Joan Hunter Dunn: Muse to John Betjeman

Joan Hunter Dunn should never have existed. She should have been a fictional figure, her name assembled, as creative writing tutors advise, out of gazetteers and paint colours. That John Betjeman deployed her so brazenly in "A Subaltern's Love-song" – "Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn/ Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun" – is an index not only of his infatuation with the real woman but also of his delight in English nomenclature. "O Peggy Purey-Cust, how pure you were," he wrote in his 1960 verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, "My first and purest love, Miss Purey-Cust!"

"It is safest not to use real names," warned John Braine in his handbook Writing a Novel (1974). The real people might sue. If Betjeman had published "A Subaltern's Love-song" now, however, rather than in 1941, Miss J. Hunter Dunn would have started a website. She would have trademarked her name and opened negotiations with Max Clifford. "Joan Hunter Dunn" might have become a commodity – a newspaper column, a magazine, a brand of white chocolate, a sportswear chain with a scent attached.

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Peggy Purey-Cust, who went to kindergarten with Betjeman, could have had her own chat show.

First published in Cyril Connolly's wartime magazine Horizon, "A Subaltern's Love-song", a paean to tennis parties, to a Home Counties world of gin and lime, long afternoons on cool verandahs with the Hillman standing on the gravel, is probably Betjeman's best-known work. In the judgement of A.N. Wilson, the poet's most recent biographer, "Nobody else could have written this poem. He wrote over two hundred poems, some very good and some not so good, but in this one he achieved perfection."

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,

With carefullest carefulness gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

The poem epitomises Betjeman's sensual nostalgia, not to say his sexual wistfulness, and has been widely anthologised, embedded into books of quotations, set to music by Donald Swann, Mervyn Horder and Jim Parker. Joan Hunter Dunn represents a gamine ideal of womanhood, less from the between-the-wars period when she grew up than from the soft-focus Edwardian era when Betjeman started at school with Peggy, the admiral's daughter.

Joan Hunter Dunn was a doctor's daughter, and Betjeman hardly knew her. She was born in 1915, nine years his junior, the daughter of George Hunter Dunn, who practised in Farnborough, Hampshire, and the granddaughter of Andrew Hunter Dunn, for 20 years Vicar of All Saints, South Acton, in west London, and then, from 1892 until his death in 1914, Bishop of Quebec. (Joan's uncle Edward Dunn was Bishop of British Honduras and Archbishop of the West Indies.) The Hunter in their name derived from William Hunter, Lord Mayor of London in 1851-52 and grandfather of both her father's parents.

Joan's mother, born Mabel Liddelow, died in 1916, aged 36. Joan was not yet one; her father remarried in 1920. She went to school at Queen Anne's, Caversham, took a diploma course at King's College of Household and Social Science, and was serving on the catering staff in Senate House, London, when the wartime Ministry of Information ensconced itself there. "Suddenly," she told Betjeman's biographer Bevis Hillier, "there was this huge surge of people and I was on duty morning, noon and night. I didn't have a day off for three months." She and her manageress colleague were billeted in the cellar. "We were bombed every night for a year and a half . . . I'd get under the bedclothes and think, 'I just hope it will be quick.' "

Betjeman, seven years married to Penelope Chetwode and working for "Mini" on propaganda films, first set eyes on her in 1940. He fell in love from afar. When he summoned up courage to ask her out to lunch (going down on his knees to do so), it was to present her with a copy of the February 1941 Horizon in which "A Subaltern's Love-song" appeared. "I must say I was absolutely overwhelmed," she told The Sunday Times Magazine in 1965:

It was such a marvellous break from the monotony of the war. It really was remarkable the way he imagined it all. Actually, all that about the subaltern, and the engagement is sheer fantasy, but my life was very like the poem.

Writing the same year to Peter Crookston, who conducted the interview, Betjeman recorded his memories of the 25-year-old Joan Hunter Dunn:

She wore a white coat and had a clean, clinical, motherly look, which excited hundreds of us. She had bright cheeks, clear sun-burned skin, darting brown eyes, a shock of dark curls and a happy smile. Her figure was a dream of strength and beauty. When the bombs fell, she bound up our wounds unperturbed. When they didn't fall, which was most of the time, she raised our morales without ever lowering our morals. When I first saw her I said to my friends Osbert Lancaster and Reginald Ross-Williamson, "I bet that girl is a doctor's daughter and comes from Aldershot."

She was, he wrote to the artist Roland Pym in 1943, "a girl to lean against for life and die adoring".

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,

And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.

We sat in the car park till twenty to one

And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

When John Murray were about to print "A Subaltern's Love-song" in book form, in New Bats in Old Belfries, published in December 1945, there was a sudden John Brainean panic. Joan Hunter Dunn was a real person? What would she say? Was she married?

Joan Hunter Dunn's engagement was announced in The Times on 31 October 1944, to Harold W. Jackson, a "Mini" civil servant and exactly Betjeman's contemporary; Betjeman was invited to their wedding, at Farnborough, in January the following year. Jackson (sometimes styled H. Wycliffe Jackson) pursued a broadcasting career in the Far East and Rhodesia. When he died suddenly, in 1963, his wife Joan returned with their three sons to Hampshire.

Joan Jackson attended John Betjeman's memorial service at Westminster Abbey in 1984, but her name was not listed among the mourners.

James Fergusson

Joan Hunter Dunn: born Farnborough, Hampshire 13 October 1915; married 1945 Harold Wycliffe Jackson (died 1963; three sons); died London 11 April 2008.