p g wodehouse in emsworth

 

Born in Guildford 1881, P G Wodehouse was christened Pelham Grenville after a godfather, but he pronouncing his first name as Plum in childhood, it became his familiar name. His father being in colonial service, Plum saw his parents for only  three months between the ages of three and fifteen.

Aged five, he was sent to Elmhurst School in Croydon – and was already writing. Aged 12 he went to Dulwich College, his returning parents setting up home in Dulwich’s Croxted Road. Excelling at cricket, he expected to follow his older brother to Cambridge. His father suffering losses on his pension, however, Plum was instead forced to start work at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (now HSBC).

After two years, during which time he freelanced for various outlets, he left to write stories for the expanding popular magazine market. His first book, The Pothunters, having been published in 1902 (by A&C Black), he was offered regular feelance work by The Globe magazine in the Strand.

Living in a Chelsea bedsit he encountered Herbert Westbrook, described by Plum’s biographer Robert McCrum as “an ambitious but lazy schoolmaster with literary aspirations” (Wodehouse – A Life, Penguin 2004). “Westbrook was teaching Latin and Greek at a small private preparatory school in Emsworth, Hampshire, [where, in 1903] he persuaded his new best friend to come and live in the school (in a room above the stables).

“This surprising move from London is explained by Wodehouse’s lifelong love of rural seclusion, and perhaps by the chance to play football and cricket with the boys.  The big house, with its inviting grounds and shady cedars, [was] on the outskirts of the picturesque oyster-fishing town of Emsworth. The school was run by Baldwin (‘Baldie’ or ‘Bud’) King-Hall and his sister Ella. Mr Abney in The Little Nugget is an affectionate portrait of the maverick schoolmaster.

“The life of Emsworth House was highly congenial. In later life, Wodehouse often stayed at Emsworth House, usually on his way to one of his habitual New York liner crossings from the Empress Dock in Southampton. He wrote The Little Nugget (1911) at the school, and dedicated Indiscretions of Archie (1921) to Bud King-Hall.

“The most notable [allusion] appears in Mike (1909), when the eponymous hero is asked about his pre-Wrykyn schooling: ‘A prep school in Hampshire,’ said Mike. ‘King-Hall’s at a place called Emsworth.’

“He [Wodehouse] always described Emsworth as an ideal place to work. In the new year (1904), Wodehouse arranged to rent a house called Threepwood, adjoining Emsworth House and its games fields. This ugly, redbrick, Victorian seaside dwelling became an essential part of his life from 1904 to 1914.

“The house was kept by Lillian ‘Lily’ Barnett, with whom he would made a close, lifelong friendship, and to whom he expressed, with rare candour, the intense happiness he always felt about Emsworth generally. His new prosperity also meant that he could now fulfil his long-held ambition: a trip to the United States of America.

“The decision to visit America was the making of Wodehouse. He became as much at home in New York as in London, forging a transatlantic literary career long before jet-travel made such a proposition commonplace.”

His earliest novels had been school tales: The Pothunters (1902), A Prefect’s Uncle (1903), Tales of St Austin’s (1903), The Gold Bat (1904), William Tell Told Again (1905), Head of Kay’s (1905). Love Among the Chickens (published by George Newnes, 1906) was his first adult novel.

 

While Wodehouse is today remembered as a peerless comic novelist, in the early 20th century he was also a leading lyricist for musical shows in London and New York. Hired as resident wordsmith at the Aldwych theatre in 1906, he met Jerome Kern – with whom he would work in the USA. In his prolific novel output, Mike (1907) featured the first of his great comedic creations Psmith (“the P is silent, as in ptarmigan, psalm and phthisis”).

Revisiting New York in 1909, he returned to England. “He seems to have renewed his lease on Threepwood and to have taken up where he left off,” McCrum reports. “Was he returning to pursue a romance with a lonely widow? In the remote and well-camouflaged world of his emotions, there are strong suggestions of a liaison with a Mrs Lillian Armstrong, whose daughter ‘Bubbles’ corresponded with Wodehouse until his death, and who believed her mother had spurned his proposal of marriage.”

He went back to the States shortly afterwards where higher US fees were, he said, “like suddenly finding a rich uncle from Australia. This, I said to myself, is the place to be.”  Commuting between America and the UK, by January 1912 he was back in Emsworth “while he worked hard at a farcical crime story actually set in Emsworth – published (in 1913) as The Little Nugget,” says McCrum.

“The Emsworth part of his life was changing irretrievably. Herbert Westbrook was about to marry Ella King-Hall. After her marriage, Ella King-Hall became his literary agent for all his British contracts and remained so until her retirement through ill-health in 1935.”

Back in New York, Wodehouse also married. His wife Ethel, born in King’s Lynn in 1885, was a widow with a ten year old daughter, Leonora, whom Wodehouse came to dote on. She was “more companion than daughter,” McCrum notes, until her sad death in 1942. Together with the outbreak of WWI, their union marked the end of his UK residency.

The following year (1914) saw the first appearance of Lord Emsworth in the Blandings Castle story published (in the UK) as Something Fresh. As Wodehouse himself recognised, it was “the best long thing I have done”.

“Emsworth pervades Wodehouse’s work in character, landscape and allusion,” McCrum points out. “Clarence, 9th Earl of Emsworth (‘a mild, dreamy, absent-minded sort of old bird’), a kind of alter ego, was always his favourite among all his characters. Emsworth’s heir, Lord Bosham, takes his name from the historic Saxon village on the coast near Emsworth.

“Threepwood, the cottage Wodehouse rented in Record Road, adjoining the Emsworth House grounds, gives its name to Clarence’s vacuous second son, Freddie. Nearby Beach Road, which runs down to the seashore, contributed Wodehouse’s first and archetypal butler, Sebastian Beach.” Damsel in Distress (1919) features Emsworth in disguise in what Richard Usborne in his Wodehouse – at Work to the End (1962; Penguin, 1978) describes as being “to all intents and purposes a Blandings novel”.

Plum’s first musical in collaboration with Guy Bolton, who became his closest friend, and Jerome Kern, Miss Springtime (1916) was forerunner of many others as lyricist for these and other Broadway luminaries such as George and Ira Gershwin. By the 1930s he was wealthy enough to settle in Le Touquet on the north France coast (convenient for trips to London) where, in 1935, he bought the Low Wood mansion adjoining the golf course. The year also saw the last of his musicals, the Gershwins’ Anything Goes.

While trying, stupendously tardily, to escape from Le Touquet in 1940, he was caught and interned by the invading Germans. While an internee he unwisely recorded a serious of light-hearted radio talks about the internees’ experience which the Germans broadcast to Britain and America. Ensuing accusations of treachery so upset him that, at war’s end, he returned to the States and never again visited the UK. Although becoming an American citizen in 1955, he was – his wartime indiscretion long forgiven – knighted in 1975, dying the same year aged 93.

Bob Smyth 2010