Wodehouse At the Wicket

by P. G. Wodehouse

  Amorous Oxonian Pops in Pavilion

  Pearson’s of 1909 published the heart-warming tale of ‘Reginald’s Record Knock’, which explains how his kindly teammates reward their excellent but inept friend Reginald Humby for his qualities by allowing him one magical day of success on the field. The introduction explains him: ‘Reginald Humby was one of those men who go in just above the byes, and are to tired bowlers what the dew is to parched earth at the close of an August afternoon. When a boy at school he once made nine not out in a house match, but after that he went all to pieces.’

  The stories clearly split into two distinct groups – one in which the cricket itself is the prime topic, and the result either for team or individual, is the key to the tale and its climax; and a number in which romance is linked in some way to a match or the performances of those involved.

  But from this stage it was less and less the English market that lured Wodehouse’s ambitions, and books, short stories and articles aimed at the affluent American publishing world increasingly took over, with only occasional references to cricket. A virtual farewell to the game is made in mid-Atlantic, so to speak, with the 1917 appearance of Piccadilly Jim, set both in New York and London, as Wodehouse sought to link the two settings to produce a story marketable in both countries. This offers the trauma of Bingley Crocker, a small-time American actor required to live in London, where in place of his beloved baseball, he is offered the inexplicable substitute of cricket.

  Newly acquired butler Bayliss is called in to explain cricket, and we are offered a masterly display of incomprehension between the cricket-aware servant, unable to appreciate that his master is baffled, and the same master, struck almost dumb that anyone should consider this strange pastime as any substitute for his ball game. Bayliss ploughs on helpfully, seeking to explain a scorecard, while in response Bingley Crocker uses breakfast table implements to explain baseball (as Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne did for cricket in the Hitchcock classic, The Lady Vanishes).

  Cricket was to make one other substantial but untypical appearance in the 1950 collection of short stories, Nothing Serious, and the tale: ‘How’s That, Umpire?’ (see here). This offers a sharp slice of social comment, in a dispute as to whether wasps are harassing the somnolent inhabitants of the Lord’s pavilion. A man in a walrus moustache is drawn into the debate: he insists there are no wasps around – ‘Not in the pavilion at Lord’s. You can’t get in unless you’re a member’.

  Precisely.

  4 Mike

  The outstanding Wodehouse cricketer and cricket character is Mike Jackson, so sharply etched that just the name ‘Mike’ immediately identifies him for the cricket enthusiast who knows his Wodehouse. The author Alec Waugh wrote in his autobiography, Myself When Young: ‘the only great cricket story of recent times is a school story – P.G. Wodehouse’s Mike’. And Malcolm Muggeridge recalls in his autobiography, The Infernal Grove, how he introduced Wodehouse to George Orwell in Paris in 1944: ‘They just talked cricket’ [Orwell knew the game from his Eton days]. The two of them got on very well … Orwell and I talked a lot about Wodehouse later, and I mentioned, as an example of how very little writers can judge their own work, that Wodehouse had told me he considered his best book to be Mike – an early and surely immature schoolboy story. Of it, Wodehouse told me – in all seriousness, too – that the book had captured the “ring of a ball on a cricket bat, the green of the pitch, the white of the flannels, the cheers of the crowd”, or words to that effect. “Certainly,” said Orwell to my immense surprise. “Wodehouse is perfectly right. Mike is certainly his very best book.”’

  Mike appeared in a serial in The Captain from April, 1907. The original title, ‘Jackson Junior’, was changed when the tale appeared in 1909 in book form, to the more familiar Mike. This incorporated the second Mike story, published in The Captain from April, 1908, as ‘The Lost Lambs’. By 1953, the two were to be published separately once again, this time as Mike at Wrykyn, and Mike and Psmith.

  Mike is a younger son of a prosperous family with three first class cricketer brothers – Joe, a Test batsman, Frank and Reggie, lesser county lights; Bob is in his last year at Wrykyn, three years older than fifteen-year-old Mike. Arrived at Wrykyn, Mike gets an early chance to show his quality when 1st XI captain Burgess bowls to him in the nets.

