the real John Betjeman

he had enemies he was terribly aware of the concept of the enemy and of the concept of the friend um we gave a reception once for a book and he wasn't sure if he would come because there might be enemies present when he came eventually he gazed around the gathering and just left out a great sigh and said friends thank goodness friends and there were other secrets too a private life shared between two women and even an interlude when england's favorite poet worked as a wartime spy john betcham was the most popular poet laureate since tennyson his relationship with his audience was intimate and affectionate but he was skeptical about his celebrity status reproof deserved or after the lecture when i saw the grapefruit drying cherry in each center lying and a dozen guests expected at the table's polished oak then i knew my lecture finished i'd be feeling quite diminished talking on but unprotected so that all my spirit broke have you read the last child though fated by ordinary readers he was largely ignored by the literary establishment he is not and would never have expected to be a poet of the very first rank but then that that's never been the issue the issue has always been is he a poet of you know anything above the fifth sixth or seventh rank and i think he is something much more than that though the work is uneven it's a simple truth that all the sort of modernists ganged up against him uh they loathed him for being popular for selling uh coffees and they loaded him also for the fact that they could never make any mark at all on the popular consciousness and that patrick's got nothing to do with the life of the nation whereas bitumens did veteran i bet your racket brings you in a pretty packet raising the old lecture curtain writing tip bits here and there about thy job your hair is thinner since you came to us in pinner and you're fatter now i'm certain what you need is country air this and that way conversation till i turn in desperation to a kind face can i doubt it mercifully mute so far oh it says i missed the lecture wasn't it on architecture do please tell me all about it what you do and who you are the story of who bitumen was is that of an outsider who craved admittance to worlds that seemed designed to exclude him [Music] he was born in 1906 in highgate london an only child his best friend was his teddy bear his parents were busy with their own lives his mother bess was a suffragette ernest his father was the third generation owner of betrayment and sons an established firm of cabinet makers benjamin's 1960 autobiographical poem summoned by bills describes the expectations of those who worked for the close knit family firm how they all trusted i would fill my father's place the governor's looking for you master john well now my boy i want your solemn word to carry on the firm when i am gone fourth generation john they'll look to you ernest bechaman and john betramon's relationship was always fraught and difficult ernest bechermann was the third generation in that great firm that made these superb pieces of furniture in pentonville road and he wanted he desperately he ardently wanted john to become the fourth generation but of course when poor john was taken into the workshops and given a chisel and a piece of wood he dug the chisel deep into my hand as he says in summoned by bells there was no question of his ever going into that firm feelings were intensified by the outbreak of war in 1914 though dutch in origin the betrayment surname sounded uncomfortable in german betrayment was a child in the first world war when to be german was not not a good idea and indeed some of his schoolmates danced around him chanting bechaman's a german spy aim oh trees and sky then crack against the column of my spine blackness and breathlessness and sick with pain i stumble on the asphalt off they go away away thank god and out of sight [Music] betrayment was also unfortunate in his first forays into love the object of his schoolboy crush was the perfect and unattainable peggy pury cust satchel on back i hurried up west hill to catch you on your morning walk to school your nanny with you and your golden hair streaming like sunlight strict department made you hold yourself erect and every step bounced up and down as though you walked on springs your ice blue eyes your lashes long and light your sweetly freckled face and turned up nose so haunted me that all my love since then have had a look of peggy pury cuss [Music] i'm sure she was very pretty and she lived near him in highgate but she lived a bit further up the hill and she was the daughter of admiral puri cust she was of a higher social order lived in a very grand mansion there is a poem called force security it's about going to a children's party for peggy pury cast up in the grove in highgate and as john leaves he hears the hostess presumably peggy's mother saying something like i wonder where you found that strange rather common little boy alienated from his family and excluded from the upper classes he idealized the young bitumen took refuge in a world of words [Music] and so at sunset off to hampstead heath i went with pencil and with writing pad and stood tiptoe upon a little hill awaiting inspiration from the sky for myself i knew as soon as i could read and write that i must be a poet aged 14 benjamin was sent to marlborough college a public school more noted for its athletes than its east eats he had not liked his time at wilbur at all and that's very clear in summer by bells again and when we went there to make the film he hadn't been back since his childhood and i remember him really hesitating about walking through the gates i mean it was quite a trauma going back but what of us the boys of marlborough college five years we boarded here imbibing knowledge five years we shivered in exiguous shorts five years