Wodehouse At the Wicket Read online

  Even though writing about cricket had gradually overtaken actual playing well before his thirtieth birthday, Wodehouse did achieve every cricketer’s ambition, appearing at Lord’s not once, but six times.

  On 29 June, 1905, when the young freelance writer was not quite twenty-four, he played for Authors v. Actors – one of a series of modest-level matches for which the headquarters of cricket was regularly made available (the main ground, at that: the Nursery ground, then known as the practice ground, was not used for matches until after World War Two).

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle captained the writers, who included Cecil Headlam, J.C. Snaith, Albert Kinross, Horace Bleakley, Major Philip Trevor and E.W. Hornung. Doyle was an excellent club player who represented MCC regularly: Wisden said of him, ‘though never a famous cricketer, he could hit hard, and bowl slows with a puzzling flight’. He is notable in cricket records for having captured just one first-class wicket in his career – for MCC v. London Counties, on 25 August, 1900, when he dismissed none other than W.G. Grace.

  If Doyle was the Authors’ star, several others had fair cricketing reputations. And E.W. Hornung was the creator of Raffles, the gentleman thief who used his cricketing credentials to wangle his way into country houses where he switched to cat burglar, lifting jewellery and valuables from bedrooms at dead of night. Hornung, married to a sister of Conan Doyle, was a keen player, but had not made the Uppingham XI.

  Doyle’s was a useful team in the social game of the day, but the Authors, after making a modest 149 on debut, were toppled by the Actors, thanks to a thunderous unbeaten century by one V. O’Connor.

  Wodehouse opened the batting with his skipper and duly made his regulation duck – bowled by C. Aubrey Smith, who at 41 was fully fast enough to worry the occasional player. The Actors needed only twenty-five overs to score 156 for just three wickets. But Wodehouse then got some revenge. His ten overs may have cost him an expensive 58 runs, but he bowled H.B. Warner, and caught Aubrey Smith. (Warner was to join Smith in Hollywood and make his name in cinema history playing Christ in the 1927 de Mille Biblical epic, King of Kings).

  A year later the Authors squared accounts by 24 runs: Wodehouse’s batting ability was perhaps better suited to No.9 (where he made a significant 14) and he bowled only in a light-hearted second innings, to pick up three cheap wickets.

  The 1907 match saw Wodehouse, again at nine, score just a single, in a total of 193, and then pay out 36 runs in five overs for two wickets: the Actors scored 4/253 for comfortable victory.

  In the following year, the English weather caught up with the fixture; just five overs were bowled in 1908 – with Wodehouse down on the batting order at No.11. He did not return to Lord’s until 1911, when the opponents were the Publishers: he took four wickets, all bowled, in a score of 240, and made a notable 60, promoted to No.4, in a drawn total of 218 for 8. And finally in 1912, Wodehouse at No.6 made 27 out of 206, before rain again intervened and the match was abandoned with just seven more overs bowled.

  Writing to his friend Leslie Havergall Bradshaw (to whom Psmith in the City is dedicated, and who was then working in New York), Wodehouse explained: ‘I made 27 in seven minutes for the Authors at Lord’s before being stumped, and then rain stopped play. Last Saturday I got 50 for our village, and took seven wickets. We had to run everything out, and it nearly killed me. With boundaries, I should have made a century.’

  He was thirty, and although he took regular exercise then as he did throughout his life, anyone who has ever both batted and bowled for any length of time at any level will understand his weariness – especially on that oddity of the age, a ground without boundaries.

  The Lord’s occasion was the last Authors’ match – and really the end of serious cricket for the increasingly diverted Wodehouse. But one other noteworthy author crossed his path around this time in a bizarre cricketing context. H.G. Wells invited the young Wodehouse and a number of other writers to dinner and, as Wodehouse recalled years later: ‘We had barely finished the initial pip-pippings when he said, apropos of nothing: “My father was a professional cricketer”. If there’s a good answer to that, you tell me. I thought of saying, “Mine had a white moustache”, but finally settled for “Oh, ah”, and we went on to speak of other things’. (Joseph Wells, father of H.G., had played seven matches for Kent in 1862-63).

