In 1956 John Betjeman’s poem ‘Lord Barton-Bendish’ was published in The Saturday Book, an annual anthology of words and pictures edited by John Hadfield. It told the tale of the eerie mausoleum of Lord Barton-Bendish – but neither baron nor burial place was real.

In December 1955 Betjeman (1906-1984) visited the ‘very pretty village’ of Letheringsett, in Norfolk. He met up with friends who included the Reverend C.L.S. Linnell, who was both vicar and historian of the parish church, and Wilhelmine ‘Billa’ Harrod, the writer and architectural conservationist. Linnell and Harrod were working together to compile the Shell Guide to Norfolk (Betjeman was the series editor).

At nearby Letheringsett Hall lived the 3rd Baron Cozens-Hardy (1873-1956) who according to the impertinent Betjeman was ‘in his dotage’ and part of a ‘very pompous’ family. In the village church Betjeman saw the monument to Cozens-Hardy’s father, Herbert Hardy Cozens-Hardy (1838-1920), Master of the Rolls, and 1st Baron Cozens-Hardy and it captured his imagination.

Betjeman invented a mausoleum in which Lord Cozens-Hardy might have spent his eternal rest – he had spotted a hilltop copse of trees in which he thought such a structure might stand. On his way home from Norfolk, on a ‘very cold train’, he composed a poem about the imaginary tomb, which begins:

Oh Lord Cozens-Hardy!
Your mausoleum is cold;
The dry brown grass is brittle
And frozen hard the mould.

Betjeman sent the poem to Billa, with his thanks for her hospitality. His Norfolk friends soon heard about the composition and the Revd Linnell was agog, writing to Betjeman ‘Oh, please, please let me see the verse’.

Betjeman submitted the poem to John Hadfield, editor of The Saturday Book. Hadfield liked the poem, and wanted to publish, but was understandably nervous about using the name Lord Cozens-Hardy. Betjeman consulted the vicar: was the poem libellous, would it cause grave offence to the family? The vicar’s response is not known to survive, but was presumably in the affirmative, so the poem appeared in The Saturday Book under the title ‘Lord Barton-Bendish’, with artist John Piper imagining how the mausoleum might have looked. There does not seem to be a record of why Barton Bendish was the chosen alternative: it is the name of a Norfolk village, nowhere near Letheringsett, and was presumably picked for its scansion and pleasing alliteration.

But Betjeman didn’t try very hard to disguise who the poem was about, and Letheringsett remained the setting. In what was a spectacular piece of mistiming, The Saturday Book was published in September 1956 and the 3rd Baron Cozens-Hardy died only a month later.

The poem was published under its original title of ‘Lord Cozens-Hardy’ in John Betjeman’s Collected Poems in 1958. Lord Cozens-Hardy’s family wrote to the publishers to ask that they might print a reply to refute the ‘creepy’ atmosphere of Betjeman’s poem: the poet described the ‘curious mausoleum’ as a sinister place which the villagers avoided after dark in case they encountered the ghost of Lord Barton-Bendish. Joan Silvester Horne, a member of the Cozens-Hardy family, did however exhibit a wonderful sense of humour by writing a pastiche of Betjeman’s poem. It began:

Oh my dear John Betjeman
Your poem is quite wrong…

Billa Harrod had been Betjeman’s hostess during his stay in Norfolk, and she too had advised Betjeman to change the name ‘in case of hurt feelings’. But there is a happy ending: in correspondence with the Norfolk author Peter Tolhurst, she wrote that Betjeman was later forgiven, and the Cozens-Hardys became friends.

Letheringsett Hall is now a care home, and there is no longer the ‘butler and a footman’ that Betjeman’s poem imagined serving tea on the lawn. Instead, when the Folly Flâneuse visited a few years ago (as the Covid pandemic drew to a close), the garden was occupied by the residents enjoying a rather jolly al fresco performance of Abba’s greatest hits.

