Adrian Barlow's blog: John Betjeman and Windlesham Sunday, 5 February 2012 John Betjeman and Windlesham Writing letters to the newspapers, it’s been said, is an entertaining but essentially solitary pastime. Perhaps, but I was touched by how many friends contacted me to say they’d seen my recent (very brief) letter in the Times. It was about a poem by John Betjeman , and I wrote it in answer to an enquiry from the founder of the Betjeman Society as to the identity of Pam, the mountainous tennis player in ‘ Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden ’. Did she exist? It’s well known that Miss Joan Hunter Dunn was based on a real person, though certainly not on anyone to whom Betjeman ever got engaged, as happens to the nervous young officer at the end of ‘ A Subaltern’s Love Song ’. That’s the poem in which Miss J Hunter Dunn appears, ‘furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun’. In ‘Pot Pourri …’, however, the poet goes one further, and ends by describing confidently the scene and the setting for his eventual marriage to Pam -whoever she may have been. Pamela Mitford ?

Possible but unlikely: she never lived anywhere near Windlesham. This was my letter as published: Sir, I suspect that John Betjeman’s Pam is as much a figment of his fevered imagination as the wedding he conjures at the end of ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’. He imagines “Windlesham bells” ringing out, but the parish church of St. John the Baptist, Windlesham, has only one bell. When my father was rector there in the 1960s, I was sometimes allowed to ring it. The first Betjeman poem I ever encountered was ‘Hunter Trials’ (probably in O’Malley and Thompson’s Rhyme and Reason) but ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ was the second, and I approved of Betjeman because he had written a poem about the place where I lived. I remember, though, being puzzled that he was wrong not only about the bells but about the architecture.

In the last stanza he imagines himself and Pam processing up the ‘Butterfield aisle, rich with Gothic enlacement’, but Windlesham Church was neither built nor restored by Butterfield: it was enlarged, in 1874, by Ewan Christian in a notably plain and unadorned style. At the age of fifteen, I had already been to All Saints, Margaret Street in London (rather to my father’s alarm) so I knew what a Butterfield church looked like, and it certainly did not look like Windlesham. The village of Windlesham is described in Pevsner’s Surrey thus: On the Berkshire border, half heath and half meadows. Big C19 houses and a busy nest of Victorian brick boxes on the former; sleek old farms on the latter, which is almost the first true countryside on this bearing coming out of London. It still has the feel, in parts, of an old Surrey village. Its roads have names like Pound Lane, Updown Hill and Snow’s Ride. This commemorates the infamous highwayman, Captain Snow, who used the local Pelican Inn as his base.

(The Pelican is now Woodcote House School , where I began - for two terms between school and university - my teaching career.) Did Betjeman have any particular connection with Windlesham? Not that I know. I suspect in fact that he chose the village both because its name conveniently rhymed with ‘Pam’ and, more significantly, because of its dactylic sound: dum-diddy. This is the key rhythmic feature of the poem. From ‘pram in the …’ onwards, phrases like ‘whizzing them …’ ‘size of her …’ and words like ‘slippery’, ‘bountiful’, ‘mountainous’ and ‘arrogant’ are all dactyls. They give the poem its momentum. A friend who contacted me after reading my letter in the paper recalled how easy it was to parody Betjeman. That’s true, of course, and while I was still at school I memorized a splendid parody published in the then infant Private Eye. Lovely lady in the pew Goodness, what a scorcher, phew! What I wouldn’t give to do Unmentionable things to you!

If old God is still up there I’m sure He wouldn’t really care, I’m sure he’d say a little lech Never really harmed old Betje. I have never accepted the argument that good poets are literally inimitable: in a way, their very distinctiveness makes them easier to parody. Put this to the test: listen to Dylan Thomas reciting ‘Chard Whitlow’ , Henry Reed’s definitive parody of Four Quartets. Betjeman, too, was a good parodist and perhaps it’s one of his strengths that he can easily wrongfoot his readers, leaving us unsure whether or not we are missing a joke. ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ is itself a good example of what I mean. It’s perhaps a more serious poem than appears at first, paying an oblique homage to T.S. Eliot (who, remarkably, had taught Betjeman at Highgate Junior School). The gauche narrator who hopes to catch a glimpse of the Amazonian Pam is an adolescent Prufrock, washing his face in a bird bath before deciding which path he dare take.

Prufrock, indeed, seems a kind of ghostly presence stalking Betjeman’s writing at this time: after all, both title and opening line of ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’ – “Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn” gesture towards ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Betjeman insists we pay attention to the title of his poem too. ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ derives from a once-popular book of the same name. That book survives now, as its subtitle ‘The Classic Diary of a Victorian Lady’ suggests, as a record of an earlier, gentler age. Betjeman’s poem does something similar. Published in 1940 at the start of the War, it accumulates remembered details of youthful summers from a suddenly vanished world: the ambiguous ‘miles of pram in the wind’, the unsettling horses’ hooves, the cheap Players’ Weights cigarette packet trodden into the sandy gorse track. Is it good to rake up these memories at such a time?

