Blanding Castle Omnibus

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Blanding Castle Omnibus Page 343

by P. G. Wodehouse


  These data limit one to the environs of the Severn between Bridgnorth and Ironbridge, between Nesscliff and the Welsh border, possibly to Baschurch. (N.B. Oldswood Halt station was opened only in the middle-to-late 1930s.)

  I took one railway fact — that it is generally a 4-hour journey from Paddington (1923), and a fast train takes about 3 hours 40 minutes (1947). I applied this to the above three areas. Bradshaw shows that the through trains only stop at Wellington (under 3 hours from Paddington) and, excluding Shrewsbury itself, Gobowen (about 3 hours 40 minutes) . This latter puts Blandings Castle eight miles from the Severn, which means that the river could hardly flow ‘through its grounds’ (though it might flow through its land, but that is not the same thing) . It also puts the castle in the suburbs of Oswestry. This is so unlikely that I discarded Gobowen.

  At this stage I decided that there must be a change of trains for the passenger from Paddington to Market Blandings. This opens up:

  1. The Shropshire and Montgomeryshire Railway, which was a possibility between Nesscliff and Kinnnerley Junction. But the trains were sparse and I feel sure that Wodehouse would have referred to their quaintness at some stage.

  2. The main-line intermediate stations between Wellington and Shrewsbury, such as Walcot and Upton Magna, and the one possibly north of Shrewsbury, Baschurch. These all put the castle in the right topographical position. But I found that the local services were too sparse to give Wodehouse the frequencies he required.

  3. The Severn Valley line. Here one could only just reach Bridgnorth in 3 hours 40 minutes from Paddington by one train, and the connections up to Paddington in the morning were extremely poor. One mainly ended up in Worcester Foregate Street.

  Therefore, by rejection, this left the L.N.W. Coalport branch from Wellington, where the trains never connected with London trains, and the Much Wenlock branch from Wellington. On this latter I found one station which fitted so many topographical and railway facts that I plumped for it—Buildwas. It means a change of trains at Wellington. So you have to swallow the fact that Wodehouse never indicates that any passenger from London to the castle by train had to change en route. And you have to allow that, though Buildwas station was closed by the ‘stream-lining’ of British Rail in 1963, Wodehouse, living in America, might never have been told so.

  Substitute Buildwas for Market Blandings and consider the facts arising. It is in Shropshire. Two and a half miles from the station takes one to the lovely village of Leighton where the Severn could run through the castle’s grounds. And it is 10 miles from the centre of Shrewsbury —say 45 minutes without hurrying in the 1920s.

  OR

  The castle could be on the south side of the river, up the slopes towards Much Wenlock. The Wrekin is terribly close and, if the castle is on the south side of the river, and therefore on a north-facing slope, every window must look out at the Wrekin. But if it is on the north side and more underneath the Wrekin, then I would expect there were trees in the park which would hide the view unless you climbed higher in the castle, i.e. onto the battlements. Therefore I favour the former site. (N.B. This is the only topographical fact that makes me favour the river between Coalport and Bridgnorth, but I cannot reconcile trains on that piece of line.)

  I feel sure that Wodehouse would have looked into a Bradshaw at some stage, having settled on his area, and discovered at what times the trains went to London and back, and how long they took. I think he will have noticed the L.N.W. branch to Coalport and seen Madeley Market station. Could that have been a part reason for naming the station for the castle ‘Market Blandings’? If only the trains had connected at Wellington, that would have been a fine station for his castle. (Could anyone have considered that Blandings Castle was really Apley Park? The Wrekin would be ideally ‘visible from its battlements’, and the Severn bounds miles of its park.)

  Omitting the London trains for the moment (they are dealt with later), the following railway facts have to be reconciled:

  Stops at, or first stop, Swindon: first stop Oxford. These two do not fit. They can be explained away, but that is not an answer. Never could one have gone from Paddington to 20 miles or so from Shrewsbury via Swindon. One could have gone via Oxford, but not have got farther north than Bridgnorth in the time taken.

  Norfolk. A 1240 goes towards, and one returns about 1945. One can get to Yarmouth at 1946, leaving Buildwas at 1040 and return on the 0900 from Yarmouth, via Birmingham, arriving at 1751. Or, if one goes direct and does not mind changing many times, one can arrive at 2011. Inconclusive. Bridgeford to Market Blandings has branch-line trains taking half an hour. It is noticeable that Bridgnorth in the 1930s was between 26 and 29 minutes away from Buildwas.

