The Inimitable Wodehouse Most fans of “Plum” claim they can recall exactly – not just the Anno Domini, but the very minute – they began to read their first ever Wodehouse book. I can't. I was blessed with parents who were, to quote Bertie Wooster, "hot stuff” on education. I was taught to read and write by the age of three, and actively encouraged to read as wide a range of literature as I could. I was reading science- fiction and Westerns at four because at three I had wandered into the lounge and seen my dad watching a TV show starring a man with funny pointed ears who was a “Vulcan”, followed by a show in which a young Clint Eastwood rode heroically along to the strains of an unseen voice yodeling, “RAWWWHIIIIDE! RAWWWHIIIIDE!” In retrospect, I probably picked up my first Wodehouse because the cover reminded me of one of those "upper class country house murder-mysteries" that Agatha Christie excelled at. My father gave me my love of sci-fi, my mother is responsible for me being glued to every Morse, Inspector Wexford, Midsomer Murders et al episode (even though I can never guess whodunit). Presumably I was lucky to start with one of the superlative examples of the Master, such as Carry on Jeeves or Psmith, Journalist, because I've never looked back. Like Bill Bryson today, Wodehouse had that friendly, “Everyman” quality that made him appear to be part of the family, like a kindly old uncle, even to readers who had never met him. A shy, gentle man who was by nature solitary, Wodehouse claimed no great intelligence other than the ability to write well; he possessed an almost innocent purity and left the main details of his life to his wife, Ethel, preferring his fictional worlds to reality. Erm…no. The above is a paraphrase of the universal image of P.G. Wodehouse that exists today. It is also complete bunkum. Plum was a master of “spin” to make Alaister Campbell green with envy; he spent the latter half of his life carefully creating the Wodehouse he wanted people to see – an unworldly, genial old duffer who just happened to be a comic literary genius. Aided by devoted family and fiercely loyal friends, Plum was able to make this “unworldly image” so subtly pervasive that learned critics blithely wrote phrases such as: “Wodehouse was an innocent”; “inability to cope with the real world”; “a solitary man” – in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In the Foreword to one of the many Jeeves & Wooster reprints, comedian and author Stephen Fry (himself a man with a brain the size of a planet), noted that Wodehouse’s genius lay in getting the reader to “suspend their disbelief” to such an extent that they accepted the most absurd of situations as plausible, such as the fact that the reader accepts - without question - the absurd idea that “Bertie Wooster is a complete fathead who just happens to have the lucky gift of being able to turn a phrase like Evelyn Waugh”. Wodehouse maintained the same illusion in real life, for decades, to the extent that learned experts “bought” him as an unworldly simpleton who just happened to be able to out-write Shakespeare. In his critical essay, The Toad At Harrow, scholar Charles E. Gould Jnr analysed one – just one – phrase of Bertie Wooster’s from the book Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, and pointed out that in this single phrase of only fifteen words’ length, Wodehouse gives his readers a pun; a cliché; a simile; a double irony and two synthesized images – value for money in anyone’s book! Now surely apparent is the absurdity of the idea that the intellect behind that phrase was a naïve recluse. There were also Wodehouse’s friends. In later life he preferred to write rather than to speak to friends, but in this he is in illustrious company – that of the Apostle Paul. In the Christian Greek Scriptures, some in the First Century congregations complained that Paul’s letters were “weighty and forceful, but his presence in person is weak and his speech contemptible” [2nd Corinthians 10:10]. Paul was a dynamic, incisive writer whose words hold the attention, but in person he was a short, bald, softly-spoken and modest man. It is a lucky author who is both a great writer and great orator, and Wodehouse knew he was much better at connecting through the written rather than spoken word, though he did possess a sharp, caustic wit. However, through his life he had many brilliant, witty, talented friends who through their presence give lie to the “vague old duffer” image. In her Vorkosigan Series book Komarr, author Lois McMaster Bujold’s character Ekaterin recalls the advice that to truly know a person, you must observe their friends. Introspectively she compares Miles Vorkosigan – short, lame, hyperactive - with her late physically handsome husband Etienne. Miles is surrounded by family and friends who are charming, loyal, generous, kind, happy, witty, unflinchingly courageous and intellectually brilliant; Etienne had no real friends and his associates were all shady dealers of some kind and usually moral/physical cowards to boot. Likewise in reality was P. G. Wodehouse, if we note those distinguished men and women who remained his friends throughout his life – people like Cole Porter, Conan Doyle, Randolph Scott, Jerome Kern, Evelyn Waugh, John Barrymore, J M Barrie, Richard D’Oyly Carte, H G Wells, etc., etc. Thus the “real” Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was a horse of a completely different colour. I cannot put it better than Barry Phelps’ brilliant – and in my opinion definitive - 1992 biography Man & Myth: “The real Wodehouse [was] a subtle personality full of complex contradictions. He was totally honest in private but for all his published writing the truth was a malleable raw material. He was shrewd [financially], had simple tastes but was a far from simple character. He was modest but had total self-assurance…” A large part of Plum’s striving for a completely innocuous public image in the latter half of his life was the disgraceful way he was treated by the British Establishment for the “infamous” wartime radio broadcasts, but also due in large part to his childhood. Like his contemporary literary great Dame Agatha Christie, Plum was brought up in an atmosphere where integrity, duty and honour were expected to come as naturally as breathing and where self-aggrandizement was the very nadir of well-bred behaviour. Like Agatha, Plum came from an aristocratic background, but unlike many today, was wise enough to heed the warning that “a man overly proud of his ancestry is like the potato – the best part of which is underground!” So who was the “real” Plum? Pelham1 Grenville Wodehouse, to list his full glory, was born 15th October 1881 in prosaic Guildford, Surrey. He was six years younger than his fellow playwright and novelist Edgar Wallace, of whose books the adult Plum was an avid reader, and nine years older than Agatha Christie. His father Henry Ernest Wodehouse was far from Britain - Magistrate of Queen Victoria in Hong Kong. Pelham was the third of his parents’ four sons and acquired the sobriquet “Plum” from his infantile attempts to say his own name. Both sides of the family had celebrated antecedents, arch-types of whom appear throughout Plum’s writing, though in all bar one case it is impossible to state that Aunt X is character Y because Plum used composites. Not transferring a person wholesale from reality to page, he instead used his innumerable battalions of relatives like a finger buffet, picking a bit here and there, and mixing it all one plate. The clergy, aristocrats, maids and butlers of the Wodehousian world are all taken from Plum’s real life. Clergy and artistry – musicians; writers; artists; poets; scholars - were particularly prevalent in his maternal family, Deane, from whom a large portion of Plum’s literary skill descended. Solidly upper-middle-class, the Deanes were direct descendents of Roberto de Dena, a Norman courtier to King Edward the Confessor. Plum’s maternal grandfather was Reverend John Bathhurst Deane, a noted and very good essayist, author, and scholar in his own right. His life’s work was The Book of Dene, Deane, Adeane: A Genealogical History, completed and published in 1899 by his daughter, authoress and poetess Mary Deane, one of Wodehouse's eight maternal aunts. The books note a previous Deane-Wodehouse interaction: in 1501 King Henry VII’s heir Prince Arthur married the Spanish Infanta, Catherine of Aragon. As part of the marriage celebrations, the officiating clergy