Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, 1900-2002
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, 1881-1975

In the library of Lambeth Palace the Archbishop of Canterbury took another sip of Buck-U-Uppo while he wrestled with his sermon for the Queen Mother's funeral. "How do we combine her majesty, grandeur even, with her fun, and the love for her that everyone has?" he said to his old friend and colleague, Augustine Mulliner, now Bishop of Monkton.

"Strength and dignity are her clothing and she laughs at the time to come. Proverbs, 25, 31," replied Augustine.

"Masterly" said the Archbishop. "Brilliant. That hits it off exactly". And he wrote it in.

The twentieth century was particularly the century of the Queen Mother. She was born as it began and died shortly after it had finished. Her death is sadder because to us it seems like the end of the Wodehouse century. Her devotion to Wodehouse reflects our own.

Wodehouse has been the century's chronicler. We can better understand people in every walk of life because he wrote about them, and when we re-read Wodehouse we return to relive that century.

1881 P G Wodehouse born.
1886 Queen Victoria confers the CMG on Wodehouse'e father, Ernest Wodehouse.
1894-1900 Wodehouse at Dulwich College
1900 The Queen Mother born as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, ninth child of the 14th Earl of Strathmore, at Glamis Castle
1900-02 Wodehouse worked (between cricket matches) for the Hongkong & Shanghai bank.
1902 100 years ago Wodehouse has tea at 22 Ovington Square, Knightsbridge, with Joan, Effie and Ernestine Bowes-Lyon, granddaughters of the 12th Earl of Strathmore, and first cousins of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon; and stayed with them at their country house at Lyme Regis.
Wodehouse published his first of several school books, The Pothunters, dedicated to Joan, Effie and Ernestine Bowes-Lyon.
1906 PGW published his first adult novel, Love Among the Chickens, set at Lyme Regis.
We can guess that Lady Elizabeth enjoyed children's parties. Glamis Castle was not Blandings Castle, but it surely had Wodehouse's parties for children at which a boy (probably a boy) with strong and rapid vocal delivery, would recite Ben Bolt fortissimo and with bravura; followed by "It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea" recited by the girl (probably a girl) with the thickest lisp.
1914 Wodehouse married Ethel Rowley. The First World War started on Lady Elizabeth's birthday.
1915 Lord Emsworth and Blandings Castle appear for the first time this year, in Something Fresh. In the same year Bertie Wooster and Jeeves make their first appearance in the Saturday Evening Post.
1921 Jill the Reckless published; Jill's address is Ovingdon Square, Knightsbridge.
1923 Lady Elizabeth married her Bertie, the Duke of York, younger son of King George V.
1926 As Duchess of York Lady Elizabeth gave birth to another Elizabeth, our present sovereign.
1927 The Wodehouses leased 17 Norfolk Street (now Dunraven Street).
1929 Summer Lightning published, in which Ronnie Fish takes Sue Brown to the Threepwoods' town house in Norfolk Street.
1932 Wodehouse's step-daughter Leonora married Peter Cazalet, Fairlawne, Shipbourne, Kent. He was the trainer of the Queen Mother's racehorses. Both the Queen Mother and many of Wodehouse's characters take a great interest in racing, in good and bad times. Wooster seems to date events only by the turf: his Aunt Dahlia married his Uncle Thomas "the year Bluebottle won the Cambridgeshire" (Carry On, Jeeves). Betting and the language of racing is seldom far away. Gally is full of stories about bookies.
In Pigs Have Wings, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe has a real Wodehouse dinner, 12 courses from Smoked Salmon to Petit Fours, to celebrate the end of an engagement to someone who ordered him to diet. He had hardly started on the smoked salmon when there is an unwelcome caller from his past.
"The historic instance, of course, of this sort of thing is the occasion when the ghost of Banquo dropped in to take pot luck with Macbeth", says our author. He need not add that this event, like much else of Shakespeare's Macbeth, is set at the Queen Mother's Glamis Castle.
The uninvited guest is the girl who had been engaged to him before the diet fanatic. She was the bride who, owing to a misunderstanding, turned up at a different church to marry him. "I thought you had blown in the honeymoon money at the races," she accuses him. She was right there.
