A Wodehouse Handbook: Vol. 1 the World of Wodehouse

By N.T.P Murphy

Norman Murphy caused a minor stir in literary circles when he published In Search of Blandings, which demonstrated that many of P.G. Wodehouse's legendary characters and settings were based on fact. In the two volumes of A Wodehouse Handbook, he reveals his findings across a wider field - the world that Wodehouse lived in a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sybertooth Inc.
• Release date: Apr 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781927592052

Book preview

Chapter 1

Introduction

There is only one legitimate doubt about Wodehouse’s survival. All comedy depends for its success on shared assumptions of writer and reader. So much of Wodehouse’s verbal play depends for its effect on the reader’s cultural recognition.

The Scotsman, 22 April 2000

It is many years now since I began to wonder how much reality lay behind Wodehouse’s stories. I noted that he had left school and written school stories, that he had gone into a bank and written a novel about a bank, that he had gone to New York and written about a young writer in New York. The settings of his books followed events in his own life, and I wondered how many of his characters had a similar basis of fact. By going through Kelly’s County Directories, which listed the names and addresses of just about everybody in the UK; Burke’s Peerage, which contains an astonishing amount of information on the Wodehouse family; and the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, I tracked down Wodehouse’s many uncles, aunts and other relatives. A surprising number appeared in fictional guise in his stories.

By reading every letter of Wodehouse’s that came up for sale in London auction rooms, I was able to trace his addresses over seventy years and to match many to those of his fictional characters. I published my initial findings in In Search of Blandings (1981). This book is an expansion of that.

Since then I have been fortunate enough to meet a man who was dropped in the ‘Drones Club’ swimming pool when someone pulled back the last rope. By looking up an obvious source, I found Bertie’s flat in ‘Crichton Mansions, Berkeley Street’, which had eluded me for years. I lunched with a gentleman who confirmed that the model for Jeeves was the man I had suspected – and another nonagerian verified the location of the Junior Ganymede club.

I have had the privilege of presenting the prizes at the school Wodehouse drew as Market Snodsbury Grammar School and am fortunate enough to possess a photograph of the pig which inspired him to create the Empress of Blandings. I have been given much useful information by enthusiasts from around the world, including a distant Wodehouse relative in Australia who gave me a superb family origin for Buck-U-Uppo.

In a review of The Odd Thing about the Colonel and Other Pieces by Colin Welch (Daily Telegraph, 26 July 1997), Alan Judd wrote: Every generation, he muses, is doomed to be a sort of secret society, with special thoughts and interests which, like passwords, are well known to its contemporaries but cannot be communicated to its descendants.

That is the reason I wrote this book. Very many of Wodehouse’s references and quotations were topical, and the first readers of his books appreciated them more than we do today. He wrote for over seventy years, and his stories reflect the social standards and events of his time. I have tried to illustrate what those standards and events were, the background against which Wodehouse set his stories. Like Stinker Pinker, some curates did get their vicarage through their sporting prowess then, young men like Freddie Threepwood did place great importance on how they dressed then, practical jokes were the custom at country-house parties then.

The second, I fear overlong, half of this book comprises quotations and references from Wodehouse’s books. He made a point of using topical references all his life, but the relevance of many is now forgotten (‘trouble in the Balkans’, ‘the celebrated Maisie’, ‘Share the Wealth movement’, ‘the Black Hand’, his interpolations for ‘You’re the Top’ in Anything Goes). And he gave us so many topical quotations from songs and advertisements of the time as well as from Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare and Tennyson, because his readers appreciated them then.

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Writing on the decline of Punch, a journalist wrote in 1988: Few readers now possess the knowledge of history, the classics and poetry that gave rise to the allusive humour of Punch. This is the Decline of the West …

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I discovered that, as Wodehouse got older, his extraordinary memory began to falter. In a letter to me, he referred to a disreputable club that he had joined around 1903. He told me it was the Wellington Club, though subsequent research showed it was the Yorick Club in Wellington Street. A natural mistake – as was his confusion over Arnold Abney and Aubrey Upjohn in Much Obliged, Jeeves (Jeeves and the Tie That Binds). When asked, he said he had forgotten where Arnold Abney had come from. This was natural enough; it was nearly sixty years since he had written The Little Nugget. Replying to a similar query on the origins of Ukridge in 1958, he forgot the name of the main protagonist but remembered that of his unfortunate partner in the chicken farm venture.

Wodehouse achieved popularity and financial success, not by what he wrote but by the way in which he wrote. It was the style, the humour and the language that marked him out. The best analogy to his depiction of Edwardian England was made by Christopher Finch, who believes that Wodehouse’s equivalent in America was the illustrator Norman Rockwell. Both deliberately drew a small world; Rockwell used settings and characters in the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he lived. As an English newspaper pointed out, Rockwell’s pictures, and especially the 332 covers he did for the Saturday Evening Post, spread a national vision at least as powerful as anything from Hollywood. He captured a set of values that the nation did indeed hold to be its own. Years after his death, one can still meet the originals of many of his paintings in the streets of Stockbridge and they all agree he was idealistic and preferred ‘to portray the world as I see it.’ Rockwell did so with humour, with warmth and with an accuracy of contemporary detail that gave verisimilitude to his work. Wodehouse did exactly the same thing.

