world’s spiritual frame by knowing its Creator in another and in oneself.”

It’s always a good thing to sense and admire beauty, and I like the observation by Salma Hayek, “People often say that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves.”

‘Lenten thoughts’ appeared in A Nip in the Air (1974) after John had moved to Radnor Walk, Chelsea, from where he could walk to the Grosvenor Chapel. A.N. Wilson says, “It may not be his best poem but it is one of his most haunting, and it is the last one where we really hear the voice of the master.”

The poem for April 2022 was

“In Memory of George Whitby, Architect”    Chosen by Stephen Stringer, Media Editor, The Betjeman Society.

I suspect if we took a straw poll of who has heard of George Whitby, even amongst the architectural community, there would not be a large number of hands raised. And yet here we have a Betjeman poem in his honour. The poem was written for George Whitby’s memorial service on 23 March 1973 at Nicholas Hawksmoor’s wonderful St Mary Woolnoth, London

George Whitby, (1916 – 1973) was an architect who’s principle works were carried out in partnership with Donald McMorran. After the war spent largely in North Africa, he returned home to train as an architect becoming an ARIBA in 1947 and an FRIBA in 1954. He joined McMorran in 1958 and subsequently became a partner in the McMorran and Whitby practice. They worked mainly on public sector buildings including schools, universities, town halls but the two for which they are most known are the City Police Station, Wood Street and the extension to the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey. Edward Denison, in his book on McMorran and Whitby concludes ‘the extension to the Central Criminal Court represents the acme of Whitby’s extraordinary spatial faculty and is a reflection of his perfectionism’.

The poem reminds us how passionate Betjeman was about architecture and how he could describe buildings in a few well-turned lines and highlights the extent of his engagement with working architects and the projects they were engaged in.  It also celebrates one of my favourite architects, Nicholas Hawksmoor and the joys of the City of London churches Betjeman so loved.

The poem starts with Si monumentum requires …….  partially quoting the famous inscription on Christopher Wren’s tomb at St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘If you seek his monument, look around you’.

The beautiful description of the interior of St Mary Woolnoth is followed by a reference to Wren’s St Paul’s surrounded by ‘a forest of steeples’. Betjeman describes St Mary Woolnoth in his City of London Churches as being ‘A very sumptuous and prominent church, and markedly different from the curves and lightness of Wren. Hawksmoor, his highly original pupil, uses mathematical regularity, squareness and weight.’

‘Behold the Law’s new fortress’ announces Whitby’s Old Bailey extension and how it is ‘paying regard to its neighbours,’. We know that Betjeman admired the extension to the Old Bailey as he wrote to Hugh Casson on 10 January 1974, “I think that George Whitby’s addition to [E W] Mountford’s Old Bailey is a marvellous piece of street architecture. In fact the whole of that side of Old Bailey is a happy combination of styles pulled together by George Whitby’s grim fortress of the law which recalls George Dance junior’s Newgate.”

Finally Betjeman locates Whitby as standing ‘in a long tradition’ of McMorran, Dance, Wren and Hawksmoor. Fine company indeed.

As for their friendship there is a thank you letter in the archives at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, from George Whitby to Betjeman at Cloth Fair dated 4 August 1972 which reads:

“My Dear John
It was indeed kind of you to write. I am most appreciative and enjoyed so much your hospitality.
Regards George”

The poem was included in the collection ‘A Nip in the Air’ first published in 1974. Perhaps not surprisingly the word ‘Architect’ was added to the title when published. It does not appear in any of the drafts of the poem held in the archives and this may be an omen that over time Whitby’s name would drift into somewhat obscurity whilst, as the poem says, his work lives on for us all to see.

The poem for May 2022 was

“May-Day Song for North Oxford”           Chosen by Andrew McCallum, Vice-Chairman, The Betjeman Society.

 

This poem was first published in Horizon, July 1945 and in New Bats in Old Belfries in the same year. The first two stanzas were published under the title “Spring Morning in North Oxford” in Selected Poems (1948) edited by John Sparrow.

