John Betjeman was born in 1906 and educated at Marlborough and Oxford. His wife, a daughter of Field-Marshal Lord Chetwode, was herself writer of distinction. His long autobiographical poem, Summoned by Bells, gives the background to his childhood in Highgate, North London. It was the subject of a highly successful BBC television film, one of several for which Sir John wrote the scripts and in which he appeared as narrator. A founder of the British Victorian Society, he was a well-known broadcaster and leading authority on architecture, particularly Victorian church architecture, and topographical subjects. However, it was as a poet that he was best known and loved. He received many of the major British literary prizes: the Royal Society of Literature Award under the Heinemann Bequest; the annual Foyle Poetry Prize (twice); and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. In 1960 he was given the CBE; in 1969 the Queen knighted him; and in 1972 he was appointed Poet Laureate. He died in 1984.
John Guest began publishing in 1938 with a job in Collins as proof-reader. In 1949, after service overseas in the City of London Yeomanry, he joined Longmans as Literary Advisor. In the same year Longmans published his war journal, Broken Images, which won the Royal Society of Literature Award under the Heinemann Bequest.
