John Betjeman statistics and form. Betjeman left Oxford without a degree. When Wordsworth returned from Paris in 1802, with the French Revolution in full swing, he put cricket into a sonnet as part of the reassuring scenery of home.In the middle of the 19th Century the fashion was all for blustering tributes to famous names, scrawled at top volume as if they were mighty oaks or towering crags.It didn’t take much for this sort of thing to grow into the patriotic drum-roll that made Henry Newbolt’s 1897 poem Plenty have sighed about the biscuit-tin jingoism of this work, which urged the soldiers of the Empire to “Play up, play up and play the game!” but it didn’t do the author any harm: he went on to become Controller of Propaganda in World War I.Cricket’s Edwardian “golden age” at the start of the 20th Century inspired poetry that imagined cricket as a delicate, fragrant, pretty sort of thing.
It dates from about 1980 and is signed by John Betjeman in what one cataloguer calls his 'frail hand of old age'. Cricket has been cranking out odes for its entire life. This time, England’s nice guy finished first As Siegfried Sassoon put it:EW Hornung, author of the Raffles crime stories, was moved by the same bitter contrast, not least because his own son was killed on the Western Front:This solemn voice is rare; for the most part cricket inspires a lighter shade of poem. And World War I waved goodbye to all that. Below is our selection of Betjeman’s best poems, along with a short summary of each poem and a link to where you can read it. John Betjeman began his poem about Cheltenham with the following memory: I composed these lines as a summer wind Was blowing the elm leaves dry The family name was Betjemann, with two 'n's, but John dropped the second 'n' during the First World War, to make the name less German. Yet few of them have added much to the kit-bag of crick-lit. John Betjeman was born on August 28th, 1906, near Highgate, London. New customers only. Endless formal occasions (luncheons, dinners, funerals etc) have been enlivened by cricketing rhymes. John Arlott’s elegy to Jack Hobbs adorns the entrance of The Oval to this day, sketching the great batsman in his own calm and deliberate voice:The playwright (and cricketer) Harold Pinter struck the same note in a mere fragment:As was his habit, he sent this gem to his circle of friends and some time later (so the story goes) rang one of them, his fellow-dramatist David Hare, to see if he had received it. One 10-year-old boy went to The Oval and wrote:The author of this nugget was John Major. Auden said in his introduction to In a 1962 radio interview he told teenage questioners that he could not write about 'abstract things', preferring places, and faces.He fought a spirited but unsuccessful campaign to save the Propylaeum, known commonly as the Betjeman was given the remaining two-year lease on Betjeman responded to architecture as the visible manifestation of society's spiritual life as well as its political and economic structure. Hare confirmed that he had.Recent times have seen a flood of new work as established poets (Gavin Ewart, Ted Hughes, Brian Jones, Norman Nicholson, Simon Rae, Kit Wright and many others) have described rollers abandoned in woods, grim-faced rebels in South Africa, radio commentators, grimy urban pitches, classic matches and so forth. 18+, BeGambleAware.org. And But the last word goes to Alan Ross, the cricket-loving poet and editor who merged both the great impulses – memoir and portrait – into a single glimpse of two famous old cricketers (one of them blind) walking gingerly out of the Long Room at Lord’s:We may have to wade through a fair amount of rum-ti-tum rhymes by “Anon” to reach sentiments as rare as this – but they are there. In the preface of his collection of architectural essays We accept the collapse of the fabrics of our old churches, the thieving of lead and objects from them, the commandeering and butchery of our scenery by the services, the despoiling of landscaped parks and the abandonment to a fate worse than the workhouse of our country houses, because we are convinced we must save money.In a BBC film made in 1968 but not broadcast at that time, Betjeman described the sound of The John Betjeman Poetry Competition for Young People began in 2006 and was open to 10- to 13-year-olds living anywhere in the British Isles (including the Republic of Ireland), with a first prize of £1,000. His father was a cabinet maker, a trade which had been in the family for several generations. The recent The earliest efforts were – how to put it? There are new accents from the Caribbean and India. Money back as bonus. Cricket prides itself on the amount of literature it has inspired, and while it is hard to name any great novels with roots in the game, there is a decent pile of excellent prose – reportage, memoir, travelogue, biography – devoted to bats and balls. Don Bradman once wrote that this played a big part in his upbringing – “reading poetry and watching cricket were the sum of my world” – and he was not alone. When his Collected Poems was published in 1955, it was a bestseller. John Betjeman (1906-1984) achieved huge success during his lifetime and continues to retain his ‘National Treasure’ status more than twenty years after his death.