Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

John Betjeman: The Biography

A not so cuddly teddy bear

Bevis Hillier
John Murray, 590pp, £18.99,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 16th August 2006

Neither Wilson’s nor Hillier’s is a properly critical biography, though one of Hillier’s best chapters deals with the drafting of Summoned by Bells. (It hints, incidentally, that Betjeman’s ear was not faultless. In manuscript, Betjeman had ‘My father, proffering me half a crown’. Tom Driberg suggested, ‘As he proffered half a crown’. Betjeman’s final version read, ‘My father, handing to me half-a-crown.’ Driberg’s still seems to me to scan better than either of Betjeman’s.)

After a slightly high-camp introduction (a lot of Wallace Arnoldish wordplay), Hillier — whose three volumes have been brilliantly condensed by his editor at Murray’s, Peter James — produces a stately and yet entirely absorbing account of Betjeman’s career from first to last; from his bullied schooldays (his Germanic then name, Betjemann, was subject to schoolyard taunts) and unhappy relationship with his cabinet-maker father, through his burgeoning career and wide range of public activities. (For someone professedly idle, he did a lot.) It is studded with fascinating little things, many of them the things that most gainsay his cuddliness (I loved, for example, his description of Louis MacNeice, a Marlborough and Oxford contemporary, as ‘that fucking little Oxford aesthete who lives near Belfast’). All you need to know is there — or seems to be.

But, compendious as Hillier is even in this single volume, he has missed tricks. Wilson covers some important lacunae, and his work contains several mini-scoops. There is really interesting and unexpected material, for example, on Betjeman’s friendship with R. S. Thomas. You’d think Betjeman would be everything that Thomas would hate: gamesome where Thomas was austere, suburban and English where Thomas was windswept and Welsh. Yet the two were more similar in background than Thomas would care to admit, and more alike in doubt. They exchanged letters, and Betjeman contributed the introduction to Thomas’s first collection.