John Betjeman on Mystery at Witchend by Malcolm Saville

John Betjeman chose to survey children's books for his About Books column in the 16 December 1943 issue of the Daily Herald.

He wasn't enthusiastic about the standard of the new volumes on offer, but did find something to praise:

One called Mystery at Witchend, by Malcolm Saville (Newnes. 7s net), about three evacuee children who have a fine time in Salop catching German spies, stands out as rather better written than most. 

The success of books of this sort depends on how well they can be re-enacted in the back garden with one's friends. The last-named can.

Jago Hazzard on Barbican station and its many identities

Jago Hazzard explains the history and many names of Barbican station.

This is the John Betjeman poem he mentions.

Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station,
Soot hangs in the tunnel in clouds of steam.
City of London! before the next desecration
Let your steepled forest of churches be my theme.

Sunday Silence! with every street a dead street,
Alley and courtyard empty and cobbled mews,
Till “tingle tang“ the bell of St. Mildred's Bread Street
Summoned the sermon taster to high box pews,

And neighbouring towers and spirelets joined the ringing
With answering echoes from heavy commercial walls
Till all were drowned as the sailing clouds went singing
On the roaring flood of a twelve-voiced peal from Paul's.

Then would the years fall off and Thames run slowly;
Out into marshy meadow-land flowed the Fleet:
And the walled-in City of London, smelly and holy,
Had a tinkling mass house in every cavernous street.

The bells rang down and St. Michael Paternoster
Would take me into its darkness from College Hill,
Or Christ Church Newgate Street (with St. Leonard Foster)
Would be late for Mattins and ringing insistent still.

Last of the east wall sculpture, a cherub gazes
On broken arches, rosebay, bracken and dock,
Where once I heard the roll of the Prayer Book phrases
And the sumptuous tick of the old west gallery clock.
Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station,
Toiling and doomed from Moorgate Street puffs the train,
For us of the steam and the gas-light, the lost generation,
The new white cliffs of the City are built in vain.

Note the reference to the flora of bombsites, with no mention of buddleias.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.

Jim Parker, John Betjeman and A Shropshire Lad

The composer Jim Parker has died - you can read his obituary in the Guardian.

He was a hugely successful composer of music for television, but I remember him for two of quirkier projects. The first, Captain Beaky and his Band, was briefly a cult in the early Eighties and explains why the Gloucestershire fast bowler David Lawrence, after first being nicknamed Syd Lawrence after the bandleader, came to be known as Hissing Syd Lawrence.

More substantially, Parker composed the music to which John Betjeman read his poems on four LPs, beginning with Banaba Blush, between 1974 and 1981. As Jon Wilde wrote in 2013, it was not cool to like these at the time, but they have turned out to have a cult following:

In music circles, Betjeman has his disciples. Morrissey referenced Betjeman's 1937 poem Slough on Everyday Is Like Sunday and chose Child Ill for his 2004 NME compilation Songs to Save Your Life. Nick Cave, Suggs and British Sea Power have all cited Betjeman as an inspiration, whereas dance producer Andrew Weatherall has covered his music. Jarvis Cocker is known to play selections from Banana Blush on his BBC 6 Music show.

This setting of A Shropshire Lad can be found on Banana Blush and I can remember it getting some radio plays in the Seventies.

I was once minded to choose it as a Sunday music video, but allowed myself to become annoyed by Betheman's idea of a Shropshire accent. So I ended up choosing the recording of A Shropshire Lad by John Kirkpatrick, which uses Parker's tune and the correct accent for the part of the county the poet namechecks.

But here is Betjeman himself, reading his poem to that tune.

John Betjeman visits St Mary the Virgin, Wellingborough

St Mary the Virgin, a 20th-century church near Wellingborough railway station, is famous for the interior by its architect Sir Ninian Comper. I have tried to visit it a couple of times but found it locked.

John Betjeman had more luck when he made this for Shell in 1960, but if ever a film cried out for colour stock...