we ran to changing rooms from sports i think it must have been awful for a boy like him because um he was doing many things that were abundant to him and he would be made to do them so for somebody who didn't enjoy games i can't imagine a chap like him enjoying it at all well do i recall the sudden impact of the hockey ball the running in from games the heartish out speed up betterment mind what you're about in those days there was no privacy whatever the lavatories no doors bathing costs nothing but when you got up in the morning you left your pajamas on the bed cued up to get into a cold plunge ah house cool boy when the kettle sings lives in a world as rich as a king's how sweet our tastes to him how deep his dreams how hopeful and how possible his schemes the schoolboy misfit finally found a home at oxford where hearty sportsmen were counterbalanced by aristocrats would-be poets and bright young things in this world benjamin's ambition seemed natural and his eccentricities acceptable even tame [Music] in this newly discovered amateur movie benjamin dressed as a vicar is seen in the company of some of the more outrageous members of the oxford fast set i think it's pretty certain that betrayment did have a homosexual phase at oxford and um he is known to have asked hugh gates school the future labor leader oh hugh do you mind if i stroke your bottom and gate school replied oh well if you must other connections were more enduring the photographer cecil beaton the poet w.h jordan and the writer evelyn war who would be a lifelong friend bitumen left oxford in 1928 without a degree three years later his first book of poems mount zion was privately published the distinctive betrayment style is already apparent dark and unsettling truths are captured through light verse and everyday detail a nurse came in with the tea things breast high mid the stands and chairs but nurse was alone with her own little soul and the things were alone with theirs and tea she said in a tiny voice wake up it's nearly five oh chincy chintzy cheeriness half dead and half alive nurse looked at the silent bedstead at the gray decaying face as the calm of a lemington evening drifted into the place she moved the table of bottles away from the bed to the wall and tiptoeing gently over the stairs turned down the gas in the hall he wants to get at the profound through the trivial because after all everybody's everyday experience consists of the trivial and and he's an artist who's interested in locating the profundity within the trivial event benjamin has i think very brilliantly made us think about being alive being dead the body the soul the parting of the twain as it were while actually talking about a tea tree and the knickknacks the ornaments in a in an old lady's room in lemington spa in the politically turbulent climate of the 1930s to be a poet of the ordinary was a revealing choice writers like w.h orton and george orwell commented on and actively resisted the rise of fascism while benjamin was to remain apolitical he did not become politicized in the left-wing way in 1933 that's for sure and indeed of course when he publishes his second book of poems um continual doom it's it's subtitled a little book of bourgeois verse i mean he's actually marking himself out as not part of the kind of left-leaning marxism [Music] circle of poets he's rather kind of defiantly identifying himself as not part of that gang the gang that benjamin did want to join was the rarified social circle to which he had aspired since childhood snob to me is a bad word and his attitude to the aristocracy was not bad and therefore i say it was not snobbish i'm not saying the aristocracy is beautiful but it's interesting for a mind like john benjamin's and he really studied it and he made it he built it up in his own imagination and made it even more beautiful more fantastic than it was originally for an outsider to be truly part of that world he would have to marry into it penelope jetword was the daughter of a field marshal she was introduced to bitumen by elizabeth and frank longford for some reason we both agreed they were very well suited to each other and we wanted them to meet and they did meet we had a very pleasant weekend and after they went back to london i said to penelope how did you like john betterman you traveled back with him in the train and she said oh i thought he was wonderful i especially liked his lovely yellowish green complexion john was invited to dinner at the savoy to meet the chat woods to see what kind of an impression he would make on the field marshall and john b and john he wore a bow tie on a piece of elastic and during the course of the dinner he kept on twanging twanging the bow tie and pinging it back into position penelope's mother went round saying my daughter's getting engaged to this little middle class dutchman that's the sort of person we invite to parties but we don't marry them and they wanted her in penelope's phrase to marry someone with a pheasant shoot ignoring her parents wishes penelope married benjamin secretly in july 1933 he seemed at last to have assembled the necessary ingredients for a happy life but as in his poetry the shadows of discontent and disappointment were always to be present beneath the sunny surface come friendly bombs and fall on slow it isn't fit for humans now there isn't grass to graze a cow swarm over death come bombs and blow to smithereens those air-conditioned bright canteens tinned fruit tinned meat tinned milk tinned beans tinned mines tinned breath slough betraman's most controversial poem appeared in 1937. hitler's troops had marched into the rhineland and in spain guernica had been destroyed by aerial bombardment many in britain feared that it would not be long before they too would be subject to the horrors of war benjamin himself of course later came to rather disapprove