Potpourri itself reminds one of Eliot’s ambivalence about memory at the start of Burnt Norton: But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Still, scents and shrubs overwhelm Betjeman’s trespasser. The ‘coco-nut smell of the broom’ draws him towards the ‘remarkable wrought-iron gates’ and ‘over the boundary’. He steals into the exclusive world of stockbroker-belt Surrey: it’s a world hidden behind gorse, conifers, above all behind rhododendrons. ‘Lucky the rhododendrons!’ sighs the love-lorn poet when Pam, ‘full of a pent-up strength’, swipes at them with her tennis racquet. He knows he’s no match for her, but he can still dream: Over the redolent pinewoods, in at the bathroom casement, One fine Saturday, Windlesham bells shall call, Up the Butterfield aisle, rich with Gothic enlacement, Licensed now for embracement, Pam and I, as the organ Thunders over you all.

‘Redolent’ not only echoes the dactylic sound of ‘petulant’ in the previous line, it recalls the scents and memories evoked in the opening lines of the poem and in its title. But the rest of this last stanza offers an unexpected rebuff to all those who have despised the speaker for his hopeless and inappropriate passion for Pam. They (we) will have to sit and watch as he, the seven-stone weakling, walks triumphantly up the aisle with his Charles-Atlas like bride. Betjeman doesn’t expect his readers to take any of this seriously, of course. Though it is a poem mixing memory and desire, it is also a fantasy enjoying its element of self-parody: no serious poet would write a serious poem with such tortured rhymes as rhododendrons / Hendren’s or enlacement / embracement. Betjeman’s whole persona showed him to be a master of self-parody. He loved a joke against himself.

Since, indeed, he contributed to Private Eye from its very earliest days (he was the original Piloti, writing the architecture column ‘Nooks and Corners’), it would not surprise me to discover he had been author of ‘Lovely lady in the pew’, the spoof that caught my eye while I was still a schoolboy, living in Windlesham. [illustration: Windlesham Church, c.1970. Artist: Doreen Barlow My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning , is due to be published by Lutterworth Press later this month. Posted by Poems of John Betjeman by J Brooke John Betjeman by Jocelyn Brooke John Betjeman's development as a poet has been slow and—since he writes in a number of contrasted styles, and is liable to revert, in his later work, to earlier techniques and mannerisms—not very easy to summarize. During a period of thirty years or so the quality of his sensibility has changed very little, though his verse as a whole shows a steady improvement in prosodic technique.

The first poem in the Collected Poems, 'Death in Leamington', is presumably one of his earliest, and may be assigned to the late twenties or very early thirties. This description of an old lady's death in a decrepit Victorian villa already foreshadows most of his later preoccupations: nineteenth-century architecture, the niceties of social usage and vocabulary and the details of English upper-middle-class domesticity; significantly, too, the poem has that element of the macabre which will recur frequently throughout his work, for Betjeman is—as T. S. Eliot has said of Webster—'much possessed by death'. She died in the upstairs bedroom By the light of the ev'ning star That shone through the plate glass windows From over Leamington Spa. Beside her the lonely crochet Lay patiently and unstirred, But the fingers that would have work'd it Were dead as the spoken word. And 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 !

Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness, Half dead and half alive ! . . . The contractions—'ev'ning', 'work'd'—are habitual with Betjeman, and like many of his other mannerisms carry an echo of minor Victorian verse. Later poems on similar themes tend to be less mannered, and it is interesting to compare 'Death in Leamington' with 'Remorse' (1954), of which I quote the first two stanzas: The lungs draw in the air and rattle it out again; The eyes revolve in their sockets and upwards stare; No more worry and waiting and troublesome doubt again— She whom I loved and left is no longer there. The nurse puts down her knitting and walks across to her With quick professional eye she surveys the dead. Just one patient the less and little the loss to her, Distantly tender she settles the shrunken head....

Here the slightly mocking tone of 'Leamington' has given place to a genuine compassion; the verse, moreover, is tauter and more firmly controlled, and the whole poem is a far more proficient piece of work, though some of Betjeman's admirers may regret the casual, rather amateurish quality which gave the earlier poems a charm of their own. In complete contrast with 'Death in Leamington' is another very early poem, 'The Varsity Students' Rag', of which I quote the first verse and chorus: I'm afraid the fellows in Putney rather wash they had The social ease and warmers of a 'varsity undergrad, For tho' they're awf'lly decent and up to a lark as a rule You want to have the 'varsity touch after a public school. CHORUS: We had a rag at Monico's. We had a rag at the Troc., And the one we had at the Berkeley gave the customers quite a shock. Then we went to the Popular, and after that—oh my ! I wish you'd seen the rag we had in the Grill Room at the Cri.