Click on the still above to watch it on the British Film Institute site.

John Betjeman goes north: Leeds in 1968

In 1968, John Betjeman was asked by the BBC to make a television programme about Leeds.

The resultant film was never broadcast

John Betjeman visits Southwell Minster

This programme was broadcast in the BBC Radio series Choirs and Places where they Sing in 1967.

The first six minutes feature John Betjeman celebrating the town and its minster. This is followed by a performance by the minster choir.

John Kirkpatrick: A Shropshire Lad

Coming back through Oakengates yesterday I was naturally reminded of John Betjeman's poem A Shropshire Lad. In it, the ghost of Captain Mathew Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel, returns to his old haunts:

There wasn’t a man in Oakengates
That hadn’t got hold of the tale,
And over the valley in Ironbridge,
And round by Coalbrookdale,
How Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Rose rigid and dead from the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley,
Rigid and dead, rigid and dead,
To the Saturday congregation,
And paying a call at Dawley Bank
On his way to his destination.

Musically, the poem is best known from the setting by Jim Parket. It is great, but Sir John's reading of his own poem does suggest the Dawley and Ironbridge are somewhere in the north of England rather than Shropshire.

John Kirkpatrick, whom I saw playing with the Band of Hope in Leicester many years ago, lives in Shropshire and uses the right accent for the district now occupied by the new town of Telford.

These days you can hear A Shropshire Lad sung in folk clubs.

A Southampton blue plaque for John Arlott

Yesterday Mark Pack posted a 1950 film celebrating cricket with narration from Ralph Richardson and John Arlott.

Attentive reader's voice: Didn't you post that film yourself a few years ago?

Liberal England replies: It was seven years ago, but who's counting?

Watching the film again on Mark's blog, I was struck by how quickly Arlott established himself as the voice of cricket. Only five years before it was made he was a police sergeant in Southampton.

Arlott made the leap to cricket broadcasting via the BBC Overseas Service, where he produced poetry programmes for Indian listeners. (He was an accomplished poet himself and had cultivated the friendship of John Betjeman and others.)

The post Arlott was given at the BBC in 1945 sounds very like the one George Orwell vacated in 1943.

Yesterday a blue plaque was unveiled on the house in Lodge Road, Southampton, where Arlott and his wife lived when he was still a policeman.

Read more on the Bevois Mount History Facebook page, from which I have borrowed this photograph.

Happy St Pancras Day

As John Betjeman once wrote:

St Pancras was a 14-year-old Christian boy who was martyred in Rome by the Emperor Diocletian. In England, he is better known as a railway station.

Today is St Pancras Day.

What with that and its being Steve Winwood's birthday, it is no wonder 12 May is a public holiday here on Liberal England.

Six of the Best 774

Natalie Bloomer lists 32 homeless people who have died on our streets this winter. She is sure there are many more.

"The Social Liberal Forum is publishing this book to contribute to a Progressive Alliance of Ideas, People and Campaigns. Contributors including leading Liberal Democrats and people from other political backgrounds and some from outside formal parties." Gordon Lishman will tell you all about it.

"Whatever the people in charge did or didn’t know, they should stand down. Horrendous crimes happened on their watch. They owe it to the hundreds of lives wrecked as a result of what happened under their noses for years. There are too many names on the headed paper that have not changed in 30 years." Adam Breeze has turned his back on Crewe Alexandra.

Modernism in Metro-Land looks at John Betjeman's television documentary Metro-Land, which was first screened 45 years ago.

"1963’s Tom Jones might be amongst the least timeless of the 89 films to date that have taken home the Best Picture prize. Tony Richardson’s adaptation of Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, which chronicles the adventurous life of a womanising troublemaker of dubious origin played by Albert Finney, is a British film that found a home in Hollywood at a crucial moment in which the American film industry was desperately looking elsewhere for inspiration, relevance, and a fresh identity in the age of television." Landon Palmer analyses a British Oscar winner.

