The zany happenings in PG Wodehouse’s literary world have kept readers in splits right from the early 1900s, and given no end of pleasure to young and old alike.
For close to a century, the very name ‘evokes a mirthful realm of hapless dukes’, ‘well-born wastrels’, ‘fearsome maiden aunts’ and sisters, ‘one very tolerant, quietly competent valet’, and an absentminded peer (his prize pig) and merry events in an ancient castle.
Where, the perceptive reader might well ask, is that castle? In the Imperial Blandings stories, it takes a fast train from Paddington about three hours and forty minutes to reach Market Blandings. On a recent October morning, we motored from Chelsea, London and pulled up at Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe, Gloucestershire in less than two hours.
A tourist map indicated that this old, stony building could well be the model for Lord Emsworth’s Blandings Castle.
When we reached the place, the morning sunshine was gradually descending ‘like an amber shower-bath on the ancient castle, lighting up with a heartening glow its liveried walls, its rolling parks, its gardens, outhouses… green lawns, and wide terraces, noble trees and bright flower-beds’.
‘The refined sun which served Blandings Castle and district’ was on turret and battlement, and on fragrant English rose flowers bred by one David Austin, the Shrophsire Lad.
Moving farther afield, we hoped to catch the ninth earl down by the pigsty near the kitchen garden, ‘draped in his usual boneless way over the rail of the bijou residence’ of the Empress of Blandings. Readers will recall that the amiable Berkshire sow was twice in successive years, a popular winner in the ‘Fat Pigs class’ at the Shrewsbury Agricultural Show.
The summer day was not quite complete. The ‘vague and woolen-headed peer’ and the deep regular breathing of the Empress were both conspicuous by their absence. It did not take long for my ‘astute mind’ to hit upon a possible explanation— viz that the man and animal might be elsewhere.
Perhaps I’d catch the Earl lying in bed with Whiffle’s book on the treatment of pigs in sickness and in health, and somewhere else in the Castle, an artist painting the Empress’ portrait.
We were at Sudeley Castle where Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar got ‘hitched up’. I was hoping for a ‘tête-à-tête with the rambling old backwoodsman’ and perhaps be invited by Lady Constance for a spot of muffins and tea.
It wasn’t my day. There was no one in sight. Rather than looking like Rodin’s Le Penseur, I sneaked into the premises, joining the trail of visitors to the Sudeley gardens. I gathered that eminent landscape designers had toiled long and hard for the design and layout of the place.
Each of the ten smaller gardens has a distinct character that blended seamlessly with the others. Topiary features such as the brilliant dumper truck, are evident everywhere. There are old-fashioned roses and herbs furnished on two sides by magnificent yew hedges.
On moving further in the fourteen acres of gardens, I noticed that the castle had rare and traditional varieties of vegetable and flowers. Explaining this, a gardener said, “They are managed on organic principles.”
The big question...
This castle was once the home of Katherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII. But was it the castle immortalised in the novels of PG Wodehouse?
It’s not an easy question. According to Joanna Trollope, Wodehouse when visiting Cheltenham liked to walk across Cleeve Common and look down at the castle in the vale below.
Cheltenham first gained popularity in the late 18th century as a spa for high society. The Pitville Pump Room there was used for the town’s renowned music and literature festival. Then there was the national hunt season. Our drive had taken us to the racecourse, Stanway, Stanton, Broadway, Chipping Campden, Upper and Lower Slaughter.
The romantic road, through the picturesque Cotswold countryside, transported us to what seemed to be English literature’s most famous location— the domain of Lord Clarence Emsworth and the Empress of Blandings. Then, to spoil the fun two British researchers confused us with ‘facts’. Sudeley Castle is not Blandings Castle, they write with authority, and what’s more, the latter is fictional.
The duo, Ian Greatbatch and Daryl Lloyd of University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis— using hi-tech software and a kind of computer-based mapping analysis tool— Geographic Information Systems, and with their extensive study of Wodehouse novels, assert that Blanding Castle is located a few miles from Shrewsbury, in Hifnal, Telford, Shropshire.
Then again, there are other Wodehouse scholars whose specialty has been to snoop around and pinpoint originals of Wodehouse’s characters and locations and link fact and fiction. One such expert, Richard Usborne, has his theories about the whereabouts of the castle. Recently another expert, Robert McCrum in his exhaustive biography Wodehouse— A Life, throws new light on the matter and on the comic genius of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.
Making connections
For the present, we know that the BBC television adaptation of the book Heavy Weather, the fourth in the Blandings series, was filmed at Sudeley Castle. Incidentally, Sudeley’s promotional material hints at a strong Wodehouse connection, noting, for example, that the double yew hedges in the Queen’s Garden were the inspiration for the gardens of Blandings.
With so much credible information from opposing sides, it seems that the model for Blandings Castle will be a mystery. It will however not stop scholars from their search. They will continue their struggle as though wading through a bog, making ‘gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sounds like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant.’
To his die-hard fan, Sir Pelham has achieved ‘pure joy’— by sitting down, ‘scratching his head’, ‘cursing a bit’ and ‘banging out a sentence’ to form a ‘simple connection of words’ around a zany set of characters— the 9th Earl, Lady Constance, redoubtable Gally, Ronnie Fish and the chorus girl Sue Brown, intrepid sleuth P Frobisher Pilbeam, Tipton Plimsoll who keeps seeing the face of a kindly gorilla after a few drinks, dukes who bung eggs at singers for making a mess of ‘Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond’, hyper young men who throw bread rolls in snooty dining halls yet blush and stammer in the presence of the opposite sex, and wannabe authors resembling in appearance ‘the more degraded types of fish’.
And that world will continue to enthrall and entertain readers in a way few settings do in literature.
