Quotations from P G Wodehouse are copyright of, and reprinted by permission of, the Trustees of the Wodehouse Estate © 2012 The P G Wodehouse Society (UK)

Wodehouse On The Web

By Geoffrey Millward

If you were to type ‘p g wodehouse’ into the Google search engine, you would be presented with 836,000 ‘hits’. This is obviously far too many to go into in any great detail as the vast majority are only passing references. However, the main sites dedicated to PGW are presented at the top of the list. So, concentrating on the first couple of pages thrown up by Google, here are a few websites that may be worth pursuing.

We are, of course, all familiar with the Society’s own website at www.pgwodehousesociety.org.uk so I won’t dwell on it, but it is a good a place as any to start. Our sister site in America is at www.wodehouse.org which has links to other international groups and our own, as well as chapters in the States.

Next up is the extensive entry in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org.This has a brief biography and many links for novels and short stories. There are also pages on all the main characters, as well as thumbnail sketches of the minor characters who crop up in the Jeeves, Blandings, Drones, Mulliner and Golfing stories amongst others. At the bottom of the main page there are links to other sites.

If you go to www.pgwodehousebooks.com and click on the ‘P G Wodehouse Biography’ you will be directed to another page where you can access the original artwork for the dust jackets of both the British and American first editions. (Please see also our article 'Cartoons and Coronets - the genius of Osbert Lancaster' here). Other pages list the short stories and serialised novels as they appeared in ‘Strand’ and ‘Chums’ magazines.

On the subject of novels and short stories, www.wodehouse.co.uk has links to Arrow Books and to our own society website. Many booksellers who stock both new and second-hand editions of Wodehouse have their own websites. Amazon is probably the best known online bookseller. Go to www.amazon.co.uk rather than .com as this is the British site. (.com will guide you to the US parent site). www.abebooks.co.uk and .com (US) also have an extensive range. Audio books are available from the above sites as well as from www.audible.co.uk. The BBC, on which many of the programmes were first broadcast, also has it's own online shop. If you want to hear brief extracts from some of these audiobooks go to www.youtube.com. Use the link from Google.

For those of you who cannot get to London or have never been on one of Norman Murphy’s Wodehouse Walks, you can now take a virtual tour thanks to Google’s controversial ‘Street View’ site. Go to http://maps.google.co.uk and zoom in on London. Negotiate your way to Mayfair, just north of Piccadilly, and locate Charles Street. In the top left hand corner of the map you will see a little yellow figure. Click on this and drag it to the junction of Charles Street and Hays Mews. By using the computer mouse you should be able to find the Running Footman pub on which Jeeves’s Junior Ganymede Club was based. Opposite the pub is No.47 Charles Street, the London residence of Aunt Dahlia. With regards to Hays Mews itself, this formed the basis for Halsey Court, home to Chimp Twist and others.

To locate the Drones Club we need to find two sites, 18 Clifford Street (on the corner of Old Burlington Street) and 34 Dover Street (between Stafford St. and Hay Hill). The Drones was based on the Bucks Club in Stafford Street but was located at the Bath Club in Dover Street. Sadly the original building of the latter was destroyed during WWII and was replaced by the more modern building opposite Brown’s Hotel.

Finally come south of Piccadilly, down St. James Street and then along King Street to the junction with Bury Street. Christie’s is on the ground floor but four storeys above is the balcony of a flat use d by both Galahad and Freddie Threepwood. PGW himself also stayed there in 1921.

If you now have a taste of how good Norman Murphy’s Wodehouse Walks are, there will be some exciting news on this subject shortly which we will also announce on this website.

As you will probably realise, this is just scratching the surface of what is available out there. Wooster Sauce, the quarterly magazine for society members, and this our society website, regularly have articles with references to relevant websites. But if you find anything that may be of interest to other members, please share it with everyone.