Sir John Betjeman was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster.
49 Facts About John Betjeman
2.
John Betjeman was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death.
3.
John Betjeman was a founding member of The Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture, helping to save St Pancras railway station from demolition.
4.
John Betjeman began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.
5.
John Betjeman was the son of a prosperous silverware maker of Dutch descent.
6.
John Betjeman was baptised at St Anne's Church, Highgate Rise, a 19th-century church at the foot of Highgate West Hill.
7.
John Betjeman founded The Heretick, a satirical magazine that lampooned Marlborough's obsession with sport.
8.
John Betjeman entered the University of Oxford with difficulty, having failed the mathematics portion of the university's matriculation exam, Responsions.
9.
At Oxford, John Betjeman made little use of the academic opportunities.
10.
Lewis, regarded him as an "idle prig" and John Betjeman in turn considered Lewis unfriendly, demanding, and uninspiring as a teacher.
11.
John Betjeman particularly disliked the coursework's emphasis on linguistics, and dedicated most of his time to cultivating his social life, his interest in English ecclesiastical architecture, and private literary pursuits.
12.
John Betjeman had a poem published in Isis, the university magazine, and served as editor of the Cherwell student newspaper during 1927.
13.
John Betjeman brought his teddy bear Archibald Ormsby-Gore up to Magdalen with him, the memory of which inspired his Oxford contemporary Evelyn Waugh to include Sebastian Flyte's teddy Aloysius in Brideshead Revisited.
14.
In Hilary term 1928, John Betjeman failed Divinity for the second time.
15.
John Betjeman finally had to leave at the end of the Michaelmas term, 1928.
16.
John Betjeman did pass his Divinity examination on his third try but was expelled after failing the Pass School.
17.
John Betjeman had achieved a satisfactory result in only one of the three required papers.
18.
John Betjeman worked briefly as a private secretary, school teacher and film critic for the Evening Standard, where he wrote for their high-society gossip column, the "Londoner's Diary".
19.
John Betjeman was employed by the Architectural Review between 1930 and 1935, as a full-time assistant editor, following their publishing of some of his freelance work.
20.
In 1937, John Betjeman was a churchwarden at Uffington, the Berkshire village where he lived.
21.
In 1939, John Betjeman was rejected for military service in World War II but found war work with the films division of the Ministry of Information.
22.
John Betjeman is reported to have been selected for murder by the IRA.
23.
Kavanagh celebrated the birth of Betjeman's daughter with a poem "Candida"; another well-known poem contains the line Let John Betjeman call for me in a car.
24.
From March to November 1944 John Betjeman was assigned to another wartime job, working on publicity for the Admiralty in Bath.
25.
John Betjeman continued writing guidebooks and works on architecture during the 1960s and 1970s and began to broadcast.
26.
John Betjeman was a founder member of The Victorian Society.
27.
John Betjeman was closely associated with the culture and spirit of Metro-land, as outer reaches of the Metropolitan Railway were known before the war.
28.
In 1977, the BBC broadcast The Queen's Realm: A Prospect of England, an aerial anthology of English landscape, music and poetry, selected by John Betjeman and produced by Edward Mirzoeff, in celebration of the Queen's Silver Jubilee.
29.
John Betjeman was susceptible to the supernatural; Diana Mitford recalled Betjeman staying at her country home, Biddesden House in Wiltshire, in the 1920s.
30.
John Betjeman died at his home in Trebetherick, Cornwall, on 19 May 1984, aged 77, and is buried nearby at St Enodoc's Church.
31.
John Betjeman was an Anglican and his religious beliefs come through in some of his poems.
32.
Unlike Thomas Hardy, who disbelieved in the truth of the Christmas story while hoping it might be so, John Betjeman affirms his belief even while fearing it might be false.
33.
John Betjeman became Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1972, the first Knight Bachelor to be appointed.
34.
John Betjeman's recording catalogue extends to nine albums, four singles and two compilations.
35.
John Betjeman had a fondness for Victorian architecture at a time when it was unfashionable and was a founding member of The Victorian Society.
36.
John Betjeman wrote on this subject in First and Last Loves and more extensively in London's Historic Railway Stations in 1972, defending the beauty of 12 stations.
37.
John Betjeman led the campaign to save Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, in London when it was threatened with demolition in the early 1970s.
38.
John Betjeman was a founding member of the Friends of Friendless Churches in 1957.
39.
John Betjeman fought a spirited but unsuccessful campaign to save the Propylaeum, known commonly as the Euston Arch, London.
40.
John Betjeman is considered instrumental in helping to save St Pancras railway station, London, and was commemorated when it became an international terminus for Eurostar in November 2007.
41.
John Betjeman called the plan to demolish St Pancras a "criminal folly".
42.
John Betjeman's lease included furniture from the house by Burges and John Betjeman gave three pieces, the Zodiac settle, the Narcissus washstand and the Philosophy cabinet, to Evelyn Waugh.
43.
John Betjeman edited, and wrote large sections of, The Collins Guide to English Parish Churches ; his substantial editorial preface was described by The Times Literary Supplement as "pure gold".
44.
John Betjeman responded to architecture as the visible manifestation of society's spiritual life as well as its political and economic structure.
45.
John Betjeman attacked speculators and bureaucrats for what he saw as their rapacity and lack of imagination.
46.
John Betjeman went on to lambast John Poulson's British Railways House, saying how it blocked all the light out to City Square and was only a testament to money with no architectural merit.
47.
In 1969, John Betjeman contributed the foreword to Derek Linstrum's Historic Architecture of Leeds.
48.
John Betjeman created a short television documentary, Architecture of Bath, in which he voiced his concerns about the way the city's architectural heritage was being mistreated.
49.
John Betjeman was instrumental in saving the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in Plymouth.