Upbringing

Wodehouse was brought up by a series of aunts. This has been used to explain why so many aunts, and so few parents, appear in his work. Particularly, it has been used to explain why the heavies in the Wooster stories are invariably aunts: Wodehouse was getting his own back on those who had made his early years a misery. After all, he would not be the first such writer to do so, runs the argument, with others such as Kipling and Saki being positioned in the same stable. This is too simplistic a view.

The Wodehouses were of the landed gentry and of the aristocracy. The Wodehouse family had risen to the latter when Sir John Wodehouse MP was created Baron Wodehouse of Kimberley in 1797. He was PG Wodehouse’s great-great uncle. The third baron, Wodehouse’s third cousin, was made Earl of Kimberley in 1866. Wodehouse’s great-great grandfather was a baronet. Many of the aristocrats in Wodehouse’s fiction came unexpectedly to their titles by circuitous routes snaking through the family tree. One such is the third Earl of Havershot:

When I say that I’m the third Earl of Havershot, I don’t mean that I was always that... But you know how it is. Uncles call it a day. Cousins hand in their spades and buckets. And little by little and bit by bit, before you know where you are - why there you are, don’t you know. [Laughing Gas]

Philip Wodehouse was knighted on the battlefield by the Earl of Essex for his valour at the Battle of Cadiz in 1596, and in 1611 he bought his baronetcy from King James VI of Scotland and I of England. The fifth baronet, Sir Armine Wodehouse, had two sons. The younger, Revd Philip Wodehouse was father to Colonel Philip Wodehouse who, aged 27, fought at the Battle of Waterloo. Aged 43, the Colonel married. The youngest of his five children was Henry Ernest (although he was to be known always as Ernest), born in July 1845. A year and half later the Colonel died. Ernest Wodehouse was to grow up not knowing his father. Neither, in turn, were the oldest three of Ernest’s four sons, of whom PG Wodehouse was the third, to know their father while they were growing up. But not, in this case, through death, but geography.

PG Wodehouse was a scion of an ancient Norfolk family. The Norfolk branch of the Wodehouse family can be traced back to 1402, the year that John Wodehouse was made Constable of Castle Rising. As major landowners, the Wodehouses were of the political class. Through the centuries Wodehouses were returned to the House of Commons, notably Sir John Wodehouse, who entered government in 1852 as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and left it in 1895 as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, by which time he was the Earl of Kimberley.

Those Wodehouses who did not interest themselves in politics often went into the church. It was the local landowner who appointed the parish priest. At around the time of PG Wodehouse’s birth the Kimberley estates ran to more than 10,000 acres of Norfolk, as well as a few hundred acres in Cornwall. With the landholding came the advowson of eleven parishes. This right to appoint the parish priest - although in Lord Emsworth’s case it is perhaps better described as a chore - is a plot line Wodehouse uses with both Lord Emsworth and Sir Watkyn Bassett possessing the right of advowson.

Four of Wodehouse’s fifteen uncles were clergymen. Wodehouse himself was not particularly religious. Although he attended church services in camp, this appears to be the exception rather than the rule in his case. Late in life, Wodehouse described himself as an agnostic. While he was contemptuous of politicians in his writing, the other family profession, as it were, comes across as an honourable occupation. His clergy are decent men, but not noticeably devout or religious. The job of a clergyman for them veers more towards being an occupation rather than a calling, one of practicality rather than spirituality. This, one suspects, was the case with many of the clergy created from the younger sons and nephews of the landed gentry, set up in a parish with a stipend and a church house.

Ernest Wodehouse had joined the civil service in Hong Kong after being educated at Repton. In Hong Kong he had met Eleanor, who was visiting her brother, who was also in the civil service out there. They were married on 3 February 1877. Any children of theirs were going to be assured of having many aunts: Eleanor was the fifth of fourteen children of her clergyman father, the Revd John Bathurst Deane, who had been born in the Cape of Good Hope, the son of Captain Charles Meredith Deane of the 24th Light Dragoons. He went to the Merchant Taylors’ School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, before taking holy orders. He was the author of four books on religious or military matters. One was a biography of a relative, The Life of Richard Deane, Major General and General at Sea in the Service of the Commonwealth; another was entitled The Worship of the Serpent, Traced Throughout the World and its Traditions Referred to in the Events in Paradise Proving The Temptation and Fall of Man.