Archbishop Dene created one Sir Thomas Wodehouse Knight of the Bath. The Reverend’s French-descended wife, neé Foudrinier, had a sister who married a Mr Newman. Their son, Eleanor Deane’s first cousin, and yet another in P. G.'s vast Army of second cousins, was none other than the Cardinal Newman. The portrait of the Cardinal in the National Gallery was painted by artist Emmaline Deane, his first cousin and another of Plum’s maternal aunts. Reverend & Mrs Deane had fourteen children, of whom Plum’s mother Eleanor in 1861 was the fifth; girls featured predominantly – Norman Murphy in his In Search of Blandings, a must for any Wodehouse lover, records no less than twenty aunts; nine of these aunts were the Deane sisters, the remaining five Deane children being boys. The eldest of the aunts was Plum’s favourite, amiable Aunt Louisa, whom we see in Bertie’s favourite Aunt Dahlia. Mary the authoress was much more formidable, the template for dreaded Aunt Agatha. Mary was in fact a rather good author in her own right, and wrote very moving love poetry. These poems were not inspired by men, and remained unpublished for several decades. Plum shared another characteristic with this aunt – fallibility in writing love scenes. Some have pounced on this as evidence that Plum was sexually underdeveloped and never consummated his marriage to Ethel. Pure tosh – he simply wasn’t good at writing romantic scenes. Authors such as Terry Pratchett and Bill Bryson can have you howling with laughter just by sitting a character down for breakfast, but ask them to write a hot and heavy sex scene and they would probably balk; Isaac Asimov freely admitted he was no good at writing gore-drenched murder scenes. By the time of Pelham's birth, his immediate Deane-Wodehouse families were only minor aristocracy, in the lower tiers of the gentry virtually indistinguishable from the upper-middle-class family that Agatha Christie was born into nine years after Wodehouse in 1890. Plum’s paternal antecedents the Wodehouse family were definitely aristocracy, though in the lower brackets thereof – landed gentry. The Wodehouse clan featured heavily in English history through the clergy, military and politics. Again some have claimed that Plum had no emotional interest in his family or ancestry because he never mentioned his illustrious lineage. But whilst too modest to boast, Plum was privately – and rightly – proud of his family’s distinguished heritage in service to the nation. Sir William Wodehouse was Baron of the Exchequer and was a favourite of the first three Kings Edward. John Wodehouse fought with distinction at Agincourt and is the alter ego of Bertie’s heroic “Sieur de Wooster of Agincourt”. Sir Philip Wodehouse, MP was knighted for his valour at the Battle of Cadiz, and created a Baronet (a hereditary knighthood) in 1611. The Wodehouse family were a bright bunch, and they increased their wealth and position because each generation followed a basic three-point modus operandi: they made it a habit to marry heiresses; as many poverty-stricken relatives as possible were off-loaded into religious orders (up until the 1950s basically institutionalised Simony); and in socio- political matters they kept their heads well below the parapet. Genealogist Sir Iain Moncreiffe (paraphrased from Barry Phelps Man & Myth) traced the many financially advantageous marriages of Plum’s ancestors and was thus able to show that Plum himself was either directly descended from, or related to by some degree of cousinship, an entire plethora of notable personages: “Dukes of Norfolk, [the poet] Lord Surrey…Byzantine Emperors…Magyars…Plantagenet Kings…Russian princes...[the] de Veres and Harry Hotspur…[he had] Popes for uncles…Simon de Montfort…Lady Jane Grey…St Thomas Aquinas…Geoffrey de Villehardouin (a great French historian)…King Alfred the Great…and [Wodehouse was] the fifth cousin of Shakespeare.” Plum was well aware of these shrewd generations of ancestors and they feature heavily in his works. When Roderick Spode unexpectedly becomes the Earl of Sidcup, he immediately heads for the nearest heiress, the soppy Madelaine Basset and one of “serial fiancé” Bertie Wooster’s many exes. Lord Emsworth appoints Reverend Rupert “Beefy” Bingham to the lucrative parish of Much Matchingham. Despite the fact that Plum was keenly politically aware (though prudently kept his mouth shut) virtually no political social commentary clouds are allowed to disrupt the vaguely Edwardian/Prohibition Utopias he created from Psmith and Ukridge through Jeeves and Blandings. There is of course Spode’s Black Shorts, a derisory takeoff of Mosley’s Fascist Black Shirts, but there are no terrible wars or shattered lives in Wodehouse – the Great War that wiped out a generation of Bertie Woosters and Gussie Fink-Nottles and Beefy Binghams and Mikes & Psmiths never intrudes on the endless halcyon days of Wodehouse. In 1881 the newborn Pelham Grenville was the great-great-grandson of Sir Armine Wodehouse, MP, 5th Baronet, after whom his favourite brother was named. Armine Wodehouse the 5th Baronet had sons by his wife Letitia, yet another heiress, John and Philip. John was created the 1st Baron Wodehouse in 1797, the year Plum’s maternal grandfather was being born on the Cape of Good Hope. John’s great- grandson was created the 1st Earl Kimberley in 1866, being Plum’s 3rd cousin – one of legions. Since primogeniture meant John got the paternal cash, Philip entered the Church, becoming a Reverend and Prebendary of Norfolk. To give you some idea of the financial wisdom of this career, we can look at Reverend John Bathurst Deane, who by the end of his life was pulling in an annual income of £1,000 from his parish – in today’s terms that’s forty grand a year, folks! Like his father, Philip married an heiress. Plum’s great-grandmother bore up under the singular name of Appolonia, neé Nourse. Whether she hated her name as much as Plum did his is forever unrecorded. It was that hatred which gives us one of Bertie and Jeeves’ most famous exchanges (Jeeves & The Feudal Spirit): “His name’s not Lemuel?” “I fear so, Sir.” “Couldn’t he use his second name?” “His second name is Gengulphus.” “Golly, Jeeves,” I said thinking of old Uncle Tom Portalington, “there’s some raw work pulled at the font from time to time, is there not?” Philip & Appolonia’s son, also Philip, entered the military, marrying yet another heiress, Lydia Lee. Their son Henry Ernest Wodehouse, born 1845, went to Hong Kong, where he met and married his colleague Walter Deane’s sister, Eleanor, who was sixteen years his junior. Eleanor herself was a minor painter, not in the league of her sister Emmaline. Her and Henry's first son was Philip Peveril John; born in Hong Kong in 1877, Peveril as he was known had the distinction of being the first English child born in the colony. Next came Ernest Armine in 1879, known as Armine, followed by Pelham Grenville himself, known as "Plum", in 1881. Lastly there was Richard Lancelot Deane Wodehouse, known prosaically as Dick, whose birth in 1892 made him eleven years younger than Plum and who was raised as a de facto only child. It was with Armine that Eleanor lived until his death; peculiarly both Ernest and Eleanor lived to be octogenarians and Plum himself a nonagenarian, whereas the other boys didn’t even make late middle-age. Her nickname for most of her life was Memsahib, which her family called her quite openly. Left is a photograph of the three elder Wodehouse boys. Peveril is standing at the back in the white suit, Armine is standing right, and Plum himself is seated on the chair. From shortly after his birth to 1883, P G lived in Hong Kong; but in 1884 Eleanor returned to Britain with her three sons, engaged a Miss Roper (whom she had never met) to be their guardian and left for Hong Kong again. More than one biographer has decried Eleanor Deane as a “stupid woman”, “undeveloped emotionally and intellectually” for this decision. Such a claim is rather strong. Wodehouse’s upbringing was perfectly normal for his social class of aristocracy - being raised by the wider family when not at boarding school (NB - the term aunt and uncle was an honorific given to adults who may have been family friends but not blood relatives; Plum was raised by a Miss Roper until the age of 5 when he began school. Rudyard Kipling was raised by his "Aunt Rosa" Holloway - no relation). Ironically, the so despised Victorian working class raised their children in the same way - children were brought up communally by the “wider clan” of grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts and older siblings as the parents were out of the home working most of the time. The “nuclear family” of mum, dad and 2.4 children currently so beloved of social workers, educational psychologists and therapists never existed, being invented in the latter half of the 20th Century by child psychologists in their perpetual (and usually hopelessly wrong) attempt to pigeon- hole every minute detail of the human psyche. Maybe Eleanor’s attitude was rather extreme, but then how do you classify extreme? One of her contemporaries was the equally middle-class Anna Mellors Cuttell, an ex-governess who was maternally from a cadet branch of the Empson family, who were social equivalents to the Wodehouses. Anna also had four children; having perhaps learned too well the art of physically caring for children whilst remaining emotionally detached, Anna had no compunctions about going on holiday and leaving these infants in the doubtful care of her workaholic husband who suffered crippling migraines, and a somewhat ineffectual teenage housemaid. In several of Plum’s works there features the odious pre-adolescent boy, such as for example the brutes, Oswald Glossop, eight-year-old brother of Honoria Glossop (yet another ex-fiancée of Bertie Wooster) and “young Thos.” an also eight-year old monster who is doted upon by his otherwise ferocious mother, Aunt Agatha. In 1896 Ernest Wodehouse was forced to retire on grounds of ill-health, when his and Eleanor’s youngest son Richard was only four. The massive age gap between himself and his brothers made Richard a de facto only child and one suspects that young Dick was rather pampered, and in fact got far more than his fair share of the belated parental adoration that Peveril, Armine and Plum missed out on. In many of Plum’s works there is a common theme of parental over-indulgence towards these “juvenile blighters” particularly on the part of mothers. Wodehouse was hurt by his mother’s disinterest, but his attitude towards nasty or unpleasant things was to expunge them from his mind – unlike Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling who were quite vengeful and spiteful towards their female parent, Plum’s attitude towards “Memsahib” appears to have been one of politely distant geniality. Tellingly, while he dedicated one of his books plainly to his father, another dedication is an ambiguous Latin phrase that can mean either “to my mother”, “or to my school”, even though Ernest was as much to blame as Eleanor for their non-appearance in their three eldest sons’ lives. However, Wodehouse's childhood actually provided excellent cuisine for his comic servings. The plethora of formidable aunts, eccentric uncles and dubious cousins that litter his works - making the lives of Bertram Wooster, Lord Emsworth and Ukridge et al extremely uncomfortable - are taken directly from his own family and their friends, particularly his mother’s many sisters. When not in school, Wodehouse and his two elder brothers spent their childhoods living with first one aunt/uncle (& family) then another. Bertie Wooster’s ferocious Aunt Agatha and his favourite aunt, Dahlia, are both composites of several female aunts, cousins and Miss Roper style guardians that Wodehouse grew up with. His paternal uncle Fred Wodehouse, for one, is echoed in various older male Wodehouse characters, such as Lord Yaxley. Others such as Claude & Eustace Wooster, or Angela Travers, Bertie’s troublesome cousins are taken from real life cousins of Plum. Admittedly however, Wodehouse's childhood contributed to his emotional distance. Biographers state that Wodehouse was "socially incompetent" and "painfully shy" to the end of his days. Wodehouse himself claimed that he had no “strong feelings about anything”. This was patently untrue, as we know – Plum was keenly politically aware, but bumbling shyness went with his determined public image of “vague old duffer”. However, Wodehouse was born tending towards shyness and his emotional development was inhibited to some degree by his peripatetic childhood outside boarding schools. From being a toddler the constant merry-go-round of living with this Deane relative then that Wodehouse one (or people who weren’t relatives at all) meant that he very rapidly learned never to become intensely emotionally attached to anyone or anything. Like Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham and Edgar Wallace, Wodehouse was raised by people other than his parents/immediate family and like them never developed a close emotional bond with his parents, especially his mother. Unlike them however, Plum displayed not the slightest bitterness or distress; he had the ability to convince himself that he was content and happy even in somewhat fraught situations, and from an early age he simply retreated into a fantasy world, happiest on his own, reading books. It must be stated that the Deane-Wodehouse families were good, decent people but a child’s emotional needs were not in the lexicon of Victorian Britain. They would not have noticed if a beloved toy was accidentally left behind in one move, and tears at having to leave a particularly loved aunt & uncle would have been met with a kind but brisk command to "buck up and come along". Nor did he always have the comfort of immediate family - the three brothers did not always live with the same relative at the same time. Eventually, Plum became very close to one of his older brothers, Armine, as they attended Dulwich College together, but his eldest and youngest brothers, Peveril and Dick, remained emotionally detached in the manner of distant cousins that as Plum commented, “you only ever see at weddings, christenings and funerals.” Even with Armine there was the problem of physical distance. The older boy won a scholarship to Oxford, becoming a professor in the Indian Education Service, and thus spending most of his life on that continent, especially after Armine converted to the Theosophist2 faith in 1911. This does not mean that Wodehouse was incapable of feeling. He was devoted to his wife, Ethel, and adored his step-daughter, Leonora, but he remained somewhat reserved, particularly after he was so viciously slandered during World War II – including by a former friend, A. A. Milne. Once, as the guest of honour at an auspicious literary gathering, this creator of the loquaciously erudite Jeeves and the quick one-liners of Psmith barely stood up and just managed to mumble "thank you" to the water carafe before sifting straight back down. When he and his wife Ethel settled in America, he specifically asked her to find a ground-floor apartment because he “never knew what to say to the lift man”. Like his contemporary, crime authoress Agatha Christie, Wodehouse had a profound loathing of being in the public gaze and hated interviews. In 1894, a major change occurred in Wodehouse's life when he was sent to Dulwich College where his brother Armine already was. He fell in love with the place and even in his old age declared the years he spent there (1894-1900) the “best of my life”. The quiet serenity and unchallenged routine of Dulwich suited Wodehouse to perfection. He developed a love and talent for cricket, and previously an indifferent scholar, began to apply himself to learning, though his academic industry dropped off in 1899 when it seemed the family did not have enough money to send him as well as Armine to Oxford, Cambridge or London. It appears Armine may have jealously protested against Plum attending Oxford with him, since at the time, it was Armine that was the ‘brilliant mind’ of the family, despite Plum excelling in Greek, Latin and knowing Shakespeare verbatim. However, the paternal decree was that there were insufficient funds to send Plum to Oxford as well. Nevertheless, it was while Plum was at Dulwich that his first writing, all about sport - usually cricket, boxing or "rugger' (rugby) - were published in the school paper and local magazines. Both he and Armine were good cricketers, though not as talented sportsmen as their younger brother Richard Wodehouse, a noted County cricketer or their cousin N. A. Wodehouse, Captain of the England Rugby team and son of Plum's Uncle Fred. Plum's talent for cricket and writing would combine to eventually create his first mainstream commercial series, that of Mike Jackson and Psmith. Armine in India was also a writer. There is a street in South Bombay named Wodehouse after him, and one in Hunstanton named