Time and again, in letters to his friends, Wodehouse spoke of trying to find material in the place where he was living at the time. Time and again, he recounted something that had happened, an anecdote he had heard, and wondered how he could use it – and then, a few months, sometimes twenty years later, it appeared in print. When he first wrote of a house, hotel or country house, he had the invaluable (to me) habit of either using its real name or giving clear instructions how to get there. He had the equally useful habit of using houses he or his relatives lived in, and when these ran out, he used the addresses of his friends. By slogging through voters’ lists and street and county directories for the appropriate years, I found many of the buildings he used in his stories.

In In Search of Blandings, I tried to identify locations Wodehouse described and the people who may not have been the ‘originals’ of his characters, but who were certainly in his mind when he created them. In this book I try to cover a wider field, the England of Wodehouse’s time. He exaggerated it, dramatised it, he made it funny. But it was real enough – real enough to be exaggerated, dramatised and made to look funny. The England he drew has long gone, but I hope this volume demonstrates that much of it did exist.

In 1951 Noel Coward put on Relative Values, which he realised would probably be the last of the drawing room comedies that had characterised the British stage for sixty years. A young earl wants to marry a film actress, his mother is horrified and the actress’s sister is his mother’s lady’s maid – as the butler says in the play, a coincidence in the best tradition of English high comedy. Coward then had the butler add: though our later playwrights would miss the more subtle nuances… . Comedies of manners swiftly become obsolete when there are no longer any manners.

It was Coward’s elegy on the world that he and Wodehouse had known, a world I have tried to describe in the following pages.

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Some years ago, a journalist interviewed a British film director known for his ‘advanced’ views and was surprised to see shelf after shelf of volumes of Punch in his office, going back a century or more. The director said they were invaluable. If there was ever a query on what people had talked about, what they had worried about at a particular time, Punch would have a cartoon or an article about it. And, he added, the drawings were so accurate that you knew exactly what men and women were wearing at the time. When a new dress fashion came in, Punch had a cartoon about it the following week. Like Wodehouse, Punch reflected a world that seems unreal to us simply because of the passage of time. But it was real enough.

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Chapter 2

Family

… in this life it is not aunts that matter but the courage which one brings to them …

The Mating Season

Wodehouse spoke rarely of his family’s history, but the pride of Bertie Wooster and Lord Emsworth in their ancestors’ participation in the Battle of Agincourt (1415) was no coincidence. The Wodehouse family was equally proud of Sir John Wodehouse, who won his knighthood for valour in that battle, which is why the family arms have the motto ‘Agincourt’.

Because the family is so ancient, there is disagreement over its origins. My edition of Burke’s Peerage states: The name of Wodehouse first occurs in Norfolk in 1402 when John Wodehouse was made Constable of Castle Rising. It is probable that he sprang from a London family, a member of which, William Power (also called Wodehouse), was Sheriff of London in 1374 and one of the King’s creditors in 1377.

I believe the Norfolk connection goes further back, to Sir Constantine Wodehouse (knighted by Henry I c. 1120), who held land near Kimberley, Wymondham, Norfolk, which became the family seat. For the next 700 years the family looked after their estates, fought for their country when called upon, married into other Norfolk families and slowly worked their way up the peerage with a baronetcy in 1611, a barony in 1797 and an earldom in 1866.

Wodehouse grew up in a family conscious of its history and, from a letter, we know he was certainly proud that the blood of Anne Boleyn flowed in his veins. Recent scholarship has shown that the blood of Henry VIII flowed in his veins as well: Henry had two children by Anne’s sister Mary, from whom both Wodehouse and the late Queen Mother were descended. The head of the family became an earl in 1866 (Earl of Kimberley), serving as Under-Secretary or Secretary of State in half a dozen Government posts. The nineteenth century saw various Wodehouse admirals and generals helping to win the Empire, which was then administered by innumerable Wodehouse colonial officers (see Chap. 22). Apart from Wodehouse’s own works, the British Library has some 30 books written by members of the family, ranging from the Index of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and several historical novels to a book on Whist and the scholarly Records of Bratton Fleming 1066–1876.

Wodehouse was born when Queen Victoria still had twenty years to reign, saw motor cars arrive as a new and dangerous invention, and was brought up by relatives who lived by Victorian standards. They were ‘gentry’, a social classification that, like the word itself, has nearly vanished. The sons of such families were expected to go into the Church, the Services or the professions, and among Wodehouse’s innumerable cousins, I could only find three who did not do so. Other occupations, though not actively discouraged, lacked that essential element of Victorian life – respectability. It may seem strange to us today, but the social ethos of the time depended on such subtle gradations.

Frances Donaldson, in her biography of Wodehouse, made an important point. Describing the status of Dulwich College, she said: Class distinctions in England in the late nineteenth century were so intricate and so numerous that they were not merely incomprehensible to foreigners, but understood only by Englishmen of a high enough social status to view their ramifications with a knowledge of upper-class taboos, and they were nowhere more prevalent than in the public school system.

Wodehouse and his contemporaries knew many ladies just like the aristocratic but impoverished Misses Deverill, who looked down on Esmond Haddock’s father because he had made money in trade. That was the world in which he had grown up, and Wodehouse accepted it, made fun of it when it helped the plot, and described it through the eyes of Bertie Wooster.

