- He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1960 Queen's New Year Honours List and made a Knight Bachelor in the 1969 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to literature.
- Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984.
- He separated from his wife Penelope, after she converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1950s. They remained devoted to one another but found that they could no longer tolerate living together. They never divorced. She continued to live at the family home in Wantage, Oxfordshire, while he moved to Chelsea, London, and spent much of his time at his second home in Trebetherick, Cornwall, often accompanied by Lady Elizabeth Cavendish - they met and fell in love in 1951, and remained lifelong friends. Family friends said that ideally Betjeman wanted to be married to both Penelope and Elizabeth at the same time.
- Son Paul (born 1937, Uffington, Berkshire) and Candida (born 1942, Dublin, Ireland). Candida Betjeman (later Candida Lycett-Green) was also a poet, popular in the 1960s.
- Having been bullied at school during World War I because of his German surname (Betjemann), he changed the spelling to Betjeman.
- After a year of being Poet Laureate, he had serious regrets about having accepted the role (he asked his friend Philip Larkin if Larkin would be happy to take over from him, and prayed to the Holy Spirit for inspiration). Amid the shortages and energy crises of 1970s Britain, he said that, regarding his own verses, "Perhaps it would be rather a good thing if paper runs out".
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