John Betjeman was an early champion of North Oxford as a district worthy of conservation and it later became one of the first official Conservation Areas in the country. It features in a number of his poems and prose writings but this poem, to my mind, celebrates a special part of north Oxford which Betjeman first got to know and appreciate when he arrived at The Dragon School as a 10 year old boy in 1917.

When he wrote this poem the area had only been developed a couple of decades or so earlier and there would have been plenty of people alive who would have remembered the time when this land was open, a mixture of pasture, meadow and orchard as hinted at by Betjeman in the verse with mention of cows and apple trees. The houses here are large, detached, varied, some brick, others rendered, some tile hung and many well gabled and mostly with large gardens which retained many of the mature trees but with the colourful additions of suburban shrubbery such as the jonquils and forsythia he refers to in the opening lines. To this day, a walk along Belbroughton and the neighbouring roads, especially in springtime when the blossom is out, is a delight.

Into this natural scene Betjeman introduces the world of learning. Many of the “emancipated children” would be sons and daughters of academics. While they are poring over books in their studies or engaged in high-table conversation, their children are playing, free-range, in their large gardens or perhaps down by the banks of the river Cherwell which flows nearby. He names two schools, his own the Dragon, known than also as Lynams and Summerfields but there are others nearby, Wychwood School for Girls is another and since the poem was published Oxford High School for Girls has moved to the far end of Belbroughton Road. Generations of children have learnt, matured and developed in this “North Oxford air” and still do to this day.

The local church is St Andrews in Linton Road which Betjeman mentions in Summoned by Bells, by ARG Fenning (1907) in neo Norman style and it is this church to which he refers in the poem; it certainly has rough cast buttresses. However, it is a mystery to me why he calls it “St. C.S. Lewis’s Church” after his tutor which whom he famously did not get on. JRR Tolkien, Lewis’s friend in the “Inklings”, lived very close by in Northmoor Road but CS Lewis lived in Headington, away to the east. He had no known association with this church. That may remain a mystery but this poem, as well as being a celebration of nature triumphing in a built environment, is, for me, a song to the “emancipated children”.

On Youtube can be found a recording of it sung by Eton College Chapel Choir.

The poem for June 2022 was

“North Coast Recollections” (Extract)   Chosen by Horace Liberty, Journal Editor, The Betjeman Society

In 1948, a collection of poems by John Betjeman was published.  Entitled Selected Poems, it was an overview of John Betjeman’s work to that date and, in addition to poems from earlier collections, it also included a number of poems from the 1940s, that had previously appeared in magazines, but this was the first time they had been gathered in book form.

One of those poems was ‘North Coast Recollections’.  Along with another poem ‘Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc Church, Cornwall’, these two poems made up a section in the book, ‘Fragments of a Cornish Poem’.  That Cornish poem was sometimes referred to by JB as ‘The Epic’, and, written in blank verse, it was the precursor of JB’s verse autobiography Summoned by Bells (1960).

‘North Coast Recollections’ had previously been published in the West Country Magazine and was a memory of JB’s childhood seaside holidays in Trebetherick – a recurring theme in his writing, throughout his life.  The extract chosen is almost too painful in its depth of feeling and its description of adolescent unrequited love.

Like so many of JB’s poems, this poem is firmly fixed in terms of location, social class (the Tennis Club etc) and is peopled with a cast of colourful characters from JB’s youth.  The dramatis personae of the poem were real people, but for publication JB changed their names to avoid any embarrassment, and these substitute-names continue today in the authorised version of the poem in Collected Poems.

However, later in life, John Betjeman made two recordings of the poem, in which he used the real names of the people he remembered.  The first of these was made for the poet Lee Anderson in 1966, and that recording has survived in Yale University Library.  In the Yale Archive recording, JB pauses almost imperceptibly as he reads, before substituting the names of the real people instead of the names in the printed text of the poem.  He substitutes Larkworthy, (for Beaworthy, in “Beaworthy Trouncer Heppelwhite and Co”); Captain Hammond (for Captain Mycroft); Mrs Harden (for Mrs Pardon); Miss Davie (for Miss Myatt); Lady Walsham (for Lady Lambourn); John Walsham (for John Lambourn) and the Stokes’s hop (instead of the Hanks’s hop).  The substitution of the names Walsham and Stokes is repeated in Betjeman’s 1974 recording of ‘North Coast Recollections’ accompanied by Jim Parker’s music on the album Sir John Betjeman’s ’Varsity Rag, giving further confirmation of their true identities.