  He is ‘saddened somewhat’ when his stumps go flying, second ball – but he keeps out the remaining deliveries, thanks the captain, and is given the accolade: ‘You don’t run away, which is something’. Mike ‘turned purple with pleasure at this stately compliment’ – and today’s cricketer should realise that Mike, facing a well-built and genuinely fast bowler aged eighteen or nineteen, is put to the test wearing by modern standards, minimal protection. There is an echo of this required toughness in Edwardian public school cricket in another story, featuring Clephane, an outrageous fast bowler who is unplayable one day, and impossible the next. Allocated the worst possible pitch in a vital house match, he terrifies the opposition, his first ball bringing a delicious response. ‘The batsman observed somewhat weakly – “Here, I say!”, and backed towards square leg. The ball soared over the wicket-keep’s head, and sped to the boundary. The bowler grinned pleasantly’.

  It is a nice reminder that modern cricketers may wince at the sight of West Indian short-pitched tactics, but the amiable Wodehouse, ninety years ago, was quite happy to record schoolboys facing ferocious attacks, on extremely dangerous wickets, with minimal protection – and with no thought that it might be ‘not cricket’.

  Mike becomes Wrykyn’s star bat, spending three years in the 1st XI and doing everything right on the field – but nothing in the classroom to suggest he is benefitting from his studies. So he is removed to a smaller school, Sedleigh, which has a reputation for scholastic achievement – and bitterness at losing his chance to skipper Wrykyn in his last year is brought out to excellent effect in the second part of the saga.

  At Sedleigh Mike meets his lifelong friend Psmith, just transferred from Eton by his own father; Psmith is also a cricketer of quality, but a lazy one, in line with his brilliant character overall. The pair finish up playing for their new school and setting it on the path to a bright cricketing future.

  Mike Jackson returns in Psmith in the City, required to make a living in a City of London branch of the New Asiatic Bank, increasingly confused by his duties, and wondering about an alternative future, when it is decided for him. Brother Joe phones one morning to ask if Mike can play for the county at Lord’s at short notice.

  He scores a splendid century (see ‘At Lord’s’, here), and fellow-banker Psmith, having persuaded his father to watch Mike, is able to suggest that the wealthy Psmith Senior fund both of them in going to Cambridge.

  We jump another season to Psmith, Journalist, which explains how, after their first Cambridge year, Mike, having hit a century in the Varsity match, tours the United States with an MCC team (Psmith ‘had played cricket in a rather desultory way at the University’). After scene-setting events, Mike has to leave with the team for Philadelphia – which shows that Wodehouse knew his American cricket, this city then being the strongest cricketing base of the States.

  By the time of Leave It to Psmith, in 1923, we learn that Mike saw out his Cambridge days (regrettably with no further cricket details), married, and became agent to the Psmith estates – only for Psmith Senior to die, and the estate to be broken up. Mike is offered the chance to buy a farm, and the book turns on the convoluted efforts of helpers to obtain the money.

  The Mike saga is unusual in that certain specific details are carefully updated in later editions. When Jackson Junior made its debut in The Captain in 1907, the Jackson family scan morning papers (no radio, let alone TV, of course) to see what progress has been made by the three cricketing brothers. They learn for instance if ‘that ass Frank had dropped Fry or Hayward in the slips before he had scored’.

  At Wrykyn, Mike’s new friend Wyatt inquires of him: ‘Are you a sort of young Tyld
esley, too?’ Wyatt explains after nets that if you showed captain of cricket Billy Burgess ‘N.A. Knox bowl, he’d say he wasn’t bad’. Arguing for Mike’s inclusion in the XI, Wyatt urges Burgess, ‘here’s this kid waiting for you with a style like Trumper’s’. And when Wrykyn play Ripton, with a legspinner opening the bowling and doing instant damage, a Wrykyn player asks: ‘I wonder if the man at the other end is a sort of young Rhodes, too?’

  Twenties editions were unchanged – but by 1953 for Mike at Wrykyn, and Mike and Psmith, amendments had become essential. Frank this time has dropped Sheppard or May; Mike is a sort of young Compton; Trueman has replaced N.A. Knox; Mike has a style like Hutton’s – and the other bowler is envisaged as a sort of young Tattersall.

  Mike’s cricket career may have fizzled out with the distraction of marriage and the restrictions of poverty – but his name lives on. When Wodehouse’s Dulwich friend ‘Billy’ Griffith had a son in 1943, he was not merely to become Wodehouse’s godson, but was christened ‘Mike’, rather than Michael, in deliberate tribute.

