The teddy bares his teeth

Ever since he could read and write John Betjeman felt himself destined to become a poet. Later he wrote, ‘I have always preferred it [poetry], knowing that its composition was my vocation and that anything else I wrote has been primarily a means of earning money in order to write poetry.’

In so doing he wrote a great deal of prose. Stephen Games gives a superb selection of his journalism, his correspondence, the texts of his broadcast talks and the scripts of his television appearances. By the1960s his radio talks and TV appearances had made him a familiar figure. To his fans he was a national treasure rightly created Poet Laureate in 1976. Games writes that Betjeman was ‘far from immune to the lure of the popular press’. By the 1950s his TV performances had become his main concern. His wife rebuked him for wasting his time on adultery and TV when he had it in him to write a serious work on architecture. A. N. Wilson writes of him that he was by nature a melancholic introvert, a sad man with an exhibitionist compulsion. His addiction to TV, a medium he professed to despise, encouraged his exhibitionist leanings.

Popular success — his Collected Poems was to sell over two million copies — did not give him the unreserved approval of the literary establishment, still less of the academic world. When universities were pouring out theses on modernist and post-modernist poets Betjeman was considered as trivial. In 1958 the critic Al Alvarez dismissed him as a skilful, harmless, minor writer of light verse who is most successful when hymning les petites plaisirs des riches; he writes little panegyrics on bullying tennis girls, the nostalgia of boarding schools and the hidden charms of Victorian architectural monstrosities. His subjects, in short are the rather delicious trials and tribulations of being upper-middle-class.