Wodehouse after Plum. Back in 1900, however, Henry Ernest Wodehouse, retired through ill-health and residing in sober respectability at Cheltenham, was less than thrilled that his third son's only accomplishments were being a good cricketer and first-class writer. Cricket didn't earn money, and scribbling was a waste of time; what a boy needed was a firm, solid career in an upstanding profession such as his own, the Civil Service, or something equally as lucrative, like banking! With the rapidly declining health of octogenarian Queen Victoria and the obviously to-be-soon succession of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, the Civil Service was a little shaky. Therefore that year Henry used his connections to get Pelham a job in the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. Plum utterly detested the time he spent there with a vengeance. His book Psmith in the City (1910), in which Mike Jackson & Psmith suffer an interminable employment in a fictitious Edwardian Bank, is directly taken from Wodehouse's own miserable experience. In a spectacularly back-firing attempt to cheer the despondent eighteen-year old Plum up, his fellow bank clerks cheerily informed him that he would only have to work there for three years, after which he would be transferred “out East” to spend the rest of his life in Raj-style luxury as a Manager while the local employees did the actual work. Plum was horrified, especially as he himself said, “I couldn’t manage a whelk stall,” never mind be an imposing personification of British Imperial authority in some humid clime where the average temperature in the shade was over 100°F. The only thing that kept Plum sane through each wearisome, grinding day was the continued success of his writing. He expanded into journalism and poetry, getting his work into local magazines and regional newspapers. He was also successful in becoming a writer for “By The Way” a column in The Globe newspaper. During his short period with the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, he was off ill for a time with mumps (which may have rendered him infertile) and then shortly after he was off ill again with ‘the flu’. Unlike the mumps, the latter illness was entirely fictitious, Plum utilizing it enable him to complete some work for The Globe newspaper. Appropriately in Plum’s 21st year, 1902, his life changed completely. His first book, The Pothunters, was published. He also had to make a choice between his writing and Banking - 9th September, as he later recalled. The editor of By The Way retired, and Plum was offered the job. With visions of exile in some tropical nightmare floating through his head, Plum virtually fled from the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, despite having only £50 to his name. As we know, it worked. Plum continued to have books published: A Prefect’s Uncle and Tales of St. Austin’s in 1903, The Gold Bat and William Tell Told Again in 1904 and The Head of Kay’s in 1905, though these were all school-boy oriented stories. In 1906 he published his first adult-oriented novel, Love Among The Chickens, which showcased his brief attempts to inject romance into his stories. By his own admission, he failed miserably – the scenes were tortured, stilted, painful to read - and wisely decided to give up. From then on, “romance” in Wodehouse was purely comic, as the complicated entanglements of Bertie Wooster, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Barmy Fungy Phipps with Honoria Glossop and Madelaine Bassett et al show. As one Wodehouse biographer put it, “the men and women of Wodehouse’s novels saw a double bed as nothing more than a nice big space for pillow fights”. By 1906 Wodehouse was far from a millionaire, nevertheless, his writing was earning him enough cash to be able to afford a trip to New York for a holiday, where within the first thirty-six hours of his stay, he sold two articles to magazines for respectively $300 and $200 each! He fell in love with America for its unpretentious exuberance, even though his emotional ineptitude meant he could never share that non-self conscious joie de vivre. Most importantly he found an eager market for his writing. It is a little known fact about Wodehouse that he was a very good playwright and lyricist, and he worked with some of the celebrities of his day, including Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton and he also had an association with Richard D’Oyly Carte, he of the Savoy Theatre fame and long-time colleague of Britain’s famed Gilbert & Sullivan. The trio began to produce Broadway plays, and in fact revolutionised the American musical – Kern, Bolton and Wodehouse invented the situation comedy, and had Plum’s novels not overshadowed his theatre work, he would now be remembered in the same rank as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. It is partially because of this, combined with his previous journalism, that it is now impossible to state with certainty what and how much Wodehouse actually wrote. In part due to his father’s disapproval, Wodehouse began from 1900 to write much of his work under pseudonyms or the names of friends and he continued this for a short while in the United States. Upon his return to the U.S. after World War II and his shameful treatment by the British media, Wodehouse resurrected his Nom de Plume for theatre writing. Often he would simply never bother to mention that playwright “Joe Bloggs” was really P.G. Wodehouse, and some of his work has therefore been lost to posterity. He is known to have written over 300 short stories and 40 novels and the true total of all his writing including poetry, plays and newspaper articles probably pushes that figure closer to a 1,000 individual pieces of literary work. By 1909, Plum was spending large amounts of time in the USA, and acquired further income that year when Love Among The Chickens was published again, since of course to the American market it was a new book. During this period of 1906-1909 two more important things besides “making it” in America would occur in Plum’s life. The first was Psmith. Psmith is unique in the entire Wodehouse canon in that he was the only character who was a real person. Obviously, Aunt Mary Deane was the basis for Aunt Agatha, Aunt Louisa Deane was the template for Aunt Dahlia, and Uncle Fred Wodehouse was the original sketch of Uncle Fred, Lord Emsworth and so forth, but all these characters in Wodehouse’s books are composites. They are mixtures of anywhere up to a dozen people iced with Plum’s own superb imagination. Only with Psmith can we point and say “Psmith = Joe Bloggs”. On a visit back to England in 1907, Plum was visited by one of his myriads of cousins, who was a few years his elder. In Something Fresh (1915) Plum explained how their reminiscences had turned to their respective schooldays. His cousin regaled him with tales of a fellow pupil, a “chap named D’Oyly Carte, son of the Savoy theatre man,” who was legendary for his eccentricity. Fastidious of wardrobe, with drawling speech, D’Oyly Carte was in the habit of putting in a monocle, through which he would peer at people in a quizzical fashion as if they were some interesting scientific specimen. As Plum recalled, he “recognized genius” when he heard it, and “bunged down [his cousin’s] description word for word.” The first Psmith story, Mike At Wrykyn appeared in 1909. Wodehouse intended the series to focus on Mike Jackson, a sort of Eton style "Everyman" but as he himself admitted, the supporting character of Rupert Psmith just took over. This first story, like so many before it, was yet another story about school-boy honour and loyal friendship in the face of adversity. However, the following Psmith novels such as Psmith In the City and Psmith, Journalist were Plum’s first non-school-setting books that were commercially successful and it was that very mainstream success which gave Plum the “push” to leave behind tales of schoolboy cricket, rugger and honour, and venture forth to the glory of Jeeves and Blandings. For many years, it was largely assumed that Rupert Psmith was Rupert D'Oyly Carte, son of Richard D’Oyly Carte, the famous founder of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Theatre Company and close colleague of comic-opera geniuses Gilbert & Sullivan, and man with whom Plum had worked as a playwright. Plum himself wrote this in Something Fresh. Shortly after Plum’s death, when Frances Donaldson was chosen to write Wodehouse’s first biography, Ms Donaldson