  Going into the daily services to and from London in depth leaves much confusion of detail, though a general pattern emerges. I have chosen Bradshaws of 1910, 1932, 1939, and 1961 to cover the dates of publication of the various books. I have divided the books into three eras: 1915-1923, 1932-1939 and 1947, 1961-1976. Rightly or wrongly I have taken the publication date of each book to represent the date of the story in it. I put 1947 with the 1932—1939 era because I feel Wodehouse would not have been able to lay his hands on a war-time or post-war Bradshaw.

  The DOWN Trains

  Wodehouse has trains, in general, leaving Paddington at around 0830, 1118/1145, 1242/1250, 1400/1423, 1515/1615 and 1700/1705. I would equate these to the 0910, 1110 (there was also an 1115 and an 1120 in 1939) and 1400. His 1515 (1939) is, I suspect, his own inclusion, and the 1700/1705 he has, for his own convenience, equated with the 1610, for there is nothing between the 1410 and the 1610 (he states there is nothing between the 1400 and 1705 [1935]). His 1700 has a restaurant car; in 1910 the 1655 had a Dining Car, though the 1610 of later years had only a Tea Car.

  The UP Trains

  Wodehouse has a ‘business-man’s’ train leaving variously between 0820 and 0850 and arriving at Paddington about midday. In fact there is nothing between the 0700/ 0720 from Buildwas, arriving Paddington 1100/1110, and the 0840/0913 arriving 1315/1408, so I think he has added this train, again for his own convenience. It connects with the actual 0855/0900 from Wellington which arrives in Paddington between 1205 and 1215 (from 1932 onwards). His other morning trains generally fit the timing of actual trains. His afternoon trains of 1400 and 1445 agree with the actual 1345 and 1515, and the ‘800 is exact with the actual 1802 or 1805.

  It is clear that Wodehouse consulted Bradshaw, or that he had a railway-oriented person to give him the information — a general system of trains approximately two hours apart, up and down, which he then made to fit in with what he wanted.

  I would prefer to have had positive confirmation that his passengers changed trains on their journeys up and down, but I believe that the sum of the evidence yields the conclusion that Buildwas was his Market Blandings.

  *

  Colonel Cobb was wise to take the publication dates of the books as giving the only possible time-scale to the enquiry. Although in this novel, Sunset at Blandings (1977), Galahad says he has only been gone a week since the activities of A Pelican at Blandings (1969), there are no years, or even months, specified in any of the books. There is a cold east wind at the beginning of Something Fresh (1915), and the house-party is strangely placed ‘between the hunting and the shooting seasons’. Otherwise surely it is always high summer with the roses out, tea on the lawn, coffee after dinner on the terrace or in some garden arbour, bathing in the lake every day. Occasional thunderstorms, occasional showers and Lord Ickenham one time has a fire in his bedroom. Hammock weather otherwise, and a perpetual annus mirabilis. Oh yes, the Empress has now won prizes at Shrewsbury three years in succession. But, if you’re going to be fussy about that, what price the information, in Something Fresh, that Lord Emsworth had been at Eton in the 1860s ? No, stick to the publishing dates like glue.

  Thank you, Colonel. The newly published Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles by Dorothy Eagle and Hilary Carnell, has no references for Bland
ings Castle or Wodehouse. We will be surprised if the second edition does not, on the strength of your identifications, have entries under these and Buildwas, Leighton and Madeley Market.

  * * *

  [1] Wodehouse, generally through the voice of Galahad, often calls Blandings Castle a Bastille, sometimes Devil’s Island.

  [2] Would a Scotland Yard detective call the Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘Sir James’ ? No, he’d have said ‘Sir’, and Wodehouse would have known this, by heart and ear, if he had lived more in England. When he wrote this, he had been nearly forty years away from England. (His own accent showed no trace of American.) In the typescript of Sunset he is writing ‘somber’, ‘behavior’, ‘demeanor’ etc. But he wouldn’t have spelt them that way in a letter to England. The typescripts of his books went first to his American agent for duplication and sending out to publishers. His English publishers would make the alterations of spelling for the English market. In my early copy of the English edition of Leave it to Psmith (1923) I find ‘arbor’ and ‘arbour’ in different chapters.