‘He writes books?’

‘He has written one. He calls it Hypnotism As A Device To Uncover The Unconscious Drives And Mechanisms In An Effort To Analyse The Functions Involved Which Give Rise To Emotional Conflicts In The Waking State but the title’s going to be changed to Sleepy Time. Popgood thinks it’s snappier.’ [Sleepy Time]

On 26 September - an uncomfortably short time since their wedding - Ernest and Eleanor Wodehouse had their first son. He was the first English child to be born on the Peak, an exclusive residential area of Hong Kong, and was christened Philip Peveril. Philip was a name long popular in the family, Peveril came from Sir Walter Scott’s Peveril Of The Peak. Peveril was the name by which he came to be known. Their second child was born in England on 11 May 1879 and christened Ernest Armine; Ernest after his father and Armine because, like Philip, it was a popular Christian name for Wodehouses through the generations. He, too, was known by his second name.

People give their children all sorts of rummy names. [Indiscretions of Archie]

PG Wodehouse was born on 15 October 1881 at 1 Vale Place, 50 Epsom Road in Guildford in Surrey, the third son to Eleanor and Ernest Wodehouse. The address was that of one of his aunts, on his mother’s side. Eleanor Wodehouse was on an extended visit from Hong Kong. PG Wodehouse started life in an aunt’s house, and he was to spend much of his youth in one. He was christened Pelham Grenville in honour of the man who was to become his godfather, Colonel von Donop.

‘His name’s not Lemuel?’

‘I fear so, sir.’

‘Couldn’t he use his second name?’

‘His second name is Gengulphus.’

‘Golly, Jeeves,’ I said thinking of old Uncle Tom Portarlington, ‘there’s some raw work pulled at the font from time to time, is there not?’ [Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit]

If you surmised from the fact that he presented himself to the world as ‘PG Wodehouse’ that Pelham Grenville Wodehouse did not like his Christian names, you would be correct. To family and friends he was known as ‘Plum’ or, more rarely, ‘Plummie’. Eleven years after son number three came a fourth and final one, Richard Lancelot, known as Dick.

Wodehouse’s grandfather was not the only author on the mother’s side of the family. Wodehouse’s Aunt Mary was a professional writer who published twelve books, the most successful of which was a historical romance set in eighteenth-century Bath. A fearsome lady, Mary is credited with being the basis of Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha. Louisa, as the oldest of Revd Deane’s children, was lumbered with the task of being a surrogate parent. Much liked by Wodehouse, she became the inspiration for Aunt Dahlia, Bertie’s slightly dubiously titled ‘good’ aunt. A more accurate description would be that she was the aunt whom Bertie liked.

When Revd Deane died in 1887 at Sion Hill, Bath, his widow and the four unmarried daughters moved to a house in Box. Here Wodehouse was to spend much of his childhood, and when he was at Dulwich College this was listed as his home address during the period that his parents were still resident in Hong Kong. The set up is recreated in The Mating Season, written two years after the final one of the aunts, Emmeline, an artist, died. The house in the novel is given as Deverill Court - there were five villages near his aunts’ house named Brixton Deverill, Monkton Deverill, Kingston Deverill, Longbridge Deverill and Hill Deverill.

But how far does the aunt connection go? Were parts of his fiction a way of getting back at the aunts who brought him up in early life? Unlikely. In the first place, as Wodehouse himself pointed out, in many cases it was a kindness of the various aunts in England to look after three peripatetic growing boys. Any resentment there was should surely be shown to his mother for neglecting her duties. Not that his mother would see it that way, and neither necessarily should we.

