Ninety years ago this weekend the battle of the Somme had settled into its ghastly inexorability. The excruciating debacle of its opening offensive on 1 July — 19,240 killed, 35,493 wounded, 2,152 missing, the British army’s highest casualty rate in a single day’s fighting — was already logged as a grievous scar on future generations as well as history. The guns continued until muffled by the snows of November when the scoreboard of losses read: Germany 650,000, Britain 418,000, France 194,000. Back home in Blighty, shining idealism long replaced by a bitter and cynical despair meant that only a pursuit of mundane ‘normality’ kept spirits up and home fires burning. That midsummer of 1916 saw published in London a new story by a prolific 35-year-old comic writer P.G. Wodehouse, titled The Man with Two Left Feet. It featured not only popular silly ass Bertie Wooster but, for the first time, a sage and tranquilly mollifying manservant, a treasure of a gentleman’s gent whose character at once so tickled readers that within a year the unflappable fellow had assumed top billing when Wodehouse called his sequel simply My Man Jeeves. There was more to Jeeves than the invention by an inspired and clever writer of an inspired and clever name.
In that last languid peacetime summer of 1914, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse had spent a holiday with his parents at Cheltenham. On 14 August he had lolled in a deckchair at the College ground watching Gloucestershire beat Warwickshire by 267 runs. Between overs, I daresay, the yarn-spinner was dreaming up fictional names; he was nifty at those, his cast-list already peopled by said Bertie and such as Conky Biddle, Bingo Little, Clarence Chugwater, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood and, of course, good ol’ imperishable Psmith.
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