By Steven Russell
Sunday, August 28, 2011
3:17 PM
John Betjeman was at heart a poet, though his broadcast work and journalism also opened the public’s eyes to the value of buildings, landscape and heritage. Steven Russell reports on an updated book celebrating his love of churches – including many in East Anglia
A POET and a hack: that was how Sir John Betjeman described himself in Who’s Who, and many people appreciated the self-deprecating writer’s wry but pertinent view of the world – laced with the kind of whimsy that saw him take to university at Oxford his teddy-bear, Archibald. His gently-comic but incisive eye fell on mundane things people recognised: such as bicycles, trains, potting sheds and lonely boarding houses at places like Felixstowe. He could be acerbic when the occasion demanded, too – his poem beginning “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough” understandably upsetting folk in the Berkshire town.
Betjeman was also interested in architecture and places, and was the force behind the popular Shell Guides in the 1930s that brought many historical delights of Britain to the attention of a growing army of motorists.
He’d also been taken by churches – hunting them out as a boy on holiday in Cornwall. They became a passion.
In the late 1950s he put together the first Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. It’s become a classic and been reprinted several times, including as a pocket guide.
Now it’s been updated for the 21st Century, when satellite mapping allows precise locations to be included for each place of worship. There are many colour photographs and county maps; Betjeman’s original 4,500-odd entries have been pruned to about 2,500, and several Roman Catholic churches have now been included for their historical, architectural or artistic merit.
Richard Surman, author of Secret Churches, has updated Betjeman’s work. He trusts the modernising captures the spirit of earlier editions and shows great respect for the writer’s fundamental love of parish churches.
After the war, he says, Betjeman worked on many magazines, as well as writing poetry, and appearances on TV became increasingly common.
“His presenting of the ABC of Churches programmes was a great success, not least to the crew, with whom he got on famously (although he did disconcert at least one member of the crew by taking his teddy bear, Archibald Ormsby Gore, wherever he went).”
Not surprisingly, Betjeman’s writing about churches is evocative. They are, he says, “even more varied than the landscape. The tall town church, smelling of furniture polish and hot-water pipes, a shadow of the medieval marvel it once was, so assiduously have Victorian and even later restorers renewed everything old; the little weather-beaten hamlet church standing in a farmyard down a narrow lane, bat-droppings over the pews and one service a month; the church of a once-prosperous village, a relic of the 15th-century wool trade, whose soaring splendour of stone and glass subsequent generations have had neither the energy nor the money to destroy; the suburban church with Northamptonshire-style steeple rising unexpectedly above slate roofs of London. . .”
Just as there was no definite modern style in England, “except in what is impermanent – exhibition buildings, prefabs, holiday camps and the like – so there is no definite modern church style,” he wrote in the 1950s.
“In the period between the two wars church architects were too often concerned with style, and they built places of worship which vied with the local Odeon or with by-pass modern factories in trying to be ‘contemporary’. They now look dated, and will, I fear, never look beautiful.
“But the purpose of the church remains the same . . . to be a place where the Faith is taught and the Sacraments are administered.”
Betjeman’s Best British Churches is published by Collins at £35
Betjeman on Suffolk: a remote land
JOHN Betjeman reckoned that as one travelled deeper into Suffolk, from the Norfolk direction, villages appeared more remote. There were fewer main roads and railway lines, he observed more than five decades ago.
“The brick and flint give way to colourwash and thatch, the villages have a softer appearance, the fields are smaller, the woodlands thicker and the trees larger, so that by the time one has left Harleston and Fressingfield behind, or penetrated into the quiet villages just inland from the coast at Southwold or Aldeburgh, one has the feeling of being in the depths of the country as nowhere else in East Anglia.”
Towns, also, were more compact and quieter, and those close to main roads “seem to have kept themselves apart from the main stream of traffic, like Woodbridge, where the bypass helps it to remain a perfect example of an old country town, spreading along the main street and thickening about the market-place in the middle”.
Lavenham he rated as “not only the most lovely town in Suffolk but one of the most beautiful in all England”.
Six of the best: Suffolk
Aldeburgh, St Peter and St Paul: Most notable . . . is the three-light window by John Piper in memory of Benjamin Britten, who is buried in the churchyard: the three sections depict The Prodigal Son, Curlew River and The Burning Fiery Furnace. In the churchyard are the graves of many other musicians, including Imogen Holst.
Ampton, St Peter, near Bury St Edmunds: The Calthorpe monument in the chancel is by the East Anglian sculptors John and Mathias Christmas, who did much of the embellishing of Charles I’s great ship The Sovereign of the Seas.
Bacton, St Mary, near Stowmarket: The church has one of Suffolk’s best double hammer-beam roofs
Bury St Edmunds, St Mary: The interior is breathtaking . . .
Earl Stonham, St Mary: Here is one of Suffolk’s finest oak roofs . . . richly carved with winged angels, pedant pineapples, figures holding shields and Green Men. The original 15th-century benches are of interest too, with poppyheads – look for the bagpiper and the monster – and the 17th-century pulpit has four hour-glasses for each quarter of the hour.
Mildenhall, St Mary: High-quality work of many periods from the 13th-century onward. The nave roof is a splendid example of cambered tie-beam construction, interspersed with arch-braced hammer-beams on which are angels with spread wings, poised as if to swoop onto the congregation below.