When it was felt that children were more likely to remain healthy and grow into adulthood in England than the Far East, and when England was reckoned to offer better educational facilities than Hong Kong, to have the children grow up and be educated in England would seem logical even though their parents would still be living in Hong Kong. Social attitudes change over time, and it is perhaps invidious to judge people out of their context. After all, all Eleanor Wodehouse was striving to do was look after her children’s health and provide them with a good education. Those are worthy aims, however clumsy the execution might seem to modern eyes.

Wodehouse and his mother did not have a close relationship. When a son could go years between sightings of his mother that is not unexpected. But when they did get together, they found they had little in common. Apart from the hindrance that they did not have shared experiences to bring them together, they did not have similar interests or hobbies which would do so either. There were few stages on which they could interact. His mother featured little in his own life, and mothers were to feature little in his fiction. Rarely dextrous when writing about emotions, he would naturally be tempted to steer clear of this particular emotionally tricky subject as he had little first-hand experience on which to draw. He was to say later in life that the children knew and saw little of their mother and, as a consequence, viewed her ‘as another aunt’.

But the absence of mothers from his fiction is not that remarkable in itself. Masses of books are written without them featuring. That’s no big deal. What is exceptional, though, is the predominance of aunts in the Wodehouse canon. Here the rationale gets murkier. The pat reason is that Wodehouse himself was brought up by aunts. Clearly you cannot divorce a man from the influences of his background and surroundings, but I don’t buy into the idea that Wodehouse’s writing career was a revenge on those who offered him homes when he was young.

The character who is most famous for his aunts and his wariness of them is Bertie Wooster. Left to his own devices, he is happy, as he himself admits, merely to ‘exist beautifully’. He needs a catalyst to rouse him from a state of happy idleness, golfing, trickling about and socialising. One force is his loyalty to his friends, which will always stir him into action, albeit sometimes warily and reluctantly, otherwise it is his aunts who force him into the activity so necessary if we readers are to get a book out of his latest experiences.

Bertie Wooster is a comic creation who appears in comic novels. The infrastructures of these novels provide the comedy. Aunts provide that much better than mothers. That Bertie hides in America because he is afraid of being in the same country as his aunt can be seen as funny; were he to do so as a result of fear of his mother, it would not be. That then becomes a bit sad. Aunts, not mothers are required for comedy. So aunts are what we get. Unless the joke requires a mother, then that is what we get. In Monkey Business Montrose Mulliner saves a baby which has been snatched by an escaped gorilla, and finds that:

The mother was kneeling before him, endeavouring to kiss his hand. It was not only maternal love that prompted the action. That morning she had signed up her child at seventy-five dollars a week for the forthcoming picture Tiny Fingers, and all through these long, anxious moments it had seemed as though the contract must be a total loss.

That would not be funny if the relative were an aunt. Then it would conjure up pictures of a rather unpleasant and cynical exploitation. It works as a joke because we automatically take it as granted that a mother’s love is there as well.

In many respects Bertie’s aunts fulfil a mother-in-law role. As a bachelor, Bertie had no mother-in-law, so Wodehouse slips an aunt or two into this part. Mothers-in-law are uniquely situated as a comic creation: they are part of the scenery and fabric of someone’s life, but while that person does not have to welcome them into it, neither can they easily, under social convention, expel them. Mothers-in-law have a wonderful opportunity to be sniffy and interfering. Also the son-in-law is under no obligation to like his mother-in-law, it is all right if he merely tolerates her.

Wodehouse’s upbringing must have left its imprint on him - everyone’s upbringing does, so why should he be different? If one is looking for a glimpse into any feelings of resentment, Bertie’s fear of his aunts may be the wrong target.

