| Welcome to the website of The P G Wodehouse Society (UK) The choices are on the left. If you are not sure what any of the sections might contain, or you haven't time to browse through them all to find out, just click the question mark to the left of the section to see a description of its contents. Plum Pie at Heywood Hill, features on BBC Radio 4's Today programme! by Jamie Jarrett The much awaited Plum Pie exhibition at Heywood Hill book shop in Curzon Street, London W1, was opened on Monday 21st October 2009 by Henry Blofeld OBE. (The exhibition ran until 16th October 2009.) Henry's opening of the exhibition featured his imagined Wodehouse eleven cricket team based on characters from various of Plum's books. We will be publishing this Wodehouse eleven shortly!
The exhibition has received much coverage in the media, including The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the London Evening Standard to name a few and the Times Literary Supplement will be having an article soon. In addition BBC Radio 4's Today programme featured the exhibition earlier today (Thursday 24th September) and you can go to the BBC website (click here) to their Today programme section to see and hear more! It features numerous photographs of the opening event as well as interviews with Sir Edward Cazalet who is Plum's step-grandson, Tony Ring a leading authority on all things Wodehousean and a founder of this society, Richard Briers the president of our Society and Nicholas Soames. Sir Edward and Tony being co-creators of the exhibition, providing many of the interesting exhibits, some never seen in public before.
Also Hal Cazalet features singing the song 'My Castle in the Air', the lyrics of which are by PGW! Hal is a step-great grandson of Plum. The BBC website also provides links to this website and of course to the Heywood Hill website! Heywood Hill really have, with the help of Sir Edward and Tony, staged a marvellous and memorable event for all Wodehouse fans. You simply must not miss this exhibition. Cancel any other commitments until you have visited 10 Curzon Street!
There was an event at the Heywood Hill exhibition for Society Members on Tuesday 29th September. For an interesting report on this by Peter Thompson please go to our Recent Events section. Throughout the exhibition Wodehouse walks, showing many of the places used by Plum in his books, were conducted by Norman Murphy. Norman has recently published a book called Three Wodehouse Walks. Details on how to order this book are in our Recent Events section along with an article about these walks. Wodehouse at the Edinburgh Fringe There are three Wodehousean events at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year! Anything Goes is being staged at The Edinburgh Playhouse, By Jeeves is on at The Space @ Venue 45 and another staging of By Jeeves is on at St Cuthbert's Parish Church! For full details please go to our Future Events section. The Inimitable P. G. Wodehouse: The Story of His Life and a Treasury of His Wit This book by Mark Hichens, with illustrations by Wendy McLerie, will be published on 25th June 2009 by Book Guild Publishing. For a review of this book by Norman Murphy please go to our Latest News section by using the menu to the left or by clicking here. To link through to the Book Guild Publishing website to read a synopsis of the book and further details please click here. Summer Lightning to appear at Keswick Summer Lightning is to appear at The Theatre-by-the-Lake in Keswick. For full details please go to our Latest News section on this website. Special Offer on P G Wodehouse Silent Movies For a very special offer on some silent PGW movies, please go to our Latest News section. This offer is available to non-members as well as members of the Society. John Mortimer was a much loved member and patron of our Society. John
Clifford Mortimer, barrister, playwright and author The media and press have been bursting with eulogies about John – ranging from lauding his genius as a writer to recognising him as one of the all-time greats as a life enhancer. I will not try to paraphrase or repeat the glorious tributes which demonstrate the quite extraordinary breadth and diversity of John’s talents and achievements. However, I was lucky enough to touch directly upon two of the multitudinous facets of John’s unique life. These were Wodehouse and the law. John was an encyclopaedic Wodehousian. He never missed an opportunity of referring to “The Master”, as he called Plum when speaking to me, in terms of the highest admiration. He wrote a thorough and scholarly assessment of Wodehouse in The Best of Wodehouse (an Everyman Anthology), starting with the theme that “It is a serious fault in our approach to literature, that we do not take comedy seriously”. Then, taking comedy seriously, he went on to rank Wodehouse as one of the best writers of the first half of the 20th century. When in 1998 we held the inaugural biennial dinner of the reconstituted PG Wodehouse Society, John was the obvious person to be the lead speaker. Having accepted our invitation, he then telephoned me nearer the time to tell me that, with the best will in the world, he would not be able to wear the prescribed dinner jacket. I had the temerity to answer by saying, “When Jeeves hears of this he will leap back like a startled Mustang”. The problem was that John was going to have to drive back all the way from a day in Court in Leeds to the dinner in London that evening and would simply not have the time or the necessary facilities to change. Notwithstanding this excuse, John appeared in full dinner regalia. Explaining how he had achieved this feat, given the constraints, he told us in his speech of how, just before he had left home for Leeds that morning, a Jeevesian voice had whispered in his ear “Sir, you should take your dinner jacket. I can only suggest, Sir, that you make full use of the Disabled Toilets in the Milton Keynes Service Area”, and, continued John, “That is exactly what I did”.