This poem is, of course, in itself something of a 'rag', but it is a good satire upon the loutish behaviour of a certain type of undergraduate at that time. The slang and many of the incidental allusions have dated, and future students of Mr. Betjeman's poetry may well be puzzled by such abbreviations as 'Troc.' and 'Cri.', for Trocadero and Criterion—restaurants in or near Piccadilly Circus, much frequented in those days by the rowdier element. The poem exemplifies, in fact, Betjeman's habit of addressing himself to a private—or at any rate an extremely restricted— audience, and it is fairly safe to say that only a person of approximately the poet's own age and educational back-ground would be able to comprehend it in detail. Such locutions, for example, as 'varsity' and 'undergrad' were at that period frowned upon by the smarter kind of under-graduate; but if Mr.

Betjeman's attitude seems here a trifle snobbish, it is only fair to point out that it is precisely the snobbery of the 'varsity' man—his ill-bred jeering at 'the fellows in Putney'—which is the main target of the satire. Another early poem, 'The Garden City', is perhaps worth quoting in part (it was omitted by Lord Birkenhead from his collection); this too is broadly satirical, though here the mockery is less unkind: O wot ye why in Orchard Way The roofs be steep and shelving? Or wot ye what the dwellers say In close and garden delving? 'Belike unlike my hearths to yours, Yet seemly if unlike them. Deep green and stalwart be my doors With bottle glass to fryke them. 'Hand-woven be my wefts, hand-made My pottery for pottage, And hoe and mattock, aye, and spade Hang up about my cottage'....

A solemn footnote informs us that 'fryke' is a mediaeval word for deck, and the whole poem hits off splendidly that spurious and suburbanized 'arty-craftiness' which was one of the less fortunate by-products of the doctrines of William Morris. Most poets write love-poems, and John Betjeman is no exception, though as a lover he appears to have somewhat recondite tastes: The sort of girl I like to see Smiles down from her great height at me. She stands in strong athletic pose And wrinkles her retrousse' nose.... Oh ! would I were her racket press'd With hard excitement to her breast And swished into the sunlit air Arm-high above her tousledhair.... —('The Olympic Girl') Elsewhere he writes appreciatively of a 'great big mountainous sports girl', with arms 'as firm and hairy as Hendren's', and the same slightly masochistic element is present in one of his most celebrated poems, 'A Subaltern's Love-song': Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun, What strenuous singles we played after tea, We in the tournament—you against me !

The poem goes on to describe a drive: Into nine-o'clock Camberley, heavy with bells And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells, and a dance in the town: Oh ! full Surrey twilight ! importunate band ! Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand! And finally: the scent of her wrap, and the words never said, And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead. We sat in the car park: till twenty to one And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. Such poems have their closest literary parallel, perhaps, in Swinburne who, if he were alive today, might well find the charms of Miss J. Hunter Dunn no less stimulating than those of the famous 'equestrienne', Adah Menken. For the most part these love-poems are linked with the poet's nostalgia for his childhood and adolescence; he seldom concerns himself with physical sexuality, and when he does tends to relate it to that macabre obsession with old-age and death which has already been noted: . . I run my fingers down your dress With brandy-certain aim And you respond to my caress And maybe feel the same.

But I've a picture of my own Of this reunion night, Wherein two skeletons are shewn To hold each other tight; Dark sockets look on emptiness Which once was loving-eyed, The mouth that opens for a kiss Has got no tongue inside....—('Late-Flowering Lust') « Poet John Betjeman's unrequited love and muse, Joan Hunter Dunn, dies aged 92 | Daily Mail Online Poet John Betjeman's unrequited love and muse, Joan Hunter Dunn, dies aged 92 Last updated at 15:24 17 April 2008 One of the great unrequited love stories of English literature is finally over, following the death of the muse of one of Britain's best known poets. Joan Jackson was immortalised in print as Joan Hunter Dunn in one of John Betjeman's most famous poems. But despite the adulation expressed for "Miss J Hunter Dunn", as she is referred to in Betjeman's A Subaltern's Love Song the pair were only loosely acquainted. Miss J Hunter Dunn married and became Joan Jackson. She died aged 92 at a London nursing home last week. Scroll down for more...

But in his fiction, former poet laureate Betjeman and his muse will be forever linked. In A Subaltern's Love Song, the poet is transfixed by Miss Dunn while playing tennis against her. He writes: "Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn, Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,". Betjeman fist met Miss Dunn while working at the Ministry of Information in the 1930s. Joan Jackson, the inspiration for Betjeman's Joan Hunter Dunn, died aged 92 last Friday A Subaltern's Love Song was written in the early 1940s, at a time of staunch, buttoned-up English reserve. The poem results in the tennis playing duo attending a dance and subsequently becoming engaged. Mrs Jackson said she was proud of the fact she had been named in Betjeman's poem during a rare interview she gave in 1965 and is believed to have attended the poets' memorial service at Westminster Abbey in 1984. Miss Jackson married and went to live abroad, returning with her family to the UK in the 1960s.