"Well, I did venture a portion of it at Sandown Park, as a matter of fact, now you mention it, but by good luck I picked a winner. Bounding Bertie in the two-thirty at twenty to one."
1936 King George V died. Edward the Prince of Wales became King Edward VIII.
Unfortunately young Windsor lacked young Wooster's valet to cough gently and say "scarcely judicious, sir" as he ventured on an ill-starr'd affair of the heart. Jeeves would surely have saved him as he had so often saved Wooster from the same fate. So Edward abdicated after a few weeks as King Edward VIII. This left the Duke and Duchess of York to succeed unexpectedly to the throne as King and Queen.
1946 Wodehouse published Money in the Bank, written during his internment by the Germans and set at Shipley Hall, Kent; see 1932.
1952 King George VI died. The Queen became the Queen Mother and her daughter Princess Elizabeth the new Queen.
1953 Ring for Jeeves published, the only racing novel, with Jeeves improbably playing the role of clerk to an absconding bookie.
1956 The Queen Mother's greatest racing misfortune: her horse, Devon Loch, mysteriously falls in the Grand National, when favourite and well in the lead.
1975 PGW was knighted Sir Pelham Wodehouse. He was 93, he was not well, and it would have been impossible for him to go to London for the ceremony. There was talk of the Queen Mother, then 74, crossing the Atlantic to confer the knighthood in America on behalf of her daughter the Queen. Even if the rumour lacked foundation, it showed how popular they both were, and how mutual their sympathy. But the protocol problems and their ages would have made it impossible.
1988 Moves were made to have a plaque put on the Dunraven Street house in Mayfair where Wodehouse had lived, and the Queen Mother to unveil it. The story, as Michael Pointon told James Hogg, went as follows.
"With Edward Cazalet's co-operation I persuaded Hutchinson, the publishers, to support us with a reception and lunch at the house. Edward knew the Queen Mother of course, and I don't suppose she needed much persuading to come and do the unveiling. I fixed some musicians and the late Benny Green asked Julia McKenzie to sing songs from the shows, first in the room where the reception was held and then during lunch. This meant that I and a few helpers had to shift the piano from room to room as the guests were sitting down to eat, which was quite a performance. But the one thing the Queen Mother enjoyed was a performance, so it all added to the fun.
"She was in her element, wanted to meet everyone and insisted on going out into the garden, which was overlooked by all the surrounding buildings. The security men were anxious, but she ignored that. It was wonderful to see the idea I had had all those years before finally come to fruition with the perfect ingredients – music, Plum's family, lots of Wodehousians and the Queen Mother to do the honours."
The plaque reads:
"I am particularly pleased to have been invited to unveil this plaque as for many years I have been an ardent reader of PG Wodehouse. Indeed, I am proud to say that his very first book "The Pothunters" was dedicated by him to members of my family.
"Sir Pelham Wodehouse succeeded in the great ambition of so many novelists: not only has he brought new words and expressions into the English language but he has also created characters whose names have become household words – Jeeves and Bertie, Lord Emsworth and his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, and even Aunt Agatha to name but a few, live on as immortal characters.
"Nevertheless I think that Wodehouse's greatest gift is that 50 or 60 years after many of his books were written they still make us all laugh, and I am sure that generations to come will continue to laugh at them just as much as we have done. What an encouraging thought for the future!
"PG Wodehouse lived in this house from 1927 until 1934, and I am delighted to unveil the plaque which now records this."

2000 The Society's formal dinner, to which the Queen Mother sent this message: "I regret that I am unable to be with you. However I send my best wishes and, as Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright once said – 'May you all have a binge to stagger humanity'."
2002 Her Gracious Wodehousian Majesty died, aged 101. May she rest in peace. "Strength and dignity are her clothing and she laughs at the time to come." Proverbs, 25, 31.