Sighing a little, Lord Emsworth reached the library and found his book.
There were not many books which at a time like this could have diverted Lord Emsworth’s mind from what weighed upon it, but this one did. It was Whiffle on The Care of the Pig and, buried in its pages, he forgot everything. The chapter he was reading was that noble one about swill and bran-mash, and it took him completely out of the world….
This is the first mention of the book. It appears in several subsequent passages, especially in Uncle Fred in the Springtime.
Then, in 1965, in Galahad at Blandings, not only was the man named Whipple, but it turned out that Galahad knew him: Augustus (Gus to his friends) Whipple, member of the Athenaeum. And Galahad had the nerve to get the current young hero into the castle (to pursue the heroine, of course) in the guise of Augustus Whipple, the author of the great pig book. Then, again of course, the real Whipple turned up, anxious to see the splendid prize-winning Empress of whom he had heard so much. And Gally got his brother to start writing Whipple a cheque for £1,000 to cover his gambling debts incurred in a poker game at the Athenaeum. At least, that was Gally’s story, and a mere £1,000 was nothing to Lord Emsworth to help the man whose book he doted on. But why was he Whipple? Neither of Wodehouse’s publishers, in England or America, knows why the honoured name was changed in Galahad at Blandings. In A Pelican at Blandings, published four years after Galahad at Blandings, it’s Whiffle again, described as an orthodox thinker in comparison with the unnamed author of the ‘startling, ultra-modern pig-book’ Pigs at a Glance. And now, in Sunset at Blandings, we have, literally, Wodehouse’s last word on the subject. The name of the author of the pig classic appears twice in Wodehouse’s own typescript. The first time he is Whiffle. The second time it starts as Whipple, and in Wodehouse’s recognizable hand, the two p’s have been changed firmly to two f’s.
[42] Wodehouse’s irreverent fondness for the law—policemen, magistrates, Justices of the Peace and occasional young barristers — is a constant and varied joy. He gives his J.P.s extraordinary powers of arrest, sentence and imprisonment, and they are not slow to use, or threaten to use, them. Doubtless Murchison of Scotland Yard, although strictly there as the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s personal watchman, can pinch a man he finds climbing at night into a window of a house where his ward is staying. Possibly Claude Duff’s solicitor is right: he, Claude, can shoot someone climbing into his window. Possibly, as early as Something Fresh, Lord Emsworth was exercising the normal right of a castle-owner and J.P. when, having heard things and people going bump in the night in his hall, he descended the stairs spraying bullets from his six-shooter. Bertie Wooster’s tangles with Sir Watkyn Bassett, as magistrate, ex-magistrate and county J.P., can get him anything up to thirty days in the jug without, apparently, a court, a bench, a jury or any suggestion that Bertie can get a solicitor to defend him. In The Girl in Blue a J.P., Crispin Willoughby, is in danger of arrest and imprisonment for pushing the local policeman into the brook in which he daily dabbles his feet after his hours of duty. In Pigs Have Wings Sir Gregory Parsloe, J.P., of Matchingham Hall, threatens imprisonment for pig-stealing (the Queen of Matchingham) on Lord Emsworth (himself a J.P. and presumably sitting on the same bench as Sir Gregory), Galahad and butler Beach. A J.P. can be terrible when roused by the suspicion that his pig or cow-creamer is being stolen. Wodehouse’s books are liberally endowed with policemen, magistrates and J.Ps. For these, and for his clergymen, we are especially grateful.
[43] As this book goes to press, nobody has been able to identify this song with certainty. Guy Bolton said he remembered it, but not its title, writer, singer or show. The Bank of England informs us that Mr. H. G. Bowen was their Chief Cashier from 1893 to 1902, and would thus have had his signature on all their bank-notes during that period. None of the Guards regiments could find any record of it in archives. The Adjutant of the First or Grenadier Regiment of Foot Guards surmised that the writer was not a Guardsman, since the Guards wear bearskins, not busbies. A letter to the Daily Telegraph produced fifteen replies (mostly guessing W. S. Gilbert or P. G. Wodehouse himself as the writer), but no answer. The Research Department of the Music Library of the British Library, the Performing Rights people and the B.B.C.’s Music Library were all put to work searching, but they were defeated. George Wood, O.B.E. (‘Wee Georgie Wood’ of music hall fame), with the help of Marion Ross as a researcher, claimed that the song had been written by George Simms (author of ‘It was Christmas Night at the Workhouse’) and Jay Hickory Wood (biographer of Dan Leno Sr. and writer of many ‘books’ for pantomimes) for Dan Leno as an interpolated number for the pantomime Dick Whittington at Drury Lane in 1898/9. But, according to the records, the pantomime at Drury Lane that winter was The Forty Thieves.
[44] See Leave it to Psmith.
[45] The last entry in the train time-table between Market Blandings and Paddington. See page 197.
[46] These are grid references to the end-paper map.
[47] Blandings has achieved its own fictional immortality. It has also, in a small but delightful way, made a factual footnote in the scholarship of rare books. In Something Fresh, you may remember, Lord Emsworth’s Museum occupied a room off the great hall:
‘The place was simply an amateur junk-shop. Side by side with a Gutenberg Bible for which rival collectors would have bidden without a limit, you would come upon a bullet from the field of Waterloo, one of a consignment of ten thousand shipped there for the use of tourists by a Birmingham firm…’
The Museum hasn’t lasted, but its Gutenberg Bible has had a curious after-life. In his ‘Occasional Publication’ monograph, One Hundred Books in College Library (1970), Sir Robert Birley, quondam Head Master of Eton, writes of the near-perfect copy of the Gutenberg Bible presented to Eton by John Fuller, the last Member of Parliament to be imprisoned by the House of Commons for defying the Speaker. (Fuller died in m 831.) There are only forty-eight known copies of this, the first printed book, in the world, though there have been rumours of a recent find in a church in Germany. Forty-eight was the number at the time when Sir Robert wrote his monograph. Sir Robert added to his note on the Eton copy ‘To the recorded copies of the Gutenberg Bible should be added one in the library of Blandings Castle in Shropshire.’ Within weeks of the publication of One Hundred Books in College Library, the Eton Librarian received a letter from the keeper of the rare books section of the Library of Congress in Washington asking for full particulars of this copy of the Gutenberg and the whereabouts of Blandings Castle. The Librarian told Sir Robert about this enquiry and Sir Robert was happy to be able to pass on the good news to Wodehouse.
Table of Contents
Sunset at Blandings
Work in Progress
The Castle and its Surroundings
The Trains Between Paddington and Market Blandings
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for reading books on Archive.
Sunset at Blandings Page 18