In his speech John considered the task of writing humourous prose. He said, “Anyone on a wet Tuesday afternoon can write a tragedy; it is easy to write about troubled adolescence in distant Australia, or broken marriages in Islington. To write great comedy is difficult as I found when working with Dicky Briers ... The great gift of Plum was to depict ordinary people and get them into extraordinary situations. Here was a writer who was highly educated, who could write a joke in the style of Euripides or Shakespeare, and you get from him an insight into the whole of our cultures.” That delightful quotation indicates the many similarities John and Plum adopted in their approaches to the written word. Both knew their Shakespeare from “soup to nuts”, and a discussion or Mastermind competition between them about Shakespeare would have been fascinating. Both were supporters of the underdog, often pricking gently the bubble of authority and bringing the culprit down to earth with, at the least, a modest bump. To appreciate this you have only to compare the pugnacious Hilda Rumpole (“She who must be obeyed”), with any of Plum’s many aunts. Hilda would have made a splendid aunt. Also, each has created fictional characters who are likely to stand the test of time by achieving immortality, with Rumpole and Bertie already having been spoken of in this category in more than one of John’s obituaries. Another memory I have of John is of when we were both appearing for different defendants in a probate case in the High Court. The issue was whether the deceased testator, when he had made his last Will, had been of sound mind, memory and understanding (or whether he was “as nutty as a fruit cake”, as Rumpole or Bertie might have said). Both John and I, although we were each appearing for different defendants, were trying to establish that the deceased, although perhaps a bit eccentric, was fully in command of his wits when he made his Will, notwithstanding that some of the provisions were a bit odd! As you can imagine, this case might have been made for John – and, in the end, the defendants were successful. John was absolutely brilliant in charming admissions out of the witnesses – even, on occasions, making the Judge laugh – and somehow bringing the deceased to life as a real and competent person, despite some of his odd foibles. However, the law on this particular topic was not wholly clear, and I shall always remember how struck I was when John came to make his formal submissions on the law. He seemed to change in character. Easy wit and dry humour were gone and I saw how at the core John was a very serious and top-class lawyer – a fact fully confirmed by his contemporaries and also by his many other skilled performances in court. He was at his best in cases involving freedom of speech, or when appearing for the under-privileged or for those who were being put upon by authority. I also remember John going round with a Road Show, which included the wonderful Joanna David, giving readings from some of the great pieces of English literature. This particular performance took place in Burnham Market Church in Norfolk. Before a packed congregation, it suddenly became apparent to John that perhaps a moment’s levity was necessary as a short release from the somewhat heavy prose that was being read. So, seated only a few yards in front of the altar, John suddenly took two pulls from a glass of champagne which had conveniently appeared by his side, and told two of the most risqué stories that you can imagine. However, because it was John and because he did it with the utmost innocence and charm, not even one of the devout old ladies present turned a blue-rinsed hair, and the ensuing laughter must have caused the aging rafters of the old church to quiver. John was appointed a CBE in 1986 and he was Knighted in 1998. Much of his continuing happiness was inspired by his sweet, intelligent and dependable Penny and the immense pleasure which he derived from the successful careers of his children. Only three months ago in October John came to the most recent PG Wodehouse Society Dinner. When, at the end of the dinner, a toast was given to John, the 150 present rose spontaneously and gave him a standing ovation which went on and on and on. There must be many multitudes of us who would relish further opportunities to do the same