When he was not quite three years old, Wodehouse and his brothers were brought back to England from Hong Kong and put in the care of relatives. As far as I can ascertain, their parents came home on leave only three times during the next fourteen years, until his father retired in 1898.

From wills, letters, newspaper obituaries and the invaluable Burke’s Peerage, I have been able to trace most of the family members. Wodehouse had four clergymen uncles, numerous uncles and cousins in the Army and Navy, and an MP on his father’s side, while his mother’s family (the Deanes) included colonial civil servants, writers and artists.

Wodehouse’s immediate family circle comprised his father, mother, two elder brothers (Philip and Armine) and his younger brother, Richard, born in 1892. Of more significance to us, however, are his uncles and aunts. His father had five brothers and three sisters, while his mother, born Eleanor Deane, had eleven sisters and three brothers. Since most of them married, he possessed no less than twenty aunts and fifteen uncles. That is why Bertie Wooster and others were bedevilled by aunts; their creator had a wide choice of models to draw on.

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Aunts Sophia, Augusta, Louisa, Juliette, Marion, Mary, Anne, Edith, Jane, Caroline, Rosamund, Emmeline, another Marion, Jemima, Alice, another Jane, Amy, Lydia, Lucy and Harriet.

Uncles Edward, Hugh, Walter, John, Augustus, William, Clement, Malcolm, Philip, Charles, Frederick, another William, Albert, another Edward and Henry.

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Originals

Father

I can find only one reference to Wodehouse’s father (Henry Ernest Wodehouse CMG) in his novels. In The Pothunters, Jim Thompson’s father promises him a pound for every race he wins at the St Austin’s sports day. Wodehouse’s father encouraged Armine and P.G. by rewarding them with a fixed tariff of tips: five shillings for taking so many wickets, ten shillings for making fifty runs, and so on.

Mother

Wodehouse’s mother (née Eleanor Deane) was a very strong-minded lady who ‘stood no nonsense’. Patrick Wodehouse, P.G.’s nephew, remembered her when he was a small boy at school in Bexhill in the 1920s. She was very sharp on money, and tips from relatives which she considered too lavish were promptly replaced by a half-crown. Patrick remembered vividly there was always red jelly for pudding when he went there for Sunday lunch. If Granny poured, there were a few drops of cream on it. If his grandfather poured, there was a tidal wave.

Because of his parents’ long absence in Hong Kong, Wodehouse never got to know Eleanor as a mother and they were never close. From everything I have read, she made a point of keeping her sons in their place, no matter what worldly success they might have achieved. And since Bingley-on-Sea in real life is Bexhill-on-Sea (see Chap. 16), I have no hesitation in suggesting that Nanny Wilks of Wee Holme, Marazion Road, Bingley-on-Sea (‘Portrait of a Disciplinarian’, 1927) is based on Wodehouse’s mother, Mrs Eleanor Wodehouse, then living at Ewart Lodge, Jameson Road, Bexhill-on-Sea.

Brothers

In Something Fresh, we are told George Emerson is second-in-command of the police force in Hong Kong. This is an obvious reference to Wodehouse’s eldest brother Peveril, who served in the Hong Kong Police from 1897 to 1932 and became Deputy Superintendent. He was awarded a CIE (Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire) in 1919.

In My Man Jeeves (1919), Bertie tells us that Jeeves is like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves in thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I’ve got a cousin who’s what they call a Theosophist, and he says he’s often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn’t quite bring it off, probably owing to having been fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.

Wodehouse refers to this useful skill eight times over the years, and it is not too difficult to trace it to his brother Armine, who, after a brilliant career at Oxford (a First in Greats, the Chancellor’s Essay Prize and the Newdigate) went out to India. He joined Mrs Besant and the Theosophists and became president of the Theosophical College in Benares in 1911.

Son-in-Law

In ‘All’s Well with Bingo’, Wodehouse worked in a private joke when Mrs Bingo sent Bingo off to Monte Carlo to collect local colour for her book. We learn the hero of her book was ‘Lord Peter Shipbourne’. Wodehouse’s son-in-law was Peter Cazalet of Fairlawne, Shipbourne, Kent. A fine games player, he got his Blue for cricket, tennis and rackets and played cricket for Kent. His brother Victor won the Amateur Squash championship four times in the 1920s.

Peter Cazalet trained steeplechasers for the Queen Mother and worked in partnership with his old school friend, the famous amateur rider Lord Mildmay, who drowned while swimming in 1950. In 1936 and 1948 they missed winning the Grand National by a hair’s breadth. They are commemorated today in the Anthony Mildmay Peter Cazalet Memorial Chase, run each January.

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Apart from The Coming of Bill, which he wrote back in 1910, babies feature rarely in Wodehouse’s stories. A notable exception is Algernon Aubrey Little, who first appeared in ‘Sonny Boy’ (1939). I wonder, no more than that, if he was a reflection of the birth, a couple of years before, of Wodehouse’s grandson, Edward Cazalet?

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Aunts

When Wodehouse entered Dulwich in 1894, his parents were in Hong Kong and his ‘home address’ was given as Cheney Court, Box, Wiltshire. Cheney Court is still there, a picturesque seventeenth-century manor house, currently home to a language school. As a result of the visit by the Wodehouse Pilgrims of 1989, they now have two rooms named The Blandings Room and The Wodehouse Room.

