John Betjeman wrote to me once. Or rather, he wrote a letter of complaint about me to my editor. The time was 1958 and I was working in London for the now defunct Belfast morning newspaper The Northern Whig.
Betjeman's Collected Poems had just been published and I had done a snappy review for the paper. With the indubitable arrogance of youth I described him as Britain's best bad poet and made some play with the words from one of his poems about making the trivial seem profound. Betejman was not amused and my editor, Bruce Proudfoot, thought his displeasure was well-founded. He sent me a sharp note, and advised that I might profit from reading the book again.
This advice presented a difficulty. I had disposed of the review copy to a nearby bookshop for half the cover price, in spite of a warning notice from the publishers: "For Review Purposes ONLY. Not for Re-sale." It was common practice in Fleet Street to rise a few shillings by selling on review copies. I once met a renowned reviewer for a national Sunday paper struggling into the bookshop with his arms piled high with freshly published volumes, none of which he had reviewed. "No shelf room left, old boy," he muttered. The London editor of an Irish group once had the humiliating - and costly - experience of having to retrieve his review copy of an expensive biography at the full cover price when one of the proprietors in Dublin queried why no review had appeared.
Betjeman, the centenary of whose birth is being commemorated this year, was sensitive about criticism and occasionally wrote poems lambasting his detractors. An only child, he had a lonely childhood and was eccentric from an early age. The Irish poet Louis MacNeice recalled meeting him as a fellow boarder at Marlborough, the English public school. There was "a door with an inscription above it - Here thou, Great Anna, whom three realms obey/ Dost sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea - and inside sat John Betjeman writing nonsense on his typewriter or polishing his leather books with boot-polish." He was, said MacNeice, a brilliant mimic but also a mine of useless information and a triumphant misfit. "I felt ill at ease with him," he added, "not understanding his passion for minor poetry and misbegotten ornament."
Like MacNeice, Betjeman went on to study at Oxford where he had a number of Irish friends and acquaintances. He was particularly close to the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and was devastated when he was killed in action in Burma in 1945. At his widow's request he designed a memorial plaque for the family demesne at Clandeboye, Co Down. He got to know Ireland well when he was appointed press attaché at the British Embassy in Dublin in 1941. He and his wife, Penelope, lived in rented houses at Castleknock and Clondalkin during their couple of years here.
She was the daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, a former British commander-in-chief in India. He did not approve of Betjeman and gave his blessing to the wedding reluctantly. "Well Betjeman, if you are going to be my son-in-law you needn't go on calling me Sir," he told the poet. "Call me Field Marshal."
The Betjemans were a popular couple on the social circuit in wartime Dublin. They were friendly with the then Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera. At their parting meeting Penelope, a horse lover, asked Dev to use his influence to prevent tarmac being put on Irish roads. The IRA thought Betjeman might be a spy and considered killing him but never got round to it. His job was far from taxing and involved partying and cultural pursuits. He could well have been describing it in one of his poems, Executive: "You ask me what it is I do. Well actually, you know,/I'm partly a liaison man and partly PRO."
Ireland had little impact on his poetry, though he did pen a few poems about it. Best known, perhaps, is Ireland with Emily: "Bells are booming down the bohreens/ White the mist along the grass/ Now the Julias, Maeves and Maureens/ Move between the fields to Mass. . ."
He also sensed the quiet resignation of the dwindling Anglo Irish gentry with whom he came in contact: "There in pinnacled protection/ One extinguished family waits/ A Church of Ireland resurrection/ By the broken, rusty gates."
Foreign fields did not inspire him. In Louis MacNeice's autobiography a recalled taking Betjeman on a tour of Istanbul. "His only comments on the buildings," he said, "were Gosh how lovely or Gosh how awful." It was to England that he turned, to its landscape and architecture and its middle classes: "Think of what our Nation stands for/ Books from Boots and country lanes/ Free speech, free passes, class distinction/ Democracy and proper drains."
His output was prolific. Apart from the poems there were books and newspaper and magazine articles. His prose ranged from Ghastly Good Taste, a commentary on architecture published in 1934, to Collins Guide to English Parish Churches (1958).
But it was broadcasting rather than prose and poetry that made him famous. He appeared frequently on radio and television commenting on architecture old and new and campaigning for many buildings threatened with obliteration. He was granted a knighthood in 1969 and three years later was made Poet Laureate.
He suffered from Parkinson's Disease and, following a series of strokes, he died at his home in Cornwall in 1984. His remains rest in the nearby graveyard of the small and quaint church of St Enodoc. The book which I criticised so harshly went on to sell millions of copies. He would be pleased to know that some of the poems from it can now be read by Dublin commuters in Poets' Corner on the Dart line.