JOHN BETJEMAN’S carefully cultivated image of himself as a devil-may-care student who “failed in divinity” at Oxford has been exposed as a myth after the discovery of his examination results.

Far from being unfazed by his failure, as depicted in his biographical poem Summoned by Bells, he resat his compulsory divinity examination twice, passing on the third attempt.

The Poet Laureate fooled the academic community for 40 years by relating only part of his academic record in chapter nine of his poem, published in 1960. “Failed in Divinity! O, towers and spires!/ Could no one help? Was nothing to be done?/ No. No one. Nothing.”

He lamented that his dreams of “Reading old poets in the library,/ Attending chapel in an M.A. gown/ And sipping vintage port by candlelight” had been dashed.

But curators at the Bodleian Library stumbled across his examination results while researching an exhibition to mark the centenary of his birth today.

Judith Priestman, co-curator of the Betjeman exhibition at the library, said that she had argued with the archivist because she could not believe that Betjeman had passed. “That is how he presented himself. He needed myths to keep himself going. But he didn’t leave Oxford as a Byronic figure.

“He was a good boy really. He presented himself as this great outsider, but actually he did jump through the hoops. He wanted to be an aristocrat, and an aristocrat would have said ‘I’ve failed, so what?’ and swanned off. He came back like the good bourgeois that he was.”

At the time Summoned by Bells was published, Betjeman declared that “one is only interesting when young and struggling”. He recounted his failure to please his father, to learn carpentry or to pass his divinity exam. “I was a poet. That was why I failed.”

He failed his first divinity examination on November 25, 1927, but returned for a second attempt on March 2, 1928. His name finally appeared — misspelt as “Beljemann” — on the moderators’ “satisfied” list on July 18, 1928.

His humiliation at having to sit the test three times was compounded when he was told by C. S. Lewis, his tutor, that he would be better suited to “pass school”, which would allow him to claim a degree without honours.

Dr Priestman said that this fuelled his enmity for Lewis. “A pass degree is a degree designed for rugby players. He used his failure at divinity to nourish his hatred for C.S. Lewis.”

Betjeman wrote to Lewis to accuse him of sabotaging his job prospects, but Lewis replied unsympathetically: “You called the tune of irony from the first time you met me, and I have never heard you speak of a serious subject without a snigger.”

Betjeman held a grudge even after Lewis’s death in 1963. Some 13 years later, the poet wrote to a friend: “I still don’t miss C. S. Lewis.”

The record of Betjeman’s pass in divinity is now displayed at the Bodleian Library alongside Archibald Ormsby-Gore, the poet’s teddy bear, which went on public display for the first time for the exhibition.

The bear was the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s creation Aloysius, the bear carried around by Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Betjeman died holding the bear in one hand and his elephant, Jumbo, in the other when he died in 1984.

Summoned by Bells is published by John Murray with permission from the Betjeman estate

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