In Wodehouse’s boyhood, Cheney Court was the home of his maternal grandmother, Mrs Deane, and her four unmarried daughters: Miss Louisa Deane, Miss Mary Deane, Miss Anne Deane and Miss Emmeline Deane. The memory of the five ladies stayed with Wodehouse a long time, which is why, in The Mating Season, Bertie Wooster’s heart sinks when he learns he is to stay at Deverill Hall, a house infested by no less than five aunts. And it needs little imagination to work out that the five ladies were given the name Deverill because of the five small hamlets in the valley below Cheney Court: Brixton Deverill, Monkton Deverill, Kingston Deverill, Longbridge Deverill and Hill Deverill. (The man who gave Wodehouse the idea of Sir Roderick Glossop lived nearby; see Chap. 37).

Mrs Deane died in 1892 and left Cheney Court to her daughters, who sold it four years later and went their separate ways. The two youngest, Anne (1854–1934) and Emmeline (1857–1944), came to London, where Anne earned a living illustrating fashion articles for magazines while Emmeline became a portrait painter. Wodehouse liked both of them; he addressed Emmeline as ‘Nym’ and visited them often during his early years in London. Both achieved some success and Emmeline’s portrait of Cardinal Newman, a cousin, now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. I cannot trace either of them appearing in Wodehouse’s stories, though he certainly discussed with Anne the difficulties of selling her pictures and his stories.

The other two sisters, Louisa and Mary, are a very different matter.

Louisa Deane (1835–1906). The eldest of the eleven children from Mr Deane’s second marriage, she was Wodehouse’s favourite aunt. He spoke of her as being kind and jolly and said she was the lady he originally had in mind when he wrote of Aunt Dahlia (but see Chap. 37). She died at Bourton-on-the-Water in December 1906 but had the pleasure of seeing her nephew Pelham come down from London that year (possibly at her urging) to play cricket for the village against the mighty MCC. Like her sisters, she was a talented artist and illustrated her sister Mary’s books Mr Zinzan of Bath and The Rose Spinner.

Mary Deane (1845?–1940). The importance of this lady in Wodehouse’s writing cannot be overstated. She was the source of the strong-minded female writers and aunts who made life miserable for those around them – ladies like Aunt Agatha, Miss Julia Ukridge, Lady Wickham or Mrs Lora Delane Porter. I had put this forward as a strong hypothesis in In Search of Blandings and was delighted to see it confirmed in a Wodehouse letter of 14 January 1955: Aunt Agatha is definitely my Aunt Mary [Mary Deane] who was the scourge of my childhood.

There are thirteen books to her name in the British Library, mostly historical novels of the Jacobites or of Regency days in Bath, and four seem to be romantic versions of incidents in the Deane family history – or Aunt Mary’s view of it. At least one is set in Cheney Court, and the heroine eventually marries the hero in the little chapel which stands about 300 yards from the house.

From every account I have read, Aunt Mary was a pain in the neck. Nella Wodehouse, Wodehouse’s sister-in-law, told me she could not think of anything good to say about her. Even her will confirms everything I had learned of her and includes a nasty crack at a nephew for ‘wrongfully taking’ family portraits from her mother’s house. (I checked her mother’s will, which confirms the pictures were bequeathed to the nephew in question. Fifty years later, Aunt Mary clearly still felt they should have gone to her.)

I am grateful to for her for one thing. In 1899 she completed the family history (Deane, Dene, Dean and Adeane) her father had begun. I suspect this was the origin of the family histories written by such luminaries as Lord Marshmorton in A Damsel in Distress and that unlikely chronicler the Duke of Dunstable in Uncle Fred in the Springtime.

Uncles

Wodehouse had four clerical uncles: Uncle Edward (Rev. Edward Isaac), Uncle Fred (Rev. Frederick Wodehouse), Uncle Henry (Rev. Henry Somers Cocks), and Uncle Philip (Rev. Philip Wodehouse). These four gentlemen had cures in Devonshire, Worcestershire and Derbyshire, and Wodehouse spent school holidays with at least three of them. I believe Uncle Edward Isaac of Hanley Castle is the cleric he had in mind for the Rev. Mr Heppenstall (see Chap. 11).

I hesitate to speculate on which other uncles appeared in the stories, but when Wodehouse was writing of colonial civil servants or Service officers, he did not have to look very far. Of his mother’s three brothers, one was a senior colonial officer in Hong Kong, one was an Army major, the third was a Royal Navy captain. On his father’s side, I can only find one uncle who was not either a clergy-man or a Service officer.

Cousins

Helen Marion Wodehouse (1880–1964). The Reverend Philip Wodehouse noted above was rector of Bratton Fleming, Devonshire, and we know that Wodehouse and his brothers used to spend occasional summer holidays with him. The Rev. Philip had four children, the eldest of whom, Helen Marion Wodehouse, a year older than Wodehouse, was a young lady of great intelligence who clearly made a deep impression on him. Cast your mind back to Miss Florence Beezley in ‘The Babe and the Dragon’ and then remember the three young ladies of whom Bertie Wooster was terrified: Florence Craye, Heloise Pringle and Honoria Glossop. These four frightening intellectuals have one significant factor in common: they were all products of Girton College, Cambridge.

