Well played, Wodehouse!

P. G. Wodehouse was rather handy with the ball for his school team though when it came to batting he had a preference for 'ducks'. T. G. VAIDYANATHAN traces the contours of the novelist's forays into cricket.

He has the most distorted ideas about wit and humour...

The headmaster of Dulwich on Wodehouse in Benny Green, P.G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography (1981).

We learn from "Performing Flea" (1961) that the last time Wodehouse visited his old school Dulwich was towards the end of July, 1939, just six weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. Here he saw his old school play St. Paul's on a Saturday and get beaten by 27 runs. In the college magazine, The Alleynian of the same month, P.G. Wodehouse has described this, his last Dulwich match, (included under the title "Dulwich vs St. Paul's" in Wodehouse at the Wicket, Ed., Murray Hedgcock (Hutchinson, 1997), pp.191-194) and it has a much-quoted sentence. Of the ever-so-stodgy Trevor Bailey -- of Essex and England - who played for Dulwich as a schoolboy in this match, Wodehouse wrote in the course of his brief account: "Bailey awoke from an apparent coma to strike a four." This surely captures the essence of Bailey's soulless batsmanship. (Only the great Cardus comes anywhere near it in his Bailey-profile (see Cardus in the Covers (London, 1978), pp.115-117)): "In the Test matches of the English summer of 1953 he frustrated Australia at least twice by a bat as completely locked as the door of a safe deposit... When at Lord's in the second Test match ....he made a mistake at long last, and saw himself irretrievably being caught, he clutched his forehead, tottered at the crease, the living and agonised picture of misery and self-disgust" (Ibid, p.116). The poet was spot-on when he wrote that the child is father of the man, for, old habits die hard. For Bailey the schoolboy clearly begat Bailey the Test cricketer! Still, by such dogged batsmanship, Bailey arrived at 41 not out but still Dulwich fell well short of the St. Paul's' total of 212. We learn, however, that the most famous Dulwichian - besides Wodehouse, John Buchan, C. S. Forester and of course, the great Raymond Chandler! - was merely "humurously resigned" on being quizzed about his schoolboy batting performance and at Cardus's playful description of it. But at that time he was hurt. He felt it "a little unfair."

Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey on 15 October 1881. He died full of years on 14 February 1975 at the age of 94 after being knighted earlier in January the same year on the same day as Charlie Chaplin. England's premier cricketing manual, Wisden, carried a 44-word obituary of "the famous novelist" the following year on the strength of his cricketing prowess for Dulwich. Indeed, the 1901 Wisden records Wodehouse's name in the Dulwich XI alongside N.A. Knox who played for England and was rated by no less than Jack Hobbs as "the most fearsome fast bowler I ever faced." In fact, Dulwich produced several fine cricketers, one of whom even captained England -- M. P. Bowden who deputised for the redoubtable C. Aubrey Smith -- of Hollywood fame -- in the Second Test in South Africa when the latter suddenly took ill.

Wodehouse joined Dulwich in 1894 where his brother, Armine, had studied before him. He was already known as Plum to his family, although as plain Wodehouse to his masters and classmates. Wodehouse was quite proud of his name: "If you say Pelham quickly, it comes out sounding something like Plum. I rather liked it, particularly after I learned during my boyhood that a famous Middlesex cricketer, Pelham Warner, was called Plum. He captained England a number of times."

The first record of cricket activity for Plum is found in The Alleynian for 1894 when he appeared for Upper III B against Upper III A in July. Batting No. 11, Plum bagged a "pair", bowled on both occasions by a certain H. A. Green. This inauspicious beginning did not however come in the way of his earning his cap in the First XI in 1898. In June that year, Plum appeared as cricket writer for the first time, reporting four Dulwich games in all of which he had taken part himself. Plum continued to make his favourite score -- "duck" -- in several innings but his Austerlitz as a bowler came in his final year, 1900, when in June against Modern VI he dismissed the the first nine batsman for 14 runs in the 1st innings. He took 6 for 23 in the 2nd innings and finished with 15 wickets for 37 runs in the match. In spite of which, The Alleynian summed up his career in that farewell season rather modestly: "A fast righthand bowler with a good swing, although he does not use his head enough. As a bat he has very much improved, and he gets extraordinarily well to the pitch of the ball. Has wonderfully improved in the field, though rather hampered by his eyesight." Not really surprising when you consider that this estimate was written by none other than Plum himself!

But all good things come to an end and soon Plum found himself doing battle in the world outside the cricket pitch. His father's finances had, by now, fallen away and Plum was deprived after his Dulwich days of an anticipated entry into Oxford University. And so, in September 1900 -- a few months before his 19th birthday, exactly a 100 years ago! -- Plum joined the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank at Lombard Street in the very heart of London's financial district. That eminent writer, Ronald Mason, in his collection, Sing All a Willow Green, writes of Plum cutting across the river Thames to The Oval (of which he became a member in 1920 eventually prefering it to Lord's. The Oval was to remain his favourite London cricket ground where he witnessed most of his first class cricket) for a long lunch break hour. It was here Plum witnessed the beginnings of the greatest Test century ever made on August 11, 1900 -- the last day of the Final Test against the Australians. Jessop scored 104 out of the 139 scored when he was at the wicket in just 75 minutes before Hirst and Rhodes took England to a historic one-wicket victory before the light worsened and a steady rain set in.

The original account of Plum's fortuitous visit to The Oval that August afternoon, comes from A. A. Thomson's Cricket My Happiness (1952). He recalls how Plum -- the greatest English humorist since Dickens -- dashed from the City to The Oval "instead of having any lunch and saw Jackson and Jessop start their stand. He did not even take time to buy a sandwich. Alas, when Jessop had made 39 (this was at lunch), poor Wodehouse had to go, for time and tide and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank wait for no one... Seeing Jessop make 39 not out out of that immortal 104 and not being there at the most dramatic finish in history must have been like seeing Ellen Terry in the first act of "Romeo and Juliet" and then having to leave the gallery because your nose was bleeding."

One likes to think that this singular misfortune led Plum to quit the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank on 9 September 1902 although the reason given by his recent biographer, Benny Green, I must admit, is just as colourful. Whatever the loss to banking -- and one at once thinks of T.S. Eliot who also quit banking to become the most famous poet of the 20th Century -- English literature's most enduring gift to cricket humour was born. It has been a long innings, indeed, beginning with the early TPothunters (1902) and finishing with the posthumously published Sunset at Blandings. Ninety-six books to be exact -- just four short of a century -- at well over a book a year. Well played, Wodehouse!

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