Of affection for his children he had little. Bailey was useful in the office, and Ruth ornamental at home. They satisfied him. He had never troubled to study their characters. It had never occurred to him to wonder if they were fond of him. They formed a necessary part of his household, and beyond that he was not interested in them. [The Coming Of Bill]

Her father had so ordered his life in relation to his children that Ruth’s affection was not so deep as it might have been. [The Coming of Bill]

Eleanor Wodehouse was widowed in 1929, and went to live with her son, Armine, and his wife, Nella. When Armine died in 1936 Eleanor stayed on with Nella. Through all the time that her mother-in-law lived with her, Nella could only remember PG Wodehouse coming to visit his mother once, although he would encourage his step-daughter, Leonora, to do so. The above quotations can be seen as his rationalisation of why visits to his mother virtually ceased once his father had died. When, in his teenage years, Plum had got to know his father, he took to him in a way he was never to with his mother. His father and he had interests in common, both being keen on sport, and this provided a meeting place for their minds. Conversely, he confessed that he could never think of anything to say to his mother.

If, as has been suggested, Wodehouse was hostile to his mother, then how does this argument account for his love for Ethel Rowley, someone who had a nine-year old daughter who was being educated on the opposite side of the Atlantic to her. If Wodehouse thought his mother cruel for inflicting this on him, would he have fallen in love with a woman who was following the same practice? Wodehouse had not even met his wife’s daughter - who was to become his step-daughter - when he got married.

Armine was to spend his career in India, and his son, Patrick, was left in the care of two sisters who looked after the offspring of ex-pats, and who had been recommended by PG Wodehouse’s friend Guy Bolton, who was later to leave his own daughter with them. Patrick was four at the time. When he was seven his mother returned for a brief spell to fix him up as a boarder at a prep school. The holidays were spent being shuttled around his relatives, one of whom was Plum whom he remembers as ‘always kind and generous towards me’. [Wooster Sauce, June 2001]

Wodehouse himself advanced Mary and Louisa as role models for two of his literary creations. But could there be a bit of Ethel in them too? How much Wodehouse was in fact bossed by his wife is a matter of conjecture. Not as much as he claimed to be, that is certain. But Ethel had a strong personality and would force him into doing things he would rather avoid. In Ethel, PG Wodehouse often saw an excuse for his actions, rather than her actually being the true motivation. But could not this idea have seeped into his work? After all, the aunt motif only comes through strongly in his fiction after he had got married. It also coincides with the period in which he wrote comedy. If the real life aunts were the inspiration, sole or otherwise, would he not have begun writing about his memorable fictional aunts earlier?

Baby Wodehouse went back to Hong Kong with his mother. When the eldest of his brothers was six, and ripe for an English education, the three children went to England with their mother. She rented a house in Bath and hired a nanny, a Miss Roper, as governess for the children. Eleanor returned to Hong Kong and her husband leaving her children, including two-year-old Pelham, in Miss Roper’s care.

In 1886 Ernest and Eleanor travelled to England as Ernest was to be invested into the companion order of St Michael and St George for his work organising the Chinese section of the Great Exposition. During this visit Mr and Mrs Wodehouse decided to move their children to a Dame school in Croydon, run by two spinsters, Florrie and Cissy Prince. There were also a couple of other children there, whose parents lived in India.

Three years into the stint at the Princes, Peveril developed a weak chest. The Channel Islands was considered the place to go to recover from such an ailment, so it was to there that Peveril was sent, along with his brothers as company. The Wodehouses were enrolled in Elizabeth College on Guernsey. After two years at Elizabeth College, Pelham was dispatched to continue his education at Malvern House, a naval prep school in Kent. For the first time the Wodehouse children were to be split up, Peveril remaining, on medical grounds, at Elizabeth College and Armine going on to Dulwich College. Behind the decision to send Pelham to Malvern House was an aunt. Aunt Edith had persuaded Ernest of the benefits of her nephew joining the navy - in which her husband, Gussie, served. Malvern House specialised in preparing pupils for the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. A naval career was always going to be unlikely for her nephew as he had problems with his eyesight. During the First World War he twice volunteered for military service, but was rejected for this defect.

