John Betjeman
John Betjeman was born in London on August 28th, 1906 and is the Poet. At the age of 77, John Betjeman biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 77 years old, John Betjeman physical status not available right now. We will update John Betjeman's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.
Sir John Betjeman (28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984) was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster who appeared in Who's Who Describes Him as a "poet and hacker."
He served as the Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1972 to his death. He was a founder of the Victorian Society and a zealous promoter of Victorian architecture.
He began his career as a journalist and rose to fame as one of Britain's most popular Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.
Life
Betjemann was born John Betjemann. He was the son of a wealthy silverware manufacturer of Dutch descent. Mabel (née Dawson) and Ernest Betjemann, his parents, owned a Pentonville Road business that sold the kind of decorative household furniture and accessories that were exclusive to Victorians.
The family's name was changed to the less German-looking Betjeman during the First World War. His father's ancestors had actually arrived in the United Kingdom a century earlier, establishing their home and company in Islington, London, and then adding the extra "-n" to prevent the anti-Dutch sentiment that was prevalent at the time.
Betjeman was baptized at St Anne's Church, a 19th-century church on the foot of Highgate West Hill. The family lived in Parliament Hill Mansions in south London's Lissenden Gardens private estate.
In 1909, the Betjemanns travelled half a mile north to More opulent Highgate. They lived in the Burdett-Coutt estate's reflected glory from West Hill:
Betjeman's early training began at Byron House and Highgate School, where he was taught by poet T. S. Eliot. He began attending the Dragon School preparatory school in North Oxford and Marlborough College, a public school in Wiltshire, after this. He belonged to the shadow Society of Amici in which he was a protégé of both Louis MacNeice and Graham Shepard in his penultimate year. He founded The Heretick, a satirical publication that mocked Marlborough's obsession with sports. Arthur Machen's influence as a student won him over to High Church Anglicanism, a shift of importance in his later writing and interpretation of the arts. In July 1925, Betjeman left Marlborough for Marlborough.
Betjeman's matriculation exam was difficult, having failed the mathematics portion of the university's matriculation examination, Response. He was, however, registered as a commoner (i.e. At Magdalen College (non-scholarship) and the newly founded School of English Language and Literature, a non-scholarship student. Betjeman made no attempt to use the academic facilities at Oxford. Lewis' tutor, a young C. S. Lewis, regarded him as a "idle prig," and Betjeman considered Lewis unfriendly, clamsy, and uninspiring as a teacher. Betjeman, who disliked the curriculum's emphasis on linguistics, spent the majority of his time cultivating his social life and his passion for English ecclesiastical architecture, as well as private literary pursuits.
He was a friend of Maurice Bowra, who later (1938 to 1970) as Warden of Wadham at Oxford. Betjeman was editor of the Cherwell student newspaper in 1927 and had a poem published in Isis, the university newspaper. With the help of fellow student Edward James, his first collection of poems was published in private. Archibald Ormsby-Gore came to Magdalen with him, the memory of which inspired his Oxford colleague Evelyn Waugh to include Sebastian Flyte's teddy Aloysius in Brideshead Revisited. In his blank verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, which was turned into a television film in 1976, a large portion of his life was chronicled.
It is a common misapprehension that Betjeman himself assumed that he didn't complete his degree because he failed to pass the mandatory holy scripture examination, also known colloquially as "Divers," short for "Divinity." Betjeman failed Divinity for the second time in Hilary term 1928. He had to leave the University for the Trinity term in order to sit for a retake of the exam; he was then allowed to return in October. Betjeman wrote to the University Board in Magdalen, G. C. Lee, asking to enroll in the Pass School, a series of examinations taken on rare occasions by undergraduates who are unlikely to obtain an honors degree. C. S. Lewis, Bells Betjeman's tutor, told the tutorial board that he thinks Betjeman will not be able to obtain an honours degree of any kind.
The Pass School's permission to attend was granted. Betjeman decided to publish a Welsh paper. Osbert Lancaster related that a tutor came by train twice a week (first class) from Aberystwyth to teach Betjeman. Despite this, Jesus College had a number of Welsh tutors who may have taught him. Betjeman was eventually required to leave at the end of the Michaelmas term, 1928. On his third attempt, Betjeman passed his Divinity examination, but after failing the Pass School, he was expelled. He had only published well in one of the three required papers (on Shakespeare and other English writers) and had had a good result. Betjeman's academic flop at Oxford ranked him for the remainder of his life, and he never reconciled with C.S. Lewis, who suffered with a bitter resentment, was devoted to him. His enduring love of Oxford, from which he accepted an honorary doctorate of letters in 1974, made this situation even more difficult.
Betjeman left Oxford without a degree. However, although he was there, he had the acquaintance of people who would later influence his work, including Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden. He served briefly as a private secretary, school teacher, and film analyst for the Evening Standard, where he also wrote for their high-society gossip column, "Londoner's Diary." Following the publication of some of his freelance articles, he was employed by the Architectural Review between 1930 and 1935 as a full-time assistant editor. "His years at the Architectural Review were supposed to be his true university," Timothy Mowl (2000) says. At this point, when his prose style matured, he joined the MARS Group, a group of young modernist architects and architectural critics in the United Kingdom.