Speaking about the impact on her of A Subaltern's Love Song, her son Edward Jackson told the Times: "When we came back to England her overriding concern was to make sure that we boys were all right. She dismissed talk of an affair, always saying 'I was in love with Dad.' "She never said she was proud to be his muse, but she did not consider it a joke. She just said that John was a nice man." Betjeman, is also infamous for his 1937 poem Slough - with the devastating opening lines: "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough, it isn't fit for humans now." He died in 1984. JHD April 17, 2008. Joan Jackson: The Times obituary Muse of John Betjeman immortalised as Joan Hunter Dunn in his popular poem: The Subaltern’s Love-song Joan Hunter Dunn Joan Hunter Dunn, later Joan Jackson, was the supreme muse of John Betjeman and the heroine of perhaps his best-known poem, A Subaltern’s Love-song. She was the embodiment of the England Betjeman loved.

She was the incarnation of his haut-suburbia ideal: a fresh-faced, very English beauty, completely at home amid tennis courts, rose beds, clipped hedges, golden retrievers, Women’s Institutes, jumble sales and sit-up-and-beg bicycles. The poem in which Betjeman immortalised her :- ‘A Subaltern’s Love-song’ Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun, What strenuous singles we played after tea, We in the tournament — you against me! Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy, The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy, With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won, I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn. Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won. The warm-handled racket is back in its press, But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.

Her father's euonymus shines as we walk, And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk, And cool the verandah that welcomes us in, To the six-o'clock news and a lime juice and gin. The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath, The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path, As I struggle with double-end evening tie, For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I. On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts, And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports, And westering, questioning settles the sun, On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. The Hillman is waiting, the light's in the hall, The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall, My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair, And there on the landing's the light on your hair. By roads 'not adopted', by woodlanded ways, She drove to the club in the late summer haze, Into nine-o'clock Camberley, heavy with bells, And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells. Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, I can hear from the car-park the dance has begun.

Oh ! Full Surrey twilight ! Importunate band ! Oh ! Strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand ! Around us are Rovers and Austins afar, Above us, the intimate roof of the car, And here on my right is the girl of my choice, With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice. And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said, And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead. We sat in the car-park till twenty to one, And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. Betjeman met her during the Second World War. He was in his thirties, a married man with one son. She was in her twenties, unmarried. He was in the Films Division of the Ministry of Information (MoI), with offices in the Senate House of the University of London; she was on the catering staff. Betjeman, who had been turned down by all the Armed Services, had been wangled into the MoI by his friend Kenneth Clark, the art historian.

(Clark had been made head of the Films Division after Churchill allegedly growled: “He knows about pictures, doesn’t he?”) Betjeman’s main role was to commission short propaganda films on such subjects as “Dig for Victory” and “Careless Talk Costs Lives”, from film-makers like Sidney Gilliat, who also directed the important 1943 film Millions Like Us, about women working in factories. Gilliat thought Betjeman was generally effective — “but also you could say to him, ‘I think that’s a bloody silly idea’, which you wouldn’t have dreamt of saying to K. Clark or Jack Beddington, who later ran the Films Division.” On December 30, 1940, Betjeman wrote to Gilliat, at the end of a business letter: “I have fallen in love with a girl in the catering department here who is a doctor’s daughter from Aldershot. She was lacrosse captain and tennis champion at Queen Anne’s Caversham.” In a radio broadcast of 1976 he recalled how he had first encountered her. “I was walking down a corridor at the Ministry of Information with my friend Reggie Ross Williamson when we saw a beautiful girl with red hair.

‘Gosh, look!’ I said. ‘I bet she’s a doctor’s daughter from Aldershot.’ And she was.” That was not quite accurate: in fact Joan Hunter Dunn came from Farnborough in Hampshire — but Betjeman later maintained, “that was near enough Aldershot to count”. One of his colleagues at the MoI, the film director Dallas Bower, assumed that Joan was an ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) volunteer seconded to the MoI; but in fact she had been appointed to the catering staff of the University of London before the war. In a 1990 memoir Michael Bonavia, who had been assistant clerk of the University’s court, remembered his first meeting with her. “Mrs Winifred Bruce, the Catering Manageress, was efficient and conscientious, but the increase in the turnover of the Refectories made it necessary for her to obtain the support of an assistant. One day, I interviewed three girls for this position. One girl had a diploma from King’s College of Household and Social Science, and had a vivid personality. Her name was Joan Hunter Dunn. “She seemed slightly amused by the proceedings and wore a short eye-veil.

I asked her, rather pompously, what she knew about institutional catering. ‘Nothing at all,’ she replied, and laughed. She got the job.” When war broke out and the university moved out of the Senate House, Hunter Dunn stayed on with Bonavia and Mrs Bruce. The arrival of the MoI brought a surge of journalists, writers, officers, film-makers and artists. She was constantly on duty and did not have a day off for three months. Bonavia provided beds for her and Mrs Bruce in the Senate House cellar. The building was a target for the Nazis — Goebbels called it “the Great Lie Factory”. There were many bomb raids. Hunter Dunn recalled: “I’d get under the bedclothes and think, ‘I just hope it will be quick’.” Kenneth Clark and the fashion editor Ernestine Carter were both to claim that they had introduced Betjeman to Joan and that they had been the first to read the famous poem. In 1995 Joan described to Betjeman’s authorised biographer, Bevis Hillier, what really happened. “Michael Bonavia summoned me to his room. ‘I’ve got someone here who would like to meet you,’ he said.

