by Bill Peschel
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born the third son of Ernest and Eleanor Wodehouse on Oct. 15, 1881, in Guildford, Surrey. His inability to pronounce his first name inspired his nickname “Plum.” (His last name is pronounced “Woodhouse,” with the typical English consistency in speech that turns Cholmondeley into “Chumley.”) There were four boys in all: Philip Peveril (1877-1951), Ernest Armine (1879-1936), Plum, and Richard Lancelot (1892-1940). The brothers were rarely close, and once out of school would go their separate ways.
The childhood of the four Wodehouse boys played out like a game of Pass the Parcel. His father was a Hong Kong magistrate in the Civil Service. Rather than take the boys with them, they were left behind in England and shifted among a succession of aunts. Not surprisingly, this inspired Plum to create memorable aunts such as Aunt Agatha (“the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth”) and Aunt Dahlia with her Mae West-like figure and voice toned up from fox-hunting in her youth. In fact, aunts figure larger in his fiction than mothers and fathers.
As the boys became of age, they were shipped to preparatory and public schools. This created an extraordinary distance between them and their family. Between the ages of two and fifteen, Plum saw his parents for a total of six months. This encouraged him to be self-supporting. Plum endured his lot with a surprising calmness of temper. “It was an odd life with no home to go to, but I have always accepted everything that happens to me in a philosophical spirit; and I can’t remember ever having been unhappy in those days.”
This isolation inspired Plum to turn inward, both for emotional support and as a way of dealing with an uncertain world. He started reading and writing as a child. By six, he recalls, he read the “Iliad.”
In 1894, when Wodehouse was 13, he was sent to Dulwich College on a partial scholarship. Two years later, his father retired and returned to England, where he would live for another thirty years on a slim pension that, this being the British Empire, paid him in Indian rupees.
Dulwich was probably the happiest period of Wodehouse’s childhood. For six years, he had a home. He had stability, he had a regular schedule, he made friends and he was athletic as much as his poor eyesight would allow. He played on the cricket team for two years, which he would draw on for his first series of stories. He also played soccer and even boxed. His brother, Armine, was even sent there ahead of him. Perhaps because there was no parental approval to compete for, there wasn’t a shred of competitiveness between them.
In 1900, Plum looked forward to attending Oxford. Armine was already there on a scholarship, and it appeared that it would be a rerun of his time at Dulwich. Then his father took him aside with bad news. The Indian rupee, on which his father’s pension was calculated, had dropped in value. Money became tight . . . tighter, really. As Wodehouse put it: “two sons at the university would be a son more than the privy purse could handle. So Learning drew the loser’s end, and Commerce got me.”
But Wodehouse biographer Robert McCrum suspected that something else lay behind this decision. Although an excellent student, there was something of the feckless dreamer in Wodehouse’s personality. His parents might have been concerned about his ability to earn a living. Looking at the family’s financial records, McCrum concludes that they could have supported Wodehouse at Oxford, so there must have been another reason for his father’s decision. “Was Ernest cruelly arbitrating some sibling rivalry with Armine that is now lost to view? Did overbearing Eleanor support her husband’s decision as a stern reminder to her shy, vague and impractical son about the realities of earning a living?”
So as the era turned from the Victorian to the Edwardian, Wodehouse pere used his Asian contacts and obtained a clerkship for Wodehouse fils at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank at its Lombard Street office in London. He would start at the very bottom. Good thing, too. Training in the Latin and Greek classics at Dulwich gave him no insights into the ways of money. “I had had absolutely no training for commerce, and right through my two years at the bank I never had the slightest inkling of what banking was.”
The square Wodehouse peg was slotted into various holes at the bank with indifferent success. Inward Bills, Outward Bills, the Postal Department, Cash Department; Plum’s self-confessed “total inability to grasp what was going on made me something of a legend in the place.” In print, Wodehouse portrayed himself as incompetent: “I was a plain dumb brick, I proved to be the most inefficient clerk whose trouser seat ever polished the surface of a high school.” But as he did with accounts of his childhood and growing up, he was exaggerating his lack of talent for comic effect. A man who would later successfully negotiate the rapids of musical theatre, with its questionable ethics and rapacious managers, could not be as dense as he claimed.