Marc Freeman on the great American television comedy M*A*S*H.

Huddersfield railway station in 1983

Nikolaus Pevsner described it as "one of the best early railway stations in England". John Betjeman said it was like "a stately home with trains".

Today Huddersfield station contains two pubs and a celebrated cat.

I photographed it in the early 1980s. I am pretty sure it was on 22 January 1983, the last day of operation of the branch line to Clayton West. (More about that another time.)

Since then the streets in front of the station have been pedestrianised and a statue of Harold Wilson erected.

John Betjeman: A Shropshire Lad

Late in his life, John Betjeman recorded four albums of his poetry with musical accompaniment. The first of these, Banana Blush, was released in 1974.

Roy Wilkinson wrote about it back in 2006:

On its release, Banana Blush was well received, with critics praising its "sumptuous musical accompaniments". Over the four albums, Parker deployed subtly distinctive instrumentation - viols, euphonium, cornet and multi-tracked vari-tuned piano. 

On Late Flowering Love, the rock session guitarists took Betjeman into new realms - the intro to The Licorice Fields at Pontefract sounds just like the Velvet Underground. 

So perhaps it's not surprising that, when the track A Shropshire Lad was released as a 45, it was made single of the week in the NME. A subsequent interview found the NME reporter popping round to Betjeman's Chelsea flat. 

"It's awfully nice of you to visit me," Betjeman says in the interview. "I've bought some splendid cakes for the occasion. Would you like tea or whisky?" Throughout, Betjeman proffers Bourbon biscuits and booze. 

Soon the interviewer admits he is "sliding under the table", but Betjeman is not to be deterred. "Have the rest of the Scotch and the shortbread," he says. "I've got lots more bottles."

It has to be said that the great man had an odd idea of the Shropshire accent. Around Dawley and Lawley, Oakengates and Coalbrookdale - all part of Telford today - it is very much of the West Midlands.

The Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway 3

In which we and John Betjeman arrive in Burnham-on-Sea.

Now watch part 1 and part 2.

The Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway 2

I posted part 1 the other day. This second part introduces the strange concept of Glastonbury as an industrial centre, and there is plenty about the flooding and drainage of the Somerset Levels.

The third and final part will appear soon.

The Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway 1

This 1986 documentary looks at the remains of this much-mourned line. It contains footage from an earlier film by John Betjeman.

This appears to be the first part of three - you lucky people!

The Guardian, the M25 and the 15th century

Today's Guardian carries the welcome news that English Heritage has bought the Great Barn at Harmondsworth, which John Betjeman once called "the cathedral of Middlesex".

However, I wonder if Maev Kennedy meant what she said in her second sentence:

Just beyond the sprawl of Heathrow, the Great Barn at Harmondsworth has stood between the roaring M25 and the M4 motorways and the straggling warehouse and industrial estates around the airport perimeter since 1426. 

Presumably not, as a revised version now appears on the newspaper's website. Still, the printed version has won her this blog's prestigious Bizarre Newspaper Sentence of the Day award.

John Betjeman on the Somerset & Dorset in 1963

britishrailways.tv

In praise of Stamford

England's most attractive town - John Betjeman

The climax [of Lincolnshire] in terms of historical as well as architectural significance, is... the town of Stamford, the English country market town par excellence - Nikolaus Pevsner

If there is a more beautiful town in the whole of England I have yet to see it. The view of Stamford from the water-meadows on a fine June evening, about a quarter to half a mile upstream, is one of the finest sights that England has to show. The western sunlight catches the grey limestone walls and turns them to gold. It falls on towers and spires and flowing water, on the warm brown roofs of Collyweston slates, and on the dark mass of the Burghley woods behind. The hipped and mansard roofs of the town rise from the edge of the river above the flashing willows, tier upon tier, to the spire of All Saints, and the towers of St Martin's, St John's, and St Michael's, and, above them all, to the noble tower and spire of St Mary's, the central jewel in the crown of Stamford - W.G. Hoskins

When we were planning the programme we presumed we would have to film all over the country - a street here, a square there, a house somewhere else. But then our researchers came back and told us they had found this marvellous town that had everything. So I went up to Lincolnshire, took one look and I knew they were right. Stamford is beautiful, extraordinary; it is absolutely stunning - Louis Marks (producer of the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch that was filmed there)

All quotations taken from the Stamford website.