Inside was John Betjeman, who went down on his knees. I just burst out laughing. My first impression was one of extreme humour. I thought anybody who got down on his knees to say ‘How d’ye do?’ to me must be mad. He asked Mr Bonavia if he could take me to lunch. ‘Certainly,’ he said.” In a Sunday Times interview of 1965 she told what happened next. “In the taxi on the way to the restaurant he put a copy of Horizon magazine into my hand and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve written a poem about you.’ I must say I was absolutely overwhelmed. It was such a marvellous break from the monotony of the war. It really was remarkable the way he imagined it all. Actually, all that about the subaltern, and the engagement, is sheer fantasy, but my life was very like the poem.” A Subaltern’s Love-song appeared in Horizon in February 1941. On January 20, 1945, Hunter Dunn married an MoI civil servant, H. Wycliffe Jackson, in St Mark’s Church, Farnborough, Hampshire.

Betjeman was invited but was unable to attend. In September that year he was making last-minute corrections to his slim book of poems, New Bats in Old Belfries, in which it was intended to include A Subaltern’s Love-song. Betjeman and his publishers, John Murray, suddenly realised with horror that the last line of the poem read “And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.” That had terrifying legal implications; but, characteristically, Hunter Dunn, by then Mrs Jackson, made no objection. One person who was slightly upset by the poem was Lady Mary Dunn, daughter of the 5th Earl of Roselyn. In the 1930s Betjeman had proposed to her and been gently turned down; so she thought the love poem referred to her and was crestfallen when she learnt there was a real Joan Hunter Dunn. Joan Hunter Dunn was born in 1915, the daughter of Dr George Hunter Dunn, a Farnborough GP. As Betjeman recorded in his letter to Gilliat, she was sent to Queen Anne’s, Caversham. She became a boarder there at the age of 6.

Her father said: “I’m sending you there to look after your elder sister” (who was already a pupil). After her marriage she went abroad with her husband, who ran an upcountry radio station in Singapore. Three sons were born between 1948 and 1955. By 1962 the boys were at school in England, but the Jackson parents were now in Rhodesia. In that year her husband died of a heart attack. She had to leave Rhodesia, because she could not get access to her money there; in any case, she wanted to be back in England, near her boys. She was very upset that she had to leave her husband’s ashes. Four years later she was reunited with them, and from that point she “began to pull through”. Betjeman, who had kept in touch with her, was a sympathetic adviser to her at this time. Her main concern, on returning to England, was her sons’ education. She tapped all kinds of trust funds, among them one of the Raja of Sarawak, to pay for them to go to Winchester College, where one of the housemasters, A. H.

(“Podge”) Brodhurst, was an old family friend. She also made her boys pick beans in a field near her home in Headley, near Bordon in Hampshire, to ensure that they learnt to make their own financial contribution. She was greatly involved with her local church and to the end of her life she retained a perfect memory for the words and tunes of the Sunday hymns. In 1996 she suffered a serious burglary while she was out at lunch with a friend. The thieves stole, among much else, a bureau containing all her many letters from Betjeman. They probably threw away the yellowing letters, which were infinitely more valuable than the bureau. When A Subaltern’s Love-song appeared in New Bats in Old Belfries, it received the kind of review described as “mixed” from G. W. Stonier in the New Statesman. He quoted from the Joan Hunter Dunn poem, commenting: “There is the flavour of keepsake and cartoon, mocking, sentimental, wittily abandoned, giving to the life on our doorstep (or verandah) the charm of a mezzotint.

The tennis girl has, of course, other admirers outside the fold: notably Mr Osbert Lancaster and Miss Joyce Grenfell. “One can imagine the first adding daisies to dropshots, the second retailing to us every monosyllable let fall during those rallies. But of all admirers Mr Betjeman is both the most passionate and the most equivocal. Does he, or doesn’t he care? A very difficult question to answer. Anyway, he must have her in his album, that album in which love-sets and sunsets, chancels and ghosts and Cricklewood laundries, the morning bathe and the evening bell, nestle so surprisingly.” One feels that Stonier was a latent Betjeman fan; but his direct question can be answered. There is no doubt John Betjeman had a great “crush” on Joan Hunter Dunn; but she stated that he never made anything approaching a pass at her. Not only was she captivatingly pretty when young — there was something of Hogarth’s Shrimp Girl in her open, riant face — but she was also the embodiment of the England Betjeman loved and celebrated (and sometimes satirised). She is survived by her three sons.

Joan Jackson, nee Hunter Dunn, the muse of John Betjeman, was born on October 13, 1915. She died on April 11, 2008, aged 92. John Betjeman’s unrequited love dies at 92 She was one of the heroines of modern English poetry. Anyone who has ever heard of John Betjeman has also heard of Joan Hunter Dunn, paragon of all that was desirable about English suburban girls in those distant days of wartime, warm beer and innate sexual reserve. She really existed, and her death at 92 in a London nursing home last Friday closes the last chapter in an intriguing story of unrequited love. Betjeman first set eyes on her by chance in the corridor of the wartime Ministry of Information 70 years ago, when he was in the films division and she was on the catering staff. In fiction she became his fantasy, furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun, a clean-limbed tennis player with whom he sat in the Hillman in the car park after the dance until twenty to one.