received a letter from Rupert’s daughter, Dame Bridget D’Oyly Carte, who was managing the family concerns (and who was in fact, the last of the family, remaining a childless spinster and having lost her only sibling, a childless bachelor brother, in a car accident some time before). In the letter, Dame Bridget explained how “Psmith” was not her father, but her uncle. Plum had mistakenly assumed that his cousin’s former schoolmate, “the chap D’Oyly Carte” was Rupert, Richard D’Oyly Carte’s nearly as famous son; in actual fact it was Rupert’s little-known elder brother, Lucas D'Oyly Carte. Richard D’Oyly Carte had two children, both boys, the elder being Lucas and the younger Rupert, the pair being respectively about nine and seven years older than Plum (Rupert being a near contemporary of Plum’s eldest brother Peveril). The height of sartorial elegance, languid of mien and erudite of speech, Lucas D'Oyly Carte was in the habit of wearing a monocle through which he peered at the world with aloof amusement. His standard reply when asked "How are you?" was to drawl with lugubrious solemnity, "Sir, aah get thinnah and thinnah." This sombre self- assessment was sadly prescient. Lucas D’Oyly Carte became a London barrister but died a childless bachelor from Tuberculosis, one prominent symptom of which is weight loss of course, so perhaps he knew or at least suspected even during his schooldays that he had the disease. He was only 35 years old. Ironically, he died in 1907, the same year his reminiscing schoolmate gave him immortality by virtue of Plum’s pen. The second most important thing to occur during this first sojourn in America was love. Plum met Mrs Ethel Wayman, a widow with a young daughter, Leonora Rowley. Superficially, they weren’t well suited, the shy, quiet Plum and the vivacious, extrovert Ethel. Despite some small squalls, Plum’s existence had also been relatively tranquil, whereas Ethel’s life up to their meeting had been fraught. In 1903, Ethel Newton had married Leonard Rowley, and in 1905 they and their infant daughter Leonora had emigrated to India, where Leonard sadly died in Mysore in 1910. Returning to London with Leonora, Ethel had rashly remarried John Wayman in 1911, but the union was engulfed in financial worry and in 1912, Wayman was declared bankrupt; shortly thereafter he committed suicide. Seeking a respite from the memories, Ethel journeyed to New York, and the rest is history. Wodehouse was far from incapable of emotion, and fell in deeply in love. The pair married after a whirlwind courtship in 1914 and remained a devoted couple for the rest of their lives. Ethel, while admitting herself she was no great genius, took over the management of “Plum”. She handled the bills, contracts, everything including the minutiae of life that taxed Plum. She was the shield and protector that stood between him and the world he was singularly ill-equipped to deal with, not because he was naïve, but because he was rapidly exasperated with assorted people’s dense obtuseness – a common personality flaw in people who are so tremendously intelligent that most of the world struggles to keep up. Plum rewarded her with a profound devotion to her and Leonora, “their” daughter, whom Plum quite probably forgot was not his biological child. Much has been made in some quarters of the fact that Plum had no children, despite Ethel being in the prime of child-bearing age and proven capable of bearing children. Some have claimed that the relationship was platonic or that Wodehouse was sexually incapable, but this is highly unlikely. It is true however that Wodehouse doubtless had a low sex drive due to his emotionally starved upbringing. Alternatively, Ethel may simply have decided that she did not want more children. Though a bit more complicated before the "pill" of the 1960s, contraceptives did exist. After all, she was married to Leonard Rowley seven years, yet they had but one child, and she had none with John Wayman. Finally of course, there was the fact that Plum had suffered from mumps in 1901. While a man having mumps doesn’t automatically equal sterility, it can do so if the illness is severe enough, so possibly Plum was infertile. More importantly, Plum was now firing on all cylinders. Psmith in the City left behind the school stories for good, and they are the best of his early work. Little Leonora loved them, and devoured each one as fast as Plum would write them. Psmith, Journalist was for his new step-daughter. But Plum was developing into an ever more complex writer. The scintillating wit of his later novels can be glimpsed in Psmith, but are a lot more long-winded, unlike the sharp verbal exchanges that make the later books so funny, particularly in the dialogue between Bertie Wooster & Jeeves, for example as this instance when Jeeves explains why an elderly male relative absolutely does not want the knighthood his wife is pushing for, because it means the King will announce to all and sundry the man’s forenames*: “What is his first name, Jeeves?” I asked, considering the rakish boater. “Lemuel, sir.” “Good grief. Well, can’t he use his middle name?” “His middle name is Gengulphus. Perhaps a light tweed, if we are to visit Mrs Travers at Brinkley?” I digested this. “There’s been some rum doings pulled at the font, eh Jeeves?” “Indeed, sir.” This exchange had its origins in Plum’s loathing of his own Christian names, Pelham Grenville, which he thought ludicrously pretentious. The point is however that the dialogue is sharp, staccato and one line long. In the first Psmith book, Psmith recounts a car crash that has just occurred with him as a passenger, and expounds a complex paragraph of verbose prose that is as ponderous as an elephant. Plum was done with Psmith in 1915. The last book in the series, Leave It To Psmith, published in 1923, which was also a ‘crossover’ with Blandings decades before other authors/TV scriptwriters came up with the notion to boost book sales/show ratings, came about only at the specific request of Leonora, who loved the Psmith stories. In an unfortunate parallel, just like the man they were written about, the woman they were written for would also die young. Leonora died in 1943, not yet forty years old. That was far in the future. By the outbreak of World War I, Plum and his family were living almost continuously in the United States, although they did spend some time in England. For instance, in 1913, Plum happened to be in England watching a Warwickshire versus Gloucestershire cricket match that featured one of Warwickshire’s finest cricketers, despite him being only 25 years old. The man’s name was Percy Jeeves, and he was also known as a vivacious, intelligent man – three years later he would be one of the many thousands who fell at the Battle of the Somme, like Lucas D’Oyly Carte, forever unaware he would shortly be granted literary immortality in 1919 when Plum published the first Jeeves short story, My Man Jeeves. The Jeeves character (we only learn his Christian name of Reginald in the penultimate title of the series, Much Obliged Jeeves (1971)) is noteworthy in that usually, Plum couldn’t remember where he dreamed up his characters’ names – or rather he claimed he couldn’t remember, possibly wanting to avoid the possibility of admitting that A was really B, and annoying a real person who got to hear about it. For instance, Plum declared he had no memory of how he came up with Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, though it is worth noting that the first time Bertie made an appearance in 1917, his surname was Mannering-Phipps. Jeeves and Wooster of course are the most famous of Plum’s works and the most popular. By the time of his death Plum had written eleven novels and forty short stories about the pair – indeed, his last ever book, Aunts Aren’t Gentleman in 1974, was a Jeeves & Wooster story. It was fortuitous for the characters that they appeared largely in short stories for quite a while. For instance, though My Man Jeeves was published in 1919, the first novel, Thank You, Jeeves didn’t appear until 1934 (though it was followed immediately by another, Right Ho, Jeeves). One of the characteristics of short stories is that the narrative must concentrate on the plot, and there is little space for in-depth characterisation. This meant that the characters were able to grow and change and become more “real” by the time of the first novel in 1934 without Plum having to adhere to a lot of back-story that he might otherwise have incautiously