John Betjeman, Poet Laureate, died 40 years ago today.
Betjeman loved church buildings. ‘I know no greater pleasure than church-crawling,’ he wrote. ‘It leads you to the remotest and quietest country. It introduces you to the history of England in stone and wood and glass which is always truer than what you read in books. You meet all sorts of people on your travels.’
If you have been following this blog you will know how much these words will resonate with me. In the typical English village, nothing rivals the church as a treasure-chest of the community’s shared history. In most cases, certainly in Norfolk, you don’t have to arrange an appointment, or pay an entrance fee. You simply lift a latch, push firmly, and step inside to an immersion in the past. Often, unlike the museums of capital cities and cultural hotspots, you will have the church to yourself for as long as you like.
Betjeman and Norfolk
Betjeman loved Norfolk. His passion for churches began here. ‘I was eight or nine years old, when I used to come here to the Norfolk Broads on the River Bure… And I think it was the outline of that church tower of Belaugh, against the sky, which gave me a passion for churches, so that every church I’ve been past since I’ve wanted to stop and look in.’
Those are the words with which he introduces the BBC documentary A Passion for Churches, which was first broadcast 50 years ago this year. I cannot think of a finer piece of television, and on its own it makes the licence fee worthwhile.
In it, Betjeman tours the churches of the Diocese of Norwich. It labels itself ‘A Celebration of the C. of E.’ It is punctuated by the stages of human life. A baptism takes place under the font canopy at Trunch.. Children gather in the church at Mattishall. Wedding vows are filmed; the groom, more recently, became the first Church of England bishop to confer ordination on his spouse. St Helen’s Hospital in Norwich represents sickness, old age and death. Betjeman observes the activity of the local church: a PCC meeting and a fete, bellringers and brass-rubbers, even the vicar writing the parish magazine. Nuns at Ditchingham tend their bees and bake altar bread. The whole business of the church – sacred and secular – is woven together masterfully.
A Passion for Churches is part prose, part verse. Only Betjeman could so expertly realise the poetic potential of Norfolk place names, as members of the Mothers’ Union gather in the Cathedral cloisters:
Bawdeswell greets Stratton Strawless,
Potter Heigham is on terms with Little Snoring,
North Creake sits beside Melton Constable,
and for everyone there’s a chance to meet the Bishop.
I wasn’t alive in 1974. The church which Betjeman portrays is very different from the church of today. As Richard Woodham, a retired priest in the Diocese, recently wrote to me: ‘Our collective memory is of every village having its own parson, choir, organist, and the regulation two churchwardens.’ The reality now in most of the churches Betjeman visits is markedly different.
If you have read these blog posts, you will know that I am grappling a lot with the narrative of decline in the Church of England, and the acute effects of this decline in rural church life. I’m trying to make careful observations, as well as discern signs of hope. A Passion for Churches both delights and disturbs me. It fills me with warm nostalgia – it is not so different from my 1980s upbringing in suburban Reading – but also a deep frustration. How have we got from there to here in half a century? Father Couling, Rector of a one-parish benefice, oils the wheels of a model engine in his study while a dozen boys attend a choir practice in the room below. Part of me wants to love him for being the eccentric clergyman who wouldn’t get through the discernment process today. The other part of me wants to shake him into evangelistic activity. How many of those children are still practising Christians today?
But back to Betjeman. Cornwall was his best-loved county. (He is buried in St Enodoc.) It is similar to Norfolk: it shares its borders mostly with the sea, has a distinctive culture and way of life, and delights in a landscape defined by beautiful churches. Norfolk does not feature in his poetry anywhere near as much as Cornwall, but this venerable county gets some memorable mentions.
His poem Norfolk takes us, like the introduction to A Passion for Churches, to childhood holidays on the Broads, and fond memories of his father from whom he was later estranged.
How did the Devil come? When first attack?
These Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence…
Likewise East Anglian Bathe, written a decade earlier:
How cold the bathe, how chattering cold the drying,
How welcoming the inland reeds appear,
The wood-smoke and the breakfast and the frying,
And your warm freshwater ripples, Horsey Mere.
Betjeman knew the north of the county too. Lord Cozens Hardy is set in Letheringsett, near Holt. The poem describes the mausoleum of Herbert Hardy Cozens-Hardy, a North Norfolk MP and Master of the Rolls.
St Margaret, Cley-next-the-Sea, the first church Betjeman visits in A Passion For Churches.
Friends and feelings
The eagle-eyed will recognise Letheringsett as the location of the PCC meeting in A Passion for Churches. A ‘Miss Cozens-Hardy’ is listed as one of the members present in the minutes of the previous meeting. These minutes are read out by none other than Billa Harrod, founder of the Norfolk Churches Trust. She lived in the Old Rectory at Holt, which, perversely, is closer to St Andrew’s, Letheringsett than it is to St Andrew’s, Holt.