I find it no coincidence that Helen Marion Wodehouse went to Girton, where she got a First in the Maths Tripos, followed by a First in Moral Sciences. She went on to earn her doctorate at Birmingham, became Principal of a Teacher Training College at thirty, earned a full professorship at Bristol at thirty-nine and was Mistress of Girton from 1931 to 1942, finishing up as President of the Federation of University Women. She wrote half a dozen books on such subjects as The Logic of Will, The Presentation of Reality and A Survey of the History of Education.

I have met two people who knew her. One, a Girton graduate, remembers her as an impressive and dignified figure held in awe by her students, who were convinced she was one of Wodehouse’s formidable fictional aunts. The other was a man who had taken his college choir to give a concert at Girton and introduced one item with a quotation from Virgil. Afterwards, over the tea and biscuits, she made her way across to thank him and murmured: I think, Mr Challis, you will find you were quoting Horace, not Virgil. But the music was excellent.

Philip George Wodehouse. If Lieutenant Tom Chase of the Royal Navy (Love Among the Chickens) had a factual origin, then I suggest a likely source is Philip Wodehouse, Helen Marion’s younger brother – of an age with Wodehouse – who went into the Navy. He was a lieutenant when Wodehouse wrote the book and went on to become captain and earn a D.S.O.

Malcolm Thompson, son of Aunt Evelyn Thompson (née Deane), gave Wodehouse many useful anecdotes about his time at Winchester College (see Chap. 3).

Edward Swinton Isaac. Son of the Rev. Edward Isaac of Hanley Castle, Worcestershire, he became a solicitor. He took his articles in London and qualified a couple of years after Wodehouse became a freelance writer. He knew Wodehouse as a boy, and they were close enough for Isaac to recommend Perceval Graves (the poet Robert Graves’ eldest brother) as someone to share digs with Wodehouse in Walpole Street. I suggest he is the probable origin of the cheerful young solicitor Gerald Nichols of Uneasy Money and Bachelors Anonymous.

Edmond Robert Wodehouse. We met the Right Hon. A.B. Filmer, the Cabinet Minister, in ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’. He and Bertie were guests at Aunt Agatha’s house, ‘Woollam Chersey, Hertfordshire’, when she decided Bertie should make something of his life and become the Minister’s private secretary. It was common practice for Ministers to introduce young men into public life this way. Indeed, Edmond Wodehouse had acted as private secretary to the head of the Wodehouse family, the Earl of Kimberley, before becoming MP for Bath from 1880 to 1906.

I note that Aunt Mary Deane’s book Mr Zinzan of Bath (1891) has a fulsome dedication to Edmond R.Wodehouse, MP. I also note that she considered young Pelham was wasting his time as a freelance journalist. She certainly had the strength of character to presume on the family relationship and approach her cousin by marriage for a job for her wayward nephew.

And I further note from newspaper social columns of the time that the Right Hon. Edmond Robert Wodehouse MP stayed with his cousin Charles Edward Wodehouse in the summers of 1902 and 1903 not at ‘Woollam Chersey, Herts’ but Woolmers Park, Herts. It is probably pure coincidence …

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Major Flood-Smith of Big Money was justly infuriated when Lord Hoddesdon purloined his hat and expressed himself with a few of the rich expletives which a soldier inevitably picks up in his years of service. Major Flood-Smith had spent seven years with the Loyal Royal Worcestershires, who are celebrated for their plain speech. I find it no coincidence that Wodehouse had an uncle and at least two cousins in the Worcesters. I should add that the officers I knew in the Worcesters were invariably polite and courteous. Perhaps things were different in Wodehouse’s day.

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1 Cheney Court.psd

Cheney Court, Box, Wiltshire (‘Deverill Hall’)

This Jacobean house, home of his maternal grandmother and four aunts, was Wodehouse’s ‘home address’ while his parents were in Hong Kong.

Chapter 3

Schools

Wodehouse’s school stories were written a century ago but still read well. Having only recently left Dulwich College, he wrote them from a boy’s point of view and went back to Dulwich regularly on Saturday evenings for at least three years to have tea with his friends and keep himself up to date with the gossip of the school. His stories were popular because they were fresh, realistic, and did not preach, as so many school stories of the time did. His fictional schoolboys lived by the code he had learned to follow at Dulwich, based not on religion but on fair play and responsibility.You might make every effort to evade punishment, but you did not let someone else be punished in your place. You might loathe another boy, but that did not stop you picking him for an important game. And, as you went up through the school, you learned to set an example to your juniors. When Wyatt told Mike Jackson in Mike what school rules can be disregarded but what unwritten rules cannot, Wodehouse told us that Mike went to sleep with a clear idea of what the public school spirit, of which so much is talked and written, really meant.

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I am grateful to Charles Bishop, who sent me an extract from The Craft of Crime by John C. Carr. It said of Raymond Chandler (another Dulwich boy): Chandler was the pre-World War I product of an eighteenth-century education received in a seventeenth-century school, taught by men who had lived most of their lives in Victorian England. Chandler had the viewpoint of the Augustans.

Isn’t this one of the characteristics of Wodehouse? He wrote the lightest of romantic comedies with a literary skill based on his training in the Classics, a discipline that went back 2,000 years.

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In an interview he gave towards the end of his life, Wodehouse mused on the fashion among young writers of saying how unhappy their childhood had been and how much they had loathed their public school. He realised he was old-fashioned in enjoying his school days, which had gone like a breeze, and in a letter to Bill Townend he mused on whether he was being a bit childish in still anxiously following the fortunes of the school Rugger team so closely.