  [3] The fact that Lady Diana’s first husband was (a) handsome and (b) named Rollo makes one sure that she was lucky that he was eaten by a lion. In Wodehouse, as a general rule, all male Christian names ending in ‘o’, such as Cosmo, Orlo, Orlando, Rollo (not Pongo, Boko, Bimbo or Bingo — they were nicknames), stamped a man as being a wet or a sponger or a fool. It is strange, though, that when The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922) was published as Golf without Tears in New York in 1924, in the story ‘The Long Hole’, Ralph Bingham had been changed to Rollo Bingham. Hugo (as in Hugo Carmody) is the only acceptable male Christian name with an ‘o’ at the end.

  [4] Wodehouse’s best girls (e.g. Stiffy Byng, Nobby Hopwood and Bobbie Wickham) certainly dominate their loved ones (The Rev. ‘Stinker’ Pinker, Boko Fittleworth and ‘Kipper’ Herring) . It looks as though this last novel might almost have amounted to a reverse message to all mankind:

  ‘Dominate her. She’ll love it, and you.’ Two of the major characters in the Wodehouse novels have been Lord Ickenham and Lord Uffenham, frequent advisers, generally unasked, of timid young men. Their advice is the same: ‘Go to the girl you have been nervously and distantly adoring, grab her like a sack of coals, waggle her about a bit, shower kisses on her upturned face and murmur passionate words (e.g. “My mate!”) into her ear. This seldom fails.’ It got Cyril McMurdo, the ardent policeman, a slap on the face first time from old Nannie Bruce in Cocktail Time, but it brought good results in the end. In this novel, Sunset at Blandings, Florence is surely going to be reconciled to her ‘weak’ husband, but, equally surely, only when she has seen him rise and dominate someone — herself, one hopes. Lord Emsworth achieves good results when he rises and dominates Florence and her hanger-on, Brenda. They are so surprised and annoyed that they leave the castle.

  [5] The Pelican Club, in Denman Street, Soho, was short-lived (1887—1892) but fondly remembered: by Galahad, who had been a prominent member, in Wodehouse’s books, by Arthur Binstcad in A Pink ‘Un and a Pelican and Pitcher in Paradise, and by J. B. Booth in Old Pink ‘Un Days. For a scholarly and suggestive analysis of the cousinship between the Pelican and the Drones, see a paper ‘The Real Drones Club’, by Lt.-Col. Norman Murphy in the August 1975 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine.

  The Gardenia Club (see p. 22), in Leicester Square, was one of many started when the Licensing Acts of the 1870s made restaurants close at 12.30 a.m. The Gardenia was a dancing club and, unusually, had women as well as men as members. It was less exclusive, in that way and generally, than the Pelican. It was opened, probably in 1882, by the Bohee brothers, black musicians who had come over from America with Haverley’s Minstrels. They sold the club to William Dudley Ward, father of the Member of Parliament for Southampton (1906-1922). Dudley Ward persuaded La Goulue (see Toulouse Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge drawings) to appear at the club. He sold the club to an Australian, ‘Shut-Eye’ Smith, who was its owner when the police closed it down, probably for infringements of the drinking rules, probably in 1889. I am indebted for this information again to Col. Murphy.

  [6] Jno Robinson has been the owner-driver of the Market Blandings station taxi (see picture, page 187) since Heavy Weather (1933).

  [7] This paragraph, almost word for word, is repeated from Chapter 2 of Galahad at Blandings. The end of the last sentence, about Galahad’s policemen friends, is new.

  [8] When Beach, in his pantry, was being suborned by Ronnie Fish to help him steal Lord Emsworth’s pig, Empress of Blandings, he put a green baize cover over his bullfinch’s cage lest it should be shocked by what it heard (Summer Lightning).

  [9] Clearly this means that the action of Sunset at Blandings (1977) follows that of A Pelican at Blandings (1969) by a week. Heavy Weather (1939) followed Summer Lightning (1929) by a fortnight.

