A field marshal’s daughter
Penelope Chetwode was born at Aldershot on 14 February 1910, the only daughter of Philip Chetwode, a cavalry officer who became a field marshal and commander-in-chief in India. She went to India with her family as a young woman, learned to read Devanagari script and fell in love with Indian art and architecture, which remained her lifelong subject. Back in London she wrote for the Architectural Review, where she met John Betjeman. They married in 1933, against her parents’ wishes.
Uffington, Farnborough and Wantage
From 1934 the couple rented Garrards Farm at Uffington, though Penelope spent time studying in Berlin in the early years of the marriage. She was a keen horsewoman and at home in the country, and their son Paul was born at Uffington in 1937. In 1945 the family moved to the Old Rectory at Farnborough and in 1951 to The Mead in Wantage.
In Wantage she kept horses and chickens, played the organ, by her own family’s account not very well, at the parish church, wrote a cookery column for a national newspaper and ran a popular tea shop in the town called King Alfred’s Kitchen. Their daughter, the writer Candida Lycett Green, went to St Mary’s School in the town. Penelope was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1948, while John remained a devoted Anglican. From the early 1970s the couple lived apart, though they never divorced, and she wrote under her maiden name.
Traveller and writer
Her best-known book, Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia (1963), describes a journey on horseback through southern Spain in 1961; the second ‘lady’ is her horse. Kulu: The End of the Habitable World (1972) records a trek in the western Himalaya, and she published scholarly work on Himalayan temples. She later lived near Hay-on-Wye, and continued to lead treks in India. She died on 11 April 1986 at Mutisher in Himachal Pradesh while leading one, and was cremated nearby.
A local friend, the Wantage GP Dick Squires, drove her and others overland to India in a converted camper van, a trip described in the Vale and Downland Museum’s account of his life.
What to see locally
- Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage: a research sheet on Penelope and a map of Betjeman’s Wantage, showing where she lived, worshipped and ran her tea shop.
- Garrards Farmhouse, Uffington: the Betjeman blue plaque.