Betjeman, John

(1906 -1984)

Information

We know from his letters that Betjeman visited Margate in 1929 while staying at nearby Birchington with his convalescing employer. This visit alone would have been sufficient to acquaint him with Margate’s pre-war gaiety, the innocent pleasures it offered as a family seaside resort as well as the more upmarket pretensions of its eastern extension, Cliftonville. There were probably subsequent visits, one of which must have taken place in the early years of the second World War, as recorded in the poem ‘Margate, 1940’. The evocation of the resort’s former glories poignantly conjures up, by contrast, the neglected, bomb-battered desolation it had become.

Quotations

From out the Queen’s Highcliffe for weeks at a stretch
I watched how the mower evaded the vetch,
So that over the putting-course rashes were seen
Of pink and of yellow among the burnt green.

How lightly municipal, meltingly tarr’d,
Were the walks through the Laws by the Queen’s
Promenade
As soft over Cliftonville languished the light
Down Harold Road, Norfolk Road, into the night.

Oh! Then what a pleasure to see the ground floor
With tables for two laid as tables for four,
And bottles of sauce and Kia-Ora and squash
Awaiting their owners who’d gone up to wash -

Who had gone up to wash the ozone from their skins
The sand from their legs and the rock from their chins,
To prepare for an evening of dancing and cards
And forget the sea-breeze on the dry promenades.

Beside the Queen’s Highcliffe now rank grows the
vetch,
Now dark is the terrace, a storm-battered stretch;
And I think, as the fairy-lit sights I recall,
It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all.