Lot 1524 , Betjeman, Sir John (1906-1984), poet laureate, writer and broadcaster; three letters to Peter Winckworth

° Betjeman, Sir John (1906-1984), poet laureate, writer and broadcaster; three letters to Peter Winckworth i. The Mead, Wantage; received 9 April 1954; ‘I am delighted to have the two pamphlets, but I cannot take up the Middle Class one for not being able to put down the Faculty one [A Verification of the Faculty Jurisdiction (1953)]. … I see in my mind’s eye anxious incumbents, the frightened churchwardens, the angry moustached Protestants. What a brute and a fool Lord Penzance was’. Asked [Walter] Taplin editor of the Spectator whether he wanted an article on Easter in Madrid from you. He regretfully declined. The Easter issue is already planned and most of it in type. I am so much in disgrace at Time and Tide now that I have no influence there. … Wasn’t the Honor Tracy case fun?’

ii. 43 Cloth Fair, London EC1, 16 October 1957; thanks for ‘a thoroughly enjoyable evening’, with a commentary on the wines – ‘The idea of a little champagne at the beginning was cunning and good’

iii. The Athenaeum, 14 March 1962; Thanks for letting us have the Mercers’ hall for the Hawksworth meeting; ‘I am sorry Ian Nairn was so embarrassingly emotional in his speech about Hawksmoor. Not the right kind of thing, I felt, for the City … the excellent hospitality of the Mercers must have enabled them to recover from the speech’

In 1937 Betjeman became a devoted member of the Church of England, speaking of it as ‘the only salvation against progress and Fascists on the one side and Marxists of Bloomsbury on the other’ (Betjeman: Letters, 1.171). Betjeman and Peter Winckworth had many things in common – poetry, Anglo-Catholicism, a love of churches, good food and wine – but it is not known which if any of these brought them together. Winckworth’s publication on Faculty jurisdiction – the process by which the Church of England regulates the maintenance and improvement of church buildings – would have been of great importance to Betjeman, whose devotion to the church lay not only in his open admiration for its buildings, its liturgy, and its worshippers, but for its faith.

In 1874 James Plaisted Wilde, Baron Penzance (1816–1899) succeeded to the offices of dean of the arches court of Canterbury, master of the faculties, and in 1875 official principal of the chancery court of York. The bishops discouraged recourse to his court, while the laity generally doubted the morality or practical sense of prosecuting ritualists and so converting them into martyrs.

In April 1954 Honor Lilbush Wingfield Tracy (1913-1989), journalist and author, had won considerable damages from The Sunday Times, which had published her account of a Canon O’Connell’s attempt to raise funds for a parish house in Doneraile, Co. Cork. O’Connell took exception and the Sunday Times printed an apology, paying £750 to charity. Tracy in turn sued the Sunday Times for damaging her professional integrity by acting without her permission.
Ian Douglas Nairn (1930-1983), architectural writer, served in the RAF until 1953, when he resigned his commission and determined to write about architecture. Like Betjeman, he wrote for the Architectural Review, and in 1962 was the first person to be invited by Nikolaus Pevsner to collaborate on The Buildings of England, producing a volume on Surrey and half of the account of Sussex. He was a trenchant critic of both architects and the planning bureaucracy, whom he considered responsible for ruining the towns and countryside of England. His long article in The Observer (13 February 1966), entitled ‘Stop the architects now’, marked a significant step in the growing challenge to the urban policies of the Modern Movement in architecture which resulted in a change in direction the following decade. Nairn's much vaunted affection for public houses combined with his connoisseurship of beer soon proved to be his nemesis, and he only published some short travel guides for the Sunday Times before collapsing into inarticulate melancholia. Nairn described himself as ‘a person who drinks a lot and can’t bear either pretensions or possessiveness’ (Nairn’s Paris, 13). ‘Difficult and intolerant he may have been’, Christopher Hurst concluded, ‘but his heart was warm. This fact shaped his whole world view—his anger was compassionate, on behalf of people and against the impersonal’ (ArchR). During his short, furious, productive career, Ian Nairn had a more beneficial effect on the face of Britain than any other architectural writer of his generation. (ODNB)

John Peter Winckworth was born on 2 November 1908, youngest of the three children of Lewis Herbert Winckworth (1864-1940), solicitor, and Ruthella Theodora, elder daughter of the Revd Herbert Clementi-Smith of Holland Park Avenue, Kensington, chaplain to the Mercers’ Company. In September 1922 he entered Grants House at Westminster School (also attended by his father and three uncles) and left in July 1927.
Admitted as a solicitor in October 1932, he practised in London, in 1947 with Messrs Trollope and Winckworth of 21 Old Queen Street, Westminster. Winckworth was one of the originators of the Seven Years’ Association, established at the 1933 Anglo-Catholic Congress to form ‘a youth auxiliary to the Church Union’. In 1948 he became Registrar of the Diocese of Oxford, and subsequently served as a Church Commissioner, Master of the Worshipful Company of Mercers 1961-2, a governor of St Paul’s School and Secretary of the Church Union.
He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in August 1940, and was transferred to the Training Progress Section of the Air Ministry in 1941.
Winckworth was author of Does Religion Cause War? (1934); Sensible Christians (1935); The Way of War: Verses (1939); A Simple Approach to Canon Law (1951); The Seal of the Confessional and the Law of Evidence (1952); A Verification of the Faculty Jurisdiction (1953); and A History of the Gresham Lectures (1966).
He died at Eastbourne on 28 April 1986, and a requiem mass was held at St Matthew’s Church Westminster on 23 June.
His portrait, by Richard Aylmer Frost (1905-1995), a Westminster contemporary, 1924, is among the collections of the school (GB 2014 WS-03-PIC-002/29): https://collections.westminster.org.uk/index.php/gb-2014-ws-03-pic-002-29
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