Although interesting in a particular sense, the true identities of the characters in the poem are irrelevant – the poem taps into the universal – the reader’s own feelings of first love.  When we read the poem, we remember our own ‘emotions that were devastating out of all proportion to their depth’, as John Sparrow describes them in his preface to Selected Poems.  That recognition of the universal in the particular is part of what makes JB’s poems still relevant to readers today.

The poem for July 2022 was

Winter Seascape chosen by Colin Manson, Treasurer of The Betjeman Society

When asked to choose the poem of the month, the task seemed rather daunting to me.  How to select just a single poem from such a wide a varied list of great poems?  In the end, it comes down to personal feelings – which poem resonates the most within my heart and soul and speaks to my love of the sea.

To understand the connection I have with this poem you need to understand something about me – as a person, as a retired Naval Officer, weather forecaster and oceanographer.  I spent many years in the Royal Navy as a weather forecaster and oceanographer.  As such, I became intimately involved with the physical environment – the wind, the waves, the sounds around me all meant something to me.  My role was to interpret that collection of experiences and to make a meaningful analysis for those charged with the operation – and especially the safety – of the men and women whose only place of safety was the ship they were part of.

‘Calm weather and smooth seas’ is a traditional blessing when seafarers part but they are the dull times for a weatherman.  I was happiest when forecasting dire conditions – not because I wanted to see everyone being seasick but because that was when my skills and experience could make the difference between danger and safety, between comfort and distress.

The poem evokes within me my memories of a winter storm off the west coast of the Outer Hebrides.  I had given the Captain 48 hours warning but our operational stance meant that we couldn’t simply run for shelter and had to stick it out and ride the storm.  Winds in excess of 90mph and waves up to 20m high towered above the ship (a Frigate of some 4800 tonnes and 146m (450ft) long) and breaking over the bridge – this is one of my abiding memories of a long and happy seafaring career.  The storm lasted some 36 hours during which some parts of the ship were literally torn off – sheared from their steel fixings like so much paper – but we made it through to the calmer waters unbowed, triumphant!

The noise of the wind across the decks, the crashing of the waves as they broke over the ship (the prayers of the crew as they mentally strove to lift the ship clear of the cascading waters) and all the while the steady beat of our mighty engines as they drove us through the tumultuous waters.  These are sounds that I can still hear of that winters storm and which the poem evokes within me whenever I read it.  In his words, John Betjeman has captured the sights and sounds of the ocean – and the visceral feeling such storms command, demonstrating the power and violence majesty of the ocean but, at the end, it also speaks to me of her enfolding, comforting majesty.  Is it any wonder that this is one of my favourite poems?

The poem for August 2022 was

Inexpensive Progress chosen by Andy Smith, Press Officer, The Betjeman Society.

‘Inexpensive Progress’ is one of Betjeman’s angriest poems. Not merely impassioned but raging. So, why have I chosen it as our ‘Poem of the Month’? It is not enough to say that it ‘speaks to me’, because I feel the same way as JB about the things he describes – but I believe it encapsulates so much of what makes me tick that it is almost an article of faith, my personal creed.

Many years ago I took up the cause of ‘preservation’, becoming a volunteer (and later, for a time, a staff member) of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and I continue to be involved in various activities in defence of our nation’s countryside and our heritage, both man-made and natural. While the poem is in essence the writer’s lament about the destructive consequences of society’s modernising tendencies, and is therefore decidedly pessimistic in tone, I take it as a warning rather than a prophecy, and have never given up hope that at least some of the Old England may yet be saved.

Indeed, it was JB more than any other writer who brought me to the conservationist movement and whose writings have continually given me the impetus (and quite often the ammunition) to fight on.