I have already mentioned in my post on Warham St Mary Magdalene the friendship between Betjeman and Lady Harrod. She was the founder of the Norfolk Churches Trust, and rescuer of many a Norfolk church. They were, in fact, very briefly engaged to be married. The engagement did not last long, as Betjeman was already engaged to his future wife. The broken-off betrothal clearly had no negative impact on their friendship. Betjeman was a great supporter of Lady Harrod’s efforts. ‘Norfolk would not be Norfolk,’ he wrote, ‘without a church tower on the horizon or round a corner up a lane. We cannot spare a single Norfolk church. When a church has been pulled down the country seems empty or is like a necklace with a jewel missing.’
I think it fair to say that Betjeman was complicated sexually. His ‘frequent lapses into lust’ are recorded throughout his poetry. His Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican are not wholly holy; indeed, they are more lascivious than Lenten! He developed a number of close (and, indeed, more-than-close) friendships with women over his life. In the 1960s he became friends with the poet, Mary Wilson, wife of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Wilson was born in Diss, the daughter of a non-conformist minister. A Mind’s Journey to Diss is a delightful poem about an imagined train journey with Wilson to her birthplace. It ends:
Then further gentle undulations
With lonelier and less frequent stations,
Till in the dimmest place of all
The train slows down into a crawl
And stops in silence… Where is this?
Dear Mary Wilson, this is Diss.
The poem suggests an intimacy of friendship, which is reciprocated in Wilson’s reply, A Journey To Diss. It’s a mirror-image of Betjeman’s poem, forming a pair of plutonic love-letters, and describes their perambulation through the town on market day, visiting her father’s chapel and eating scones. It ends:
We climb the hill as daylight fails,
The train comes panting up the rails,
And as the summer dusk comes down
We travel slowly back to town.
What day could be more sweet than this,
Dear John, the day we came to Diss?
Betjeman came to Diss in more than just his imagination. He made a short film about the town, Something About Diss, in 1963. He ends with a scathing attack on ‘copybook contemporary architecture’, which he describes as ‘out of scale, out of texture, and very soon out of date’. Like Lady Harrod, he was a conversationist ahead of his time. Diss is my destination tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how much it has changed.
Betjeman was not all nostalgia. Not only did he help change the way we think about and treat our built heritage, but he was also ahead of the times on issues environmental. I was reminded of this on a recent episode of Radio 3’s Words and Music. His poem, Harvest Hymn, is a prescient parody of We plough the fields and scatter, published in 1966. (It’s best sung.)
We spray the fields and scatter
The poison on the ground
So that no wicked wild flowers
Upon our farm be found…
We like whatever helps us
To line our purse with pence;
The twenty-four-hour broiler-house
And neat electric fence.
In his lifetime – and still now – Betjeman’s poetry was disparaged. Objectors to his appointment as Poet Laureate called him ‘a lightweight, amusing but rather trivial’, and ‘a songster of tennis lawns and cathedral cloisters’. Conversely, I think it’s Betjeman’s vernacular style which endeared him to the public. Here was a man, scruffily rubbing shoulders with London’s high society, writing poetry in the language of the people. There’s a tendency for modern poetry (and art and music) to be too ascetic, as if unobtainability goes hand in hand quality. That was not Betjeman’s way.
A window at Booton, featured in A Passion For Churches
Betjeman and faith
Betjeman the Christian is as complicated as Betjeman the Everything-Else. His faith, like much else in his life, was largely formed as a child and young adult. Summoned By Bells, Betjeman’s verse autobiography, traces his life from childhood to his early 20s. Searching for Sunday Evensong in the streets of London, he writes:
’Twas not, I think, a conscious search for God
That brought me to these dim forgotten lanes.
Largely it was a longing for the past,
With a slight sense of something unfulfilled.
Betjeman’s faith was one which was riddled by doubt and, sometimes, despair. I think most people’s faiths are, it’s just that Betjeman was refreshingly honest about it. Later in Summoned By Bells, in the chapel of Marlborough College, we catch a glimpse not only of Betjeman’s doubts, but also the tension between faith and sexuality which remained with him beyond adolescence.
The Old Marlburian bishop thundered on
When all I worshipped were the athletes, ranged
In the pews opposite …
… Oh, who is God? O tell me, who is God?
Perhaps he hides behind the reredos…
Give me a God whom I can touch and see.
Was Betjeman more concerned with religion than faith? Perhaps. Again, in Summoned By Bells, he has tea with a Cornish rector while church-crawling on holiday.
He asked me which church service I liked best —
I told him Evensong… “And I suppose
You think religion’s mostly singing hymns
And feeling warm and comfortable inside?”
And he was right: most certainly I did.
“Borrow this book and come to tea again.”
Betjeman was in once sense classically Anglican: he loved hassocks and hymnbooks, the smell of furniture polish and musty prayer books. The teenage Betjeman, at least, preferred Evensong to Holy Communion. As an undergraduate at Oxford however, he encountered Anglo-Catholicism. It seems to have been a moment of (at least, partial) conversion for him. Writing of religion at Pusey, he first dismisses any notion of a call to Rome. This doesn’t cross his mind for a moment. Instead, more fundamentally:
What seemed to me a great question then
Tugged and still tugs: Is Christ the Son of God?
