September 17th 2015 was a very special day for fans of P.G Wodehouse as Jeeves and Wooster celebrated their one-hundredth birthday! Their creator Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born October 15th 1881 and his novels capture a more innocent time, but maybe just as famous is his letter writing, leading me to a little bit of trivia on the author that I thought you might like to hear.
Everyone who knows anything about the author knows that he entered into a lot of correspondence, but fewer people may know that the author is reported to have never posted his mail. His belief was that people were fundamentally honest and public-spirited and would pick up a dropped letter and post it in a post box.
Wodehouse wrote “Someone always picks it up, it saves me going down four flights of stairs every time I want to mail a letter.”
Now I hear you, it was a different time and you’d probably think that this would never happen today, but a couple of years ago the Gloucestershire Echo relived the experiment and of the eighteen letters they left around Cheltenham and Gloucester, fifteen found their way into the post box! It would seem that we’re still a public-spirited lot after all.
Although Wodehouse himself didn’t come from the Cheltenham, he is said to have fond memories of the town. It is said that he found the name for his Jeeves character when watching Worcestershire cricketer Percy Jeeves play at Cheltenham College’s grounds during a match between Gloucestershire and Worcestershire in the summer of 1913. Sadly although the character lives on in print, his namesake was killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 at just 28 years-old.
Wodehouse got about a bit and we’re not too sure just where he tested out his letter carelessness, but he was born in Guildford where he started out as a reluctant banker. He soon started writing and by 1940 was living in France for tax reasons where he was taken prisoner by the Germans.
The author spent much of his life living in the U.S, writing Broadway musicals that would shape the American musical industry that is still thriving today. From 1947 until his death in 1975 at 93 years-old he lived in the US and in 1955 took dual British-American citizenship. He was a prolific writer throughout his life, publishing more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories and other writings between 1902 and 1974. Wodehouse died in Southampton, New York in 1975.
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