John Betjeman

[Neely]

He does seem to have an attraction to those athletic, feisty, tennis-playing females.

Don't we all!

[Emil Miller]

Don't we all!

Well I have walked many of the footpaths in Surrey and strongly relate to Betjeman's evocative description of them. When, it comes to mountainous sports girls with sizeable thighs, however, you can count me out.

[YesNo]

When it comes to mountainous female features, I suppose I'd be more interested in a Dolly Parton mountainous look. I can't imagine her playing tennis.

Although my wife and I tried to learn to play tennis some years ago, we didn't have enough interest in it to continue. Tennis, like golf, seems to be a sport for those in a social class above ours anyway. What do you see the annual taxable income that the families Betjeman describes earn? My guess is above 250,000 euros.

[kev67]

Yes the comments about him being very accessible is certainly true, he was a bit of a people's favourite and quite popular in his time. Also the points about him writing about, romanticising even, the disappearing England - the quiet country villages, the little cricket grounds etc, is also correct, for this it seems he was both praised and criticised in equal measures.



What about the Slough poem?

Slough

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
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 minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/intuition/Slough.html

It's also read at the start of the link I posed earlier. This is one of his more famous poems, very well known. The TV comedy series written by Ricky Gervais was based in slough, presumably because of the poem of course.

Cont later...

Great, I'm glad you liked the poems Yes/No.

Just heard this poem cited on the radio in an item about house building. I don't think Slough has become any more beautiful. It's probably a lot more multi-cultural now than when the poem was written. It also has airliners flying over it from Heathrow airport every five minutes. Guess what's the other side of the M4 though: Eton and Windsor, home to the queen. It's as if there was a crappy part of town divided by a classy part of town but by a motorway instead of a river. I think I went to a library in Slough once and there was a flyer of a friendly bomber plane on a noticeboard, so it seems like they actually celebrate this poem. I expect they are actually proud Ricky Gervais' The Office was set in Slough too.

[kev67]

There was a story that John Betjeman was appointed as a diplomat or possibly even ambassador to Ireland during the second world war. The IRA were going to kill him, but then read some of his poems and changed their minds.

[Emil Miller]

When it comes to mountainous female features, I suppose I'd be more interested in a Dolly Parton mountainous look. I can't imagine her playing tennis.

Although my wife and I tried to learn to play tennis some years ago, we didn't have enough interest in it to continue. Tennis, like golf, seems to be a sport for those in a social class above ours anyway. What do you see the annual taxable income that the families Betjeman describes earn? My guess is above 250,000 euros.

I don't think John Betjeman would have approved of Dolly Parton, in tennis shorts or otherwise. She simply doesn't conform to the Britishness of Miss Hunter-Dunn.
We have the Wimbledon tennis championships coming up very soon and it does have connotations of upper class superiority but, setting aside the tweeness of strawberries and cream and Pimms no.1, tennis is quite widely played by people in England regardless of their social position.
It would be difficult to calculate the salary level of the class of people in Betjeman's poems because there is no comparison with the relative value of money then and now, but also the fact that we didn't even have decimal currency in those days. Much of a person's wealth was usually tied up in land or property and money was considered slightly vulgar and something best left to an accountant.

[prendrelemick]

See also "The Olympic Girl" I can't remember the exact quote, but I remember the erotic imagery of a tennis raquet being pressed between her breasts.
Edit: here it is..

Oh! would I were her racket press'd
With hard excitement to her breast


Infact I think the whole poem is verging on the fetishist-erotic. Or is it just me!

[YesNo]

The Olympic Girl is the third poem so far where a tennis Amazon charms a lesser mortal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLuAhKGIDbo

I don't understand the "green" in the last line of the poem:

Little, alas, to you I mean,
For I am bald and old and green.

Dolly Parton would be a better fit for a Kenny Rogers sort of man. Woody Allen's movie Match Point reminds me of the kind of woman Betjeman would admire: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416320/

[Neely]

I think that green there means lacking in experience or naivety. This would also fit with him describing himself as a worm and feeling that she is so much above him - he's clearly held in her power. And yes I think there is certainly more than a bit of eroticism in there for sure, it's total sexual fantasy, even more so than in the last poem.

Oh Match Point is a great film and of the stock Betjeman is referring to in the Joan Hunter Dunn poem and others. Match Point is Woody Allen's personal favourite film of his own making, if also a little nostalgically English, probably as a result of it being directed by viewing England from outside.

[Emil Miller]

And there was I thinking that Betjeman was a kindly old gent with only a slight remembrance of feminine things past only to discover that he was a bit of a raver. I can tell you one thing, I shall be watching the women's tennis at Wimbledon with my eye less trained on the ball than in former years.

[Neely]

And there was I thinking that Betjeman was a kindly old gent with only a slight remembrance of feminine things past only to discover that he was a bit of a raver. I can tell you one thing, I shall be watching the women's tennis at Wimbledon with my eye less trained on the ball than in former years.

Ha, ha. Consider it research.

[YesNo]

I downloaded the latest Google Earth and checked out Wimbledon: tennis and golf divided by Church Lane. I see Slough is just west of London. It does look like a developed patch of gray surrounded by the green outside greater London.

[Neely]

I downloaded the latest Google Earth and checked out Wimbledon: tennis and golf divided by Church Lane. I see Slough is just west of London. It does look like a developed patch of gray surrounded by the green outside greater London.

Yes, I don't know how accurately this picture related to the Slough of Betjeman's day, but grey certainly sums it up. Slough Trading Estate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ae...ing_Estate.JPG

I think you could just about substitute any similar dull grey area for Slough though. The point is, I think, that it is encroaching upon the green. He's also criticising the pettiness of such insular places as well of course as parodied in Ricky Gervais' The Office set in the Slough trading estate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7UrvGg65Lw

[Emil Miller]

According to an article in the Independent on the occasion of Miss Hunter-Dunn's demise, it seems that J.Betjeman was prone to put it about all over the place, even late in life when most men have swapped their libidos for sanatogen tonic wine. What he would have done in these days of Viagra and other sexual stimulants leaves the mind boggled but there's no doubt that he did capture the wistfulness of a world where sex was to be enjoyed rather than taken for granted as is often the case today. This extract from the article sums it up neatly.

In a world of weekend tennis parties in Surrey and Berkshire, of agreeable country houses with labradors, butlers and sensible matrons dead-heading roses with trug and secateur, Betjeman's poetic alter-ego exists in a chronic fever of sexual excitement. Everywhere he looks there are girls to be adored, clear-skinned, fresh-faced athletic goddesses in pristine shorts and crisp cotton blouses, untying their Hermès scarves to let their hair blow free when taken for a spin by a chuckling lothario in an MG.

[YesNo]

So Joan Hunter-Dunn was a real person! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Jackson

Google Earth gives me a view of the Slough Trading Estate from the outside and it looks like The Office gives me an interesting view from the inside.