Sir John Betjeman, the most popular poet laureate of the last century, who came to embody everything English, was born into a family of Dutch furniture makers who may actually have been German.

His selected poems sold more than 2m copies and made him a kind of colourful, eccentric uncle to the nation. He also became the first TV poet, with a reach and popularly his successors have yet to match.

His deceptively dark light verse won him a large audience. His most famous poem, Slough, in which he implored the bombers to destroy the town of "tinned milk, tinned beans/Tinned minds, tinned breath", is always thought of as a joke, but it was in fact a daring and controversial poem coming as it did in the wake of Guernica.

He idolised the aristocracy, and eventually married into it, though Penelope Chetwode's parents did not approve. When he first met her father, a field marshal, he turned up in a bow tie on an elastic band which he twanged right through lunch.

The marriage withered in middle age, but the couple stayed together by virtue of a "civilised arrangement" that allowed Betjeman time for his mistress, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish.

Asked near the end of his life if he had any regrets, he said: "Yes. Not enough sex."