Trains and Buttered Toast [Hardcover]

John Betjeman (Author), Stephen Games (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2006

Eccentric, sentimental and homespun, John Betjeman's passions were mostly self-taught. He saw his country being devastated by war and progress and he waged a private war to save it. His only weapons were words—the poetry for which he is best known and, even more influential, the radio talks that first made him a phenomenon. From fervent pleas for provincial preservation to humoresques on eccentric vicars and his own personal demons, Betjeman's talks combined wit, nostalgia and criticism in a way that touched the soul of his listeners from the 1930s to the 1950s. Now, collected in book form for the first time, his broadcasts represent one of the most compelling archives of 20th-century broadcasting.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Try Before You Buy: the two-minute sampler' -- Metro 20060607 'A century of John Betjeman' -- Waterstone's Books Quarterly 20060501 'Stand by for a real treat.' -- Daily Mail, Val Hennessy, Critic's Choice 20060609 'Games! has produced a volume which no Betjeman maniac will be without.' -- -- Evening Standard: A.N. Wilson 20060619 'What a joy' -- Scottish Sunday Herald/Magazine 20060605 'Beautifully produced! Betjeman was evidently a comic writer of the highest class' -- Guardian 20060708 'Excellent' -- Spectator 20060708 'Informative and entertaining' -- Scotsman 20060601 'In Trains and Buttered Toast Betjeman's voice is gloriously new again' -- The Times/Books 20060819 'Stephen Games has made a useful, entertaining selection of Betjeman's radio talks' -- Sunday Telegraph/Seven 20060827

About the Author

John Betjeman was born in 1906 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. His gave his first radio talk in 1932; future appearances made him into a national celebrity. He was knighted in 1969 and became poet laureate in 1972. He died in 1984. Stephen Games writes about in architecture and language. He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, made documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and was the first arts correspondent on The Independent. His work for the Guardian brought him a British Press Award. He has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and deputy editor of the RIBA Journal. In 2002, he edited the radio talks of Nikolaus Pevsner, whose biography he is writing.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: John Murray (June 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0719561264
• ISBN-13: 978-0719561269
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,771,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A nostalgic journey back to the golden days of travel and broadcasting, July 3, 2006

By 

Michael A. Roodyn - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trains and Buttered Toast (Hardcover)

This is a most enjoyable read for anyone interested in John Betjeman or indeed anyone longing back to the times when trains had windows that would open! Stephen Games has skilfully edited
JB's talks broadcasted by the BBC during a period of 40+ years. The range of topics, clearly indicating the diversity of the broadcaster, poet and architectual buff ( self taught), range from the wit of Wordsworth to a lament of modernism encroaching on metropolitan and rural life with many interesting talks covered in between. Anyone interest in " how we lived then" should buy this book now.

Michael Roodyn

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pleasant tour of old England, July 8, 2011

By 

John the Reader "John" (Orlando, FL) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Trains and Buttered Toast (Paperback)

The BBC (British Broadcasting Service) felt that it had, under its Chairman Lord Reith, a moral obligation to educate and elevate the taste of `the masses' - their listeners. In 1938 John Betjeman gave his first radio talk, on the architecture and renovation of Waterloo Bridge in London, and launched a broadcasting career that ran until the 1960s. His areas of interest were architecture and the `trashing' of the English countryside, religion and, of course, books, authors, literature and poetry. One of his last radio talks , in 1959, was a celebratory reading of his own - by then - immensely popular poetry. He became, according to The Times, the `first Teddy Bear of the nation', and that nation erected a charming statue of him, holding onto his hat whilst peering about in perpetual enthusiastic curiosity in the now renovated St. Pancras Railway station, whose architectural façade he was instrumental in preserving from demolition.

His popularity was established by these hundreds of radio talks and his participating in "The Brains Trust" a quiz show in the common knowledge format, where this self-proclaimed "semi-intellectual" was able to show off a flexible extemporizing intelligence which appealed to those broad `masses' of the BBC listeners. One of his producers, the later infamous spy Guy Burgess asked him to give a series of interviews and talks on the `British Eccentric', explaining that he thought to himself `.... who more suitable to than you to talk about one of the others?'

John was not a handsome man, Wilhelmine Cresswell, once briefly his fiancé, recalled in an interview later " ...his hair was like last year's birds nest and his teeth were covered in slime'! Despite this, he made an equally successful migration to the medium of television and became one of the most popular British Poets Laureates.

Betjeman published over a hundred books of Victorian architectural comment, hymns, country guides and - of course - dozens of his poetry. His keystone work "Summoned by bells"was autobiographical and was made into a film. It is from that work that the title of this book was taken;
Safe in a world of trains and buttered toast
Where things inanimate could feel and think.

The pieces in the book are from his radio talks and cover a broad spectrum of his thoughts and interests - I would have liked more of his train-travel narratives or period pieces like those I enjoy from J.B. Priestley or Eeh Bah Goom Priestley as Betjeman described him with that wicked sense of humour he sometimes flashed.

However; Betjeman's poetry, as distinct from the marvelously evocative town and country descriptive pieces in this book does not engage me very much, but, with that humour again, he writes "I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think. It jingles for the slaves of their own passions".