committed to paper back in 1919. Agatha Christie had the same problem with her Hercule Poirot character after starting out with the full-blown The Mysterious Affair At Styles which had the heroic, detailed character of Arthur Hastings (really her then husband, Archie Christie). The fact that Christie was a womanizing waste of space severely cramped her style in writing Hastings in later novels after her and Christie’s divorce and in the end she married him off and despatched him to a horse ranch in South America. Plum didn’t have that problem, and reading the stories in publication order you can see the subtle development of the two characters. Of course, the plot line of the clever servant and the dim master is hardly new – it was old hat by the time of the ancient Greeks – and the first few Jeeves and Wooster stories fell very much into this stereotype. Initially, despite being educated at Eton and Oxford (two places Ernest couldn’t afford to send Plum) Bertie Wooster is merely Reginald Pepper again, a previous character of Plum’s who was a brainless dunce forever getting himself into all sorts of imbroglios. Gradually, through the series, Bertie goes from being a fatuous dunderhead so dense light would bend around him to being, while not a Great Thinker, an adequately-intellectual protégé of the brilliant Jeeves, and who sensibly consults his valet on all their contremps. Likewise, Jeeves is initially a very sketchy character. Bertie goes from 23 to 30 in the series, but the closest people have come to Jeeves’ age is a general idea that he is about a decade to a dozen years older than Bertie, making him from 33-35 to his early forties. However, in the 1930s, Plum and Ethel had a manservant named Robinson who was a veritable cornucopia of useless trivia, and who could be guaranteed to elucidate like a talking encyclopaedia on any given subject, so Plum incorporated this massive intellect into the Jeeves of the first novel. As the stories go on, we discover that Jeeves’ personal foibles will not allow him to be the valet of a married man, so the pair end up having to pull off a variety of hair-raising japes in order to keep Bertie out of the clutches of matrimony which will, according to Jeeves’ personal code of honour, necessitate him leaving Bertie’s employ – an unthinkable horror. They are hampered by the fact that Bertie (like Plum) was raised with that quintessential English attitude of honour and respect, especially towards women. When various females from the daffy Madelaine Bassett (‘the stars are God’s daisy-chain’) to the terrifyingly corn-fed Honoria Glossop (‘laugh like a train entering a tunnel’) declared they were engaged to Bertie, he realised that publicly denying this fact would be tantamount to calling the fiancée du jour a liar, something abhorrent to his sense of honour. Bertie and Jeeves have to work desperately behind the scenes to either get the woman to break off the betrothal, or preferably get her married off to some chum of Bertie’s and thus negate the danger altogether. Throughout the series, Bertie ends up being engaged almost ten times, including re-engagements to some of the same women. Besides his books (between 1914 and 1920 he had thirteen books published)and his work as a playwright with Kern, Bolton and Richard D’Oyly Carte, whose dead son he had immortalized in Psmith, Plum obtained work as a “script doctor”, or “rewrite man” as they were called. He found the work so easy he called it “money for jam.” With the advent of motion pictures, especially “talkies”, Hollywood was winnowing through fiction at an ever-increasing rate in a quest for fiction that they could turn in movies – Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, and dozens of others were made into films. However, budgetary constraints and the chaotic set up of the early studios meant that quite often, hatchet jobs were done on the stories filmed and a script doctor was needed so that the screenplay could be repeatedly changed in order to make the finished movie make any kind of coherent sense. Virtually all the films of the 1930s adapted from famous stories like Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes are in truth a ghastly mess, and it is strongly advised to ignore them and just read the books, though Wodehouse himself became friends with Basil Rathbone, actually a good Sherlock Holmes. Edgar Wallace the thriller writer also worked in Hollywood in the late 1920s, on films that included King Kong. In 1929 Plum was in America when his father Ernest died in May, and after earning nearly $50,000 for what he considered virtually doing nothing, Plum gave a reporter an interview in which, utilising his customary public ‘child-like naivety’ persona, he candidly exposed the idiocy of the Hollywood studio system that hired and fired with bizarre randomness. The interview was published in full across the nation. Somewhat excessively, Plum was credited with single-handedly bringing an end to the ludicrous system, though credit more probably belongs to the great Wall Street Crash of that year. Plum’s frank innocence and willingness to answer any question put to him was a hint of the furore that would come a few years later, when he was shamefully victimized by certain elements of the British press. At the time, however, Plum and Ethel decided to return to Britain. Repeatedly over the previous few years, Plum had had run-ins with the American IRS, and though each time he was able to obtain court judgments in his favour, he became utterly exasperated by the repeated imbroglios with the “intractable, idiotic Inland Revenue”. They returned to England in 1931, and in 1932 rented a villa at Le Touquet, France, which was the year Plum’s stepdaughter Leonora married Peter Cazalet. These rapid moves in the space of a year didn’t slow him down. Between 1920-1932 he had six books published, including Very Good, Jeeves. From 1932, Plum and Ethel lived at Le Touquet in France, and by 1939, Plum had had published sixty-five books, not including his plays, poetry, and journalistic articles. He also had two step-grandchildren to dote upon, Sheran, Leonora & Peter Cazalet’s daughter born in 1934 and Edward born in 1936, though sadly the latter year also saw the death of Plum’s favourite brother Armine, aged only 57 years old. In 1939 he received a Doctorate in Letters from Oxford (Magdalen College), the university his father had been unable to afford to send him to. What makes “Plum’s” tremendous output so remarkable is the fact that Wodehouse was almost always writing “at the top of his game”. Some of his best books, Thank You, Jeeves (1934) Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), Blandings Castle (1935), The Code of the Woosters (1938), and Uncle Fred In The Springtime (1939) were written in this period, but besides all these, his other output was almost as good. Indeed, the only “flaw” that Plum displayed more than once was a surprising lack of imagination in his character’s names – somewhat astonishing considering the battalions of unusually named aunts, uncles and cousins. Rupert Psmith (Lucas D’Oyly Carte) was on one occasion Ronald Psmith. A more obvious example is in the Jeeves & Wooster series. There is the dreaded Aunt Agatha who is also Mrs Spenser Gregson, yet on several occasions, Plum refers to her butler as Gregson or Spenser. We have Sir Roderick Glossop, father of the “corn-fed” Honoria, one of Bertie’s many ex-fiancees, and also Sir Roderick Spode, later the Earl of Sidcup, and leader of the “Blackshorts”, a Fascist organization that was the closest Plum ever came to indicating that evil existed in his Golden World. Nevertheless, the vast majority of his work can be classed as “very good” or “excellent”, but even the less sparkling examples are automatically classed as “keepers”. Wodehouse is unique in that it is hard to immediately think of anything he wrote that was actually mediocre. Indeed, of all his books, perhaps only The Coming of Bill in 1920 fits that description. Wodehouse’s writing also highlighted his way of life. Plum himself said that he wrote “by ignoring real life altogether”. His characters all live in an undesignated “golden age”, a “perpetual summer” of golf, cricket, avoiding aunts, and sport at the Drones Club. There is no sickness, no war, no tragedy of any kind. So, despite the ominous rumblings of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Plum continued to live at Le Touquet in happy contentment. Few people expected Germany to strike. World War