Some critics maintain that Wodehouse had a fixation on his old school and never grew out of it. He certainly remembered Dulwich with great affection all his life and for a very good reason: it was his real boyhood home. It is often forgotten today, but Colonial civil servants were usually forced to send their children home to boarding schools in England. Before the advent of air-conditioning, few European children survived more than a couple of years in the Tropics, and in those days of slow travel by ship, most parents only got home leave every five years. The result was that Wodehouse and his brothers were brought up by aunts and uncles.

While uncles, aunts and parents (see Chap. 2) came and went, Dulwich College was the first stable environment in Wodehouse’s life – a place of routine, order and discipline, the factors every boy needs. When you have not seen your mother for four years, the term alma mater has an added significance. Spending thirty-seven weeks of the year at school and fifteen at home, you come to know your schoolfellows better than your own family. And the ties of friendship can be very strong if, like Bingo Little and Bertie, you had been through prep school, public school and Oxford together. It is worth pointing out that, except for his last twenty years spent at Remsenburg, Wodehouse was at Dulwich longer (six years) than anywhere else in his life – and he went back there often over the next forty years.

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The Old School Tie is derided today as a symbol of snobbery and class distinction. Perhaps some wear them as such, but they are no different from the baseball-caps and insignia worn by millions in support of their local football team. It is a recognition symbol, a signal that shows which ‘tribe’ you belong to, no more than that. And very useful signals they have been on occasion. Bill Townend, Wodehouse’s old friend, met Raymond Chandler for the first time in Los Angeles in 1913 when Chandler noticed Townend was wearing an Old Alleynian (Dulwich Old Boys) ribbon round his straw hat.

If it is all right for Freemasons, Elks, Shriners, football or baseball clubs, it’s all right for Old School Ties as well.

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The routine for boys of Wodehouse’s background was to attend a small kindergarten school till the age of seven or eight, when you went to your prep-school (your ‘prepper’). This was a boarding school which prepared you for entry to your ‘public school’ at thirteen or fourteen.

In 1886 Wodehouse went with his brothers to a small school run by the Misses Prince in Croydon, a south London suburb. The school, now named Elmhurst, is still going, though much enlarged and in different premises. I have not found any reference to this establishment in his stories, though, many years later he said it was where he first encountered the cheerful optimism of Cockney housemaids like the splendid Elsie Bean, who voiced her opinion of her employer, Mugsy Bostock, with ‘quiet fortitude’: An overbearing dishpot, that’s what you are, and I would like to give my month’s notice. (My thanks to Christine Hewitt for the information that, in 1891, the Misses Prince’s housemaid was Edith Knight and the parlourmaid was Annie McLintock. )

Malvern House

In 1890, Wodehouse and his brothers went to Elizabeth College in the Channel Islands, and it was not until 1891 or 1892 that he joined the establishment whose name he was to make famous: Malvern House. His parents intended him to go into the Navy, and Mrs Wodehouse’s brother-in-law, Commander Augustus Bradshaw, who lived at Dover, told them of the school, which specialised in preparing boys for the Army and Navy.

Malvern House, Kearsney, just outside Dover, was owned and run by Mr Richard Harvey Hammond. It appears first in the short story ‘Out of School’, where James Datchett teaches at ‘Harrow House’, a small school ‘just outside Dover’ run by Mr Blatherwick. Malvern and Harrow are both famous public schools, and the change of name was obvious to English readers. The American equivalent would be to change a school name from Princeton House to Dartmouth House.

Wodehouse published the story in 1909, but we do not hear of the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn until The Code of the Woosters thirty years later. And we do not read of the combination of Upjohn, Malvern House and Bramley-on-Sea till Wodehouse’s sixty-eighth book, The Mating Season, in 1949. I think the reason is simple. William Townend wrote that, around 1938, Wodehouse, then living at Le Touquet, came over to England to spend the day with his old friend. Wodehouse hired a car and the pair of them went to look at his old prep school in Dover. The letter clearly implies that it was the first time Wodehouse had been back since he had left it forty-four years before. It was just the sort of trigger that would put Hammond/ Upjohn back into Wodehouse’s mind to grow and develop over the years.

In Much Obliged, Jeeves it is memories of Arnold Abney (of The Little Nugget) that haunt Bertie Wooster, not Aubrey Upjohn. When a reader pointed out the error, Wodehouse apologised. He said he knew the name Abney from somewhere but could not remember the source. Because of his age (he was under some pressure to complete the book in time for publication on his ninetieth birthday), it is an understandable lapse. When he realised it would be difficult to feature the abominable Brinkley in a story set in Aunt Dahlia’s Brinkley Court, he had Jeeves persuade Bertie the man’s name was Bingley, not Brinkley. Nevertheless, he was careful to ensure that the name of Aunt Dahlia’s house never appeared in the story.

It is tempting to conjecture that perhaps Wodehouse did win the prize for Scripture Knowledge at Malvern House (with four clerical uncles, he would have had a head start) and it is likely he helped himself to the biscuits in the headmaster’s study. This certainly used to occur at a prep school where I was an assistant master. But, without further evidence, we are left with only two firm references to Wodehouse’s time there, Aubrey Upjohn and the sergeant-major.