The man who would become Poet Laureate wrote his paean in 1941 to a very English beauty in an age when propriety between the sexes served only to heighten imagination and fuel desire. Taking her to the golf club dance resulted in their engagement; that’s how it was in the 1940s. In real life they knew each other but not, apparently, as well as that. Joan, daughter of a GP from Farnborough, Hampshire, married a civil servant named Jackson and went to live abroad. When he died and she returned with her three sons to England in 1963, Betjeman made contact with her again. But their relationship appears to have been entirely platonic. Edward Jackson, her youngest son, said yesterday: “When we came back to England her overriding concern was to make sure that we boys were all right. She dismissed talk of an affair, always saying, ‘I was in love with Dad.’ “She never said she was proud to be his muse, but she did not consider it a joke.

She just said that John was a nice man.” Betjeman was invited to Joan’s wedding in 1945, and was an occasional lunch guest at the couple’s house before they emigrated to Singapore, and subsequently to Rhodesia. Bevis Hillier, Betjeman’s biographer and president of the Betjeman Society, interviewed Joan Jackson several years ago. “She told me that John Betjeman had been so kind to her when her husband died, taking her sons out to lunch and helping to find schools for them in England. She said he was such a gentleman, and there was never any question of him making a pass at her.” Betjeman was regarded as a shrewd judge of women, knowing which to make advances to and which not. Despite his gently lustful thoughts towards her in 1941, the real Joan Hunter Dunn fell into the latter category. During her life she tended to ignore the fuss about the poem. Yet in an interview she gave in 1965 she spoke glowingly of the moment that Betjeman told her he had written a poem about her, and how the knowledge brightened the drab wartime days.

She was an unnoticed figure at Sir John’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey in 1984. The tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice live on in a poem of enduring appeal. Joan Jackson - Telegraph Joan Jackson Joan Hunter Dunn: her life was 'very like a poem' 12:01AM BST 17 Apr 2008 Joan Jackson, who died on April 11 aged 92, was in her earlier life Joan Hunter Dunn, the inspiration for Sir John Betjeman's most popular poem, A Subaltern's Love-song, which hymned her red-headed beauty as "furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun". Betjeman first saw her in a canteen while walking down a corridor at the Ministry of Information at London University in December 1940. "Gosh, look!" he remarked to a friend.

"I bet she's a doctor's daughter from Aldershot." He discovered that she was, indeed, a doctor's daughter - though from nearby Farnborough, Hampshire - and conjured up his reverie about them being affianced and playing tennis together: What strenuous singles we played after tea, We in the tournament - you against me! Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy, The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy, With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won, I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn. Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you've won, The warm-handled racket is back in its press, But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less. After composing the 44-line poem Betjeman wrote seeking her permission to publish. On being introduced to her early the following year he went down on his knees - at which she burst out laughing. "My first impression was one of extreme humour," she later recalled.

"I thought anybody who got down on his knees to say 'How d'ye do' to me must be mad." Related Articles Sir John Betjeman's muse dies at 92 17 Apr 2008 Betjeman then invited her to lunch, handing her a copy of the magazine Horizon as they took a taxi to the restaurant. "I hope you don't mind," he said, "but I've written a poem about you." "I must say I was absolutely overwhelmed," Joan Jackson continued. "It was such a marvellous break from the monotony of the war. It really was remarkable the way he imagined it all. Actually, all that about the subaltern and the engagement is sheer fantasy, but my life was very like the poem." She was born Joan Hunter Dunn on October 13 1915, not only the daughter of a doctor but also the niece of two colonial bishops. Her mother died when Joan was two, and she was sent to Queen Anne's, Caversham, aged six. "I'm sorry, darling," her father told her.

"You have to go because your elder sister needs looking after." A spirited girl who was once stood in a corner for putting butter on one side of her bread and jam on the other, Joan played much tennis, captained the lacrosse team and was head girl. After obtaining a diploma at King's College of Household and Social Science, she joined the catering department at London University before the war. On applying for the job of assistant to the manager she arrived at the interview in a hat with a short eye-veil, and seemed amused when asked what she knew about institutional catering. "Nothing at all," she replied, and laughed. The job was hers. Although she and Betjeman met several times, they did not know one another well at the ministry. Yet as the subject of his most evocative poem, Joan Hunter Dunn continued to exercise a powerful influence over his imagination. Betjeman, who was conscious of seeming a pale green intellectual as a member of the ministry's film unit, said that her white coat and clean, clinical, motherly look "excited hundreds of us". "She had bright cheeks, clear sun-burned skin, darting brown eyes, a shock of hair and happy smile.