School holidays were spent being transferred among relatives. It was an age when the bringing up of children was left to the servants, so even during his brief stays with his relatives Wodehouse hardly got to know them. Of the servant class, however, Wodehouse developed a fondness. He attributed this to affection for the maids at the Princes’ house when he was still very young. It was an affection which was to remain with him. In the twenties and early thirties he would frequently stay as a guest at Hunstanton Hall, and even rented it himself for a period. The parlour maid at Hunstanton, Mrs Hide, became one of the many people with whom he kept up a correspondence.

When aunts, with Pelham in tow, went visiting the neighbours, it was often suggested that young Pelham might be happier taking tea with the servants. He probably was. This was to have another benefit later in life for he understood, better than most of his class could be expected to, how the servant mind worked and how they ordered themselves. The first Blandings Castle novel is told from the point of view of those below stairs, with the hero and heroine a valet and maid and the etiquette of behaviour in the servants’ hall - more stifling than those of their masters - minutely observed. These visits must have been remembered when he came to write Spring Fever, in which Mike Cardinal returns to a castle he used to visit as a small boy:

‘What is this door before which we have paused?’

‘The drawing-room. You seem to have forgotten the geography of the house.’

‘They didn’t allow me in the drawing-room much, when I was here before. Rightly or wrongly, they considered that my proper place was in the tool shed, playing ha’penny snap with Tony and the second footman.’

When Patrick Wodehouse came to stay, Plum and Ethel Wodehouse were not sure how to entertain him, and they would send him out with the footman to walk the dogs in the morning. Wodehouse’s sympathetic thoughts towards domestic staff did not extend to nannies. He remembered Miss Roper, even though he was in her charge only up to the age of five, as strict. A short story about George and Frederick Mulliner’s nanny, Nurse Wilks, is entitled Portrait Of A Disciplinarian. She thinks nothing of locking ‘Master Frederick’, by now an adult, in the cupboard for not kissing his fiancée ‘Miss Jane’ when apologising to her, nor of shutting Jane Oliphant in the cupboard as well, for trying to smoke. But criticisms of nannies in his books can be seen less as a reaction to his own nanny as a reaction against authority. Nannies represent authority, and such figures always had a hard time of it in Wodehouse’s work.

The aristocracy are generally seen as being unfit to carry out their duties. Justices of the Peace are portrayed as being self-interested. Lord Emsworth’s interest in his role upholding the law of England extends no further to seeking retribution on those who threaten and endanger his pig. Edmund Haddock pronounces a defendant he was seeking to give 30 days’ imprisonment to not guilty when he discovers he is the brother of his betrothed. Sir Watkyn Bassett uses his knowledge of his niece’s allowance to fine her exactly the amount which will bite. Bertie Wooster - with no evidence whatsoever - is sure that Pop Bassett sticks to the fines he hands out, and eventually gets him to pay him the £5 which he fined him for pinching a policeman’s helmet on boat race night.

Getting their helmets pinched on boat race night - a custom which is a given of undergraduate life in Wodehouse’s fiction, but does not correspond to the reality - is one of the main functions of the English police. The police in England are bumbling and are figures of fun to be condescended to, outwitted, bullied and humiliated. They are to be pushed into ponds, have their uniforms stolen and be beaten up. In Do Butlers Burgle Banks?, a policeman, Claude Potter, gets shot and the main character, Mike Bond, regrets that it is not fatal. The plot of Frozen Assets centres on Edmund Biffen ‘Biff’ Christopher’s attempts to prevent himself from being arrested before his thirtieth birthday so as to inherit a fortune. He is one of the heroes in the book despite his tendency to commit physical violence on the police of whatever country he might happen to be in. He cannot return to Paris because of an attack on a policeman there. We are asked to feel sympathy for his plight, not that of the unfortunate gendarme. The book opens with a scene where a deliberately unhelpful sergeant of police in a dingy little Paris police station prevents Jerry Shoesmith from getting back his wallet when he needs it.

Stilton Cheesewright uses the majesty of the law to conduct a vendetta against Bertie Wooster, whom he suspects of trying to steal Florence Craye away from him. But American policemen are depicted as being most definitely corrupt, gaining advancement both in their profession and society by bribes. When Psmith is in New York and seeks protection to go about his lawful duty he goes not to the police but to a gang leader. Any private detective in the Wodehouse canon is liable to be more crooked than those he is sent to investigate.

