P.G. Wodehouse

Biography

October 15, 1881: a small house in Guilford, Surrey, opened its door to Pelham Grenville Wodehouse—nicknamed “Plum” before he could walk—while his mother was on a family visit from Hong Kong, where her husband held court as a magistrate. Within weeks mother and son sailed back east, only to part again when the boy was shipped off to Dulwich College, the London boarding school that would become his true home. Fourteen-year-old Plum rejoined his parents in 1895 in a rambling villa they christened simply “the old house.” After leaving Dulwich he tried grown-up life as a banker, tallying figures for the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank for two dutiful years, then bolted to the old Globe to write a cheeky column called “By the Way…” Between cricket scores he smuggled in his first stories—school yarns like The White Feather for The Captain magazine—until comic dialogue hijacked every sentence. By 1910 the English-speaking world had conceded defeat: Wodehouse could live where he pleased, and he pleased to live alternately in New York and France. Golf, happily immune to his 18-handicap, supplied the fairway for dozens of stories that soon reached millions from Calcutta to Kalamazoo. In 1913 he met Ethel Rowley, an American widow; in 1914 he married her. Their life of tea, typewriters and poodles settled in Le Touquet until 1940, when German boots crunched up the driveway. Interned first in Upper Silesia, Wodehouse still chipped out manuscripts, was persuaded—politically tone-deaf—to make five light-hearted radio chats, and watched in bewilderment as Britain howled “traitor.” When the camps emptied he crossed the Atlantic, became a U.S. citizen in 1955, and let Hollywood paste his name on posters that rarely resembled his plots. Age and illness circled like spaniels: bouts of pneumonia, heart scares, lungs that forgot their trade. Yet the typewriter clacked on, pausing only when, in early 1975, Buckingham Palace telegraphed forgiveness and a knighthood. Too frail to travel, Plum received the accolade in his Long Island hospital ward from Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, a lifelong fan who cheerfully crossed the ocean to do the honours. His final jest remained half-told: nine chapters of Sunset at Blandings before a heart attack closed the story on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1975. He was 93 and had stacked nearly 200 books, stories, lyrics, and plays like so many golfing trophies. Ethel survived until 1984; the daughter he adopted, Leonora, had died on an operating table in 1942, taking a piece of his laughter with her.