Sunday 8 November 2009

Betjeman and Bristol

Letters from John Betjeman to Bryan Little, rescued from a skip a few years ago. Click on images to see large.






7 comments:

  1. Did you find them in a skip? he writes exactly as I would have expected him to.

    I love getting a real glipse of the past in snippets like these. we are now in contact with 'our chateau' owner - and there is a mystery lady!

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  2. But what was Bryan Little doing in a skip?

    Hard night on the tiles?

    love
    chrissie
    xxxxxxx

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  3. Best phrase "measly 10 guineas"...

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  4. Well, JB addressed the first letter to 'my dear boy' which was possibly what he called everyone he had affection for, but Mr Little could have been pretty young. Ten guineas (£10 10s, or £10.50) in 1954 would have been worth quite a bit. I believe you could then have bought a week's groceries for ten bob (£0.50). I can't speak from actual experience of managing a household budget - I was only aged 2.

    So Betjeman lived in Wantage? News to me.

    Lucy

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  5. PS - I'm also pretty certain there were no skips in 1954 except the ones little girls did in the playground!

    Lucy

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  6. I did find them in a skip, Anji; along with a large pile of other docs, photos and watercolours. It all seemed such a dreadfully wasteful thing to have done, getting rid of them that way.

    Quite, Chrissie!

    I suspect that Mr Betjeman was a bit of an adept at playing the amiable chap, Liz. It sounds almost self-parodying...

    I just looked it up, Lucy...

    60. Mr. Carr

    asked the Minister of Labour the increase since April, 1953, in the average weekly earnings of manual workers.

    § Sir W. Monckton

    The average weekly earnings in the last pay week of October, 1953, of all manual workers in the industries covered by my Department's six-monthly inquiry are provisionally estimated at 160s. Id.


    ...so the ten guineas are over two quid more than an average weekly wage, which ain't that bad.

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  7. These are fabulous, Dru, though the correspondence in the next post is more fun, perhaps. What else was in the skip, I wonder? Bryan Little wrote probably the best history of Bristol - a really fine historian. I love JB asking him casually if he knows who could 'do Yorks'...

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