  Albert Kinross, a dramatic and art critic, wrote in his autobiography, An Unconventional Cricketer, an account of E.W. Hornung’s establishing the Authors team, which played first at Esher. Early Authors’ elevens included the Hampshire player H.V. Hesketh-Prichard as star bowler. Another celebrity was the novelist A.E.W. Mason who ‘did not appear to take the game very seriously’. Kinross wrote: ‘P.G. Wodehouse, I remember, joined us, an old Dulwich boy, and still rather the schoolboy. He, as Lucas before him, was doing comic stuff for The Globe. Esher, then something like a village, put us up and fed us; its ladies turned out for tea with us on the field; and in the evening there were dinner-parties’.

  He explained that ‘in addition to our games at Esher, we sometimes went to Lord’s and did battle with teams of Actors and Publishers. Needless to say, St. John’s Wood was not blocked with traffic on these occasions, though the Actors proved something of an attraction. Far more so than we poor Authors, who were so misprized that one charitable firm of batmakers arrived with the offer of a guinea weapon to the one of us who should make top score. Neither Doyle, nor Hornung, nor any of us leapt at it, exactly’.

  Kinross pays tribute to Conan Doyle as an inspiring captain, who ‘usually delivered the goods, made runs, took wickets, and held catches’. But the Publishers ‘were not so good a side, and we beat them easily – although in S.A. Pawling of Heinemann’s they had one uncommon bowler who could send down a fast in-swinger with an authentic fizz – a brute of a ball to start on, and bad enough at any time’.

  The Artists had been less famous: in cricket terms, the most significant of the first team was Albert Chevallier Tayler, whose general work is overshadowed by his 1905 series of forty-eight drawings, ‘The Empire’s Cricketers’ – now very much a collector’s item. Cricket, the weekly journal which ran from 1882 to 1913, records the Artists in their Edwardian heyday as fairly basic in organisation: the only subscription payable was life membership, at one guinea.

  The first Esher match against the Authors (tagged ‘E.W. Hornung’s XI’) was on June 30, 1902. It was on 22 May, 1903, that twenty-two-year-old Wodehouse made his debut. Batting at No.4, ‘J.G. Wodehouse’ made 33 before being run out – at twenty-two he must have been fit enough to take quick runs, especially against the mainly middle-aged opposition, so you can only speculate that he may have been let down by his more elderly partner, either Kinross at five, or Conan Doyle himself, who made 28 at No.6.

  The Authors made a solid 184: the Artists were dismissed for 83, with J.C. Snaith taking six wickets, including that of Chevallier Tayler for a duck.

  On 20 May, 1904, Wodehouse was relegated (if the Cricket report can be believed) to last man in a 12-a-side match, scoring 44, while his No.11, P. Graves (brother of Robert Graves, the poet), made 55 not out, to give the Authors a total of 221. The Artists were dismissed for 159: Conan Doyle took five wickets, and Hesketh-Prichard six. There was an intriguing, distant echo of that match and the Wodehouse part in it when on 26 September, 1960, he wrote to Graves in response to a letter, commenting how nice it was to hear from him ‘after all these years. I remember so well the time – gosh, it must be nearly fifty-five years! – when we shared rooms … I remember that stand in the Artists match. Great days!’

  Kinross in 1923 was the only survivor of the pre-war Authors to play a further match when a few enthusiasts at the Authors’ Club challenged the Actors – ‘who seemed to have gathered new strength’, as he records. ‘Young Alec Waugh did his best, but we hadn’t a chance’.

  It was Waugh who in the Wodehouse compilation, A Centenary Celebration, published in 1981, records: ‘I first encountered Plum Wodehouse in August
, 1910, [it was actually the 1911 match] at Lord’s, where he was playing cricket for the Authors against the Publishers. I remember the match well. Conan Doyle captained the Authors, S.S. Pawling the Publishers. Pawling, universally called “The Skipper”, was one of the bulwarks of the Hampstead CC, which was known as the nursery of Middlesex cricket: he had played a few times for Middlesex’ (three matches in 1894).

  Waugh recalled ‘a closely contested draw’ (the Authors lost 8/218, chasing 240). ‘My score card, which I kept for many years, is now in the Haverford College Library. Hugh de Selincourt was playing, as was Gunby Hadath whose name was as well known to readers of The Captain as Plum’s.