I had destroyed the German monarchy when its princes agreed to relinquish their claims to the throne. But, with stupid, short-sighted spite, Britain, France and America imposed punitive fines on the country that led to massive starvation and unemployment in the 1920s, despite the fact that the German people had been powerless to prevent their leaders fomenting the war. Such folly inevitably produced massive anti-British resentment amongst ordinary Germans. When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he turned the nation’s industries around within two years and provided a standard of living not even present in pre-war Britain; had Hitler remained Chancellor instead of seeking further glory, he would probably have gone down in history as a hero, or at the very least an economic genius. Thanks to the folly of Britain and its allies, Hitler had a weapon he could use; he focused the anger of the German people against Britain and the rest of Europe. Plum and Ethel were captured at Le Touquet in 1939, and Plum was placed in an internment camp. In 1941, Plum reached sixty, and in line with the Nazi policy, he and Ethel were released; Plum learned that his youngest brother Richard Wodehouse the cricketer had died in 1940 at the young age of 47, and his mother Eleanor also died in 1941. Upon Plum’s release from internment, still in France, he was approached by an American journalist and a German Hollywood scriptwriter friend, who asked him if he would be willing to make some broadcasts over the radio, despite the war between Britain and Germany reaching ever greater depths of iniquity. Ever willing to help someone out, Plum agreed, and gave five broadcasts over German radio to America, which were heard by virtually no-one except short-wave radio enthusiasts. Unfortunately for him, British war hysteria and fanatic nationalism were at their height, also, he was P. G. Wodehouse. Since the 1880s there had been certain factions in British politics rabidly anti- American. Plum’s obvious and open love of America irritated them unbearably. Other sections of the “intellectual” community were also deeply jealous of Plum. He was reasonably handsome, happily married, of noble birth and highly successful, unlike most of them. His books were not pompous long-winded treatises raved over by the intelligentsia but unknown to anyone else, his books were read and loved by millions, particularly by those irksome ordinary people who wouldn’t realize they were so stupid they needed the intellectuals to do their thinking for them. The radio broadcasts were not in the slightest way offensive, pro-German or anti- British, but they gave these seething factions a focus upon which to vindictively vent their envy and malice. Writing as “Cassandra”3 in the tabloid newspaper The Daily Mirror, columnist William Connor wrote a disgraceful article excoriating Plum for the broadcasts and labelling him a quisling, stating several untruths as fact, including that Plum had agreed to the broadcasts in exchange for his release from a German prison camp (completely untrue). Despite the unanimous protests of the BBC, Connor then went on radio to further slander Plum following his libellous article (which Plum had decided to sue over, but then changed his mind). At no point during these shameful libels and slanders did Connor or his ilk apportion any blame to the American journalist, or the German scriptwriter, or explain the public that in America, the most popular people were isolationist politicians praising Hitler as a “great statesman” and urging the American people to ignore the war and Britain, despite Britain warning them that the Germans were planning to attack the USA. Had Hitler not been stupid enough to arrange the attack on Pearl Harbour, America would have probably never entered the conflict; not for nothing did Winston Churchill dryly comment, “America always does the right thing, but only after it has exhausted all other alternatives.” Plum was confounded by the hysteria and watched the British media foaming at the mouth with bemused bafflement and deep hurt at the vitriolic slanders hurled at him. Then, it ceased to matter. In 1943 Leonora, now Mrs Cazalet and mother of two young children, died – her daughter Sheran was only nine, her son Edward was seven. Ethel and Plum were utterly devastated. For Plum, it marked the end of his experiment in emotionalism. At the memorial service for the victims of September 11th2001, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s words were read to the American people: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” It was a price Plum found too high. He did not become cold, bitter, aloof or in any way unpleasant, but there was now an unbridgeable distance. He remained jolly, affable and witty, but apart from Ethel and a small circle of friends, nothing touched him. Many years after the war, Plum ended up having lunch with William Connor, whose wicked articles precipitated so much trouble. Plum called him a “splendid fellow” and the two became friends. However, their friendship was not because Plum graciously forgave Connor’s disgraceful attack; Plum had simply never harboured enough animosity to care. In 1945, the death of Hitler brought relief to the world. In Paris when it was liberated, Plum and Ethel made themselves known to a soldier, and within days had MI5 en route to debrief him. Several investigations always returned the same conclusion: Wodehouse was innocent of any wrongdoing, never mind treason. Unfortunately, these reports were considered classified, and were not made public until 1999 by the British Government, long after Plum could have used them to vindicate himself and sue the appalling William Connor et al for every last penny. However, personally reassured that he was ‘in the clear’, Plum began making plans to return to Shropshire and pick up his writing. However, the factions working against him, unknowing of the MI5 reports clearing him, were still in full play. Friends warned Ethel of their plan, incredibly, to try Plum for treason when he returned to Britain. Ethel, still grieving for her only child, had enough of such shenanigans. Plum regarded this ridiculous action with utter bewilderment and an utter lack of concern. With a shrug of their shoulders, the Wodehouses left the clearly barmy Britons and settled in New York in 1947. That however was not the end of the matter. After the hysteria had died down, the press decided to be merciful. When Wodehouse begged to return, suitably penitent, they would be persuaded to forgive. They would even consider inviting the poor exile to come back if he was suitably chastened. Articles full of stern rebuke that ended with magnanimous forgiveness were penned in anticipation, and full of self-righteous zeal they travelled across the pond to see the anxious supplicant. To their absolute outrage, they found nothing of the sort. Not only was Plum not repentant or remorseful, he wasn’t the slightest bit miserable. More importantly, he didn’t want to go to Britain. Plum loved America so much that he had applied for U.S. Citizenship (he became an American citizen in 1955). He was happily engrossed in his writing, and didn’t even think about Britain. If Plum gave the broadcasts any thought at all, he harboured not the slightest regret – as far as he was concerned, he had done them as a favour to help someone out, and in the same situation would have done exactly the same thing. Infuriated, the factions returned to Britain, but found a way to vent their spleen. Repeatedly over the following years, Wodehouse was nominated for a knighthood. Repeatedly, these factions used his non-existent “treason” to spitefully deny him one. What made their actions completely pathetic was the fact that Plum was oblivious to their venom. Born into the aristocracy, Plum knew how the peerage system worked, and had simply assumed that becoming an American citizen would bar him from all honours bar, possibly, an “honorary” (not real) knighthood. He would have been surprised to learn that he had even been nominated, never mind rejected. Nor did the appellation “Sir” matter very much. Plum was the grandson of a Baronet; his uncle was a Baron, his cousin an Earl and his great-uncle a Cardinal. A mere knighthood was hardly anything to get excited about. Of course, Plum in no way despised the Honour or sneered at it, but he had that casual, “Oh, another knighthood for the family” attitude peculiar to those of ancient lineage. If he wished, Plum could