Betjeman's sexual history can best be characterized as bisexual, with females as his longest and best documented friendships, but a more accurate account of his sexuality may have suggested that he was "the hatcher of a lifetime of schoolboy crushes," which sadly did not develop any further. However, he has been regarded as "temperamentally gay" and has also served as a penpal of Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas, Oscar Wilde's companion. Betjeman married the Hon. on July 29, 1933. Penelope Chetwode, the granddaughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, is the daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode. The couple lived in Berkshire and had a son, Paul, in 1937, and a daughter, Candida, in 1942. Betjeman was a churchwarden at Uffington, Berkshire, where he lived until boundary changes in 1974. He paid for the deepest cleaning of the church's royal arms and later presided over the conversion of the church's oil lamps to electricity.
Betjeman and Jack Beddington, a Shell-Mex and BP communications manager, and a friend who was publicity manager, helped guide Britain's increasing number of motorists around the counties of the United Kingdom and their historic sites. The Architectural Press was released by the Architectural Press and Shell financed them. Betjeman's Cornwall (1934) and Devon (1936) were among 13 stories published by the start of World War II, of which Cornwall (1934) and Devon (1936) were written. In 1951, Shropshire, his third book, was written and designed by his good friend John Piper.
Betjeman was disqualified for military service in World War II, but the Ministry of Information found war service with the Ministry of Information's film division in 1939. He became the British press attaché in neutral Dublin, Ireland, in 1941, working with Sir John Maffey. He was his secretary in Dublin, author of the book The Spirit and the Clay, who portrayed the Basque Country's resistance to Francoism. Betjeman may have been involved in the intelligence gathering. He is thought to have been selected for murder by the IRA. After a meeting with an unidentified Old IRA man who was impressed by his work, the order was cancelled.
Betjeman wrote poems based on his experiences in Ireland during the "Emergency" (the war), including "The Farewell to Greta Hellstrom in 1922," which included the line "Dungarvan in the rain" in the war. Until it was revealed to have been a member of a well-known Anglo-Irish family of Western county Waterford, the object of his affections, "Greta," remained a mystery. His official briefing included making friends with top figures in Dublin's literary scene: Patrick Kavanagh befriended him first, and then at the start of his career. Kavanagh's daughter's birth with a poem titled "Candida"; another well-known poem includes the line "Let John Betjeman call for me in a car. Betjeman was sent to another wartime service, as a publicity for the Admiralty in Bath from March to November 1944.
Penelope, Betjeman's wife, became a Roman Catholic in 1948. The two families fell apart, and in 1951, he met Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, with whom he shared a lifelong friendship. Betjeman had more than a dozen books by 1948. Five of these were verse collections, with one in the United States. In 1958, he collected Poems, which reached 100,000 people. Ken Russell was inspired to make a film about him, John Betjeman: A Poet in London (1959). It was the first time on the BBC's Monitor programme that it was shot in 35 mm and running 11 minutes and 35 seconds. His address was Old Rectory, Farnborough, Berkshire, 1953.
Betjeman began writing guidebooks and articles on architecture in the 1960s and 1970s and then began to broadcast. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society (1958). Betjeman was closely linked with Metro-land's history and spirit long before the war, though the Metropolitan Railway's outer reaches were not known before. He made Metro-Land, a well-regarded television documentary for the BBC, directed by Edward Mirzoeff in 1973. His daughter, who was born in 2006, led two celebratory rail rides from London to Bristol, then to Quainton Road, following Betjeman's centennial celebrations. Betjeman and Mirzoeff produced A Passion for Churches, a commemoration of Betjeman's beloved Church of England, which was filmed entirely in Norwich's Diocese. He suggested that the Turner Bequest be housed in the Fine Rooms of Somerset House in 1975, thereby scuppering the Minister of the Arts' proposal for a Theatre Museum to be housed there. The BBC televised The Queen's Realm: A Study of England, an aerial anthology of English landscape, music, and poetry, selected by Betjeman and produced by Edward Mirzoeff in honor of the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977.
Betjeman was a fan of M.R.'s ghost stories. M. R. James - The Book of the Supernatural, James and Peter Haining introduced him. Betjeman remained at his country home, Biddesden House in Wiltshire, in the 1920s, and he was attracted to the supernatural; Diana Mitford recalled him. "He had a frightening vision" that he was handed a card with wide black edges, on which his name was engraved, as well as the date." He knew this was the date of his death. Betjeman's Parkinson's disease has progressively hampered over the past decade of his life. He died at his home in Trebetherick, Cornwall, aged 77, and is buried nearby at St Enodoc's Church.
Awards and honours
- 1960 Queen's Medal for Poetry
- 1960 Appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1960 New Year Honours.
- 1968 Companion of Literature, the Royal Society of Literature
- 1969 Appointed Knight Bachelor in the 1969 Birthday Honours.
- 1972 Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom
- 1973 Honorary Member, the American Academy of Arts and Letters
- 2011 Honoured by the University of Oxford, his alma mater, as one of its 100 most distinguished members from ten centuries.