  ‘I can remember nearly everything about the match except Plum’s own innings. He went in first wicket down [second wicket, says the MCC match list] and made sixty runs. I can only assume it was a sound, straight affair.’

  Those Wodehouse Lord’s appearances were among his last direct cricketing involvements of any sort: there followed a steady physical distancing from the game over a long period, embracing war, vast social change, marriage, and his discovery of America, which led him virtually to settle there from 1911, with only the periodic return visit to Britain.

  3 The Cricket Writings

  P.G. Wodehouse, freelance writer of the new Edwardian era, drew on his public school experience to write public school stories very early in his career – and also drew on his cricketing experience to weave cricket into those stories, and write other studies, mostly humorous, on the game.

  His first (unsigned) article on cricket published by Punch in 1902 was tantalisingly titled, ‘Under M.V.C. Rules’. This, as his official biographer Frances Donaldson commented, ‘combines the style of Punch in the early years with the style we are now able to recognise as that of Wodehouse, to a remarkable degree. It is a comment on a newspaper article about a new game called vigoro, which is said to have characteristics of both cricket and tennis, to be played with a soft rubber ball, and to be playable all the year round by both sexes’. The title is at first sight a mystery – until you realise that for Marylebone Cricket Club, the author wishes you to read ‘Marylebone Vigoro Club’. (See ‘Under MVC Rules’, here).

  The first Wodehouse book, The Pot-hunters, also published in 1902, records life at St. Austin’s, but has no cricket content: it is not till we progress a year to A Prefect’s Uncle that the game appears. A focus is Beckford v. MCC – with a pleasant essay about life in the classroom on the day of a school match, boys trying all sorts of dodges in the effort to monitor the progress of play from indoors. There is a leisurely and extremely readable account of the match, with Wodehouse taking us inside the mind of the cricketer – and it is much as it would be today.

  The other school stories – Tales of St Austin’s (1903); The Gold Bat (1904); The Head of Kay’s (1905); and The White Feather (1907) – contain little cricket. Tales of St Austin’s does offer in ‘The Odd Trick’, a fascinating insight into the realism of the young Wodehouse about the morality of cricket – both the public principles of the game, and the ruthless manner in which it can be exploited by the unscrupulous or mischievous. It tells how irreverent Philip St H. Harrison, punished for ‘ragging’ by prefect Tony Graham, takes his revenge when dragooned into umpiring a house match. Twice he gives a batsman ‘Not Out’ to Graham’s bowling: once he calls a ‘no-ball’ to invalidate a legitimate delivery about to break the wicket.

  The droll tale, ‘How Pillingshot Scored’, tells of an imaginative junior who escapes inevitable humiliation and dire punishment in a feared Saturday examination, by the simple expedient of volunteering to score for the XI at an away match on that day, his form-master admitting he had been personally scored off by this trick.

  The St Austin’s collection includes ‘The Tom Brown Question’, which first appeared in The Public School Magazine of December, 1901 – only months after the young Wodehouse left Dulwich. This is another sample of Wodehouse’s realistic approach to school life, involving a sly assault on the ‘wholesome’ public school stories of the day which earnest adults sought to foist on their juniors, as a character analyses Tom Brown’s Schooldays. He cites the instance where Tom’s school (Rugby) plays MCC. Tom wins the toss on a plumb wicket – and puts the visitors in first. ‘Now, my dear sir. I ask you, would a school captain do that? I am young, says one of Gilbert’s characters, the Grand Duke, I think, but, he adds, I am not so young as that. Tom may have been young, but would he, could he have been young enough to put his opponents in on a true wicket when he had won the toss?’

  Wodehouse briefly turned ghost in 1907, when he wrote for his old Dulwich teammate N.A. Knox an article, ‘On Fast Bowling’, published in the Daily Mail. This was Knox’s finest season, when he played twice for England against South Africa, making him a good by-line for Britain’s first truly popular newspaper. Sporting heroes were greatly to its taste; the Knox article appeared on 17 May, sandwiched between ‘England through Japanese eyes’ (an account of how he found life in Britain by Mr K. Jugimura, a special correspondent of the Tokyo daily Asahi); and a study: ‘Colonial Conference reports – Mr Winston Churchill and the Daily Mail’.