Wodehouse had no interest in banking, but he used his time wisely. He had, literally, no choice. In addition to learning their duties, clerks were being groomed for a managerial job in the Far East after 24 months. The prospect horrified him. He already had ambitions to live as a writer, but now he had a deadline. He had two years, he said, “to establish myself on a pinnacle of fame as a writer.” And, given his father’s decision about Oxford, he would have to be self-supporting.
So he wrote, at the bank when he could, and in his “horrible lodgings . . . off the King’s Road.” He’d walk the streets, like Dickens did, jotting down in his notebook observations and conversation that he could work into his stories. He threw a lot of darts—verses, short stories, articles—hoping for a score. Within two months after beginning his clerkship, he sold his first comic article, “Men Who Have Missed Their Own Weddings,” to Tit-Bits. That was followed with sales to any magazine that would have him, such as Scraps, Vanity Fair, and Windsor Magazine. He had many more misses than hits, but he pressed on. When he contracted mumps, he spent three weeks in bed at his family home and wrote 19 short stories. His illness gave him time to refine his writing. It also left him sterile and possibly impotent, and perhaps influenced his stories.
Then he landed a break through his school connections. Harold Begbie’s “By the Way” column in The Globe newspaper required a daily stream of briefs and poems that humorously commented on the day’s news. Begbie’s assistant was William Beach Thomas, a classmate of Plum’s at Dulwich. In August 1901, he began contributing pieces to Thomas. When they needed an assistant to fill in on their days’ off, Wodehouse was hired. He could call in sick at the bank, then walk to the newspaper and write the column for ten shillings and sixpence a day. Daily journalism gave Wodehouse experience in meeting deadlines and producing material on demand, and certainly boosted his confidence. He began to sell his public school stories to the boys’ story newspapers such as The Magnet and Public School Magazine.
In September 1902, Beach Thomas prepared to leave on a five-week vacation. He asked Wodehouse to take over. It was a moment of decision. He could fake an illness to substitute for a day, but not for five weeks. He decided to take the plunge and throw up his position. “Having to choose between The Globe and the bank, I chucked the latter and started out on my wild lone as a freelance.” In addition, that month also saw the publication of “The Pothunters”, his first collection of stories. There was no looking back.
Plum and Conan Doyle
“Conan Doyle was my hero. Others might revere Hardy and Meredith. I was a Doyle man, and I still am.”
P.G. Wodehouse
To say that Wodehouse admired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would be an understatement. He read the stories as a child, and over his career managed to work more than 500 references in his books, including one phrase that entered the popular culture.
Underneath that admiration was another bond that was cemented by cricket. Both played the game as schoolboys and young men. While Conan Doyle was a lifelong player, Wodehouse stopped playing as a young man and used his experiences as fodder for his early school stories.
Of the two men, Conan Doyle was the more enthusiastic. “It’s a jolly game,” he wrote his mother in a letter
when he was a student at Stonyhurst, “and does more to make a fellow strong and healthy than all the doctor’s prescription in the world. I think I could take a place in the eleven of any club in Edinburgh.” He continued to play the game as an adult. He played for the Portsmouth eleven while doctoring there. He played during his honeymoon in Ireland. Even a visit to the Boer War didn’t diminish his love of the game. During a stopover at St. Vincent, he hoped to get up a game against the Royal Scots regiment, “only most of [his team] have been inoculated & faint on every small provocation which will not improve their play.”
By all accounts he was an excellent amateur player, as perceptive of the game as Sherlock Holmes at a crime scene. “A grand bowler,” a teammate wrote, “Knows a batsman’s weakness by the colour of the mud on his shoes.” He was particularly proud of scoring a century (100 runs) at Lord’s Cricket Ground, considered the home of English cricket, and kept a mud-stained bat in his office as a memento. When he pitched against the legendary W.R. Grace and got him out, he wrote a poem commemorating it (the next day, Grace got his revenge by striking out Conan Doyle).
