The Church as a Building and the Church as a Community in the Work of John Betjeman

Abstract

Still they stand, the churches of England, their towers grey above billowy globes of elm trees, the red cross of St George flying over their battlements ... schoolmistress at the organ, incumbent in the chancel, scattered worshippers in the nave ... as the familiar Seventeenth Century phrases come echoing down arcades of ancient stone. --John Betjeman's Guide to English Parish Churches, 1 With more than two million copies of his Collected Poems sold to date, John Betjeman is one of modern English literatures most popular figures, loved for his poetry and for a broadcasting career of longer than forty years in which he shared his interests with his audience in radio and television programs. A measure of his revered status was the flood of new or republished material greeted the 2006 centenary of his birth, including a new biography by A. N. Wilson and the release in DVD format of the films Betjeman made for BBC television in the 1970s--Metroland, A Passion for Churches, and Summoned By Bells. A collected volume of his BBC radio broadcasts, assembled by Stephen Games and titled Trains and Buttered Toast was a great success, and a further volume, Tennis Whites and Teacakes, appeared the following summer, drawing together Betjeman's published and unpublished writings on the theme of Englishness. The autumn of 2007 also marked the publication of another volume edited by Games titled Sweet Songs of Zion: a volume more religious in its content, drawn from a series of radio broadcasts on hymns and hymn writers Betjeman gave toward the end of his life. On reading this extra material, it becomes clear Betjeman was a far more complex figure than we may have hitherto believed him to be. The man described by The Times in the 1970s as the teddy bear to the nation had once been something of a snob in his outlook, scornful of the very suburban, middle-class society would later take him to its heart. Although, in the words of one biographer, he entirely threw off [his] pacifist convictions when war broke out in 1939, his wartime writing and broadcasting toned down the harsh aesthetic pronouncements of the 1930s in favour of a more inclusive, shared sense of the Englishness was so threatened by Hitler's war machine. (Wilson 135) (1) His work from the 1950s to the 1970s, seen at the time as a prolonged exercise in nostalgia, was actually an urgent call to preserve aspects of English culture were being lost in the drive for post-war modernisation and rebuilding Furthermore, Betjeman's religious writing is remarkably candid in nature, and the honesty with which he addressed his own spiritual doubts and anxieties makes him a figure of considerable relevance to modern readers. Betjeman's Christianity was vitally important to him, but he was not always comfortable in that arduous love affair, as he described it in Summoned By Bells, and his writings fluctuate between spiritual assurance and anxiety. This fueled some of his finest poetry, collected and discussed by Kevin Gardner in his 2005 volume, Faith and Doubt of John Betjeman, and it may also be seen in his writings on subjects like church architecture and hymnology. From the material now available, it would appear whilst Betjeman was never wholly comfortable in his religious life, he never sought to suppress unease but chose rather to weave it into all aspects of his writing. In doing so he left his readers with poems that, in Gardner's words, describe the perils of faith and the struggle to believe ... celebrate the social and cultural significance of the Church of England [and] reveal the intersection of architecture and faith, of aesthetics and the spirit (Faith viii). In his lifetime, the enormous success of Betjeman's poems and radio and television broadcasts testified to his capacity to connect with his audience. His appointment as Poet Laureate in 1972 was, as some commentators noted, the official acknowledgement of what the British public had already decided: he was the poetic voice of the nation's culture. …