The original of Aubrey Upjohn, Mr Richard Harvey Hammond, owner and headmaster of Malvern House, retired in 1909 and died that year at the age of 81. He was in his sixties when Wodehouse served his time there; perhaps it was age that made him the short-tempered tyrant Bertie Wooster/Wodehouse remembered. In his will, he left the school to his eldest son with the words and the goodwill of the school, if any – a prescient phrase since the establishment closed its doors two years after his death. The building was demolished in 1963, but Hammond’s grave can be seen in Kearsney churchyard, a stone cross standing beside the small extension on the south side of the church.

His name is easy enough to trace. In the same way that the three trochees (long/short) of Stanley Featherstonhaugh (pronounced Fanshaw) Ukridge is a reflection of Herbert Wotton Westbrook (see Chap. 34), Aubrey Upjohn has the same alliteration and metre as Harvey Hammond.

In Chapter 17 of Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, Bertie Wooster is startled by an unknown voice who had shouted ‘Hey’ at him: He had not made a good impression on me from the start because his voice had reminded me of the Sergeant-Major who used to come twice a week to drill us at the private school where I won the Scripture Knowledge prize which I may have mentioned once or twice. The Sergeant-Major’s voice had been like a vehicle full of tin cans going over gravel, and so was the Hey chap’s. Some relation perhaps.

Wodehouse’s memory went back eighty-odd years when he wrote that. The newspaper report of those attending Hammond’s funeral made specific mention of Sergeant-Major Beeden, for twenty-seven years drill instructor at Malvern House.

Dulwich College

In April 1894, aged twelve and six months, Wodehouse entered Dulwich College, when the school was going through an excellent period, and joined with a good group. Arthur Herman Gilkes, the headmaster, noted in his diary for 1899, Wodehouse’s last year, that the Sixth Form was the pleasantest he had known – responsible, hard-working boys of whom he was proud.

Wodehouse loved it from the day he arrived and followed its fortunes all his life. For the next forty years, whenever he was in London, he went down to Dulwich to watch the school Rugger matches and made time to write them up for the Old Boys’ magazine. When he moved to France, he would arrange meetings with his London publisher to coincide with important fixtures. Towards the end of his life, the only thing that would get him to spend a night away from Remsenburg was the Old Alleynian dinner in New York.

The seven school stories that established him as an author – The Pothunters, A Prefect’s Uncle, Tales of St Austin’s, The Gold Bat, The Head of Kay’s, The White Feather, Mike – and a dozen short stories in The Captain owe much, but not everything, to Dulwich. Because the school lay on the outskirts of London, and Wodehouse wanted to employ such factors as collecting bird’s eggs or being out of bounds, he moved it to the Shropshire hamlet of Stableford, his family home from 1897 to 1902. That is why Roughton, Worfield, Chesterton and many of the other place names in the school stories will be found around Stableford, while Badger Dingle, the original of ‘Badgwick Dingle’ of The Pothunters, lies just a few hundred yards from Wodehouse’s old home. (See Chap. 35.)

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Tales of St Austin’s

These stories are clearly set in Dulwich, so why did Wodehouse choose the name St Austin’s? In the period 1900–05, when he often used to walk the six miles from his lodgings in Chelsea to Dulwich, Wodehouse’s route took him past a church on the road about a mile north of Dulwich. Attached to it was a small infants school named – St Austin’s.

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The Phrases & Notes notebooks, in which Wodehouse wrote down ideas and anecdotes he could use, begin in May 1902 and end in 1905. They record his frequent visits back to Dulwich, and time and again they have the comment Use in school story … followed by some anecdote he had heard at Dulwich. I have set out some examples below.

Note 86 (Sept 1902): To be worked into school story: two characters like Wade and Knox, who play half (scrum-half and fly-half) & are great pals, one doing the fighting work, the other the brilliant work … [A.L. Wade played for Dulwich 1902–3–4 and went on to play Rugger for England; N.A. Knox played for Dulwich 1902–3 and went on to play cricket for his country. See Knox, N.A. in Quotes & Refs.]

Note 222: For school story: – N.A. Knox got put into Everett’s house because Everett knew his people. Hates it. It spoils his whole life at school. Nobody to talk to or pal up with …" [See Dallas’ complaint in chap. 5 of The Pothunters.]

Note 224 (b): N.A. Knox has row with Doulton. [Doulton was the Dulwich master responsible for music. ‘The Head of the House’ was PGW’s original title for The Head of Kay’s.] He cuts choir practice because he has to look after nets. D. comes up & says to him: ‘It’s all off about solos for the concert.’ NAK scratches his name off singing competition list, which he had won before. (Might make this the reason of concert row in ‘The Head of the House’. The chap’s house, hearing why he is not singing at concert, determine to wreck success of same, and do so.)

Even clearer is:

Note 225: School story mems:

(a) House match story. Captain of XI in very weak house. 200 to win. Kid (the hero of the story) keeps up his end while captain (cp NA Knox) scores century.

(b) NA Knox, the one man in a one man team, confesses to me how sick he is of bowling on & on all through the term, with chaps dropping his catches.

Wodehouse used these in The Head of Kay’s and probably made the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ Fenn’s piece at the concert because it was what Wodehouse’s brother, Armine, came back to play at the 1899 Dulwich concert.