Her figure was a dream of strength and beauty. When the bombs fell, she bound up our wounds unperturbed. When they didn't fall, which was most of the time, she raised our morales without ever lowering our morals." It was noted that, when Betjeman was transferred elsewhere, Miss Hunter Dunn stopped smiling at his colleagues. He was unable to attend her wedding to Harold Wycliffe Jackson, a Ministry of Information civil servant, in January 1945. But in September Betjeman hastily got in touch to ask if she minded if the poem was published in his collection, New Bats in Old Belfries. She assured him there was no objection, but asked for her name to be taken out of capital letters in the last line. Some three years later Betjeman described her in a letter to the illustrator Roland Pym as "a lovely sturdy creole type girl with curly hair and strong arms and strapping frame and jolly smile and soft laughing voice, a girl to lean against for life and die adoring". After the war the Jacksons went to Malaya, where Harold (or "Jackie", as he was known) ran a radio station.

When they then moved to Singapore, Joan happily ate chicken sandwiches at Raffles Hotel 20 minutes before the youngest of their three sons was born. On coming home in 1957 Jackie joined ITV and then accepted an invitation from the BBC to launch the television service in Rhodesia, where he suddenly died of a coronary in 1963. When Joan Jackson returned to their house at Headley, in Hampshire, two of the boys were at prep school and one was at Winchester. It was not an easy life. She obtained help with the boys' education from Winchester and also from the White Raja of Sarawak. Betjeman wrote to her, and started coming down for lunch, taking the family for walks afterwards. They enjoyed picking beans and strawberries. One great event for the family was when the Earl of Snowdon came down to take a photograph for The Sunday Times, and leaned out of an upstairs window to photograph them having tea off the silver service on the lawn. Since Betjeman was liberal with his affections, speculation about the relationship with his muse persisted over the years, not least when she attended Betjeman's memorial service in 1984.

But Joan Jackson took little notice, neither saying she was proud to have become his muse nor considering it a joke. She told one of her sons that Betjeman was married, and added: "I was in love with Dad." Rhymes of passion: Betjeman's women | The Independent This Britain Rhymes of passion: Betjeman's women Joan Hunter Dunn, who has died aged 92, inspired one of the poet's most rapturous works. But its suggestion of an inhibited man was far from the truth. By John Walsh Thursday 17 April 2008 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online "The sort of girl I like to see," wrote John Betjeman in The Olympic Girl, "Smiles down from her great height at me./ She stands in strong, athletic pose/ And wrinkles her retroussé nose./ Is it distaste that makes her frown, So furious and freckled, down/ On an unhealthy worm like me?/ Or am I what she likes to see?" The note of furtive, self-abasing English lust is entirely characteristic of his early poetry – though not necessarily of Betjeman himself.

He, from first to last, adored women and contrived to sleep with lots of them. He ran a wife and mistress simultaneously for 33 years. But, in his poetry, things are rather less rosy. 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. The Betjeman lecher often sounds like a voyeur or a stalker, peeping and lurking and plotting to seize his chance. He is a shocking fetishist. In The Olympic Girl he wishes he were "her racket press'd/ With hard excitement to her breast." In a late poem, "Senex", he is overcome with inconvenient desire as he ponders an array of girls' bicycle saddles.

In Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden he eulogises: "Pam, you great big mountainous sports girl," and faints with longing for her sturdily masculine allure: "See the strength of her arm, as firm and hairy as Hendren's;/ See the size of her thighs, the pout of her lips as, cross,/ And full of pent-up strength, she swipes at the rhododendrons,/ Lucky the rhododendrons." Lucky indeed. At various times, in different volumes, she reappears as Myfanwy, a strapping, super-confident "chum to the weak", or Bonzo Trouncer, another Aphrodite in shorts, or Laurelie Williams, Queen of the Hunt Ball. But the last word in Betjeman Girl was Joan Hunter Dunn, who has died aged 92. The poem he wrote for her, A Subaltern's Love Song, a paean of rapture over a posh tennis partner, is full of the now-familiar Bertie Wooster-ish hopelessness of the nervous lover, but full too of the quivering social dread of the outsider.

He tries to mock the upper-class world that is second nature to Joan, even as he itemises its cars, and gardens, its verandah and summer house, in a dazed rapture. He worries about changing for dinner, and the "ominous, ominous dancing ahead". He is out of his depth socially, and drowning in love. Of his love for the girl "furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun," there can't, however, be much doubt. He employs a favourite erotic image, of the "warm-handled racket" parked snugly back in its press, and considers the blazer and shorts casually thrown on her bedroom floor. She is his perfect girl. And the ambiguities of the poem inspired by the real-life Ms Dunn show how much she got under Betjeman's skin. Betjeman's biographer, Bevis Hillier, is convinced that, though the poet had a huge "crush" on Ms Dunn, he never made a pass at her and they stayed platonic friends. They met in London during the Second World War, at the Ministry of Information where they both worked. He was in the films division, she in the catering department.