Barnacle Bill: A late Ealing comedy

Charles Barr, in his great book on Ealing Studios, pulls no punches:

Barnacle Bill marks an unmistakable end of the line for Ealing Comedy. Made when the company had already left the physical environment of Ealing Studios, it is like watching the last twitching of the nervous system after death.

And in his memoirs This is Where I Came In, the Ealing screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke does not remember it happily:

the film was not a success. We should doubtless have reflected that running a pier is not an activity that many people wish to enjoy vicariously.

Barnacle Bill tells the story of a retired naval officer, played by Alec Guinness, who buys a run down seaside pier. Thwarted in his attempts to revive it by the town's authorities, he registers it as a ship and offers stationary cruises. When his enemies attempt to demolish the pier, he inadvertently sails the remaining fragment across the Channel and becomes a national hero.

Barr writes:

the central image of this community of innocents and eccentrics sustaining a life which is doubly unreal: first it's all holiday (recalling the unreality of Titfield as a working community), and, second, it pretends to move while remaining stationary.

There couldn't be a better image for the static and unrealistic nature of the Clarke/Ealing community. It's as if the tide of inevitable change  - made the more inevitable by the soft, innocent philosophy of those resisting change - surrounded Pimlico, which had decided change wouldn't happen, and floated off into the sea.

All this is true - you have to be familiar with the other Ealing comedies Passport to Pimlico and The Titfield Thunderbolt to understand Barr's arguments fully, but then I assume all my regular readers will be - yet I rather enjoyed Barnacle Bill when I saw it again on DVD the other day and I can offer the following points in its defence.

The first is Alec Guinness. His genius as an actor means that you believe from his first appearance that he has been a naval officer. Or perhaps it is something about that generation of British actors. One reason for the success of The League of Gentlemen is that it is so easy to believe that Jack Hawkins has commanded men in battle.

Then there are the purely nostalgic reasons. Barnacle Bill was filmed on Hunstanton pier, which was already in decline and, after fire and storm, was finally demolished in 1978. A report in the Lynn News suggests its history is not so far from the controversial one depicted in the film. Those interested in North Norfolk in that era should watch the John Betjeman film I posted a few weeks ago.

And do not forget the pleasure to be found from the sheer quality of the cast in this era. In Barnacle Bill you will find Maurice Denham. Lionel Jefferies, Richard Wattis, Alan  Cuthbertson, William Mervyn, Donald Pleasance, Joan Hickson and Warren Mitchell in minor roles.

But most important is the possibility of a more radical reading of the film. The authorities in Sandcastle-on-Sea, the town where the pier is located, is depicted as both corrupt and pleasure hating. Guinness is a more modern figure. He sets free the fist in the pier's dismal aquarium, so that he can put a bar in its place, and dismisses the awful variety artists from the end-of-pier show, humiliating the escapologist by tying him up with insoluble Naval knots.

The young people may be shown as calling everyone "Daddio", but Guinness is on their side. When they start tearing out the seats of the old theatre, he joins in, much to their bafflement, because he realises that a dance hall is the way forward and will be profitable.

Guinness is ultimately defeated in Sandcastle-on-Sea, but the film suggests that had he found himself in Titfield he would, at the very least, have been running the youth club. (Rather like another former naval officer, Paddy Ashdown, come to think of it.)

King's Lynn to Hunstanton with John Betjeman

This film was made in 1962, seven years before the line closed. Some still dream of reopening it.