Indeed, there is a strong strain of anarchism in Wodehouse’s fiction. Police are not to be respected, and although criminals may be thwarted in their endeavours, they never get punished for their crimes. Lies and blackmails abound. In Wodehouse’s school fiction it is the schoolboys who set the tone and structure of that society, not those in authority. Sheen is punished by being sent to Coventry by his fellow schoolboys for ignoring part of the schoolboy code. Sheen later is only able to rescue his reputation, and boost the standing of the school itself, by deliberately contravening the headmaster’s orders.

Do Butlers Burgle Banks? throws up all sorts of insights into Wodehouse’s morality. Not only is a policeman shot, but not killed to the regret of the main character, but a hero of the book is a villain, Horace Appleby. Yet even he has his strict code, and refuses to let Charlie Yost share the proceeds of a robbery because he carried a gun. Discovering that a girl - his ex-fiancée - is locked in the safe of the bank, he telephones the owner for the combination of the lock, although realising the peril this will place him in. Contrasting with this, the action of the story takes place after the funeral of Sir Hugo Bond of Bond’s Bank who was revered as a great local benefactor, with money he himself has stolen. His nephew, Mike, takes over the bank, but does not denounce his uncle:

‘How could I after that funeral? The whole town had gone into mourning, everyone was telling everyone that there had never been anyone like him... what a noble soul... what a big hearted benefactor. Did you expect me to stand up and say “You’re all wrong chaps. The man you think so highly of was a crook and a swindler”? I couldn’t do it. Besides, when you’re running a bank you don’t shout from the rooftops that it’s short two hundred thousand pounds in its funds.’

The trustees of the bank, General Sir Frederick Featherstone and Augustus Mortlake had accepted the wages of responsibility without taking on board the responsibility. These trustees, misunderstanding a comment of Mike’s, are happy to think that he is going to commit suicide to get them out of a sticky position.

Mike Bond compares Sir Hugo’s actions to a former schoolmate of his who was always generous at the school shop to his friends. Only later was it discovered that he ‘has been helping himself right and left to the contents of his schoolmates’ pockets.’

‘Little beast!’

‘Not at all, Gussie. He was quite a good sort. We all liked him, even after the facts were discovered. He’s a member of parliament now.’

Horace Appleby, the hero of the story, ends the book engaged to be married and determined to go straight, though this not so much due to morality but a consequence of retirement. Sir Hugo’s reputation is also assured. Crooks are not unmasked in Wodehouse, even unlovely ones such as Mr Slingsby in Bill The Conqueror, who is allowed by the hero to make his escape to America.

Flowing from this dislike of authority is a strong opposition to those who set themselves up to judge others. This may have its roots in Wodehouse’s youth, when he was brought up to tight strictures on how a young gentleman should look and behave. Miss Roper’s fussiness over personal attire - her charges always had to look perfect young gentlemen - can be seen to have an outlet in Jeeves’ preoccupation over clothes.

‘What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this? Do you realise that Mr Little’s domestic happiness is hanging in the scale?’

‘There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.’ [Very Good, Jeeves]

Jeeves’ pedantry might also carry echoes of Miss Roper:

‘I hold that rank is but a penny stamp.’

‘Guinea stamp, sir.’

‘All right, guinea stamp. Though I don’t believe there is such a thing. I shouldn’t have thought they came higher than five bob. Well, as I was saying, I maintain that the rank is but the guinea stamp and a girl’s a girl for all that.’

‘“For a’ that”, sir. The poet Burns wrote in the North British dialect.’

‘Well “a’ that”, then, if you prefer it.’

‘I have no preference in the matter, sir. It is simply that the poet Burns --’

‘Never mind about the poet Burns.’ [Indian Summer Of An Uncle]

Jeeves is a good guy in the chronicles, the Efficient Baxter a bad guy. But why? What are Baxter’s crimes? He tries to bring order to Lord Emsworth’s life, and prevents him from evading his duties. He is conscientious. He judges others more harshly than many of those he sits down to dinner with; he suspects impostors, and that he is almost invariably right does not matter. Baxter conspires against the tide of anarchism which he fears will overwhelm Blandings.