  [10] Beach has been butler at the castle since Something Fresh (1915), when he had an under-butler, Meredew. But now (1977), and in several post World War II books, he calls it eighteen years, and for all we know he would have called it eighteen years at the time of Something Fresh. Wodehouse has never treated time with anything other than irreverence. It shows that time does not quite stand still for Gally when he says that he is fed up with London. We have always seen Galahad as a deep-dyed Londoner, seldom far from the bars and barmaids, theatres and clubs of the West End: essentially a visitor to, rather than a resident at, Blandings. In Full Moon (1947), Gally said that he had never been able to understand his brother’s objections to London, a city which he himself had always found an earthly Paradise. Now we know that, though he still has rooms in London, he regards his family home, in spite of sisters on the premises and Sir Gregory Parsloe across the fields, as his home and ‘as near resembling an enchanted fairyland as dammit’.

  [11] Lady Diana, with Lady Florence still to come. This gives Lord Emsworth and Galahad ten sisters at last count. Wodehouse had a pleasant devil-may-care attitude to the Threepwood sisters. On page 50 Gally can count up only five sisters, and those include the newcomer Diana. Wodehouse would have checked and corrected this number before publication. Nine times out of ten (literally) Wodehouse’s purpose in dragging in sisters is to provide ‘heavies’, people to boss Lord Emsworth, disapprove of Gaily, say ‘No’ to lovers of daughters and nieces. Lady Florence and Lady Diana have never been mentioned before. And for the first time the benevolent old author has given us a Threepwood sister whom we can like. But she speaks no word and never comes onto stage. The roster of sisters now and, alas, for ever, is: Lady Ann Warblington [Something Fresh]; Lady Charlotte (what was her married name?) [‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’]; Lady Constance (first Keeble, now Schoonmaker. Both her husbands have been American millionaires, both nicer than she deserved) [Leave it to Psmith, Summer Lightning, Heavy Weather, Blandings Castle, ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’, Pigs Have Wings, Service with a Smile, Galahad at Blandings, ‘Sticky Wicket at Blandings’, Plum Pie, A Pelican at Blandings]; Georgiana, Marchioness of Alcester [Blandings Castle]; Lady Hermione Wedge (who looked like a cook and whose daughter Veronica was the dumbest blonde of all) [Full Moon, Pigs Have Wings, ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’]; Lady Garland [Full Moon, Pigs Have Wings, ‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’]; Lady Julia Fish [Heavy Weather, Summer Lightning]; Lady Jane (what was her married name? Geoffrey Jaggard in Blandings the Blest deduces ‘Allsop’ via Galahad at Blandings. Perhaps. Her charming daughter Angela was the one whose fiancé, James Belford, produced for the distracted Lord Emsworth the wonder-working hog-call that got the Empress back to eating properly [‘Pig-Hoo-o-o-o-ey!’, Blandings Castle]; and now Lady Florence (Wodehouse in his notes seems undecided whether it should be Moresby, Ormsby or Appleby) and Lady Diana Phipps, soon to be Lady Diana Piper, wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. She was the only sister Galahad approved of. He disliked all the others and they disliked him. He had said to Lord Emsworth in Galahad at Blandings, ‘I’ve always said it was a mistake to have sisters. We should have set our faces against the
m from the outset’.

  [12] Wodehouse had scored out a last sentence to this first paragraph of the chapter. It read, ‘And this had always struck him as odd, for his sister Florence, her mother, had even in childhood been constructed of aristocratic ice’ . Wodehouse took it out, probably, because Florence wasn’t Vicky’s mother, but step-mother. But ‘constructed of aristocratic ice’ is too good to lose.

  [13] Dolly Henderson married Jack Cotterleigh of the Irish Guards, and their delightful daughter (Sue Brown was her stage name) married Ronnie Fish, son of Galahad’s sister Julia (Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather).

  [14] It is only in the last three Blandings books that the eighth earl of Emsworth, father of the current ninth, of Galahad and of ten daughters, gets more than a mention, and he is shaping up to being retrospectively, rather a nasty character: here, ‘a bully and a tyrant’. It is odd that the benign Wodehouse dragged the eighth earl from his grave to make an ogre of him. If you try to work out when the ninth earl succeeded to the title, you must take into account that Vicky says she just remembers the eighth and he terrified her.

  [15] See Full Moon and Galahad at Blandings.

 

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