Taken from Betjeman’s Best British Churches
Betjeman on Essex: no ugly sister
ESSEX, reckoned John Betjeman, was “a stronger contrast of beauty and ugliness than any other southern English county.
“Most of what was built east of London in the 19th and 20th centuries has been a little bit cheaper and a little bit shoddier than that built in other directions. Southend is a cheaper Brighton, Clacton a cheaper Worthing, and Dovercourt a cheaper Bournemouth.”
On the plus side, “The county also has the deepest and least disturbed country within reach of London. Between the Stour, Blackwater, Crouch and Thames estuaries is flat agricultural scenery with its own old red-brick towns with weatherboarded side-streets like Maldon, Georgian Harwich and Rochford – the headquarters of an Essex puritan sect known as The Peculiar People.
“Colchester was, as Pevsner said in his Buildings of England: Essex volume, more impressive than any town in England for ‘the continuity of its architectural interest’ – extensive redevelopment has changed that.
“The flat part of Essex has not the man-made look of the fens. It is wild and salty, and its quality is well described in S. Baring-Gould’s novel of Mersea, Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes, 1880. It is part of that great plain which stretched across to Holland and Central Europe.
“Most of inland Essex, east and north of Epping Forest, is undulating and extremely pretty in the pale, gentle way suited to English watercolours. Narrow lanes wind like streams through willowy meadows, past weatherboarded mills and unfenced bean and corn fields.
“From oaks on hill-tops peep the flinty church towers, and some of the churches up here are as magnificent as those in neighbouring Suffolk – Coggeshall, Thaxted, Saffron Walden and Dedham are grand examples of the Perpendicular style. Thaxted, for the magnificence of its church and the varied textures of the old houses of its little town, is one of the most charming places in Britain.”
Essex, the poet felt, looked its best in sunlight, “when the many materials of its rustic villages, the brick manor houses, the timbered ‘halls’ and the cob and thatched churches, the weatherboarded late-Georgian cottages, the oaks and flints, recall Constable.
“The delightful little town of Dedham and one half of the Stour Valley, be it remembered, are in Essex, and were as much an inspiration to Constable as neighbouring Suffolk, where he was born, and to which Essex is often so wrongly regarded as a poorer sister. It may be poorer in church architecture, but what it lacks in architecture it makes up for in the delicacy and variety of its textures.”
Six of the best: Essex
Bradwell on Sea, St-Peter-on-the-Wall: Approached by a cart track through fields, and situated on the sea wall at the mouth of the Blackwater, this is one of the oldest churches in the county, having been built by St Cedd in about 654. Its materials were mostly taken from the ancient Roman fort of Othona, on the gateway of which the church is said to stand.
Copford, near Colchester, St Michael and All Angels: Must not be missed. The south aisle of c.1300 contains what must have been some of the earliest medieval bricks in England. The fame of this church lies in the remains of wall-paintings over the whole of the original building. They date from the middle of the 12th century, though have been considerably over-restored since their discovery in 1865.
Fairstead, near Braintree, St Mary: One of the earliest Essex churches, and the tower, nave and chancel have Roman brick quoins [outer corners] and dressings. Important wall-paintings of c. 1275 were discovered during the restoration of 1890.
Little Maplestead, near Halstead, St John the Baptist: Built by the Knights Hospitaller c. 1340, it is one of the five “round churches” in England.
Purleigh, near Maldon, All Saints: Of great interest to Americans because its rector from 1632-43 was Lawrence Washington, great-great-grandfather to George Washington.
Rivenhall, near Witham, St Mary and All Saints: Possesses the finest medieval stained glass in the county. In 1840 the then incumbent brought over from France some 12th-century glass from a church near Tours and fitted it into the east window, thus giving St Mary’s some of the earliest surviving glass in Europe.
Taken from Betjeman’s Best British Churches
Betjeman: the man
Born London, August 1906
His father is cabinet maker Ernest Betjemann
John drops one of the ‘ns’ during the 1914-18 war, to make it appear less German
Boards at Marlborough College
Childhood holidays often spent in Cornwall, where father owns property. The area shapes many of John’s poems
Goes to Magdalen College, Oxford, but fails a divinity exam and does not finish his degree
Works as a teacher in Buckinghamshire before becoming a private secretary and then moving on to another prep school
1930: appointed an assistant editor of The Architectural Review
1931: Mount Zion, his first book of poems, published
Marries Penelope Chetwode, daughter of a former commander-in-chief in India
Becomes film critic for the Evening Standard
Still writes poetry
Works on the Shell Guides to English counties
1941: goes to Dublin as press officer to Britain’s representative there
1942: Daughter Candida born
1943: Back in England, works in the Ministry of Information
Writing continues to go strongly and appearances on radio and TV – including arguing the case for threatened buildings, and through documentaries such as 1973’s Metro-land, which examines suburbia on the edge of London – earns him a wide profile
Knighted in 1969
Becomes Poet Laureate in 1972
1974: A Nip in The Air, his last book of new poems, comes out
Suffers from Parkinson’s Disease and a series of strokes
Dies in May, 1984, at home in Cornwall