So, are we still in that ‘age without a soul’ that Betjeman decries? Pylons still ‘bestride the hills’ but they have long halted their advance across the British landscape as new technologies have enabled power supplies to be hidden underground. Thankfully we have not yet said ‘goodbye to hedges’, and indeed in many parts of the countryside wild hedgerows have gradually returned, and are thriving, while the neatly-trimmed privets of suburbia have never really gone away.

Meanwhile, the green belts around our cities may be under increasing pressure from development but, mercifully, they are still largely intact. A good deal of the ‘unpretentious greenery’ is still here, five decades after JB’s poem was first published, benefiting from the protection of the planning system. So too are many of those ‘winding country lanes’ – but regrettably the volume of motorised traffic that they carry continues to multiply.

The ’patch of shaven green’ with which any new development is usually endowed may be less shaven these days than when JB was writing; this is in part because of a recognition that allowing nature to flourish provides more colour to verges and open spaces, but perhaps mostly because the trimmed budgets of local authorities mean fewer municipal lawn-mowers.

Meanwhile, new roads continue to be built as the population rises, and with it the number of cars, whose way must be lit by yet more of Betjeman’s ‘concrete monsters’ spewing out their ‘yellow vomit’. Nowadays we call this light pollution, and it is the principal reason we no longer have dark skies at night, except in the remotest parts of the British Isles. (As yet, little is being done to rid us of this blight and give us back our black, starry night skies.)

The poem is spot-on about the grim standardisation of our High Streets. While valiant efforts have been made by campaigners to protect the local characteristics of some of our towns and villages, so much damage had already been done by the time ‘Inexpensive Progress’ was written – seven decades ago – that the best we can manage nowadays is to fight a rearguard action to preserve what little is left.

Betjeman’s nightmare vision of a nation so thoroughly wrecked by the onward march of progress may not yet (quite) have come to pass, but this poem serves as a powerful reminder of why all who cherish the Old England, as JB did, must continue to fight the good fight in defence of our precious heritage, traditions, sights and sounds.

If we ever doubt the righteousness of our cause, we can always return to the writings and broadcasts of Sir John Betjeman.

The poem for September 2022 was

Summoned By Bells (Extract) chosen by Dr Daisy Dunn, author of Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

John Betjeman had a habit of taking his hands off the wheel while driving his motor car through Oxford. “Phew! Gothic!,” he would cry as he sped down the High Street pointing out each and every detail of the architecture.

Sitting in the passenger seat on many occasions was Maurice Bowra, a colourful young Classics don from Wadham College, who had never quite mastered the art of driving himself.

Betjeman was a student when he first came within Bowra’s orbit. He had come up to read English at Magdalen College but failed to hit it off with his tutor. C. S. Lewis was new in post and had high expectations. Betjeman’s decision to ‘cut tutorials with wild excuse’ to go gallivanting around the city with his teddy-bear like ‘a pretentious playboy’ did nothing to endear him to the older man.

I recently had published a group biography entitled Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars, in which I described the importance of Maurice Bowra’s friendship with John Betjeman and others. The extract above is taken from Summoned by Bells, Betjeman’s ‘life in verse’ of 1960, and gives a flavour of what it was like for students to fraternise with this most sociable of academics in the 1920s.

Betjeman’s visual recall of the setting is remarkable. Bowra collected Chinese furniture (he was born in Kiukiang in 1898) but it was his contemporary British art and classical texts that caught the poet’s eye. Often, Bowra would lend books to favoured pupils, or give them copies as presents. He was a great believer in softening the boundaries between disciplines. A student of Greek, he thought, would do well to immerse himself in Russian, German or contemporary British poetry.

Bowra had fought on the Western Front before coming up to read Classics at Oxford as a teenager. He was sustained in the trenches by his passion for the verse of Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats and the young T. S. Eliot. Having begun to write poetry of his own, Betjeman was only too pleased to find in him a willing reader and critic. ‘Death in Leamington’ and ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’ were among the early poems Betjeman shared with Bowra. They quickly bonded over their interest in poetry.

