Wodehouse arrived at Dulwich College when he was twelve and a half, and the six years spent there, he recalls, ‘went like a breeze’.1 He described it as ‘a resolutely middle-class school’. Its pupils were sons of ‘respectably solvent’ parents, who had sent their sons to be educated in the knowledge that ‘we all had to earn our living later on’.2 With this ethos came a spirit of determined hard work, strong discouragement of ‘putting on side’, and good sportsmanship. Situated in the suburbs of South-East London, the imposing red-brick Victorian building is surrounded by sixty-five acres of rolling green fields, chestnut-lined avenues and cricket pitches. At the time Wodehouse arrived, the school was thriving, with more than six hundred boys.
Much of its success could be attributed to its extraordinary headmaster, Arthur Herman Gilkes. Wodehouse recalls Gilkes as ‘a man with a long white beard who stood six-foot-six in his socks and he had one of those deep musical voices. I can still remember how he thrilled me when he read us that bit from Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus which ends “But I, mine Werther, am above it all”. It was terrific. But he also scared the pants off me!’3 Gilkes had a magnetic presence, instilling the importance of fair play, as well as a love of sport and a thirst for knowledge. Harsh on slang and smoking, he was also generous and charismatic. He was often to be found umpiring on the cricket pitch, or giving the boys individual ‘tutorials’ for which they had to read an essay aloud – an experience which was, Wodehouse remembered, ‘akin to suicide’.4
At Dulwich, things went well from the start. Wodehouse excelled in the open examination, winning a £20 scholarship, and was placed in a form of boys older than himself. While Wodehouse’s brother, Armine, flourished in the sixth form, Gilkes took Wodehouse minor under his wing, banning him from cycling (due to his poor eyesight) and suggesting boxing as an alternative. But it was during his years in the sixth form that Wodehouse made his mark. He represented the school in the First XV for rugby football and the First XI at cricket, and also busied himself writing poetry. In 1899, he was chosen to be one of the editors of the school magazine, under the eye of William Beach Thomas, a Dulwich master later to become a famous war correspondent.
Wodehouse relished the social and gastronomic aspect of school as well. For most of his time he was a boarder, initially sharing a dormitory, and then a study bedroom, with one or two other boys. There were ‘open fires in winter, a kettle for tea or cocoa, a toasting fork, a twice-daily delivery of bread, milk, and what the boys called “spreads” such as dripping, meat extracts, or honey. There was a Buttery in the Centre Block for milk and jam or chocolate “splits” during morning break, and “warm” cake for afternoon tea; and there was a meat meal and often sponge or suet puddings […] at long trestle tables in the Great Hall at 6pm.’5
Though Pelham Grenville was seen as the more sportingly inclined of the brothers, he had his heart set on a place at Oxford, and was equally committed to his studies. ‘We might commit mayhem on the football field, but after the game was over we trotted off to our houses and wrote Latin verse.’6 He also showed an early thirst for literary journalism and remembered ‘stroll[ing] down to the station’ after school, to ‘read the weeklies and the magazines on the bookstall’ [see plate 4].7 The shelves would have been full. The Education Acts of the 1870s led to an explosion in the numbers of newspapers and journals catering for every sector of society. Writing in 1955, Wodehouse recalls the number of boys’ magazines. Chums was a particular favourite, a weekly periodical modelled on The Boy’s Own Paper, which included advice on ‘How to Train for the Football Season’ and ‘The Right Way to Carry a Boa-Constrictor’, as well as serials which made ‘an enormous impression’ on him as a young reader, such as Max Pemberton’s Iron Pirate and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Then – in 1900 – the Captain appeared, and in the first number was a serial by Fred Swainson called Acton’s Feud. It began, I remember, ‘Shannon, the old international, had brought a hot side down to play the school ...’ and if there has ever been a better opening line than that, I have never come across it. It was something entirely new in school stories – the real thing – and it inflamed me to do something in that line myself. If it hadn’t been for Acton’s Feud, I doubt if I would ever have written a school story.8
Wodehouse’s first piece of published writing – an essay entitled ‘Some Aspects of Game-Captaincy’ – appeared as a prize-winning contribution to The Public School Magazine when he was still at Dulwich. His fee – 10/6 – was recorded in a notebook entitled Record of Money Received for Literary Work, in which he was to log his income for the next seven years. The essay is a masterpiece of classification, characterising the various types of football-playing schoolboys according to their genus: ‘the keen and regular player’, ‘the partial slacker, and lastly, the entire, abject and absolute slacker’.9 Almost all of Wodehouse’s early published writings – The Pothunters, Tales of St Austin’s, The Gold Bat and The Head of Kay’s – were school stories and, like his very first piece, were based on his life at Dulwich and the fiction that he read during his time there.
Apart from a certain frostiness on the part of ‘Scotty Gibbon’, the football captain, or the ‘scratching’ of the annual match against Bedford owing to poor weather, there was little to mar the Dulwich years.10 The biggest potential shadow came early on in his time at the school, with the news of his parents’ return. In 1895, Ernest retired early from the Civil Service due to ill-health, and the Wodehouses took a house near the school at 62 Croxted Road, where Wodehouse was later to set several of his novels. Pelham had to adapt quickly, not only to life as a day boy, but also to living with his parents and a new younger brother, Dick, who had been born in 1892. Relations with Ernest, Wodehouse remembers, were always amicable, despite his father’s habit of occupying the toilet for two hours every morning. He found his mother to be a more difficult character. ‘I met her as virtually a stranger’, he recalls, ‘and it was not easy to establish cordial relations’.11 But London life did not suit Ernest and Eleanor, and within a year they moved to the countryside, settling in the Old House in the Shropshire village of Stableford. Wodehouse returned to being a boarder.
An English family home meant that finally the Wodehouse boys could be reunited in the school holidays. Wodehouse loved the countryside, and often used it as the backdrop for his school stories, drawing on the architecture and spirit of Dulwich and relocating them to Shropshire.12 Even while home for the vacation, he was keen to stay in touch with his school friends. Wodehouse was popular with all of his year, but he formed a particular bond with two boys, Eric Beardsworth George and William Townend, both of whom were later to become artists and writers. Together, they styled themselves the ‘three genii’. Wodehouse and Townend’s friendship (rather like that of Bertie Wooster and Bingo Little) would last a lifetime [see plate 5].
Wodehouse often returned to his old school to attend rugby and cricket matches, and followed the progress of his old school teams with keen interest. In many ways, Wodehouse never left Dulwich at all. ‘I sometimes feel’, Wodehouse confided, ‘as if I were a case of infantilism. I haven’t developed mentally at all since my last year at school. All my ideas and ideals are the same. I still think the Bedford match the most important thing in the world.’13
1 PGW to William Townend, 7 March 1946 (Dulwich).
2 Jasen, p. 11.
3 Jasen, pp. 18–19.
4 Margaret Slythe, ‘P. G. Wodehouse: The Dulwich Factor’, Plum Lines, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter 2008), p. 8.
5 Ibid., p. 9.
6 Jasen, p. 15.
7 PGW to Saville, 31 August 1969 (private archive).
8 PGW to Richard Usborne, 3 June 1955 (Wodehouse Archive).
9 P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Some Aspects of Game-Captaincy’, The Public School Magazine, February 1900, p. 12.
10 PGW to Richard Usborne, 11 January 1952 (Wodehouse Archive).
11 Jasen, p. 9.
12 ‘Preface’ (1969) to Something Fresh (1915).
13 PGW to William Townend, 9 February 1933 (Dulwich).