Some sources claim that a copy of the poem, signed by Betjeman, can be seen on the wall of the Kings Head in the village. The Flâneuse couldn’t find it, and enquiring as to its whereabouts she was met with a shrug and a ‘John who? Never heard of him’.

The Flâneuse is indebted to W.S. Peterson’s John Betjeman: A Bibliography (2006).

Your thoughts and comments are always welcome – scroll down to get in touch. Thank you for reading.

The Flâneuse is taking a short break and will be back in two weeks.

In the 18th century Bank House in Wisbech became home to the Peckover family, and as well as providing a family home it housed their banking business, which became a great success. Over time they acquired further land and extended the gardens behind the adjacent properties, and built garden buildings including this striking summerhouse. In 1943 the house and grounds were given to the National Trust by the last surviving descendant, and the property was renamed ‘Peckover House’ to commemorate the family.

An exact date for the summerhouse seems hard to find: the National Trust guidebook simply states that it was built in the 19th century. It was extant by 1877 when the summerhouse, and its associated garden layout, are clearly shown on the Ordnance Survey town plan of Wisbech published in that year.

The summerhouse was described in that entertaining annual compendium of words and pictures The Saturday Book. In the volume for 1959 Olive Cook (1912-2002) wrote an article on follies in which she wrote that the Palladian temples ‘with which our island is so thickly strewn’ were too rational to be classed as follies. At Peckover however she found the quirky garden pavilion to be ‘a true folly’. The article was accompanied by photos taken by her husband, Edwin Smith (1912-1971), many of whose works are now in the collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Cook wrote of the pavilion that its ‘outline suggests the Orient’, but it was the interior which particularly caught her attention: ‘inside there is a grotesquely rusticated pedestal table in stone, with a gigantic stone melon fastened to its top’ (no, it doesn’t look like a melon – keep reading). Cook wrote that the setting too was impressive, with palm-trees, incongruous in the ‘icy winds of the Fens’, making ‘a mad attempt to substantiate this dream of the East.’

Although the exotic planting around the arbour was lost in the 20th century, historic photographs of the garden can be found in the National Trust Collections. They can’t be reproduced here for copyright reasons, but this 1904 view of a Dracaena australis in flower at the family’s neighbouring property of Sibalds Holme gives an idea of the specimens the family collected.

Barbara Jones (1912-1978) doesn’t mention the summerhouse in either edition of her Follies and Grottoes, but she did sketch the building, possibly because she always intended a companion volume on ‘Garden Temples and Pavilions’. Sadly this was never realised as Jones died after a short illness in 1978, just as she had begun to focus on the project. Her drawing includes the grotesque stone table, and the mystery table-top object.

The gardener and writer Graham Stuart Thomas redesigned parts of the grounds for the National Trust and in 1979 he described the garden in his book Great Gardens of Britain. The piece is accompanied by his own pencil sketch of the ‘painted summerhouse’, and although the curved bench can be seen, there is no further furniture. The garden writer Arthur Hellyer admired the ‘amusing little pavilion’ in a Country Life article in 1980 and compared the green and white painted arbour to a ‘gay booth at a fair’, but again there is no mention of the table.

The ornate wooden bench around the interior of the shelter remains today, but the current team at Peckover were unaware that the table had ever existed, and sadly no records seem to survive to account for its disappearance. Peckover’s Senior Gardener, the nominatively-determined Louise Gardner, did however have some interesting thoughts on the so-called ‘melon’. She thinks it looks like a coco de mer, the world’s largest seed, something the Peckovers ‘may well have had an interest in considering their foreign seed collection and general interest in exotic plants’. But sadly it too has disappeared without trace.

The arbour is not listed, but the gardens at Peckover House are listed at grade II on the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England. The listing gives the briefest of mentions of the ‘wooden painted loggia’.

Wisbech is an incredibly handsome Georgian town, and well worth a visit. For more on Peckover House, which reopens in the spring, see https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/cambridgeshire/peckover-house-and-garden

Thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box if you would like to share any thoughts or ideas.