again and again. Newly discovered P G Wodehouse Story has appeared in The Sunday Times! by Jamie Jarrett Members will be aware from the September 2008 and December 2008 Wooster Sauce issues of the recently discovered P G Wodehouse story entitled 'Providence and the Butler'. This story had as yet never been published in the UK. However, The Sunday Times printed this story in full, within their magazine, on 28th December 2008. We announced this on our website well before publication and hope that many of you were lucky enough to obtain a copy of the first UK publication of this delightful short story. As reported first in the UK by The P G Wodehouse Society (UK) members' magazine, Wooster Sauce, John Dawson recently discovered this story in the US Library of Congress's digital archive. Inspired by Norman Murphy's A Wodehouse Handbook, John is now embarking on a project to gather, annotate and write about every piece of Wodehouse's work between 1900-1910. This is a massive undertaking and we not only wish him well for this, but look forward to the Wodehousean world benefiting from his endeavours. Our thanks also to Tony Ring for bringing us this important publication information prior to the event. If you enjoy the world of Wodehouse, why not join our society? See the full story of this discovery in our members' magazine Wooster Sauce. Take a look at our Recent Events Section to see what you are missing and whilst you are here take a look at our Latest News. For details of member benefits and how to join this friendly and interesting society, click Society Details to the left. Goodwill on the streets The Daily Telegraph recently published a brief article entitled 'Goodwill on the streets' by Stephen Adams. It discusses whether or not people can still be bothered to pick up and post letters lying on the street and goes on to say "More than half a century ago, P G Wodehouse said he never bothered posting correspondence: he had such faith in his fellow countrymen that he would simply toss them out of his window." The Daily Telegraph conducted a brief experiment with 20 discarded postcards in a number of towns and cities and 14 of them were delivered. Stephen rightly concluded that the death of public spiritedness has been exaggerated! Discount
Offer from Arrow Books to Members of Members will know from Wooster Sauce that Arrow books are offering a 25% discount to members who wish to purchase any of the many editions of P G Wodehouse's work they now publish. A different password is required when ordering any books from each tranche of books published. For example the latest books were published in October 2008 and a different password is required to purchase any of these at the 25% discount. Books from the earlier publication dates in April 2008 and August 2008 also qualify for the discount, but each have separate passwords. Full details are of course available to members in the Society's quarterly publication Wooster Sauce, but for convenience you can also apply to Hilary for details on chairman@PGWodehouseSociety.org.uk. Please entitle your email "Arrow Discount details please". The Arrow website can be found using this link: A new history of Wodehouse's beloved Dulwich College has just been published (click here for details) Picnic with Arrow - see Recent Events and for further information Arrow's website, www.wodehouse.co.uk. New volume of Plum's letters - Oxford English tutor Sophie Radcliffe is editing a new collection of PG Wodehouse's letters which should be published by Arrow in 2010 (click here for an update)
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Week's A Long Time in the World of Wodehouse A
Wodehouse Handbook Some quiz entrants have been experiencing difficulties in submitting answers to our quizzes. If you wish to enter but think your entry might not have been successful, please email the Quizmaster direct by clicking here BBC Radio 4 Today programme presenter James Naughtie has written a feature for The Times celebrating PG Wodehouse (click here to view) Latest
changes Please address any comments to cgreece@eclipse.co.uk
Quotations from P G Wodehouse are copyright of, and reprinted by permission of, the Trustees of the Wodehouse Estate. |
Reports and picture galleries
from across the pond as The Wodehouse Society (the US
society) held its 2007 convention on Rhode Island. Visit 