This is not to neglect the frivolous side of their meetings. As the verses above make abundantly clear, dinner chez Bowra was quite a thrill. The food, for starters, seemed remarkably sophisticated for the time: oysters, tournedos, bombe surprise. To be invited to one of Bowra’s parties was generally considered quite a coup among Oxford students. Betjeman captures the competition for attention that arose amongst them and Bowra’s withering response to their efforts to impress.

No matter how hard they tried, the youngsters could not match Bowra’s ability to forge clever witticisms and puns, and generally dominate the room with his booming voice. Kenneth Clark, the art historian, could be considered just one of the many ‘imitation Maurices’ Betjeman mentions. Clark consciously modelled his voice on that of the classicist. Maurice Bowra was very much the man Betjeman and his peers longed to be.

The greatest tribute Betjeman could pay him features at the end of his section on Bowra in Summoned by Bells. I was never taught by Bowra, Betjeman says, but ‘Maurice Bowra’s company / Taught me more than all my tutors did.’ Isn’t that often the way in life?

The poem for October 2022 was

Parliament Hill Fields chosen by Don Kennedy, former Council member of The Betjeman Society.

My choice is “Parliament Hill Fields”, which, as well as being a richly descriptive poem, brings fond memories of our late friend and former Betjeman Society Chairman Lance Pierson – the posthumous recipient of this year’s Betjeman Award, to the “person, group or organisation which in the opinion of the Society’s Council has made the most significant recent contribution to the understanding, or enjoyment of the life and work of Sir John Betjeman”.

 

One of the areas explored by Lance in his inspiring, poetry-related guided walks was the considerable distance from Kentish Town to Highgate Village (with an advance reminder of the steep hill involved!). Each of the poem’s landmarks (or its former location) would be duly pointed out – as well as the front door of JB’s birthplace at Parliament Hill Mansions (in Lissenden Gardens, near Gospel Oak station). As I also discovered, from the rear of the building, looking across the foot of Parliament Hill Fields, there’s a notable overview of the former North London Railway on its way to and from Hampstead Heath station; I’ve often wondered if John noted this when very young and was suitably enthused by the passing trains!

 

Lance’s walking route would continue past St Anne’s Church (where JB was baptised), JB’s second home at 31 Highgate West Hill (marked by an English Heritage blue plaque), and then the home of Peggy Purey-Cust – a name immortalised in the poet’s “Summoned By Bells” (“My first and purest love”). In a letter, he thanked her for getting in touch again:

“…How well I remember you with your golden hair down your back & that house on the top of West Hill. I remember going to tea there & your mother being there & looking out over London from under Cedar trees I think they were…”. On one of the last occasions I met Lance – the Society’s 2021 “Betjeman’s Birthday” readings at the St Pancras Station statue (an event, often with an associated walk, I inaugurated on August 28th 2008) – he excitedly announced that someone had recently opened the relevant front door to his group in West Hill!

 

Lance’s walk would continue with a short detour towards Parliament Hill and the south end of Highgate Ponds, before the party finally attained Highgate and a welcome sit-down and suitable refreshment. For me, John Betjeman’s tram-journey-in-verse (with its poignant ending) is a constant reminder of the imaginative way in which Lance brought the poem to life for so many people.

The poem for November 2022 was

A Lincolnshire Church chosen by Dr John Florance, President of the Shires Branch of The Betjeman Society.

My choice for Poem of the Month is, I think, one of Betjeman’s best. It’s ‘A Lincolnshire Church’. The church in question is St. Margaret’s, Huttoft and Betjeman beautifully evokes its setting and its social context:

 

…around it, turning their backs,

The usual sprinkle of villas;

The usual woman in slacks,

Cigarette in her mouth,

Regretting Americans, stands

As a wireless croons in the kitchen

Manicuring her hands.

 

We are in the immediate post-war period. The American forces which had been stationed in the county and had brought a whiff of glamour to war-time Lincolnshire have gone and the church and what it stands for is rapidly becoming ignored.

 

I love the line ‘Dear old, bloody old England’ which sums up the affection and exasperation many of us feel for our country! It invariably reminds me of a pub conversation I had with an Asian friend many years ago. We were putting the world to rights and complaining bitterly about the latest enormity of the government when she suddenly said: ‘This bloody country! I wouldn’t live anywhere else!’ She was not being ironic, just reflecting a mixture of unavoidably conflicting feelings.