I find the next section of the poem rather moving. Betjeman doesn’t make his mind up one way or the other. Rather, he declares his desire, or his intention, to believe in the Christian faith:
Some know for all their lives that Christ is God,
Some start upon that arduous love affair
In clouds of doubt and argument; and some
(My closest friends) seem not to want his love –
And why this is I wish to God I knew.
As at the Dragon School, so still for me
The steps to truth were made by sculptured stone,
Stained glass and vestments, holy water stoups,
Incense and crossings of myself – the things
That hearty middle stumpers most despise
As, all the inessentials of the Faith.
There is, I am sure, a television scene of Betjeman in the chapel at Pusey House, talking about doubt. I watched it many years ago, and now, despite trying, cannot track it down. He talks frankly about doubt and difficulties, but also about how, very occasionally, he has rare moments of complete clarity, when the Christian faith makes absolute sense. He comments that those months of doubts and struggles are worth it for that second of certainty. I wish I could find it.
One such second must have led him to write St Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London, N. (A now long-redundant church building which the Diocese of London has just put on the market. Betjeman must be turning in his grave.) Most of this poem is nostalgia for ‘the streets [his] parents knew’, but it ends with him kneeling before the Reserved Sacrament in the chancel of the church. The last stanza is a prayer:
Wonder beyond Time’s wonders, that Bread so white and small
Veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see,
Is the Power which sends the shadows up this polychrome wall,
Is God who created the present, the chain-smoking millions and me;
Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all –
Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself To Thee.
The best summary of his faith is found in a lesser-known poem. In 1955 he wrote The Conversion of St Paul, a rebuttal to a humanist attack on Christianity broadcast on the BBC. It is worth reading in full. This is the final stanza:
What is Conversion? Turning round
To gaze upon a love profound.
For some of us see Jesus plain
And never once look back again,
And some of us have seen and known
And turned and gone away alone,
But most of us turn slow to see
The figure hanging on a tree
And stumble on and blindly grope
Upheld by intermittent hope.
God grant before we die we all
May see the light as did St. Paul.
The font canopy at Trunch.
An ‘Easter feeling’
I first discovered Betjeman’s poetry as a teenager, in a boarding school environment not entirely different from his. (‘It was not quite as awful as you think.’) I remember trying to imitate him in my A-level anthology of poems, Poems of Love and Faith, which now sounds like something to be debated at General Synod. Thankfully, these mediocre manuscripts are long-lost and (almost) forgotten. There was definitely a poem about St Michael and All Angels, Booton. I can recall a teacher making a (rare) good example of my work in front of the class, quoting my ‘vestment-showered priest’. There was also, in true Betjemanian style, a poem about a teenage crush, Love Unrequited.
Today, while I have given up emulating him, my affinity to Betjeman is as strong as it ever was. Like him, I am church-crawling. (Although my mode of transport is more Shanks’s pony than pushbike or classic car.) And like him, I am glorying in the wonder of our Christian heritage, grappling with the relevance of the Church in the modern world, and praying for God’s wisdom and discernment.
A Passion For Churches culminates with the celebration of Easter Day. Christians in Lowestoft, Britain’s first dawn, gather to ‘greet the rising sun’. This is the faith-filled Betjeman making a resounding statement. ‘A Celebration of the C. of E.’ is incomplete without Easter. All of the church’s activity and actions happen in the light of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Bells of St Peter Mancroft, loudly pealing,
Fill the whole city with an Easter feeling.
‘He is risen today! He is risen today!’ they plead,
Where footpath, lane and steeper valley lead.
Across the Diocese, from tower to tower,
The church bells exercise compelling power;
‘Come all to church, good people,’ hear them say,
‘Come all to church. Today is Easter Day.’
Today’s anniversary coincides with the final day of the Easter season, the feast of Pentecost. (Although I suspect Betjeman would rather we still called it Whitsun.) This is the day God fulfils the paschal mystery. Today Christians celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the apostles, and the continued outpouring of the Spirit on the church today. It is only by the working of the Holy Spirit that Betjeman can say, ‘The purpose of the church remains the same… to be a place where the Faith is taught and the Sacraments are administered.’
My prayer today is that the Holy Spirit may move through the churches to which I am making pilgrimage, and through all the churches of this land where that faith is taught and those sacraments are celebrated.
The final words of this tribute to ‘Betj’, as he was known, should belong to him. And what better than the final words of A Passion For Churches. You can watch it this evening on BBC4, or whenever you like on iPlayer. It’s perfect Sunday night television. If you can, go to Evensong first.
But still the faith of centuries is seen
In those who walk to church across the green;
The faith of centuries is in the sound
Of Easter bells that ring all Norfolk round.
And though for Church we may not seem to care
It’s deeply part of us. Thank God it’s there.
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