"P.G.W." in the Malvernian

The Malvernian is the school magazine of Malvern College in Malvern, Worcestershire, England (not to be confused with Malvern House, which P. G. Wodehouse attended between 1891 and 1893). A complete run of digitized copies is available at the College's website here.

The April 1901 issue contains a humorous article on country cricket, signed "P.G.W." Here it is in its entirety:

COUNTRY CRICKET.

"A chiel's amang ye takin' notes."

At last the task is completed! After a searching analysis we have divided country cricket into its component parts; reduced it, in fact, to the level of a formula. It has taken us many a summer holiday, but the deed is done, and we are at length able, with a heart swelling with proper pride, to offer the following facts for family consumption, with the assurance that they are not only scientifically correct, but wholly free from alkaloid and all other such deleterious ingredients.

To proceed, then. The first essential item in the village team is The Wag, the second, "Charles, his friend." The Wag is in nine cases out of ten the local Doctor—why, we cannot say, unless it be that a constant attendance at beds of sickness promotes a cheerful frame of mind.

In the event of the Doctor scratching for this post, the Curate is generally enrolled: though he is not quite so efficient as the disciple of Æsculapius, in that his jokes are apt to be less broad. Moreover, he will probably have certain scruples as to the exchanging of airy badinage with chance passers-by, the which should be the Wag's chief source of waggishness.

We now come to "Charles, his friend." He is an indispensable item. It must not be thought that, because his conversational powers are limited to a raucous laugh, he is therefore no help to the conversation. Far from it. A raucous laugh is a very present help in time of trouble, and what the Wag would do without Charles, we shudder to think.

Next the Captain. This onerous position generally falls to the lot of the Curate, the poor man being, in cases of emergency, obliged to sustain the posts of Captain and Wag simultaneously. The Captain may be distinguished by the profanum vulgus by the fact that he goes on to bowl first, and (please read this slowly and thoughtfully: it is an epigram) never comes off whether he comes off or not. Men may come and men may go at the other end with all the variety of a kaleidoscope, but he goes on for ever. It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that he can only bowl with wind and hill in his favour. When it is the turn of his side to bat, he naturally goes in first, "to give his men confidence."

Finally, the Hero. Every village team has its hero. He is generally a man who has failed ignominiously to justify his inclusion in a weak "Colts" Eleven, and is for that reason an object of veneration to all. He goes in first with the Captain, and shares the trundling with him, The rest of the team may be ranked as "villagers and retainers," after the fashion of Stageland.

P.G.W.

Naturally one wonders if "P.G.W." stands for P. G. Wodehouse. More precisely, if it stands for Pelham Grenville Wodehouse the humorist, because even "P. G. Wodehouse" in this case wouldn't narrow it down enough, as we will see below.

As far as I know, there is no positive evidence to answer the question one way or another, in the form of a clear, unambiguous statement by one of the parties involved (writer or editor). On one hand, Wodehouse the writer did keep in his early years a record of "Money Received for Literary Work" which has been examined to exhaustion by scholars. While a few obscure items in it are yet to be tracked down, it certainly doesn't contain an entry that could correspond to this one. But a non-commercial magazine like the Malvernian wouldn't normally offer payment for contributions, most of which are volunteered by current and former school members, and so "Money Received" would not necessarily have anything to say about it. (I believe it does not contain entries for PGW's many contributions to his own school magazine, the Alleynian.) On the other hand, the magazine may or may not have kept a record of authors, but in any case this is not available to me.

Internal evidence is always tricky. It comes down to how "Wodehousian" one feels the article is, in terms of style, quality and subject matter, always taking into account the very early date. This can only be a subjective appreciation. For my part, I wouldn't have any problem believing this piece is authentic on its own merits: cricket in general, and even village cricket, feature prominently in PGW's articles and stories in the 1900s. A few references and turns of phrase can be linked to specific passages in contemporary works, such as "Charles, his friend," whose "conversational powers are limited to a raucous laugh:" compare "The other youth was apparently of the 'Charles-his-friend' variety, content to look on and applaud, and generally play chorus to his companion's 'lead.'" (The Manoeuvres of Charteris). [Although the "Charles his friend" figure is not Wodehouse's own creation. There may be a future blog topic on this one.] Arthur R. has pointed out others, like "airy badinage" (found in Love Among the Chickens), "a very present help in time of trouble" (used in "The Comeback of Battling Billson") or "villagers and retainers" (in The Head of Kay's). None of these are exclusive to Wodehouse, but they add up. The last one is especially strong, because in the novel the phrase seems to be associated with the last type described in the article: "I'm going to play 'villagers and retainers' to your 'hero'" (although in context the speaker isn't really thinking in terms of cricket.)

The mention of "a weak 'Colts' Eleven" is also interesting, because to the best of my knowledge Wodehouse only ever used "Colts" in this sense ("A young or inexperienced person, a 'green hand'; now in Sport (orig. Cricket), a young or inexperienced player; a member of a junior team; also in pl., the team itself" according to the OED) in his articles about Malvern College that I will comment on later. Finally, the use of classical references (Æsculapius, profanum vulgus) and "Stageland" (theatrical) language are also Wodehousean traits.

