Poetry Review – John Betjeman – An Incident In The Early Life Of Ebenezer Jones

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Betjeman wrote many humorous poems but this one is a shocking and terribly sad story, all the more so for being horribly true. It may be the single-cruellest event I have ever read about. The 1940 poem is preceded by an account of the terrible event written in 1879 by Sumner Jones, brother of Ebenezer Jones (himself a poet later in his life) relating to their childhood. The brothers were attending a London boarding school where Ebenezer was concealing his new friend, a Lurcher dog that had wandered into the upstairs school room where the teacher was one Rev. John Bickerdike who already had a reputation for extreme animal cruelty. Discovering the dog, the teacher ignored the howls of protest from Ebenezer and casually threw the dog from the classroom window to its death on the ground below in front of the entire class including Ebenezer who was then left unattended as he sobbed uncontrollably at his desk for the rest of the day. Betjeman’s poem examines the event through the eyes of a passing milkman who hears the boy’s cries. The milkman is then distressed by an unknown sound, which Betjeman identifies as the boy’s heart breaking. The poem is extremely powerful in its own right but somewhat overshadowed by the brutal description of the events in account that inspires and accompanies it. I can only hope Bickerdike himself came to some wretched end. Arthur Chappell