Sunset at Blandings (27 page)

[42]
Wodehouse’s irreverent fondness for the law—policemen,
magistrates, Justices of the Peace and occasional young barristers — is a
constant and varied joy. He gives his J.P.s extraordinary powers of arrest,
sentence and imprisonment, and they are not slow to use, or threaten to use,
them. Doubtless Murchison of Scotland Yard, although strictly there as the
Chancellor of the Exchequer’s personal watchman, can pinch a man he finds climbing
at night into a window of a house where his ward is staying. Possibly Claude
Duff’s solicitor is right: he, Claude, can shoot someone climbing into his
window. Possibly, as early as
Something Fresh,
Lord Emsworth was
exercising the normal right of a castle-owner and J.P. when, having heard
things and people going bump in the night in his hall, he descended the stairs
spraying bullets from his six-shooter. Bertie Wooster’s tangles with Sir Watkyn
Bassett, as magistrate, ex-magistrate and county J.P., can get him anything up
to thirty days in the jug without, apparently, a court, a bench, a jury or any
suggestion that Bertie can get a solicitor to defend him. In
The Girl in
Blue
a J.P., Crispin Willoughby, is in danger of arrest and imprisonment
for pushing the local policeman into the brook in which he daily dabbles his
feet after his hours of duty. In
Pigs Have Wings
Sir Gregory Parsloe,
J.P., of Matchingham Hall, threatens imprisonment for pig-stealing (the Queen
of Matchingham) on Lord Emsworth (himself a J.P. and presumably sitting on the
same bench as Sir Gregory), Galahad and butler Beach. A J.P. can be terrible
when roused by the suspicion that his pig or cow-creamer is being stolen.
Wodehouse’s books are liberally endowed with policemen, magistrates and J.Ps.
For these, and for his clergymen, we are especially grateful.

[43]
As this book goes to press, nobody has been able to identify
this song with certainty. Guy Bolton said he remembered it, but not its title,
writer, singer or show. The Bank of England informs us that Mr. H. G. Bowen was
their Chief Cashier from 1893 to 1902, and would thus have had his signature on
all their bank-notes during that period. None of the Guards regiments could
find any record of it in archives. The Adjutant of the First or Grenadier
Regiment of Foot Guards surmised that the writer was not a Guardsman, since the
Guards wear bearskins, not busbies. A letter to the
Daily Telegraph
produced
fifteen replies (mostly guessing W. S. Gilbert or P. G. Wodehouse himself as
the writer), but no answer. The Research Department of the Music Library of the
British Library, the Performing Rights people and the B.B.C.’s Music Library
were all put to work searching, but they were defeated. George Wood, O.B.E. (‘Wee
Georgie Wood’ of music hall fame), with the help of Marion Ross as a
researcher, claimed that the song had been written by George Simms (author of ‘It
was Christmas Night at the Workhouse’) and Jay Hickory Wood (biographer of Dan
Leno Sr. and writer of many ‘books’ for pantomimes) for Dan Leno as an
interpolated number for the pantomime
Dick Whittington
at Drury Lane in
1898/9. But, according to the records, the pantomime at Drury Lane that winter
was
The Forty Thieves.

[44]
See
Leave it to Psmith.

[45]
The last entry in the train time-table between Market
Blandings and Paddington. See page 197.

[46]
These are grid references to the end-paper map.

[47]
Blandings has achieved its own fictional immortality. It has
also, in  a small but delightful way, made a factual footnote in the scholarship
of rare books. In
Something Fresh,
you may remember, Lord Emsworth’s
Museum occupied a room off the great hall:

‘The place was
simply an amateur junk-shop. Side by side with a Gutenberg Bible for which
rival collectors would have bidden without a limit, you would come upon a
bullet from the field of Waterloo, one of a consignment of ten thousand shipped
there for the use of tourists by a Birmingham firm…’

The Museum hasn’t lasted, but its
Gutenberg Bible has had a curious after-life. In his ‘Occasional Publication’
monograph,
One Hundred Books in College Library
(1970), Sir Robert
Birley, quondam Head Master of Eton, writes of the near-perfect copy of the
Gutenberg Bible presented to Eton by John Fuller, the last Member of Parliament
to be imprisoned by the House of Commons for defying the Speaker. (Fuller died
in m 831.) There are only forty-eight known copies of this, the first printed
book, in the world, though there have been rumours of a recent find in a church
in Germany. Forty-eight was the number at the time when Sir Robert wrote his
monograph. Sir Robert added to his note on the Eton copy ‘To the recorded
copies of the Gutenberg Bible should be added one in the library of Blandings
Castle in Shropshire.’ Within weeks of the publication of
One Hundred Books
in College Library,
the Eton Librarian received a letter from the keeper of
the rare books section of the Library of Congress in Washington asking for full
particulars of this copy of the Gutenberg and the whereabouts of Blandings
Castle. The Librarian told Sir Robert about this enquiry and Sir Robert was
happy to be able to pass on the good news to Wodehouse.