 

Secular Huttoft, then, apparently pays no attention to the church at its heart and the church’s interior makes a significant contrast with what surrounds it. Betjeman knew perfectly well why he was drawn to churches. It was for their beauty, of course – a beauty made the more vivid as the country became characterised by ‘telegraph poles and tin’. But more than this it was for their function:  a church is a place for (and which encourages) worship. ‘The presence of God Incarnate has brought me to my knees’ he writes echoing the words of the Gothic Revival architect he much admired and knew, Sir Ninian Comper (1889 – 1960): ‘The purpose of a church is not to express the age in which it is built or the individuality of its designer. Its purpose is to move to worship, to bring a man to his knees, to refresh his soul in a weary land. The note of a church should not be that of novelty but of eternity.’

The poem is in two sections and in the second Betjeman is confronted with a fascinating mystery in the shape of an Indian Christian priest standing at the east end of the church. What was this unlikely person doing charged with the cure of souls in a remote Lincolnshire parish? Fascinatingly, Betjeman refuses to seek an answer to his question. Rather, he sees the presence of the priest as part of the mystery of God’s grace – His unfathomable workings in the world He has made: ‘The same mysterious Godhead / Is welcoming his friend’. I always find those final words oddly moving and profound.

 

We now know more about this priest than Betjeman did or wished to know. He was the Revd. Theophilus Caleb, vicar of Huttoft from 1943 until 1959. He was born in Allahabad, Northern India in 1881 and by 1902 he had become a barrister of Gray’s Inn, London but then attended Theological he College. He was ordained at St Albans in 1907. By 1926 he had held 7 posts in 19 years and seems to have been a rather divisive figure. Before coming to Huttoft he had been Vicar of Lumb in Lancashire and had fallen out with his largely non-conformist congregation over his High Church ways.

Much more has been discovered about The Revd. Caleb Theophilus and although his story is interesting it doesn’t really illuminate the poem in which Betjeman’s sense of his presence in a Lincolnshire church is central. Theophilus’s grave can be seen in Huttoft churchyard.

Lincolnshire, the county of Tennyson, was one of Betjeman’s favourites – he even suggested that one should need a passport to cross its border.  ‘A Lincolnshire Church’ makes one want to go there in order to see the higgledy-piggledy headstones outside the church and the interior where Betjeman pondered the mystery of God’s creation and the ways of grace.

The poem for December 2022 was

The Flight from Bootle chosen by Dr Philip Pullen, Trustee of The Philip Larkin Society and Chair of Larkin100

When I was first asked to nominate a ‘poem of the month’, my immediate thought, apart from wondering if I was at all qualified to do so, was that I would narrow down my choice by selecting something from Banana Blush, that wonderful album of ‘musical poetry’ (or poetry transformed by music) that Betjeman made with the musician Jim Parker in 1974, the first of four such records they would make together.  In fact, if I could break the rules entirely I would nominate the whole record and turn it into ‘Album of the Month’ since I often tend to listen to it all in one sitting, sometimes in a coordinated set of strides if I allow Betjeman to accompany me on a walk while listening on headphones. But I have narrowed it down to a single track.

I was first introduced to the record several years ago by a friend and fellow Larkin Society member, who gave me a copy as a present. I didn’t think I would enjoy it, or that it would appeal to either my musical or poetic senses, but I was totally wrong. Listening to it for the first time was a revelation, almost on a par with a first playing of the Beatles ‘Sergeant Pepper’ as a 1960s teenager. It sounded instantly magical and almost psychedelic in parts: a pairing of voice and music that shouldn’t work but does. Later on, I discovered that some of the most creative pop musicians of the 1980s and 90s, such as Morrissey, Nick Cave, and Jarvis Cocker also enjoyed listening to it and found inspiration within it. Cocker’s fascinating radio programme about the album is still available to listen to on BBC Sounds and is worth seeking out.