of the poem and regretted that it become so famous he thought it was you know too easily comic but in fact i think at the time it was written very seriously in fact if anything what's wrong with it is it is perhaps a bit too impassioned obviously in one sense he's drawing on the worries about aerial bombardment i mean it's a poem written and published at just the date when the theory the bomber will always get through is current and being much agonized over and yet i think in the end it's not a poem about that it just borrows that idea in order to talk about betraymen's dislike not unique to him by any means of what seems to be happening to the lives of ordinary people in in nineteen thirties written when the unfriendly bombs finally did fall in britain benjamin's contemporaries scattered evelyn ward joined the army w.h jordan fled to america bachmann himself was preparing to spend a quiet war at the ministry of information when he found what appeared to be a more agreeable posting one day early in 1941 my editor mr smiley called me into his office and said great did you ever hear of a poet called john vetsman and i said i had and in fact i for this mother had forgotten i think the irish times had in fact published a couple of veterans the young benjamin's poems and he said well he's just been made press attached to the british embassy with their baby son paul the betrayment set up home in ireland the political climate was difficult the war had allowed irish premier emma debalera to show his independence from britain he refused to allow ireland to join the allied fight against the nazis the neutral irish were a problem if they were not backing the allies would they go over to the other side as press attached to ambassador sir john mafi benjamin's job was to represent britain in the best possible light a task for which he was very well suited oh no he wasn't stuffy at all i thought for a moment you said scruffy i mean no but he certainly was roughy but he he wasn't stuffy at all that was part of his appeal uh he he liked i mean he liked ireland and of course at that time ireland must have seemed a kind of paradise [Music] in news and woodbine walls and gelder nettle deep the faithful rest winding leagues of flowering elder sycamore with ivy dressed ruins in demeans deserted bogs surrounded bramble skirted townlands rich or townlands mean as those old counties of them screen us in the kingdom of the west they lived in a kind of marcus disorder in a kind of upmarket bohemia and [Music] we esh on our knees it was a kind of not kneeling but we ate with our food on our knees it was kind of buffy more almost like a picnic in in a deserted drawing room would be if that's how i remember it and it was great fun i can remember that you know the conversation absolutely sparkled it was a wonderful time bitumen's most public coup was to persuade the dublin government to allow laurence olivier to film the battle scenes of henry v in ireland [Music] not only was henry v propaganda for the allied cause the location filming also boosted the irish economy by 80 000 pounds a triumph of public relations for the british press attache but there was another side to benjamin's work in ireland something he would only speak about 40 years later from his office in 50 upper mount street dublin he was sending back regular intelligence briefings to london what exactly were you doing in that period i was the press attache i was in matthew's office one of what they call memphis spies for two and a half years bitumen monitored the shifting allegiances of the neutral irish from the man in the street to members of the cabinet he provided insight into the activities of the ira who saw the war as a chance to achieve a united ireland [Music] the ira is divided into republicans place hunters and gun maniacs nazis anti-christian and pro-hitler [Music] devil era himself thinks that the allies are beaten and there is no doubt that he and his party as a whole would rather see them win [Music] dublin port butchers are almost all german the band master of the irish army is german i suggest that some sort of censorship be made from here on articles dealing with the following subjects speculations on plans of the british in the event of a german invasion of the sixth six counties when the germans circulate one thing it is our duty to refute it when it appears in print my intelligence services can help here the tough-minded politically astute tone of these top-secret reports is hard to associate with the avancular image of the popular poet at that period i couldn't have believed that he was up to anything but what is a spy like what does the spy behave like the most obvious thing in a way for a spy in in in english by now would be to behave like a typical silly young man in london benjamin's controllers praised his work others were less pleased the ira as benjamin reported was desperate and divided and was looking for a way to strike back morale among ira volunteers both outside those who were still at liberty and particularly those who were still in jail and i was one of them it fell to a complete low they had they almost lost all respect for a time until they reorganized themselves out of this spirit of desperation a plan was born to assassinate a high profile figure the target was the british press attache the plot to murder benjamin has remained a secret until now this newly discovered letter sent to benjamin by a former ira volunteer tells the story the letter you've shown me was put together by dermot brennan who had in the very early forties acted as a journalist and as a public relations person for the ira in 4142 dermot brennan was responsible for civilian intelligence for the army council he details how the ira planned to execute bitumen i got communications describing you as dangerous and a person of menace to all of us in