Wodehouse’s big-game hunters are always ridiculous figures who set out to kill in foreign lands based on an arrogant assumption that their way of life is best and they are the most important thing there. Capt Jack Fosdyke is a particularly unappealing example of the species and his warped view is delightfully sent up:

‘If you had led the rough, tough slam-bang, every-man-for-himself life I have, you wouldn’t be frightened of gorillas. Bless my soul, I remember once in Equatorial Africa I was strolling along with my elephant gun and my trusty native bearer, ’Mlongi, and a couple of the brutes dropped out of a tree and started throwing their weight about and behaving as if the place belonged to them. I soon put a stop to that. Bang, bang, left and right, and two more skins for my collection.’ [Monkey Business]

Captain Fosdyke is later shown to be a coward when he encounters a gorilla in Hollywood, which is, of course, only a human in a gorilla suit.

A lack of respect for others’ rights and property is also a characteristic of another big-game hunter, Jane Hubbard. In order to stop an argument, she blows a hole in her host’s front door with an elephant gun which she happened to be holding as she had recently shot at one of his guests from short-range - and missed - thinking he might be a burglar. Big-game hunters are always shown to be vain, risible figures:

Eustace was lying in bed listening to Jane Hubbard as she told the story of how an alligator had once got into her tent while she was camping on the banks of the Issawassi River in Central Africa ...

‘And what happened then?’ asked Eustace breathlessly ...

‘Oh I jabbed him in the eye with a pair of nail scissors, and he went away,’ said Jane Hubbard. ...

‘Nail scissors!’

‘It ruined them unfortunately. They were never any use again. For the rest of the trip I had to manicure myself with a hunting spear.’ [The Girl On The Boat]

In the short story Feet Of Clay Capt Fosdyke is talking with Agnes Flack, whom he wants to marry because of her money:

‘Ever seen the Grand National?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I won it a couple of times. I remember on the second occasion Lady Astor saying to me that I ought to saw off a leg to give the other fellows a chance. Lord Beaverbrook, who overheard the remark, was much amused.’

‘You seem marvellous at everything.’

‘I am.’

‘Do you play golf?’

‘Oh, rather. Scratch.’

‘We might have a game tomorrow.’

‘Not tomorrow. Lunching in Washington. A bore, but I can’t get out of it. Harry insists.’

‘Harry?’

‘Truman. We’ll have a game when I get back. I might be able to give you a pointer or two. Bobby Jones said to me once that he would never have won the British and American Amateur and the Open if he hadn’t studied my swing.’

This distaste for people imposing their value judgements on others can also be seen in Wodehouse’s dislike of communism and socialism. Communists are attacked for being hypocrites. Bingo Little’s support for communism is only as deep as his love for a communist girl. Bertie Wooster, not the greatest political philosopher it is fair to say, gently points out the absurdity of his conversion:

‘I say you don’t know how I could raise fifty quid somehow do you?’

‘Why don’t you work?’

‘Work,’ said young Bingo surprised. ‘What, me? No, I shall have to think of some other way. I must put at least fifty on Ocean Breeze.’ [The Inimitable Jeeves]

Orlo Porter, a communist, bemoans his life in conversation with Bertie Wooster in Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen:

‘Do you know what my insurance company pays me? A pittance. Barely enough to keep body and soul together on. And I am a man who likes nice things. I want to branch out.’

‘A Mayfair flat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Champagne with every meal.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Rolls Royces?’

‘Those, too.’

‘Leaving something over, of course, to slip to the hard-up proletariat. You’d like them to have whatever you don’t need.’

‘There wouldn’t be anything I don’t need.’