‘The Flight from Bootle’, which includes the words from which the album title is taken, is my actual nomination for poem of the month. It was the poem that initially piqued my interest on first listen, telling as it does the curious tale of two female friends of indeterminate age visiting London from the wilds of Liverpool, and perhaps experiencing more than they bargained for:  a tale it seems, with hidden depth and meaning.

I’d always preferred to ‘hear’ Betjeman’s poetry rather than simply read the lines on the page, and Betjeman had always given me more options for doing that than Larkin, who was himself, sadly, more reluctant to ‘read aloud’ and whose own approach to poetry was to stress the importance of the written over the spoken word. Perhaps he was not entirely right to do so. In any case, Banana Blush took things to a completely different level as far as my own appreciation of Betjeman is concerned and added a new dimension to the poetry. AN Wilson perceptively notes how the rhythmic balance and match between Betjeman’s voice and Parker’s creative accompaniment brings the poems to life in a way that a silent reading is simply not able to do. What we come to realise, he says, is that we are not simply experiencing poems, but songs.

The story is told that Betjeman was advised to adopt the Rex Harrison mode of speaking the lines in time with the music rather than to attempt to ‘sing’ them, an approach that Harrison, with apparently no singing ability, carried off with such panache on the stage recording of ‘My Fair Lady’.  ‘The Flight from Bootle’ is a great example of getting this right. The tempo is perfect. Both parts – voice and music – are in total harmony with one another and this is down to the cleverness of Parker’s arrangement. It is a style and technique that Parker called ‘till ready’, letting the music follow the voice, and owes much to arrangements used in music hall song.

Musically, this poem makes it feel like we are beginning a dance in time, as indeed we are. We find ourselves transformed back to the nineteen thirties and to the public rooms of a London hotel, a place of crowded gaiety, full of the novelty and excitement of drinking exotic cocktails, with much scope for risk and adventure, for moments to be grasped and acted upon. The words and music combined make this feel almost three-dimensional in its effect.

Lonely in the Regent Palace

Sipping her ‘Banana Blush’

Lilian lost sight of Alice

In the honey-coloured rush.

It was the next rhyming couplet, that really made me curious when I first listened to it.

Settled down at last from Bootle,

Alice whispered, “Just a min,

While I pop upstairs and rootle

For another safety pin.”

 

Now what is all this about?  ‘It’s not quite what it appears to be,’ my friend said, when we first talked about the poem, ‘there’s more than a search for a safety pin involved here!’ What is it exactly that is keeping Alice from her friend? Look back at the 19^th century derivation of the word ‘rootle’ and I think we know exactly where Betjeman is taking us.

And this is what I like about him and his poetry: the mischievousness; the risqué references; the deeper meaning behind the surface of apparently simple and innocent lines and easy rhymes. Beyond that, it’s the ability to conjure up a complicated and far-reaching story out of very few words, one that works so powerfully on our imagination. That’s what good poetry can do of course, and Betjeman is a master at it.

We are also left to ponder the sadness and loneliness of Lilian, left behind to wait in vain in the honey coloured lounge with ‘drops of the immortal hour’ falling on her ‘like an ineffectual shower’. There are definite shades of Larkin there I feel: it reminds me of the arrow shower falling at the end of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and that same feeling of lives being transformed. What with Alice’s rootling and Lilian’s subsequent scrounging, these two women’s lives have seemingly been changed forever, who knows to what effect. Never such innocence again, as Larkin might well have said.

The poem for February 2023 was

Matlock Bath chosen by Steve Jackson, Chairman of The Betjeman Society.

As I was born in Derbyshire and have lived variously in South Derbyshire, Derby, Matlock and now Chesterfield I take pride in the fact that JB chose to write a poem about Matlock Bath in the centre of the county.  I like to think of JB arriving at Chesterfield Midland Station as it was, to be ferried to Edensor, the village where his second wife (in all but ceremony and legal definition), Lady Elizabeth Cavendish had a second home on the Chatsworth Estate. From there it is a mere five miles to the Matlocks – for there are seven of them – and one of these he wrote about in the poem ‘Matlock Bath’. Matlock and Matlock Bath are essentially Victorian creations to enable the Victorians to take the waters rivalling neighbouring Buxton. You drank the waters at Buxton but had Matlock water applied to you in various baths and pools, usually freezing, to cure ailments from scrofula to lassitude! It was particularly favoured by down at heel clergymen, and I think JB would be amused at the thought of these distressed men being tormented in instruments like sitz baths or hosed down with high pressure freezing water to subdue the flesh or at least be cleansed physically or spiritually. There were many churches and chapels built for Victorians of all denominations to pray for deliverance and salvation, and temperance houses flourished too alongside many alehouses.