recount his ancestry back over a thousand years, what was a knighthood to him? Of far more interest to Plum was television, specifically, televised adaptations of his work. He had been a playwright and loved the theatre, seeing many productions of his plays, but unlike his contemporary, Agatha Christie, who was fortunate enough to see her work transferred to celluloid repeatedly throughout her life (beginning in 1928 when she was thirty-eight and had only a few books published), celluloid glory came late to Plum. Admittedly, there are problems with adapting Wodehouse. Much of the humour is in word-play and the descriptions that Plum wrote on the page, which of course could not be seen on screen. There was also cost – putting Plum’s work on film, say for example, the Blandings series, would require the hiring of stately homes, lavish costumes, and the creation of a world were certain things did not appear. Any War Memorials to World War I and II, for instance, would have to be avoided in shots of Plum’s perpetually jolly 1920s world. It was considered prohibitive. On 14th October 1960, the eve of Plum’s 79th birthday, a “birthday salute” to P. G. Wodehouse, signed by eighty “distinguished English and American men and women of letters” was published in the New York Times. Amongst the luminaries whose signatures adorned it were Agatha Christie, Cole Porter, Kinglsey Amis, Aldous Huxley, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, John Updyke, Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash and Evelyn Waugh. Perhaps galvanized by this illustrious homage to Wodehouse, the first TV series of Wodehouse’s work was put into production by none other than that bastion of the British Establishment, the B.B.C. Starring Ian Carmichael (though slightly too old) as the hapless Bertie Wooster, The World of Wooster series was a hit. Unfortunately, it was not until many years after Plum’s death that Oxbridge- graduate actor/comedians Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie would reprise the roles in four critically acclaimed series (see above left), with Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster. They were universally praised as the definitive Jeeves and Wooster and each of the four seasons was a ratings hit. Sadly the seasons could only “skim” nuggets from various stories of the ‘canon’ and unfortunately, for a variety of factors, the programme was ended after the fourth season. Predominantly the issue was money. The 1960s version with Ian Carmichael was produced by the BBC – publicly funded by the taxpayer, it had deep financial reserves which had – justly- built its global reputation for “period” drama. ITV on the other hand, which did the far superior Fry/Laurie version from 1991-1995, was a commercial concern that found it prohibitively expensive to keep hiring period clothing, interior sets, motor vehicles and of course those grand aristocratic country houses that predominate in Wooster’s world. There was also the cost of ‘airbrushing’ out of shot Britain’s ubiquitous War Memorials which are in every hamlet and village, and finding village greens and cricket grounds unspoilt by unsightly concrete monstrosities or other architectural vandalism. Finally there were increasing difficulties retaining the same cast and crew from season to season. Season 1 has the most superb casting of the programme, with Francesca Folan peerless as Madeline Bassett, Brenda Bruce as Aunt Dahlia and Mary Wimbush as Aunt Agatha. Unfortunately various actresses played Madeline and Aunt Dahlia from Season 2, and were far more ineffective and miscast in the roles. Mary Wimbush did not portray Aunt Agatha in Season 4, and her replacement simply could not convey the fearsome aspect of the ‘nephew crusher’ or her gimlet gaze. Importantly, however, the involvement of the BBC TV series in the 1960s helped to gradually kill off the appalling vendetta against Wodehouse. In the New Year’s Honour’s List of 1975, Plum was finally awarded the knighthood so long denied by men unworthy to tie his shoelaces. Sadly, by this point Plum’s health was so precarious that Ethel was warned if he went to England to receive the Knighthood in person, it would be a one-way trip. Understandably, she vetoed such a journey, to Plum’s distress. It is interesting that Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother wanted to journey to America to present the Knighthood personally; a great fan of Wodehouse, The Queen Mother rightfully believed he had been treated shabbily over the years, not least by the British Government, who had been tacitly complicit in slandering Wodehouse by not releasing the MI5 reports exonerating him. That same British Government protested in the strongest terms against such a trip, and the Queen prevailed upon her mother, who reluctantly abandoned the idea. Nevertheless, the knighthood was granted and Plum and Ethel became Sir and Lady Wodehouse. Just six weeks later, on February 14th, Valentine’s Day, 1975, after 61 years of marriage and nearly eighty years of consistently brilliant writing, 93-year- old Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse died peacefully with his Lady Ethel by his side, at Southampton, New York. It was the serene end to a truly great life. © 2006, C. D. Stewart 1 Plum was more than likely named Pelham after “Henry Pelham”, aristocratic hero of the novel Pelham: or the adventures of a Gentleman by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the iconic Victorian novelist, journalist and MP credited with inventing the English detective novel, crime thrillers, fantasy fiction and science-fiction, besides being a journalist and poet of towering repute. Born Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer 25th May 1803 to General William Earle and Mrs Elizabeth Barbara (nee Lytton) Bulwer, this great author married a relative of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rosina Doyle Wheeler, niece of the Governor of Guernsey, by whom he had two children, Emily and Edward. The famous Pelham novel was published in 1828, and the hero’s habit of wearing black for dinner began a fashion trend that has persisted to the 21st Century. The novel pre-empted the amateur detective genre (a la Miss Marple) by nearly a century. Bulwer’s most famous work was the novel Paul Clifford in 1830, which opens with the legendary opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night…”His science-fiction novel The Coming Race (1871) accurately predicts the development of electricity and nuclear energy – the strength giving elixir in the novel, “vril” came to be associated with any supposedly strengthening, invigorating elixir, such as Bovril – “bovine vril” Created a Baronet in 1838, under the terms of his mother’s will he had to make Lytton his “last” surname upon inheriting her Knebworth estate in 1843. Lytton was a close friend of novelist Charles Dickens, and had much to do with the famous Foudrinier Brothers of London, whose relative of course was “Plum’s” maternal grandmother. 2 Theosophy: a mixture of the Greek word “Theo” meaning God, and “Phil” (love) “osophy” (of wisdom) = “love of wisdom”. Theosophy was founded in the early 20th Century by persons concerned at the depth of hatred between Religion and Science. Theosophists believed that many Religious beliefs could be supported by scientific evidence, and likewise that some Scientific claims must be accepted on Faith, since there will never be any way to prove certain theories. Therefore, they called upon Science to understand it needed to have a spiritual side, and Religion to understand that it needed to have a material side. Theosophists still exist today. 3 In Classical Greek Mythology, Cassandra was the Princess of Troy, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, the only female of their (unlikely!) 51 children. The sun-god Apollo (son of Zeus, King of the Gods and Leto, a Titaness, twin brother of Artemis, Goddess of Hunting) offered Cassandra the gift of prophecy if she would have sex with him. He granted her psychic powers, but she reneged on the deal. Since as a god he could not withdraw the gift (actually, the Greek (and other) mythological deities did just that all the time, but that would ruin the story) Apollo cursed Cassandra’s precognition – her visions would always come true, but no-one would ever believe what she said, no matter how many times what she saw came true. Thus Cassandra was doomed to see the fall of Troy, the death of her father and her brother Hector.