Candida Lycett Green

Candida Rose Betjeman was born on 22 September 1942 in Dublin where her father, John Betjeman was wartime press attaché at the British Embassy.[3] Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, a friend of her father, celebrated her birth with a poem "Candida". Her mother, the Hon. Penelope Valentine Hester Betjeman (née Chetwode; 1910–1986), was the daughter of Field-Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode (later Lord Chetwode) (1869–1950). Her paternal grandparents, Ernest and Mabel ("Bess") Betjemann (her father dispensed with the second "n"), died in 1934 and 1951 respectively.

In 2007, Lycett Green attributed to Ernest Betjemann, said by her father to be a hater of verse, a poem found in the log book of a yacht he had sailed on the Norfolk Broads in the 1920s.[4] She regretted not asking her father more about his parents: "but it's not vital when you're young".[5] An elder brother, Paul, had been born in 1937. The Betjemans returned to England in 1943, moving from Uffington to Farnborough in 1945, and then to Wantage in 1951.

On 25 May 1963, Candida Betjeman married Rupert Lycett Green, a rising figure in the tailoring business, whose shop Blades opened first in Dover Street, London and later in Savile Row. His particular kind of entrepreneurship was said at the time to "typify the revolt of the upper class young". The couple had five children, including Imogen who married Augustus Christie, director of the Glyndebourne Opera.[10] The couple became friends of the then Prince of Wales.[11]

During the "swinging" sixties, the Lycett Green family was associated with members of London’s "in" crowd, Blades being frequented by many names of the period, including the Beatles, actor Terence Stamp and John Aspinall, founder of the Clermont Club. In 1967, she wrote a poem called the Knightsbridge Ballade that was evocative of the period. In this, the subject (aged 18 as opposed to the poet’s 25) declared that she was "frightfully keen" on Terence Stamp and wished she had a bigger bust: "Though Mummy says it's frightfully smart/And any more would beckon lust".[12]

Lycett Green edited two volumes of her father’s letters (1994–95) and an anthology of his prose, Coming Home (1997). In the second volume of letters, she described herself as a hoarder of correspondence (unlike her brother) and referred to her late father (with her husband) as her best friend. Lycett Green contributed to magazines such as Queen (from which she was dismissed because of her association with Private Eye),[13] Vogue, Country Life and The Oldie.

Lycett Green shared some of her father's campaigning zeal, as regards, in particular, the perceived erosion of England's fabric. They both found an outlet in the "Nooks and Corners" column in Private Eye (to which Betjeman was the first contributor in 1971) and she later contributed to "Unwrecked England" in The Oldie (founded by Ingrams).

In an article in Country Life in 2003, Lycett Green identified several aspects of English life which had become "universal fixtures in our mind's eye": cricket on the village green, Trooping the Colour, bands playing in a town park, the Women's Institute singing Jerusalem, pearly kings and queens at the Lord Mayor's Show and discussions about the weather over a pint of beer in the local pub.[14] In her autobiography, Over the Hills and Far Away, she writes about her experiences with cancer.[15]

Statue of John Betjeman at St Pancras railway station

In 2006, Lycett Green organised various events to mark the centenary of her father’s birth. These included a gala at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London and a jamboree in Cornwall for eight thousand people.

There were excursions by train from London to Bristol and, through "Metro-land", to Quainton Road; Lycett Green unveiled a commemorative plaque at Marylebone station to mark Betjeman's fond association with the railways. Presenting the Mayor of Slough, with a book of her father's poems,[16] she made clear that he had regretted his mildly notorious poem of 1937:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn't fit for humans now.

Lycett Green wrote about the organisation of these various events, noting the intricacies of the rail schedules ("How long will the train stop at Ruislip so that [the poem] Middlesex can be read over the tannoy?")[17] and being followed around Cornwall by a television crew ("I have had a microphone down my bra for almost two days now").[18]

In 2007, Lycett Green was a member of "an alarmingly grown up" panel of judges to select a sculptor (Martin Jennings) for the Statue of John Betjeman that was erected on the concourse of the redeveloped London St Pancras station.[19]

Candida Lycett Green died at the age of 71 on 19 August 2014 from pancreatic cancer. She was survived by her husband Rupert and their five children, Lucy, Imogen, Endellion, David and John.[20]