‘Matlock Bath’ was published in High and Low in 1966, and this poem I deem to be in hymns in the ‘Low’ category. It captures all of JB’s key interests: faith through his references to the bible and the Congregational Church, railways with the reference to the railway station, architecture, landscape and poetry. One might also add his fear of death and destruction. With all this rich content it is one of my favourite JB poems for being local and reminding me of why I am so much a follower of JB’s work.

At first reading it seems to be a pastiche of a poem. There are contrived rhyme’s, antique words and oddly referenced quotes from the Old Testament. I assume he thought the robust language of hymns and the Old Testament suited the nature of Matlock Bath. He describes it topographically very well. The banks of the River Derwent, Lovers Walks, the Heights of Abraham and the terraces remain for us to visit today. The Railway Station remains though it is reduced in its grandeur yet trains still stop there on the Derby to Matlock line which is very scenic and enjoyable. The stops at Whatstandwell and Cromford are both memorable and ‘poetic’. There are also two references to two non-Matlock items, but still Derbyshire related. Speedwell Cavern is actually 25 miles from Matlock Bath and is a cave network you can still visit, enjoy the thrill of an underground boat ride and see stalactites and stalagmites. Blue-John (derived from the French for the colour of the stone bleu jaune – blue and yellow) is a unique stone found only in Derbyshire and used particularly in Victorian times for expensive souvenirs such as the ash trays that JB mentions.

But what is the meaning of the poem? Is the theme that we will all perish anyway, perhaps dramatically if God and his/her instrument, nature, decides?? I wonder if Matlock Bath is a metaphor for all the wickedness in the world and we should be in awe of God’s works and the puniness of man. Poetically each verse contains six lines the first four building to a climax only to be punctured in the last two lines by a joke or light hearted reference to soften the blow of impending doom.

I said earlier it is in the Low category. I was always intrigued by the fifth verse and the direct reference to nonconformist worship. The cold, the discipline, the dark colour of the paint and attic bedrooms all depict suffering on Earth. But why shriek with fright at Pilgrims of the Night? The latter is a hymn written by Frederick William Faber, C.O., who was a noted English hymn writer and theologian, who converted from Anglicanism to the Catholic priesthood. His best known work is ‘Faith of Our Fathers’. Though he was a Roman Catholic writing for fellow Catholics, many of his hymns today are sung by Protestant congregations. Could this be JB referring to fear of Catholicism in the shape of Fr Faber? There is also a melodramatic film of 1921 with the same name about criminals and gambling, and of course the phrase can also simply mean people of dubious character and behaviour who inhabit the night and follow its wicked ways! I’d like to think it is Fr Faber. The theme of hymns matches others quoted such as ‘Rock of Ages’. I think there are quotes of at least three other hymns in the poem.

Today’s Matlock Bath could be said to have fulfilled some of JB’s fears. Although essentially the same as in Victorian times, Matlock Bath is now a place of pleasure especially on any Sunday in summer. There are pubs, fish and chip bars, cafés, amusement arcades and gift shops, while the noise is accompanied by the creaking of leathers and knees of aging motor bikers who congregate in hundreds to admire their Harley Davidsons, Triumphs and Hondas. In the autumn there is even the Venetian Nights during Matlock Illuminations held along the River Derwent. Lord Byron called the Matlocks ‘Little Switzerland’, and this has now become ‘Little Blackpool’ in Matlock Bath. But don’t let this put you off! Other days you can see kayakers defy the rushing Derwent, travel on a cable car and still enjoy High Tor and the Pleasure Grounds.

Perhaps still the spirit too of JB as he toddles his way around a fascinating remnant of Victorian England.