short you were depicted in the blackest of colors i had a call from two of the second battalion staff they were determined to stare things with the british they wanted to take the spotlight off the ira internal difficulties they told me they had picked a man they would hear about a fellow named benjamin the letter concludes with an extraordinary revelation the attempt on benjamin's life was called off when brennan read his poetry i had looked up some of your literary work and came to the conclusion that a man who could give such pleasure with his pen couldn't be much of a sacred agent and may well be wrong anyway the second battalion mob called off that little venture john betterman left dublin in august 1943 content with a job well done not knowing how close to death he had come the family now with the addition of a young daughter canada settled back into the kind of english life which betraymen would come to epitomize the decades after the war were to see the full flowering of betrayment's poetic voice he had found a language and an unintimidating verse style with which his audience could identify the collected poems published in 1958 confirmed that he could command the kind of mass audience of which most poets can only dream really if you imagine all those two million copies he sold of the collected poems they're there on the shelf with mrs beaton they belong with a certain idea of the culture and they represent that and they and they do so with a kind of warm and generous irony so that looking at betrayment one things that this is a benign and beneficent poet who the sense of the whole nation well i think the reason that benjamin appeals such wide audience has got a great deal to do simply with accessibility these are poems written in on the whole in very traditional forms and in a very conversational language i mean not quite conversational but more like conversation than like high art benchman stayed in london's older skate during the week he joined his family in the country at weekends where the little dramas of the local pony club provided an irresistible subject for his pen it's awfully bad luck on diana her ponies have swallowed their bits she fished down their throats with a spanner and frightened them all into fits so now she's attempting to borrow do lend her some bits mommy do i'll lend her my own for tomorrow but today i'll be wanting them too just look at brunella on guzzle the wizardist pony on earth why doesn't she slacken his muscle and tighten the breach in his girth it is of course a piece of social satire but it's a piece of strangely affectionate social satire i think very often betrayment writes his best satirical work where he's not wholly at odds with his subject i mean here he's slightly in two minds he he relishes it but he also wants to to send it out and i think the result is a wonderfully achieved little poem with curiously and interestingly an element of pain within the kind of souffle of verbal fun penelope was mad on horses and i don't think it helped that they moved to a very horsey area in berkshire leathery limbs of upper lamborne as john wrote um john got thrown into this horsey society and he not only uh didn't get on on horses when penelope put him on the back of a pony he shouted you're trying to kill me also didn't like wide open spaces very much he was sort of a little bit agrophobic and he associated this with having been brought up in suburbia with and or the outskirts of london where everything was closed in he did say that going for long walks in the open air annetti was with sort of lots of people a security blanket of some sort unnerved him despite his agrophobia the shell oil company saw benjamin as the perfect voice for their guidebooks to the english countryside before long his skills were transferred to the screen here is the mausoleum of the dashwood family who live in west wickham park below and not only dash woods lie here to see those square recesses they contain urns intended for the hearts of members of the hellfire club as a broadcaster he offered geniality apparent expertise and an absolute conviction in the rightness of his opinions bitumen and television would prove a hugely popular combination he celebrated britain as he saw it from national monument to suburbia sometimes to the dismay of his friends my father used it against him and thinking thinking it was a betrayal of literature uh education intelligence everything to be on television because you're sucking up to the masses and you and rather rather quite nasty about it uh with otherwise i don't know but the truth is that benjamin was naturally a performer uh he loved it and he was a great success and i think caused as much happiness possibly by his television appearances they're not i think quite secure happiness as he did by his parents through that secret door which was then hidden in tapestry crossed this little room and hid himself in this cupboard television i think in fact works rather well for benjamin because it is not the art of the crowd it's not the art of mass address the art of the loudspeaker it it comes famously into individual people's individual houses and addresses one or two people sitting on their own sofa in their own living room you know the people who get the credit for the programs on telly are the people whose voices and faces like my awful face become familiar we also get the reps but television is teamwork and we artists are only a small part you've got to have a sympathetic producer he was happy doing it i think he was pleased to be involved in the whole process of filming he loved making films he loved he loved the the crew and the jargon he liked being part of a team he was very good to work with he was interested in everybody one of the very early ones i did with him was a film about a hotel in winter clevedon in somerset and it was a day in the