The end of the pied piper

At the age of 13, William Norton, the son of a police sergeant and a Post Office worker, wrote to John Betjeman warning him of the impending destruction of Lewisham’s Victorian Gothic town hall. In no time Betjeman put William on to the recently founded Victorian Society, urged him to organise a petition, wrote him several long letters alerting him to other fine churches in Lewisham and Catford and then turned up at the town hall to be photographed with the boy. Despite all this, Lewisham town hall was demolished. It was still 1961, after all. England still slept. Betjeman at the same time was vainly battling to save the Euston Arch and the great glass rotunda of the Coal Exchange. Who else would have turned aside from those gruelling national campaigns to help an obscure schoolboy in one of London’s dimmest quarters to try and save a grimy town hall by George Elkington (no, I hadn’t heard of him either — his town hall in Bermondsey has been demolished too)?

It is in these years, Betjeman’s fifties and sixties, that he is transformed from a popular versifier and telly poppet into something approaching a magus. He turns up everywhere with the battered felt hat thrust down over the Roman emperor’s skull, the lopsided, green-toothed chuckle instantly enchanting the ill at ease and seducing the frosty — his catchphrase ‘Ooh I am enjoying this’, uttered with every semblance of sincerity in the most trying circumstances. After hours of an interminable coach trip to Bucharest, Betjeman was heard to pipe up, ‘Oh, I am enjoying the boredom.’

This is the third and final volume in Bevis Hillier’s huge life of the most popular of all poets laureate, and it is a triumph. The job could, I suppose, have been done in a single volume and has been, as Hillier generously points out in his preface, by Derek Stanford in 1961 and by Patrick Taylor-Martin in 1983.