The first mention of Wodehouse and Conan Doyle together was when they played cricket in 1902 at Lord’s. The “Allahakbarries” had been formed by J.M. Barrie from the staff of The Idler magazine. Its members included Jerome K. Jerome, A.A. Milne, A.E.W. Mason, Punch humorist E.V. Lucas, and Raffles creator (and Conan Doyle relative) E.W. Hornung. While they played for fun against village teams, their captain, Conan Doyle, bowled and batted with his characteristic intensity. One Allahakbarrie joked about the “surprisingly low death rate” after a particularly hot match.
It was probably about this time that the 21-year-old Wodehouse interviewed Conan Doyle for an article that appeared in V.C. magazine in July 1903. They weren’t close friends. They would meet regularly for lunch, when Conan Doyle would talk about anything but Holmes. “I think the legend that he disliked Sherlock must be true,” Wodehouse said. “It is with the feeling that he would not object that I have sometimes amused myself by throwing custard pies at that great man.”
Coincidentally, they possibly found in cricket the names for their greatest characters. While some Sherlockians point to Stonyhurst classmate Patrick Sherlock as an inspiration, Conan Doyle also knew of cricketers Mordecai Sherwin, Frank Shacklock and William Mycroft. Wodehouse named Bertie Wooster’s butler after Warwickshire county bowler Percy Jeeves, who died in the Somme in 1916.
But if Wodehouse owed an enormous debt to Conan Doyle, he paid it back with interest by creating Holmes and Watson’s most popular catchphrase. Holmes says “Elementary” in “The Adventure of the Crooked Man,” and “Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow” in William Gillette’s play “Sherlock Holmes” (1899). But it wasn’t until “Psmith, Journalist” (1915) that Wodehouse put in the mouth of Psmith (who shares Holmes’ attitude and deducing abilities) the phrase’s best-known version: “Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.”
Grit: A Talk With Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
P. G. Wodehouse
Wodehouse left his clerking job at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in September 1902 determined to support himself as a writer. This led to an explosion of short stories, verses and articles, including this interview with Conan Doyle, which was published in V.C. [Victoria Cross] Magazine on July 2, 1903. The article was discovered by Richard Lancelyn Green during his research for his unfinished bibliography of Conan Doyle.
One of the reasons why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books make such delightful reading is the vividness and truth of the outdoor episodes in thereof. And the reason of the vividness is that he has had personal experience of the thing of which he writes. Like Mr. Squeers’ boys, he “goes out and does it.” And there can be no doubt that, however much such a feeling may be censured by the superior person, the public likes a man to resemble his books. It is grateful when a writer who can describe a fight like those in “Rodney Stone” and “The Croxley Master” is able to use the gloves in fact as well as fiction, and when the author of a story like “The King of the Foxes” or “The Crime of the Brigadier” is not a merely theoretical huntsman.
Immensely powerful in build, and the keenest of sportsmen, he is the very embodiment of the Man in the Field. There is strength behind everything he does. Whether he is riding straight on the hunting-field, or going in in a bad light to stop a rot, or bowling to break up a long stand at cricket, he does it with the air of a man who gets there. The last time I saw him play was down at Chatham for the Authors against the Royal Engineers. He went on to bowl fourth change, when the score was 220 for four wickets, and the wicket playing like a billiard-table. In his third over he had clean bowled the man who had been doing what he liked with the bowling for two hours, and in another seventy minutes the side was out for 290, and he had taken five wickets for forty-four. He was captain that day. A captain who is capable of bowling like that, and yet does not try his hand till fourth change, is no ordinary man.
One of the few things Sir Arthur has not done in the course of his life is to come down from a balloon in a parachute. And he means to try that some day.