life of this hotel and the hotel was was largely full of old people and he did a commentary imagining what they were thinking what they might be saying to each other and it was an incredible piece really and i don't think anybody had done that kind of film before one thing about being in a hotel is that you're independent and you can pick and choose who you want to talk to which reminds me that i must go down to lunch there's someone there i said i'd have a glass of cherry with and i don't really think i ought to keep the old dear waiting any longer with her husband busy penelope was isolated and yet by seeking conservation and religion she had widened the gulf between them the real crisis of their marriage however occurred when penelope became a roman catholic and evelyn war tried to bully john into becoming a catholic too but john wasn't having any why um i think it was just too foreign for him john had no time for the baroque splendors of the roman church he liked the quietitude of the anglican church the betrayments never divorced but their differences had driven them apart well i think although john and penelope loved each other they were in some ways incompatible they were not exactly childish but they were childlike in that each wanted his or her own way and those ways diverged what john really needed i think was a sort of victorian wife who would minister to him be almost a nurse maid and enable him to write his poetry at a london dinner party in 1951 he met lady elizabeth cavendish the unmarried sister of the duke of devonshire the attraction was mutual and immediate i think that it would have been impossible for him to go on living the life he had before he met elizabeth and so that was the arrangement that suited him best he of course lived separately from elizabeth cavendish you know they were tremendously close companions they were in love with each other but they always lived in separate houses i think that the situation did in a sense resolve itself but not without leaving certain wounds that's complicated if if a man loves two women it's bound to be betterment introduced lady elizabeth to the north cornwall coast which he had known from childhood holidays it was one of the few places where he had been truly happy we used to picnic where the thrift grew deep and tufted to the edge we saw the yellow foam flakes drift in trembling sponges on the ledge below us till the wind would lift them up the cliff and o'er the hedge then roller into roller curled and thundered down the rocky bay and we were in a water world of rain and blizzard sea and spray and one against the other hurled we struggled round to green away as the fifties gave way to the sixties veterans popularity showed no signs of waning but the doubts were never far away he had of course a huge popular following but he said to me once rather bitterly and he said it to others that to be popular is to be mistrusted and uh he had his foes real and imagined for much of his life he was he was sort of unsure about his status as a professional poet he was never quite certain that he he made the grade as a poet and of course he took any criticism very much to heart i think in his appreciation of architecture and particularly church architecture he found a sort of certainty he found something he was good at this is the easternmost end of the cathedral and this end was added in order to have a place for the shrine of saint thomas beckett it's an octagon and it's called the corona it's a place to which all pilgrims came bachmann's love for english churches went back to his boyhood it was one of the few passions he'd been able to share with his father i was eight or nine when i used to come here to norfolk growing and sailing with my father and i think it was the outline against the sky of the church town of beaver which first gave me a passion for stopping at every church i saw going in and having a look how did the devil come when first attack these norfolk lanes recall lost innocence the years fall off and find me walking back dragging a stick along the wooden fence down this same path where 40 years ago my father strolled behind me calm and slow how did the devil come when first attack the church is just the same though now i know fowler of laoth restored it time bring back the rapturous ignorance of long ago the peace before the dreadful daylight starts of unkept promises and broken hearts [Music] half a century later betrayment would use his public profile to save from ruinous neglect some of london's finest churches when we got down to maryland which was one of his favorite buildings it was so sad then it was always locked and it was it was it was just used at the time and he ran a great campaign to try and get it back into use it of course had no parish to speak of at the time and there was no one really fighting for it he was sitting here on his pathetic traffic island surrounded by traffic dirty uh miserable and i think it typified to bechman all that was saddest about the church of england in the city it had these majestic churches it simply didn't know what to do with them i think he was a great romantic he liked to think that the great old days of the church of england could be reborn through these magnificent buildings and i think one of the sadnesses is that uh is that now that these buildings are much more accessible and much more being reused and better never really lived to see that day bachmann's romantic notions brought him into conflict with the other voice of architecture in the sixties nicolas pezner pevzner's buildings of england series were in direct competition with benjamin's shell guides i think there was actually quite a profound disagreement serious disagreement as well which was partly i think that betraymen felt that pevsner's interest in buildings was too kind of dry and austere and and technical as if