We had managed to escape any rain during the Millennium Tour in 2000, and this time around it had held off earlier in the week so that the Wodehouse Walks and the visit to Lord’s were pleasantly dry, even sunny at times. But the day marking our departure to Shropshire was Friday the 13th, and our Wodehousean good luck just couldn’t hold for ever. Though everybody arrived at the coach on time, and we even managed to leave the hotel five minutes early, it wasn’t long before the first drops were seen, and by the time we reached Weston Park some three hours later, it was very wet indeed. But this did nothing to mar our excitement or ruin what turned out to be a corker of a good day.

The fun began on the coach as our Entertainment Guru, Tony Ring, handed out the day’s fiendish quiz. Each day the quiz had a theme, and Friday’s was “General Wodehouse Fiction”. We had to identify which colourful journals Wodehouse had contributed to, the nationalities of certain characters, what types of animals certain other characters were (specifying breed in the case of dogs), and complete village names (e.g., Wapshott-on-the-_____). Wrestling with these problems could have completely ruined our day were it not for the entertainment Tony had lined up to help while away the hours on the road.

First up to the microphone was Ranjitha Ashok, who read “A Letter from Aunt Agatha”. In this masterpiece of epistolary writing, Bertie’s least-favourite aunt vigorously defends herself against such slanders as the assertion that she kills rats with her teeth and she tells her side of certain well-known events in the Jeeves and Wooster canon. The letter was brilliantly funny, and we applauded all the harder when we learned that it had been written by none other than its reader, the immensely talented Ranjitha. Bravo!

There was a brief lull, and then it was the turn of Masha Lebedeva and Arthur Findlay to entertain the masses with a selection from “The Clicking of Cuthbert”. Masha made her way to the front of the coach wearing a Russian shirt (see her separate report here) and, appropriately, she took the part of Vladimir Brusiloff, while Arthur acted as narrator. We could not contain our laughter as she announced in an impassioned tone: “I spit me of Sovietski!” The applause for the duo’s reading was well-deserved.

Next up to the microphone was Bob Rains, who read an excerpt from “Bertie Changes His Mind,” again to much applause. This provided Tony with the segue he needed for a discussion on which fiancée Bertie Wooster should have married. The first three candidates were proposed by Christine Hewitt, who suggested it should have been Pauline Stoker; Carey Tynan, who thought Florence Craye should get the nod; and yours truly, who plumped for Bobbie Wickham (for many of the same reasons that Christine had given for Pauline). Tony then opened up the floor for other candidates, and after a slow start, the debate became very lively, to say the least. Some of the proposed names had merely been acquaintances of Bertie’s, not fiancées, and others were not even female (the less said about that, the better). Finally Tony called for a vote, and the winner proved to be Pauline Stoker, with Emerald Stoker running a very close second, though she was disqualified because she had never been engaged to Bertie. See Wooster Sauce for more details about this scintillating debate.

Dave, our very able and good-humoured driver, made excellent time, and we reached Weston Park ahead of schedule. Just before we got there, Norman had Tad Boehmer read from A Wodehouse Handbook a list of the features of Weston Park that, according to Norman, make it the Blandings Castle estate. And once we got out and started walking around, we could see exactly what he meant. Despite the rain, we happily retraced the steps of Sue Brown in Heavy Weather as she turned and walked across the terraces, though before heading to the pigsty, we made a detour across the lawn to Gally’s cedar tree. Here we saw that the branch on which, in 2000, Hilary Bruce had found clear evidence of hammock marks, was now cut off, alas. Norman delivered a brief lecture to his soaking-wet charges, then led the group around to the kitchen garden, where we found the pigsty mentioned in chapter 1 of Pigs Have Wings and also saw the pond where Gally nearly drowned as a child (Pigs Have Wings, chap. 8).