Pluck and Parachutes
“I think the man who first tried coming down in a parachute was the pluckiest man on earth,” he said, “though aeronauts have told me that it is really perfectly safe. I should like to try it, just for the sake of the one great experience. But it must be nervous work stepping over the side of the car for the first time. You must start at least a mile and a half from the earth, and for the first thousand feet I believe you fall like a stone. But I suppose a parachutist gets used to it. Courage is rather a hard thing to judge for that reason. If one sees a man at his own special work for the first time, one is generally impressed by his coolness, especially as, being new to it, one is frightened oneself. The first time I went up in a balloon I was terribly frightened. It was pleasant enough at first, with all the spectators cheering, and so on. But when we had been rising some minutes, and were a mile from the ground, and I looked over the side:—I was never in such a miserable fright in my life. To see people running about, looking the size of dogs, and to feel that there was only a sort of strawberry-basket between me and that! It was a long time before I would let go of the ropes. But after I had been up a little while I became quite used to it, and I suppose that is what happens to everyone. Spencer, the aeronaut, who was with me, struck me as being very brave and cool. I heard one story about him which seemed to me to support this impression. It was while he was in India, in the days before balloons were so common as they are now. Spencer was going to give an exhibition at Calcutta, and thousands of natives had come to see him go up, some of them from a considerable distance. On the day when the ascent was to take place it happened that a tremendous hurricane was blowing. The authorities were in great trouble about it. Word had gone forth that the ascent was to take place on that particular day, and the natives had come in to see him go up. If the ascent was postponed, the faith of the native in the word of an Englishman would be considerably diminished. Spencer saw the point, and up he went, and away he was carried at a hundred miles an hour, and finally came down again in some tiger-haunted spot on the Hoogli, where the people lived up trees to prevent the tigers getting at them. Spencer sat on what was left of his balloon and looked around him, spent the night on the wreck with the tigers, and in the end got help, and came safely back to Calcutta after a journey of a week or more. Yes, he got an ovation when he arrived. That sort of thing is quite different from courage on the field. A soldier is really such a minute atom in such a mighty host that I don’t see how he can be afraid. I have certainly never seen one afraid myself. You see them laughing and cracking jokes all the time that they are under fire. In my experience a man always plays the game as a matter of course. It comes in his day’s work. Cases of cowardice are so rare that one would notice them directly. I must have seen some brave men in the hospitals, but no case in particular stands out in my mind. You expect a doctor to treat a fever-case wit
hout thinking of the risk, and the patients are almost without exception equally plucky.”
Some Experiences
“Are any of those stories you told in ‘The Surgeon Talks’ in ‘Round the Red Lamp’ true ones?” I asked.
“Some of them. And they are nearly all founded on fact. They are the sort of thing that might happen.”
“When you were in the whaler in the Arctic, did you see anything particularly brave done?”
“I saw a man climb from one boat to another across the body of a living whale. Perhaps it is hardly what you could call brave, but it was certainly cool, and it is a good instance of how lightly a certain class of men treat danger. This man hauled himself on to the whale’s body by means of a fin, walked across it—a distance of a dozen feet—and jumped into the boat on the further side. Another instance of this curious indifference to danger occurred on a steamer on which I was doctor. I was roused up in the middle of the night by one of the mates, and told to go round to all the passengers and tell them that the ship was on fire. I broke it as gently as I could to the women, but I didn’t mince matters with the men. I told them straight out what had happened. One of the last men to be informed was a Swiss. I went to his bunk and woke him. ‘The ship’s on fire,’ I said; ‘get up.’ ‘I vos often on board ships that vos on fire,’ he said in an uninterested voice, and he turned over and went to sleep again. He seemed more bored than anything else by the news.
“People talk a great deal of nonsense,” said Sir Arthur after a pause, “about the degeneration of the race. The race is all right. I will give you an instance. In the hospital in South Africa there were eighteen assistants, who all came, curiously enough, not only from the same town in Lancashire, but from the same mill. You couldn’t have found eighteen men who looked more degenerate at first sight. They were stunted and ruddled, and didn’t look as if they were good for anything. But they worked splendidly. Fourteen of the eighteen were down with enteric at the same time. You might have expected the others to be frightened. Not a bit of it. They went on doing their work as stolidly as if no such thing as enteric had ever been heard of. All that men like that want is good leading. Then they are as good as anybody.”