he felt that pedsna went round a village church with a sort of tape measure and a slide rule and somehow missed the point it was a church and that betraymen believed in a slightly more impressionistic kind of architectural criticism which which gave a sense of the life of the building as it were and its effect upon one's emotions upon one sensibility whereas pebbs knows a much more scientific architectural historian than that i did find a memo in the bbc radio papers it was a note from one of the producers saying mr benjamin never wishes to appear on a radio program with professor pebsner again and i suspect that there was some personal slight made by pevzner to betraymen on a radio program er betterman was very clever but he probably wasn't in an academic sense as clever as pevzner and pevzner probably scored over betrayment and betraymen never forgave it bitumen saw pevzner speaking out for the kind of england which had first horrified him in the 30s an england of planners and developers i want to tell you before we go it's very serious there are rumors of an over spill coming thousands of industrial workers from the north of england and london will be settled down on rich agricultural land outside the town it means that supermarkets will appear in the streets that there will be strangers everywhere is it really in the public interest to use a civil service phrase to overwhelm a balanced prosperous community with a strange one are the treasury the planning authorities to trample on our hearts can't be right i think there was a melancholic and of course a hatred of the modern world and the uh almost every aspect of it is conservative with a very very small c indeed loathed all the signs of prosperity in wilson cars and modern buildings uh occasionally he sucked up to modern architects and said not too bad or some monstrosity or other but basically he lose the door the bright new future the gleaming glass and chrome and of course this is an architectural as well as a poetic um issue a culture wall that happens in all kinds of areas um and betraymen rejects the proposition that the way to make human beings happier is radically and mechanically to change the nature of the world they live in and even at home in britain there are people intervening political interventionists of one kind or another who were saying let's tear up the book as we know it let's let's rebuild let's remake let's create a gleaming new world and betraymen's always i think committed to the proposition that that is not the secret of human contentment john was a private man in a very public position he would have felt anguish a little more intensely than ordinary people he was also subjected to extraordinary assaults he put himself on the line in many cases defending buildings he had in the end to be very careful he told me about what buildings he defended because if he stood up everything that he liked that was being destroyed then his he would lose his credibility over major projects so he had to lie low he had to support carefully chosen causes and he came in for a lot of flack over all this in october 1972 the establishment officially recognized benjamin's status as the country's favorite poet but the new poet laureate was in no mood for self-congratulation what of all the pleasure that you've written sir john what pleases you most don't never please with any of it always think it could be better which do you find most satisfying i don't think i'm ever satisfied that i don't think you can reach perfection on this earth the nearest you can get to it is where we are standing now with the waves and the sea and the ever-changing light in his later years i think he was feeling increasingly fearful and uncertain he was producing less poetry there were more calls upon his time there were more interruptions to his work every now and then upon sean forth's the old benjamin the occasional pot boiler appeared as john's fear tended to dominate his talent with the onset of parkinson's disease in the mid-seventies followed by a series of strokes the themes of age and mortality which betraymen had explored since his youth had now become reality he said that he went visiting a hospital i think it must have been some baths because he was living in cloth there at the time and a nun he knew was dying in hospital and he said to her aren't you afraid of dying and she said oh no not at all it would be like packing up books at the end of term which is another very betranesque image actually and uh he said i wish i could feel like that but i don't john betchaman was buried in saint eledoch's church cornwall in may 1984. [Music] he died down here in cornwall the actual day of his funeral there was a tremendous storm and in a way it somehow felt appropriate you know this part of cornwall is is very wild and it's what betcham loved about it it's not a pretty pretty place and i know when i was one of the pool bearers we had to carry the coffin nearly nearly a mile to the church there's no road to the church and we were completely soaked through but i think somehow it was as though the the elements themselves were celebrating this extraordinary life his wife penelope his children canada and paul and his companion lady elizabeth were all present at the funeral i made hay while the sunshine my work sold now if the harvest is over and the world cold give me the bonus of laughter as i lose hold [Music] if you want to know more about being a poet then check out channel4.com ideasfactory join us on a trek through mongolia tomorrow night here on ford desperately seeking agathy is at 12 45 and coming up on four we're battling for sports icc qriket world is next [Music] you

Channel: Aaron Marchant

Views: 17,037

Keywords: John Betjeman, Betjeman, documentary

Id: LjQC0PdHit4

Length: 48min 15sec (2895 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2018