As the rain was hampering our movements, we escaped to a semi-enclosed area where giant chessboard had been set up. “Who plays chess?” cried Norman, and before you could say “Jeeves” a game had begun between Bob Rains and Tad Boehmer; Bob was the eventual victor. Meanwhile, some wandered the grounds, disregarding the wet stuff, while others went to look at a video about Weston Park in a nearby room, and still others spent a bit of oof in the gift shop. Tamaki Morimura was the first to spy and snatch up the lone black pig in the shop, resulting in a forlorn string of Wodehouseans moaning about their inability to get a pig of their own. Tamaki’s Empress was duly admired during lunch in the Stables Restaurant. By this time we had all bonded so well that we could barely make ourselves heard over the roar of voices.

Following lunch, we had just enough time to tour the house (which hadn’t been open in the morning) before boarding the coach and setting off on the next part of our journey. Our route took us through Shifnal, better known to you as Market Blandings. It is considerably changed since PGW’s time and is now missing most of the numerous pubs that had been part of the scenery a hundred years ago. But The Beehive is still there, and Norman pointed it out to us as we passed through the town.

Down narrow lanes we travelled, admiring the soggy but beautiful countryside, and finally we arrived at Stableford, home to PGW’s parents from 1895 to 1902. The house where they lived, once called The Old House, is now Hays Bank, and the owner, Peter Hollingsworth, seemed just as glad to see us as he had been back in 2000. (It is thanks to Mr Hollingsworth, in fact, that we know that, in Wodehouse’s time, the resident of a nearby cottage was a gardener named Mr Mulliner.) Some of us played with two wet but friendly dogs, while others wandered through the beautifully kept gardens, examining the property from stem to stern. In our handout, Norman informed us: “Wodehouse used the place name Stableford often in his stories and began by locating St Austin’s School here in The Pothunters. ‘Badgwick Dingle’, where the schoolboys went bird’s-nesting, is clearly Badger Dingle which lies about 600 yards along the road, and if you know those early school stories, the names Worfield, Walls, Roughton, Chesterton and Beckbury will be familiar. They are all hamlets and villages within a two-mile radius, while Wyken, which lies just over a mile to the south, was combined with the local landmark, the Wrekin hill, to give us Wrykyn.” And of course, PGW’s frequent visits here instilled a deep love for Shropshire that found its way into his books.

Finally, reluctantly, we boarded the coach in order to wend our way to our hotel in Tewksbury. But first we swung by Droitwich Spa to ogle the exterior of the Chateau Impney Hotel. PG and Ethel Wodehouse had stayed here often in the 1920s, and he had written about it in chapter 14 of Bring On the Girls. It is perhaps better known to us as the model for Walsingford Hall in Summer Moonshine, and it fits to a T the description of it that PGW gives in that book: “... a vast edifice constructed of glazed red brick, in some respects resembling a French chateau, but, on the whole, perhaps, having more the appearance of one of those model dwellings in which a certain number of working-class families are assured of a certain number of cubic feet of air. It had a huge leaden roof, tapering to a point and topped by a weathervane, and from one side of it, like some unpleasant growth, there protruded a large conservatory. There were also a dome and some minarets.” This remarkable structure was built in 1875 by John Corbett, “The Salt King”, for his French wife, though it should be noted that she left him soon after its completion. We speculated on this as Dave drove into the hotel car park, slowly, so that folks on one side of the coach could take pictures as we went in, and those on the other side could record it for posterity as we went out.

Then it was on to the Hilton Puckrup Hall Hotel in Tewksbury, and along the way, John Graham read excerpts from chapters 1 and 2 of his favourite novel, Heavy Weather. This seemed, somehow, a particularly apt title given what the elements had given us that day, but it didn’t matter at all to the light-hearted Wodehouseans aboard the coach. There had been, after all, plenty of joy in the morning – and the afternoon as well.

Elin Murphy (Editor, Wooster Sauce - which you can only get by joining the PG Wodehouse Society (UK)!)

Tour photographs taken by Tamaki Morimura and added to Hetty Litjens' website (click here)