This article, penned by Tom Sharpe, was published in Pick of Punch(1986).
Tom Sharpe, Britain’s most popular comic novelist, thinks maybe he has discovered an amazing truth behind the works of The Master, P. G. Wodehouse. Or maybe he hasn’t. At least he’s discovered the Colonel (right). Now read on.
ONE OF THE GREATEST pleasures I know is to meet an astonishing person. Such an experience came my way last year when I met Colonel Norman Murphy, the author of In Search of Blandings, at Hunstanton Hall in Norfolk. We had arranged to “rendez-vous” there (my phrase, almost certainly, because in my Marine days Colonels always rendez-voused) to look for the Octagon which plays such an important part in “Jeeves and The Impending Doom”, he was to find it and I was to photograph it. Of course at the time I didn’t really believe him; I knew Wodehouse had lived at the Hall on and off during the late Twenties and early Thirties but I’d always toed the accepted line that P.G.W. was the creator of an idyllic world, not its meticulous recorder.
Colonel Murphy KNEW the Octagon was at Hunstanton and obviously regarded me as a heretic.
“We’ll find it over there,” he said with daunting authority as I tried to lead him in the direction of the moat, “over there” being in the opposite direction. I have an idea he even told me how far it was from the house.
Sure enough, behind a gate, across a bridge over a muddy pond and surrounded by shoulder high stinging nettles, was the Octagon just as Plum, through Bertram Wooster, had described it. It wasn’t what I had expected. In my mind’s eye it should have been on an island in the middle of a large ornamental lake instead of on a small island in a pond but there was no doubting its existence.
I came away from it with sneaking suspicion (why do suspicions always “sneak”? They should be more forthright) that I was in the presence of some ghastly guru who walked — loped would be better — at 25 miles an hour, never stopped talking and who KNEW with a fearful infallibility everything there was to be known about dear Plum and was about to destroy his idyllic world in a welter of disappointing facts. It was almost as though I had agreed to meet some galloping serpent in the Garden of Eden and was being given a very exact lecture on the constituents of apples and what Eve was wearing.
For another hour we shot into courtyards, and out of them, invaded what looked like private gardens while the Colonel questioned anyone foolish enough to ask what we were doing. In the end, on the far side of the moat, we came across some broken down outhouses. Among them was an abandoned chicken run which backed onto a brick shed with a square iron door about two feet high.
In an attempt to introduce some levity into the proceedings, I remarked that we were now standing in the presence of The Empress Of Blandings’ famous pigsty. It was a flippant remark — at least I thought so at the time; no prizewinning pig could possibly have squeezed through that small iron doorway. But the Colonel seized on it with all the enthusiasm of a fanatic. I can’t remember what he said but I do remember wandering away with Mrs Murphy and muttering something disparaging about weaners. Behind us the Colonel was scrambling in and out of more stinging nettles and, having proved the obvious, that only the infant Empress could have lived in the stye, had turned his attention to some crumbling brick walls. I won’t go on. You will find how astonishing Colonel Murphy and his methods are in In Search of Blandings to be published by Martin Secker & Warburg later this year.
Instead let me turn to the man Murphy himself. He is of course an eccentric, one of that special breed whom all men of good sense treat, as the Muslims do village idiots, with the highest regard and as such to be protected. Colonel Murphy needs no protection. Armed with a seemingly infallible memory, the capacity to walk most people off their feet and to provide information with an unstoppable quality that makes the Ancient Mariner look like an amateur, he is one of Britain’s great obsessives. For 40 years he has made a study of London and acquired a mass of information that is, I suspect, more encyclopaedic than that of anyone else in the world. Streets are his speciality. From his office in the Ministry of Defence he strode forth during his lunch hours and made the remarkable discovery that every source of information he needed was within a mile. I should add here that a Murphy mile is two and a half times longer than that of any normal biped. In nine minutes he could cover the one and half miles to the British Museum Library; in less he could hit Somerset House and the same time took him to St Catherine’s House where wills are kept. Only Kelly’s Directories defeated him, being out at Hampton Wick. He went there at weekends.
So year after year and lunchtime after lunchtime the strange, thin figure of this obsessive ex-schoolmaster-cum-lawyer-cum-IBM employee-now-soldier stalked the streets of London seeking what interesting facts it could devour until one day, one weird and wonderful day in 1972, it entered a bookshop and picked A Pink ‘Un and A Pelican by A. Binstead off the shelves and a new and astonishing P.G.W. expert was turned loose on the world.
Presumably the idyllic world of Blandings and Brinkley Court had entered our desk Colonel’s imagination as a schoolboy, but now it seized him.
The streets of London he knew so well were peopled with the ghosts of Galahad, Lord Uffenham, Uncle Fred, Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Aunt Dahlia and a host of others. Fiction had turned to fact. At least in Colonel Murphy’s mind.
From that sublime revelation his forced marches to Somerset House and the British Library took on a new meaning. Where before he had concentrated his attention on the hidden life of old London, he now delved into birth certificates and wills and Kelly’s Street Directories. There he unearthed facts about Wodehouse aunts and uncles and numerous relatives and at the same time applied his infallible memory to characters and places in Plum’s novels and linked real people and real places to their fictitious counterparts.
He visited every house Wodehouse had lived in, and during his weekends and holidays followed clues to Kent, Sussex, Shropshire and anywhere else in the country that might have provided The Master with inspiration.
I have no idea how many quiet householders have suddenly learnt they were living in part of the idyll and this by a man in a bowler hat and carrying an umbrella. So for nine years this astonishing man unearthed the material, the prima materia, from which P.G.W. distilled his magical stories. When he had finished, and the book was written he sent it to five publishers and wrote to a further ten. In each case it was rejected. The Colonel was not to be defeated.
Rightly determined to prove their judgment wrong, he had the book printed and published himself and sold it so successfully that it has become a collector’s item and the publishing world has woken up to the fact that it once rejected the most important work on Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse since Richard Usborne’s Wodehouse At Work To The End. Certainly the two biographies add little to our knowledge. In Search Of Blandings tells us much more and, while scholars may dispute his findings, I am convinced.
But then I was there when this astonishing man saw the first glimmer of light that led him to reveal the splendid origins of the Empress of Blandings.
