By Robert Bruce (pictured, above)

Central London was amazed by two extraordinary events on the Tuesday of the great Wodehouse Millennium celebrations. First a phenomenon unseen for many months beamed down from the skies. The sun shone and London was at its finest. Second the Wodehouse Society’s chairman, the unstoppable Colonel NTP Murphy (pictured, below), broke all known records and attempted and achieved two consecutive Wodehouse walks. His brisk pace and speed of delivery of all known, and many unknown, facts about Wodehouse and London carried him through a total of five unprecedented hours of unburdening of his knowledge and detective work.

There was but one snag. London conspired at every corner and at every street crossing to sabotage his efforts. There seemed to be no Wodehouse haunt outside of which a pneumatic drill was not hammering, or a team of macadaming ruffians were not relaying the road. The noise and the chaos was tremendous and at times not all of it was coming from the Society’s chairman.

As a result of advice at the opening talk of the tour on the night before many people switched from the expected over-subscription of the morning walk into the afternoon walk. The result was predictable. The morning walk was under-subscribed and the afternoon one was, well, more than comfortably replete with enthusiasts. Colonel Murphy dragooned us, if that is the right word for one from the Green Howards, into the most unlikely nooks and crannies of buildings old and new to hear his information. From veteran representatives of the Dutch nation to younger folk from Cincinnatti they were hauled bodily into positions from which they might catch his words, or simply catch their breath.

Indeed the afternoon started with a ceremony in which the youngest member of the party presented the chairman with a plastic instrument emblazoned with the slogan ‘Hog Call’. The booking hall of Green Park station came to a halt as the redoubtable NTP tried to bring us to order by blowing this curious piece of tubing. The noise was interesting. But, as he said after regaining his breath: ‘What sort of pigs do you have in Cincinnatti?’.

There was no time to find out. We were off down Berkeley Street for our first port of call. This was the house where Wodehouse lived for a short time and which was the prototype for Bertie Wooster’s abode. The detective work which had been involved in discovering this had been exhaustive. Gratitude for the chairman’s efforts was expressed by all. And then in a short period we looked at a gate erected in 1760 to protect the inhabitants of London from the depredations of highwaymen, the site where lawn tennis was invented and first played and a house containing wood panelling made from an oak tree personally selected by William the Conqueror. Then it was on into Charles Street where Aunt Dahlia’s house was identified, in actual fact the house of playwright Ian Hay with whom Wodehouse stayed, and opposite it the pub which served as the model for the Junior Ganymede.

Then amidst the tumult of a hot and busy London afternoon we headed east. We viewed the site of the Bath Club where dastardly deeds were done as young chaps reached the end of the exercise rings above the swimming pool only to find that the last ring had been pulled from reach with the inevitable and damp results. We stood crammed in a doorway opposite another model for the Drones Club, in reality Buck’s Club, and then sped on down to Burlington Arcade, which we learned was built only as a last resort by the Duke of Burlington to keep the populace from having access to the wall of his garden over which they threw dead cats and assorted detritus. This despite his efforts at building an ever-higher wall as a deterrent. We stood and marvelled at the successively elevated courses of brickwork as they towered above us. Then we dawdled carefully under the eyes of the beadles down the arcade and emerged to storm down St James’s Street and hear anecdotes about White’s and Boodle’s Clubs. In particular the tale of members espying a man collapsed on the club steps and immediately starting to bet on his chances of survival. A passing surgeon was, we were told, discouraged from assisting the sick man on the grounds that such assistance would amount to foul play.

Our chairman disappeared shortly afterwards. But only to reappear, panama hat in one hand and pipe in the other, from the depths of an alley which he claimed was the original entrance to Henry VIII’s cowshed. In the courtyard behind he explained why duelling had, as it were, died a death, why snuff-taking had also, for different reasons, died another sudden death and why a bas-relief in the corner was that of Lord Palmerston.

Flagging somewhat and fighting a losing battle with the roaring traffic we continued along Pall Mall. Stories about the exploits and nature of Nell Gwynne’s calling had to be toned down for the sake of the youngest member of the group, lest the pride of Cincinnatti’s younger generation be corrupted by tales of the orange-selling trollop. Pausing briefly to marvel at an extraordinary and treetop-tall maori totem pole hidden, if that is possible for something the height of a mature chestnut tree, in a building at the bottom of Haymarket we crammed ourselves into a bank doorway at Trafalgar Square. There we heard how the artist Landseer kept a deceased lion for so long in his studio as the model for the huge lion-sculptures in the Square that neighbours had to resort to the police to clear the rotting and smelly cadaver from their neighbourhood.

Then we stood in the shade of Northumberland Avenue and gazed across the road at the site of the old Constitutional Club, beloved as his club by Wodehouse and lived in for days as an escape into a blissful peace where the crinkling of an ill-turned newspaper page would seem as violent a sound as the traffic outside now is. (Mr and Mrs Ring, pictured, below, particularly enjoyed this scene.) This was the club of Lord Emsworth, under the guise of ‘The Senior Conservative’ club, and also, as our chairman had discovered, that of the chairman of the bank in which Wodehouse toiled during the only unhappy period of his working life.

Next door, by happy chance, stands a welcoming pub with a reproduction of the sitting room of Sherlock Holmes on the upper floors. But we had more work to do. An alley alongside the pub leads you to the last remaining piece of Moorish tilework around what was once the door to the Turkish baths which not only did Wodehouse and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle frequent but also, in the books, young Psmith.

At this point our chairman released us from our task and instead exhorted us to buy him large quantities of gin and tonic in the pub, which we did, and, with the sun streaming through the windows we rested amidst further tales, this time of the extraordinary bureaucracy of military life. And then as evening approached we made our way across the road to the Savage Club where more revelry and exertions awaited us.