This was written by Wodehouse when in his nineties. His views were unchanging from when he was in his twenties and was explaining the political philosophy of that most eccentric and shallow of socialists, Psmith:

‘I’ve just become a Socialist. It’s a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the equal distribution of property and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it.’ [Mike]

The extent of Psmith’s addiction to the socialist cause is shown by a career which starts with him working in a bank, goes through a stage owning a magazine and then ends - as far as the reader’s knowledge extends - in gaining employment as secretary to a hereditary peer. The Old Etonian and member of several gentlemen’s clubs is no socialist as has been claimed by some commentators. He is as patronising to the socialist cause as he is to many of those in power over him - at least nominally - whom he encounters on his way through life. His attitude to socialism is amused contempt.

Psmith’s socialism is not credible, nor was it ever meant to be. The case of Bertie’s replacement manservant for Jeeves, Brinkley or Bingley, is not clear. Bertie is convinced that he is a socialist out to start a bloody class revolution at his expense. But where is the evidence? When Brinkley does decide to try to murder him religion seems to be competing with drunken derangement as the driver of his action. Indeed, a friend of mine, himself well to the left politically, found this book hilarious simply because he did not believe Brinkley was an ardent left-winger, and found much humour in Bertie’s paranoia. So far so good, except that Brinkley, who is called Bingley now, re-appears in another Wooster novel where Jeeves acknowledges that Brinkley had had left-wing leanings earlier which have disappeared now that he had become a man of property himself. This, of course, fits with the general Wodehouse analysis of the motives of many left-wingers. But of Brinkley’s political leaning I am genuinely not sure.

Socialists are normally sent up by Wodehouse for their self-interest disguised as an altruistic philosophy, but in the story Archibald And The Masses Archibald sets out to help the working classes in a patronising, ignorant and uncomprehending manner: This is another variation on the theme of wrongly applying one’s own value judgements and lifestyle where it is not necessarily appropriate.

Although critics have sought to illustrate that Wodehouse was opposed to the philosophy of Nazism through his criticism of Oswald Mosley in the guise of Roderick Spode, a more imaginative and creditable argument would concern his opposition to democratic socialism and communism. That communism and fascism are seen as opposite ends of the political spectrum can be viewed as more a convenience for political abuse than as a rational analysis of their components. Communism and fascism both require an all-important, knowing state. As such, surely it can be argued that both philosophies are left wing. The further left one travels on the political slide rule the more important the state as a judge becomes. The further right one travels the less important, and the less respected the state. Margaret Thatcher’s political philosophy was about ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state.’ If one travels to the furthermost rightward reaches of the political scale does one not find anarchism rather than fascism? (Or maybe it is simply that the political map should be drawn as points around a circle, or a U shape which almost meets at the top, rather than as a straight line.)

Anarchism has its own strains of philosophy, one of which states that any action by an individual is permitted - even murder - so long as that individual’s conscience can live with it. This philosophy underpins the structure and plots of many of Wodehouse’s novels. Bertie is always hamstrung precisely because his conscience is so restricting that he is frequently crippled from taking the necessary action to rid himself of whatever particular peril is plaguing him at the time. It requires him to stay engaged to girls he can’t abide, court danger by rushing to friends in need, and to honour his word. Jeeves’ own moral code is much looser, and so he is able to countenance a much wider scope of action. It is often through this, rather than superior intelligence, that he is able to extract Bertie from problems which Bertie was incapable of escaping on his own.

The Chimp Twists, Soapy Molloys and Percy Pillbeams of this world operate as they do because their consciences are untroubled by their actions; Appleby, though a professional crook, will not allow a girl to remain locked in a safe because his conscience cannot allow it. Wodehouse’s villains are never made to pay for transgressing society’s rules so far as the actions of the book are concerned, although prison sentences may be part of a character’s history. If they can live with themselves that is all Wodehouse asks. A man cannot leave a taxi cab clad in the wrong-coloured shoes not because any government or police force has forbid him to, but because he himself cannot bear to countenance the idea. The rules that govern the actions of the characters in Wodehouse’s world are not those of a law-enforcing and legislating body, but of the individuals themselves.