Ernest Betjeman

Betjeman was born in 1906 in north London, the son of the head of a cabinet-making firm, Ernest Betjeman.After primary school in Highgate, Betjeman went to Dragon School, Oxford, then Marlborough College, and in 1925 he was accepted, by the skin of his teeth, for English at Magdalen College, Oxford.The public school system and his attendance at Oxford would soon be crucial to his success as a poet, and to his private need to secure employment.

In the last century, despite educational reform, a great deal of high-profile poetry from England was dominated by Oxford and Cambridge graduates.Oxbridge was a hallmarking factory for poetry, but a "forger" of poetry standards in both senses of the word.Even his friends remarked at Betjeman's well-honed networking skills, and Oxford proved just the place for him to begin to develop friendships with members of the aristocracy and other soon-to-be influential figures.Betjeman only differed from the dubious norm in not actually succeeding at Oxford: he left without a degree.Nevertheless, the Oxford brand was so strong his failure was far from fatal.

Most of his later employment came not on merit alone: in several jobs he was incompetent.Work was secured, rather, through contacts made at university or at his old schools . Later on, this would also mean that his books of poetry and his guidebooks to English counties did tend to get reviewed.Until his poetry turned sour in A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954), they tended to get sympathetic reviews, too.It is hard to imagine that a writer from outside that world would have succeeded on the basis of his slight talents, and his serial ineptitude at work also suggests that the public school system carried him again and again.

In 1933, he married Penelope Chetwoode, whose father was Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India.Betjeman called her, affectionately it seems, "Filth".From early on there must have been a sense of a terrible mistake having been made.
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They stayed together, but Betjeman had affairs, the most significant with another glittering aristo, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret.

‘This biography inadvertently reveals details of the unearned literary life that Betjeman led'

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Betjeman seems to have been distant from them, especially Paul, the first-born.Betjeman was clearly repeating in some degree his own relationship with his father, which was an arms-length one, made worse by Betjeman's decision not to work in his father's firm, but to try for an upper-class literary life.Hillier does not explore this, preferring a more empirical, "so-and-so came over then so-and-so said this" approach.This unintentionally rather underlines the frenetic networking Betjeman continued to carry out after he had left university.

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As Ireland had officially declined to be involved in the Second World War, and its territory was of strategic importance to both the Allies and the Germans, Betjeman may well have been used more than his official post demanded of him.A mysterious letter relating to Betjeman "fishing" on the west coast - a pastime he disliked as much as horseriding - certainly raises the question of clandestine activity concerned with marine navigation.

Happily for Betjeman, the IRA must have had second thoughts - perhaps they read his CV and decided they could let him do his own damage.If so, they made a mistake: so much of a good impression had he made on the Irish print media that when he did leave, his departure was front-page news.

Betjeman would later make pioneering interventions in the arena of town planning, significantly encouraging the public, albeit in a reactionary way, to take more of an interest in their built environment.Immediately after the war, though, he reverted to his natural dufferism, working ineffectually for a year as an administrator at the British Council.In 1946 he became Secretary to the Oxford Preservation Trust, a job which again he carried out less than excellently.Nevertheless, further radio appearances kept him before the public, and from 1948 he lived by freelance work for the print and broadcast media.

His high public profile, and his rather old-fashioned verse, meant sales of his poetry increased.This second volume of Hillier's projected three-part biography takes the reader up to the highpoint of 1958, the year of Betjeman's extremely successful Collected Poems.It sold at the rate of a thousand copies a day in its first few weeks.Such popularity certainly makes Betjeman a "phenomenon" , but really his poetry simply lived up to its unassuming aesthetic, and would surely not have had such a hold on the public had not Betjeman had such good connections.

As such, this huge biographical project is overblown . It is difficult to say whether Betjeman, who died in 1984, would have approved of it as another example of English eccentricity, or whether he would have been embarrassed by details which inadvertently reveal what an unearned literary life he led.