Poet, broadcaster and church-lover
John Betjeman was born in London in 1906. His father’s family firm made fine furniture and fittings in Pentonville. He went to Highgate School, the Dragon School in Oxford and Marlborough, then to Magdalen College, Oxford, which he left without a degree. He became known in the 1930s as a writer on architecture, as editor of the early Shell Guides and as a poet with a gift for place, class and comedy. He was knighted in 1969 and appointed Poet Laureate in October 1972, a post he held until his death in 1984.
Uffington, 1934–1945
In 1933 Betjeman married Penelope Chetwode, and in 1934 the couple rented Garrards Farm on the High Street at Uffington, below White Horse Hill. They threw themselves into village life and entertained many well-known friends there. Betjeman served as a churchwarden at St Mary’s, and their son Paul was born in 1937. The house and the village’s chapel-goers turn up in his later children’s book Archie and the Strict Baptists. A blue plaque on Garrards Farmhouse, unveiled on 24 June 2006 by the poet Pam Ayres, records that he lived there from 1934 to 1945.
Farnborough and Wantage
In 1945 the family bought the Old Rectory at Farnborough, high on the downs south of Wantage, and in 1951 they moved to The Mead in Wantage, close to the parish church of St Peter and St Paul, where they worshipped. The Mead remained the family home for about twenty years; accounts differ on whether the Betjemans’ life there ended in 1971 or 1972, by which time John and Penelope were living largely separate lives. Penelope ran a tea shop in the town called King Alfred’s Kitchen, and their daughter Candida went to St Mary’s School. The couple were friends of the local doctor’s family, the Squires, whose son Dick later led the campaign for the park named after the poet.
Betjeman died at Trebetherick in Cornwall on 19 May 1984 and is buried at St Enodoc’s Church there, not in Wantage.
What to see locally
- Garrards Farmhouse, Uffington: blue plaque on the High Street (a private house).
- Uffington Museum, Uffington: has material on the Betjemans’ years in the village.
- All Saints, Farnborough: a memorial window designed by John Piper, his friend and Shell Guide collaborator, installed in 1986. The church is cared for by the Friends of Friendless Churches.
- Betjeman Millennium Park, Wantage: a two-acre wildlife park beside Letcombe Brook between the parish church and the Lamb, saved from development and opened in 2002.
- Vale and Downland Museum, Church Street: a bust of Betjeman, unveiled in 2016 by his granddaughter Imogen Lycett Green, with displays and a map of ‘Betjeman’s Wantage’.
- Wantage Betjeman literary festival: held in the town each October.