  The partnership makes for very much a period piece, but begins in undoubted Wodehouse style: ‘Pace is to a great extent a gift, like red hair, or collecting postage stamps’. It ends with a boost for an unnamed but identifiable brand of dry ginger ale, at which manufacturer Cantrell & Cochrane was so pleased that it had the article reprinted in a four-page pamphlet.

  In 1909 Wodehouse produced one of his most intriguingly different books – a broad satire called The Swoop, Or How Clarence Saved England. This was a caricature of a genre increasingly popular as Edwardian Britain became concerned about potential invasion. It tells of Clarence Clugwater, a Boy Scout of ingenuity, determination, and impeccable loyalty, who rallies a shaken Britain when that unaware nation is invaded by Germany, Russia, Switzerland (‘the Swiss Navy bombarded Lyme Regis’), and five more countries.

  “Paper, General?”

  Clarence’s self-centred family, to his patriotic despair, is quite unaware of the threat posed to England by avaricious outsiders. His oldest brother Reggie, reading his paper, comments that Fry is on his way to his eighth successive century, and wonders if he goes on like this, might Lancashire win the championship? ‘I thought he was playing for Somerset’, comments younger brother Horace. ‘That was a fortnight ago – you ought to keep up to date on an important subject like cricket’, says Reggie.

  In 1909, we have Wodehouse forecasting an era in which cricketers would coolly shrug off loyalties and change counties – something increasingly happening today, if not quite yet at the mid-season speed he envisaged. Clarence ultimately restores Britain to the control of her own people, in the process making Kennington Oval safe for Fry, and whoever else may have been lately acquired by Surrey.

  The Captain ran a series of Wodehouse cricket stories and articles, beginning in 1902: by 1909 the style and name were well enough established to justify four contributions to a Newnes anthology, Twenty-five Cricket Stories. ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ is a Wodehouse theme used later – that of two contestants for a maiden’s hand, agreeing that the one who makes more runs in a village match shall be allowed a clear sight of the quarry, only to find afterwards that she is already engaged (in this case to the curate who captains their side). ‘The Wire-Pullers’ is rare as a Wodehouse story told in the first person by a girl – a seventeen-year-old whose father reluctantly promises to let her holiday in London if he scores 50 in the next village match – and the young lady finagles that happy outcome. The supposed author is Miss Joan Romney, who appears again in three similar stories, using her feminine wiles to sway the results of games, ranging from a village match played to decide whether a right-of-way shall remain open, to Gentlemen v. Players at Lord’s. (English cricket today might yearn for such an effective seductress.)

  ‘The Lost Bowlers’ tells of a modest touring team discovering that a crack eleven of
first class cricketers has been assembled to meet them in the final match of their Devon tour. They hijack the players (and win) by the simple expedient of luring them into a brand-new, fascinating motor car – remember this was 1909 – and driving them off into the distance on the pretext that no-one knows how to turn or stop the monster.

  Another outlet for early Wodehouse was the monthly magazines which entertained the middle and better-educated lower classes. Pearson’s of August 1906 ran ‘The Pro’, a curious Wodehouse story leaving you to work out the validity of the plot. The basis is that an Oxford star drops out of the amateur game to play under an assumed name as a Middlesex professional.

  Hired by a financier to reinforce his country house eleven in a significant match, Gray the pro. tells his temporary employer he will ensure they win only if allowed to marry the man’s daughter. The father consents, and all is well – except that the cricket buff can only be alarmed at the account of how the couple had become betrothed ‘during the luncheon interval of the third day of the ‘Varsity match in the little balcony at the top of Lord’s pavilion. His reason for selecting this spot was that he knew it would be empty at that time’. It may well have pleased Wodehouse to cock a snook at Lord’s authorities, who still allow no women in the pavilion except for the Queen.

  But much more factual is an intriguing indication that intrusive tabloid journalism poking its nose into the private lives of cricketers is not only a creation of vulgar today. When Desmond Fendall folded his lady in his arms, this was noticed by an acute newspaperman. He ‘wired an account of the incident to his journal, which came out that evening with the following headlines:

  The Lady at Lord’s

  Tender Interlude at ’Varsity Match

  Did she Accept Him?