  In middle age, Mike Griffith wrote: ‘Being christened Mike has its drawbacks, especially with solicitors and legal documents, when nobody will take my word for it! I am of course thrilled to have an association with PG – incidentally I took on Grenville (his second Christian name) later on, and have passed this name down to my son. PG’s letters are wonderful. I never met him, alas. My father visited him in Remsenburg, Long Island, but I never did so, more’s the pity. My own career as a county cricketer for Sussex was fairly undistinguished, but PG was always interested in my exploits’.

  The original edition of Mike is now so scarce an item (a first edition was quoted recently at £1,200) that it is perhaps no surprise that even Mike Griffith has only a second edition, in his personal ‘super collection of PG’.

  5 Jeeves (and Bertie)

  The one specific cricketing reference and reminder that lives on throughout Wodehouse, despite the fact that its subject has nothing whatever to do with the game, is in the naming of Jeeves. He was christened after Percy Jeeves, the Warwickshire professional who was killed in France in 1916. Jeeves the cricketer fitted into the persona of Jeeves the gentleman’s personal gentleman for his immaculate turnout and behaviour: records of the time indicate that he was renowned for impeccable grooming, spotless flannels, and smartly ironed shirts.

  A rare photograph shows Percy Jeeves looking much more the Edwardian amateur than a paid servant of the county – strong features, confident half-smile, blazer collar turned up, white cravat tied stylishly.

  A Yorkshireman, born at Earlsheaton, Jeeves grew up in Goole: he made his debut against the Australians in 1912 while qualifying for the county, but had only two seasons to show his skills before enlisting. F.R. Foster described him as ‘the greatest all-rounder in the game in 1914’: he turned out for The Players against the Gentlemen at The Oval – and was memorably termed ‘one of the most gentlemanly of Players’. Plum Warner was much impressed with his 4/44 off 15 overs, predicting he would be an England bowler soon. He was quickish medium, with an easy action, getting much life off the pitch.

  The Goole Times in a feature on that district’s favourite son, almost certainly was misguided when it suggested that Wodehouse spent some time at Edgbaston in 1913-1914, seeing the young Jeeves in action: there is no record that he ever went to Birmingham. In 1960 Wodehouse wrote to a correspondent to recall watching a county match at Cheltenham, ‘when one of the Gloucester shire bowlers was called Jeeves. I suppose the name stuck in my mind, and I named my Jeeves after him’.

  A Gloucestershire bowler? Well – from 1913 to 1960 is a considerable stretch of memory. It was probably on August 14th-16th 1913, when Gloucestershire beat Warwickshire by 267 runs, Jeeves making one run and taking only one wicket, but picking up two catches – perhaps pocketed so silently and smoothly that the action instantly reminded Wodehouse of his noiseless and efficient new manservant character (who first appeared in print in 1916 – only a matter of weeks after the original Jeeves died on the Somme).

  A visit to the cricket museum set up in 1993 at Edgbaston under the direction of curator Ken Kelly reveals a mini-display of Percy Jeeves, with a Yorkshire Post article on 1981 by the cricket writer Rowland Ryder, under the evocative headline: ‘What-ho, Jeeves – the demon bowler’.

  Ryder tells the story of Percy Jeeves, and records writing to Wodehouse in 1967 to check if cricketer had indeed led to valet. Wodehouse replied from Rensembrink on October 26, 1967 – the letter is on show – to confirm the link, mentioning the Cheltenham match and saying: ‘I remember admiring his (bowling) action very much’. Percy Jeeves’s county cap, and pictures of the promising player in action, add to the display.

  Ryder in his semi-autobiographical Cricket Calling (1995), devotes a chapter to ‘The Unplayable Jeeves’, recording how his father when Warwickshire secretary had spotted the unknown Jeeves in a village match, was impressed by his ‘effortless grace’ as a bowler – and invited him to join the county.

  For those who had long felt that the original Jeeves deserved some more lasting memorial in the game he played so briefly, there was good news when Wisden in 1996 at last listed Percy Jeeves in its historic record of ‘Births and Deaths’.

  So that is cricket and man (although Wodehouse decided not to invest his Jeeves with the cricketing quality of the original): what of cricket and master? Sadly, there is no record that Bertie Wooster ever trod the cricket field; he was a racquets Blue, played a little tennis – and that appears to be that.