The Dulwich concerts were sometimes quite rowdy affairs. In 1900 the boys in the gallery began to stamp their feet in time with the music (see The Head of Kay’s again), upsetting both the performers and the audience. Gilkes had to stop the performance to restore order, but the stamping resumed when the encore was played.

The same thing happened in 1901 and again in 1902, and there was more disorder in 1904 when a boy was hissed as he began his song, hissed again when Gilkes had restored order, and hissed again when the headmaster mentioned his name. Eventually the guests left and the boys remained behind to be reproved by Gilkes, but there seems to have been some further disturbance later that day when a boy was about to be beaten by the prefects and his supporters tried to rescue him.

In Chapter 8 of Mike (‘A Row with the Town’), we read that Wrykyn had fielded four teams to play the Old Boys at cricket and followed the custom of having dinner together afterwards followed by singing. After the proceedings closed, the boys were meant to make their way quietly back to their Houses, but the custom had grown up of walking into the town, singing a song around a lamp-post and then racing back to their Houses. But on this occasion a fight with local townees led to P.C. Butt being ducked in a pond. A biography of Gilkes notes that in 1899, Wodehouse’s last year, the Old Alleynians had brought down five teams to play the school, there had been a dinner afterwards, and later ‘rowdiness ensued’. It sounds very like the school-town row in Mike to me.

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One of the institutions at Beckford was a mission. The school by (more or less) voluntary contributions supported a species of home somewhere in the wilds of Kennington … Gethryn collected not only for Leicester’s house, but also for the Sixth Form, and was consequently, if only by proxy, a man of large means.

A Prefect’s Uncle, Chapter 6

It should come as no surprise that Dulwich supported a mission at Walworth Road, Kennington and that, in addition to the money collected from each class, the headmaster, Gilkes, specifically noted an extra donation from Wodehouse’s house (Treadgold’s) of £4 17s 9d.

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Although Wodehouse drew on many personalities and anecdotes from Dulwich (see Originals below), he used other schools as well. While the names of the hamlets and villages around St Austin’s/ Wrykyn (Dulwich) are those of the villages around his home at Stableford in Shropshire, The White Feather gives us a very different location, and the Wrykyn of Mike is somewhere else again. The clues to their source are again to be found in the invaluable Phrases & Notes.

In The Gold Bat, Wrykyn lies across an unnamed river from the town of Wrykyn, but in its sequel, The White Feather, it is firmly set beside the Severn River and boats play a large part in the life of the school. The obvious candidate is Shrewsbury School. It is only about twenty miles from Stableford, which means Wodehouse may well have visited it, and it lies across the River Severn from the town. It has a steep bank running down to the school boat-houses, fits the location given in The White Feather exactly – and I can find no other school in a similar location anywhere on England’s longest river. I should add that Wodehouse had a cousin there and recorded two anecdotes specifically about Shrewsbury in his notebooks, and in the centre of the quadrangle there is a statue of the school’s most famous pupil – Sir Philip Sidney.

In Mike, Wodehouse moved Wrykyn again, some sixty miles downstream. Since Mike Jackson and his brothers were so clearly based on the famous cricketing Fosters who all attended Malvern College (see Chap. 10), it is understandable why he did so. When Wyatt shows Mike Jackson around the grounds, we read:

They skirted the cricket field, walking along the path that divided the two terraces. The Wrykyn playing-fields were formed of a series of huge steps, cut out of the hill. At the top of the hill came the school. On the first terrace was a sort of informal practice ground, where, though no games were played on it, there was a great deal of punting and drop-kicking in the winter and fielding-practice in the summer. The next terrace was the biggest of all, and formed the first eleven cricket ground, a beautiful piece of turf, a shade too narrow for its length, bounded on the terrace side by a sharply sloping bank, some fifteen feet deep, and on the other by the precipice leading to the next terrace. At the far end of the ground stood the pavilion, and beside it a little ivy-covered rabbit-hutch for the scorers. Old Wrykinians claimed it was the prettiest school ground in England. It certainly had the finest view. From the verandah of the pavilion you could look over three counties.

The grounds of Malvern are exactly as Wodehouse described, with three enormous steps cut out of the hillside, the boarding houses around it and, as he said, the finest view of any school ground in the country. I visited it on a sunny day and reckoned I could see forty miles across England. Wodehouse certainly knew the school well enough to write an article on cricket at Malvern for Public School Magazine in September 1900 and a piece on the school itself two months later.

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The obituary of Roger Brevan, music master at Downside, noted his maintaining all his life that the three vital elements of a good education were the Bible, Kennedy’s Latin Primer and the cane.

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Around December 1903, Wodehouse filled pages of his notebook with anecdotes recounted by a cousin, Malcolm Thompson, who was at Winchester College. He is referred to as ‘M.’ in the notes:

Amusements: – M. and pals used to keep ferrets and rat on the downs. Housemaster knew of this, but didn’t disapprove … [See Renford and Harvey in The Gold Bat.]

… Once M. got leave from headmaster, a keen archaeologist, to go to Netley Abbey, and instead spent day ratting. [See Psmith and Mr Outwood in Mike.]

The studies were divided by partitions which reached to within two feet of ceiling. Once M. & Co took chap and hurled him over partition onto prefect’s table, where card party was going on, smashing shaded candles etc. When prefect went next door to seek blood, the room was, of course, empty. [See the short story ‘Ruthless Reginald’ in Tales of Wrykyn.]

Prep was held