In December 1940, Betjeman was 34, married, and with his first child, Paul. But he engineered a meeting with the girl with red hair, in the office of a friend called Michael Bonavia. As Joan came through the door, Betjeman sank to one knee, and she burst out laughing. He asked Bonavia if he might take her to lunch, was given permission (she herself seems not to have been consulted) and, in the taxi to the restaurant, showed her a copy of Horizon magazine and said, "I hope you don't mind but I've written a poem about you." She was, she said, "Overwhelmed - actually, all that about the subaltern and the engagement is sheer fantasy, but my life was very like the poem." Her life was the object of Betjeman's love, quite as much as her burnish'd skin. He came from a comfortable middle-class background; his father was a successful furniture-maker of Dutch ancestry.

Bullied at school for having a German-sounding name when the First World War was raging, he fell in gratefully with the smart jeunesse dorée at Oxford in the 1920s (Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell et al) and, through them, found his way into the country-house-weekend set. There, floundering a little among the nobs, he compensated by romancing the ladies. He fell in love and proposed to many girls who bore surnames to make any social climber tremble, including Camilla Russell and Pam Mitford. In a 2001 BBC documentary, John Betjeman: the Last Laugh, one of his conquests, Wilhelmine Creswell, now Lady Harrod, painted an unflattering picture of Betjeman the party animal: "He was just a sort of joke we all knew, really. His hair was like last year's nest. And his teeth were covered in green slime." It didn't, however, stop him from proposing to Ms Creswell, nor she from accepting. But it got nowhere. "It was just a thing John did," the fiancée recalled later.

He liked girls and he liked the idea of being in love. So we got engaged, but it didn't mean anything." Things were more serious with Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode. They were married in 1933, moved to a farmhouse in Uffington on the Berkshire downs, where their son Paul was born in 1937 (a daughter, Candida, followed in Ireland in 1942). Within a year of tying the knot, Betjeman was having sex with the housemaid, and continued to have "crushes" and liaisons with many women throughout his long, happy but peculiar marriage. They were a violent pair. "John and I used to have physical rows," Penelope recalled in the BBC documentary. "We used to kick each other round the house. I remember once, it was frightfully funny, we were sort of pushing each other round the house, and Cyril and Jean Connolly were in the bath together. They hadn't locked the door, and we went in, kicked each other round the bathroom, with Cyril and Jean sitting in the bath, astounded.

Then we kicked each other out again." The rows with Penelope weren't always so frightfully funny. Sometimes they left him shaken and weeping – but generally he could find another lady friend, like his old pal Margie Geddes, to hug him until he stopped trembling. By all accounts he loved his wife but could not bear their quarrels. She became preoccupied with her own interests – horses, India, mountain-climbing, Catholicism – and gave him enough space to fall for other women. The great coup de foudre in his life was his meeting with Lady Elizabeth Cavendish in 1951. The daughter of the 10th Duke of Devonshire was, at 25, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman was 45, a journalist, reviewer and poet. They met at a dinner in Mayfair given by Lady Pamela Berry, the political hostess. Dinner was delayed when one of the guests failed to show up: it was Guy Burgess, and he failed to attend because he'd just defected to Moscow. Betjeman and Elizabeth did not speak to each other all evening, but a connection had been made.

They became friends, then lovers and, for 30 years, her mother's house in Edensor, on the Chatsworth estate, became their trysting-place and the poet's second home. He kept a flat in London, seldom inviting his wife up from the country to stay. Betjeman, who used to call his wife "Filth". enjoyed a lot of sex. "When John was with Elizabeth," wrote Hillier, with masterly tact, "she ministered to his comfort in a way that Penelope rarely did." Penelope knew about Elizabeth, but did not force the issue. Elizabeth told him she didn't want to break up the marriage, and tried to keep her distance, but failed. Betjeman told friends he felt torn apart because he loved both women, and could give up neither. If he gave up Elizabeth, he said, he knew he'd never again write anything of consequence. The poet's long affair with the duke's daughter remained an open secret among friends until 1973 when – now knighted and made Poet Laureate – Betjeman moved (with Lady Penelope) to a house in Chelsea five doors away from Elizabeth.

The press came a-calling and the ménage a trois was suddenly all over the media. The end of Betjeman's life was a rather inelegant battle between wife and mistress to decide who should be his principal carer. When he was bedridden, they worked alternate shifts at the Chelsea home. He contracted Parkinson's disease and suffered a stroke in 1981 while visiting Elizabeth. In April 1984, he spent Easter with her at Chatsworth and died a month later in Cornwall, with her by his side. He was buried there, and his long-suffering wife had to rush down from London for the funeral. It was considered all jolly awkward for those attending. Shortly before he died,, Betjeman was asked if he had any regrets about his life. "Yes I have," he said. "Not enough sex." From the tennis-playing Amazons of his twenties to the elderly, scrapping handmaidens of his dotage, women – their mystery, their strength, their powerful arms and soft flesh, their confidence and their ministrations of comfort – took up the lion's share of his life's attention. It he didn't have enough sex, it certainly wasn't for lack of trying.

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Question: In a John Betjeman poem, what lady was... "burnished by the Aldershot sun" ?
Answer: JOAN HUNTER DUNN