Extras
P.G. Wodehouse played in one further match serious enough to be recorded (beyond those mentioned previously). This was for Bourton Vale against MCC in 1906, at Bourton-on-the Water in Gloucestershire. Batting No.9 in a 12-a-side match, Plum made three and 24, and took one wicket; MCC won by nine wickets. The Wodehouse link came because his favourite Aunt, Louisa Deane (the model for Aunt Dahlia), lived at Bourton. The club was strongly supported by local landowners and the upper classes, and played a regular fixture against MCC from 1891, as well as entertaining the Eton Ramblers from 1893. A member of the 1906 Bourton Vale team was G.H. Simpson-Hayward, who captained Worcestershire, played five Tests for England in 1909-10, and was the last of the great “lob” (underarm) bowlers in big cricket.
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The youngest Wodehouse brother, Richard Lancelot Deane, known always as Dick, who was born on May 30, 1892, and went to Cheltenham rather than Dulwich, played three first-class cricket matches while working in India. These were for The Europeans in the Quadrangular Tournament; he batted six times for a total of 84, with a top score of 52 (against the Parsis), and took five wickets for 138 runs.
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Elder brother Armine might have been forgiven some disillusion with cricket after his most publicised effort for Dulwich in 1898 – his last year at school. Batting No.5 for the college in its major match against MCC, he made a duck in the first innings and six in the second – run out both times.
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There is a rare slighting Wodehousean reference to cricket in “Creatures of Impulse“, published in October, 1914, in Strand Magazine and McClure’s, and reprinted in the Plum Stones series. When the somewhat stuffy and lonely Sir Godfrey Tanner KCMG stayed at the private school run by his nephew George he was bothered by the endless activities and noise of the small boys. Tanner Snr sought solace in the stable yard where, to his nephew’s surprise, he was found one day playing cricket “unskilfully, but with extreme energy”. Sir Godfrey explains; “I suppose many years ago one would have found pleasure in ridiculous foolery of that sort. It seems hardly credible, but I imagine there was a time when I might really have enjoyed it”. On his nephew suggesting, “It’s a good game”, Sir Godfrey responds; “For children possibly. Merely for children. However it certainly appears to be capital exercise”.
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“Shall we ever get Bradman out in the Tests?” (Letter from PGW to Bill Townend on May 15, 1938, referring to the series about to begin in England). Answer: Yes – for scores of 51, 18, 103, and 16. He also made 144 not out and 102 not out, while being unable to bat in either innings of the Fifth Test. Average – 108.5.
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PGW drew his character Claude Cattermole “Catsmeat” Potter-Pirbright from real life, Catsmeat having taken to the stage partly because it allowed him the chance to play county cricket. He was based on Basil Foster of the famous Worcestershire Fosters, whom Plum had met on the cricket field. B.S. Foster opened the innings for Actors against Authors at Lord’s in 1907, and made 100 before being caught by A.A. Milne off PGW’s bowling. Dismissed for 193 (Plum out for a single), the Authors were then hit for 253 for four wickets off just 26 overs. Plum’s 2/36 off five overs were the only reasonable bowling figures. Basil Foster played the hero, George Bevan, in the 1928 New Theatre (London) production of A Damsel in Distress, adapted by PGW and Ian Hay from the Wodehouse novel of the same name. He also played Psmith in Leave It to Psmith at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1930.
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The cricket-enthused English journalist Michael Davie spent a day at Remsenburg to mark PGW’s 90th birthday, resulting in an article in The Observer of October 10, 1971. Asked how Bertie Wooster was conjured up, PGW responded: “Bertie was an absolutely recognisable type when I started writing about him. How jolly life was in those days! I was thinking of the country house cricket matches: I played in a lot of them. Everyone seemed to have a reasonable amount of money. I mean, the Berties never had to work”. Which country houses staged those matches which Plum enjoyed, you wonder. Are there any scoresheets tucked away in their libraries?
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Plum’s enthusiasm for Surrey cricket must have been encouraged by the Dulwich professional from 1872 to 1895, William Shepherd. The Alleynian declared in 1879, “From the arrival of Shepherd dates a complete reform in the history of our cricket”. Shepherd was just 5 ft 5½ inches tall, and weighed a little over nine stone. As a left-arm, medium-pace bowler he had a unique delivery, “which gave the impression he was extracting the ball from his waistcoat pocket”. Born in Kennington in 1840, he played 13 matches for Surrey in 1864-65, then making his name as a coach, with engagements at Oxford and The Oval, before joining Dulwich. Shepherd drained, levelled and re-turfed the college playing fields, and devoted enormous energy to the cause of Dulwich cricket.
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Cricket My Pleasure, the book of memories by the Yorkshireman A.A. Thomson, was said to have been read by PGW in one sitting. He added that it was “the best he had ever come across”.
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A tribute to Plum’s love of cricket came in 1998 with the formation of The Gold Bats, a team representing The P.G. Wodehouse Society (UK). Beginning with an annual match against The Dulwich Dusters – the Dulwich College masters – this extended its fixture list in 2001 with the first of a series of games against The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, played at West Wycombe under the Laws of Cricket applying in 1895 (in honour of Holmes’s declaration, “It is always 1895”). The Gold Bats now also play regularly against The Charterhouse Intellectuals, The Kirby Strollers, and The Mount, as well as contributing members to George Sherston’s XI v Matfield Village, a match played in memory of Siegfried Sassoon.
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PGW wrote to Ralph Blumenau, author of A History of Malvern College 1865-1965: “When I was a small boy, I used to spend part of the summer holidays with an uncle who was Vicar of Upton-on-Severn, and I played a lot of boys’ cricket, some of it on the Malvern ground. From those early days, the place fascinated me. I was of course cricket-mad, and I can well remember peering in at the pavilion and reading all those illustrious names on the boards”. (The author notes; “Malvern cricket was the inspiration [sic] of P.G. Wodehouse’s schoolboy story, Mike at Wrykyn; the Jackson brothers in that book are taken from the Fosters, and the climax is, appropriately, the ‘Ripton Match’”).