P.G . Wodehouse

“Had his only contribution to literature been Lord Emsworth and Blandings Castle, his place in history would have been assured. If Jeeves and Wooster had been his solitary theme, still he would be hailed as the Master.  Had he written of none but Mike and Psmith, he would be cherished today as the best and brightest of our comic authors.

“If he had given us only Ukridge, or nothing but recollections of the Mulliner family, or a pure diet of golfing stories, Doctor Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse would nonetheless be considered immortal. That he gave us all those - and more - is our good fortune and a testament to the most industrious, prolific and beneficent author ever to have sat down, scratched his head and banged out a sentence.”
Stephen Fry

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (pronounced wood-house), “Plum” to friends and fans, ranks among the best loved comic authors in English history.  Born in October 1881 in Surrey, England, Wodehouse was schooled at Dulwich College until family circumstances required him to find employment at the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank in London. There he stayed for two years until, shortly before his first novel, The Pothunters, was published, he found that his income from writing exceeded his eighty-pound-a-year salary. Once in the published world, Wodehouse moved himself to New York, met and married his wife Ethel Wayman, infiltrated musical theatre and film, his only complaint that he had been paid “a hundred and four thousand dollars for loafing”, adding cheekily that he felt as though he had “been cheating them”.

It can be fairly said that Wodehouse was more than a little naive – so much that it led to the greatest controversy of his life. In 1940, Wodehouse and his wife, refusing to flee from France (possibly because of underestimating the threat of WWII, and possibly because his wife did not want to leave their dog, Wonder), were interned in a series of German camps. After his release, Wodehouse wrote and recorded a five-part serial about his experiences – not shying away from lampooning his captors and the whole situation – and this being broadcast on German radio caught him not a little flak back home in England, where a sense of humour about the Germans was not a must-have for all the ladies and gentlemen. He was exonerated in the public’s eye many years later and, after a first attempt at knighting him was blocked by the Prime Minister at the time, he was knighted finally in 1975.

Most famous for the Jeeves and Wooster novels, Wodehouse also contributed the Blandings series (the first in which is Something Fresh (retitled Something New in the U.S.), a  host of short stories revolving around golf, the many relations of Mr Mulliner and other serial characters like Psmith, Ukridge and the members of the Drones Club to the annals of English literature. But none achieved such wide recognition as the Jeeves stories, birthplace of the archetypal Gentleman’s Personal Gentleman, Jeeves, which rocketed to fame with the 1990s BBC series Jeeves and Wooster starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie – the pair to this day remain vociferous Wodehouse enthusiasts, among the most vocal of Wodehouse’s fans in the world.

One of the English language’s most productive writers, who is said to have used the word “death” only eight times in his ninety-eight novels, Wodehouse died peacefully on St Valentine’s Day 1975 (six weeks after his knighting), manuscript on lap, after “a good morning’s work” on his latest novel.