  The inimitable quality of Jeeves and his master is borne out by the very modest attempts to copy these stories – even by those well-qualified to do so. The quirky Simon Barnes of The Times produced in 1989 a lively series of cricket studies in the styles of noted authors. A La Recherche du Cricket Perdu includes: ‘How’s That, Jeeves?’ This is clever in being quite true to the original style, but even the ingenious Barnes found it impossible to conjure up a true Wodehousean plot: the story casts Jeeves as Loamshire dressing-room attendant, looking after county skipper Wooster in the Benson & Hedges semi-final against Surrey, and suggesting at a crucial moment that Gussie Fink-Nottle bowl his leg-breaks. Gussie has apparently achieved nothing in other matches despite persistent self-belief that he is a slow bowling genius: why he should now prove unplayable, taking seven wickets for ten runs, is unexplained. But as Madeline Bassett, bizarrely transmogrified into telephonist at Loamshire, renews her tryst with hero Gussie after having threatened to hitch up with Bertie, and Loamshire chef Anatole decides against joining Surrey when his fiancée Pamela from behind the members’ bar changes her mind about a transfer because of Surrey’s defeat, Jeeves has once again given satisfaction.

  6 The American Years – Cricket Endures

  In a 1975 BBC interview, Wodehouse declared: ‘My game now is baseball. Oh, I’m crazy about it. I’d much rather watch a baseball game than a cricket match. I think what’s wrong with cricket, that is, if you’re keen on one team – I was very keen on Surrey – well, I’d go to see Surrey play say Lancashire, and I’d find that Lancashire had won the toss, and they’d bat all day, whereas with baseball, the other side only bats about ten minutes at the most.’

  Wodehouse in America obviously enjoyed little immediate exposure to cricket: his friends were mostly Americans, and his writing was aimed at a market which would have been baffled at more than the occasional glancing reference to so alien a game.

  There were brief refresher courses in cricket on the fairly regular prewar London visits: Wodehouse tried to watch Dulwich play either cricket or rugby whenever he returned, and in 1932 he contributed to The Alleynian an account of Dulwich at home to Tonbridge. This is very much a standard cricket report of its age, offering no humour: only the initials at the end identify the author.

  But the report ran to nearly 2,000 words, and was written at the height of Wodehouse’s earnings capacity on either side of the Atlantic. He was then able to ask – and get – as much as
4,000 dollars for a contribution to the Saturday Evening Post. By 1935 he was down to just a thousand words on Dulwich v. Tonbridge. Again the style is very simple, with no indication of batting or bowling method, tactics or detail, such as we expect today. But the reports were written out of love and loyalty, and at some financial sacrifice.

  Meanwhile cricket continued to slip into the professional Wodehouse product, as in Laughing Gas, published in 1936, when Reggie, third Earl of Havershot, mourns his translation under the bizarre influence of dentist’s gas into the body of the juvenile screen idol, Joey Cooley. The young peer grieves for many reasons, not least the loss of his notable physique: ‘I used to go in for games, sports and pastimes to a goodish extent, thus developing the thews and sinews. What future have I got with an arm like that? As far as boxing and football are concerned, it rules me out completely. While as for cricket, can I ever become a fast bowler again? I doubt if an arm like this will be capable of even slow, leg-theory stuff. It is the arm of one of nature’s long-stops. Its limit is a place somewhere down among the dregs of a house Second Eleven.’

  These are cricketing deep waters: slow leg-theory was known to the young Wodehouse, but confused in the English mind of 1936 by fast leg-theory – a very different and fishy kettle.

  Bodyline was a major concern to cricket of the Reggie Havershot year, as the England team headed for Australia, uncertain of its welcome after the bitterness of 1932-33. (This was when England won back the Ashes with the aid of ruthless fast bowling tactics directed by skipper Douglas Jardine, the supremely skilled Harold Larwood bowling intimidatory deliveries that brought Australia’s batting genius Don Bradman down to mere mortal proportions). Did Wodehouse simply wipe that sour episode out of his mind?

  Certainly he must have known all about it: friends kept him informed on the game, and he still saw English papers. He was to have a unique opportunity to learn about this controversial episode in 1937, when the fast bowler Gubby Allen, a member of the Bodyline team, returned from leading England in the 1936-37 Ashes series via America, spending some time in Hollywood, and having much to do with Wodehouse.