However, it is easy to lose perspective and overlook how much Wodehouse's early style owes to the milieu of the school magazines in which it developed, especially if one's main source of familiarity with that milieu is Wodehouse himself. In other words, there is a risk of viewing specific tropes and expressions as characteristic of the author, when they really are the common stock of school magazine writers. In the course of my research on this piece I came across a number of unsigned articles in the Malvernian for which a case for Wodehouse's authorship could be made based on internal evidence alone. I hope to be able to expand on those in a future post.

The circumstantial evidence is where things get interesting. The main difficulty, of course, of supposing that Wodehouse could have been the author of this piece is that in principle there is little reason why he should be writing for the magazine of a school of which he wasn't a pupil. He contributed regularly to the Alleynian, published by his alma mater Dulwich, until as late as 1939, but to no other school magazine that I know of (not counting, of course, the Public School Magazine, which was a regular commercial publication).

But Wodehouse did have a connection of sorts with Malvern College at that particular time. In 1900 he wrote two articles for the PSM about the College: "Cricket at Malvern" (September) and the longer "Malvern College" (November), both available at Madame Eulalie. They are introductions to Malvern's history, customs, architecture, and above all sports. They show that he spent time at the College collecting material, exploring the grounds and interviewing the natives. [There is a much earlier connection as well. He once wrote to the author of A History of Malvern College 1865-1965: "When I was a small boy, I used to spend part of the summer holidays with an uncle who was Vicar of Upton-on-Severn, and I played a lot of boys' cricket, some of it on the Malvern ground. From those early days, the place fascinated me" (Wodehouse at the Wicket, pp. 199-200).] 

One may speculate (but only speculate) that during his visit to the College he made the acquaintance of the Malvernian editor and was eventually invited to contribute a short piece to the magazine. That he knew the editor is at least certain. The October 1900 issue contains this brief note concerning the second of Wodehouse's articles:

An article is appearing in the November number of the Public School Magazine, entitled "Malvern College." It is profusely illustrated, principally by amateur photographs taken by Malvernians, and boasts as frontispiece a signed photograph of the Headmaster. This article derives peculiar interest from the fact that it is written not by a professional journalist, nor by anyone connected with the school, but by the ex-Editor of the Alleynian. His criticism upon the Malvernian is interesting, and both is, and is likely to be, thoroughly justified by the facts of the case. The Malvernian, says he, "is fairly good, as school magazines go!" The school magazine consists of a conglomeration of facts concerning the School which, with perhaps unconscious irony, the editor is wont to describe as "news." He is also permitted to insert now and then an article of "literary merit," such as, for instance, a dissertation on the "Leonids," or a description of how fish are caught in Norway. As the School Library possesses a copy of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," it would be superfluous and presumptuous to try to improve upon it; and waste of time to write what is never read. If the standard of interest is to be raised, the canons should be more liberal than they are.

This was written before the second PSM article appeared, and the phrase on the Malvernian did not make it into the published version, which devotes its last paragraph to the magazine and its current editor. The conclusion is that the editor must have seen it in an earlier draft, and his response to it may have caused Wodehouse to delete or rephrase it. In the November issue we find the editor handsomely acknowledging the change:

The Public School Magazine has at length appeared, in which is published the article on Malvern College. While not pretending to be absolutely exhaustive, the letterpress gives much interesting information in a pleasant manner, and is only equalled by the excellence of the illustrations. But nowhere do we perceive the criticism on the Malvernian, so confidently predicted in October. We must offer apologies to the Editor of the P. S. M. We had excellent reason for believing that this remark would appear, and it speaks volumes for Mr. Wodebouse's charity that he did not allow it to go to press.

The next step is to find another candidate, someone whose initials matched "P.G.W." and was likely to contribute to the magazine at the time. I browsed all the issues for several years preceding and following 1901 without finding anyone even partially suitable. Another wonderful resource available at the Malvern website is the collection of College Registers with complete information about everyone who attended the school, with dates, family, background and accomplishments. Again, nobody with these initials was a student at Malvern between 1891 and 1901.

[Curiously enough, the place was full of Wodehouses. Two brothers, William Stanley and Charles Edward, sons of W. H. Wodehouse of Woolmers Park, Hertford, attended Malvern between 1865 and 1872. Then six sons of the second were there between 1897 and 1912, from Sydney Herbert Wodehouse, 1897-1900, to Frederick Guy de Picquigny Wodehouse, 1908-1911. There was even a P. G. (Percy George) Wodehouse, but he could hardly be the candidate I was looking for, since he was born in 1888 and only entered the College in 1903. This overpopulation of Wodehouses makes the task of searching for ours through the issues of the Malvernian difficult, since they keep popping up in cricket and other reports.

At the end of his second article, our PGW thanks "Mr. Bullock, for the very kind way in which they assisted me in preparing this article." This must be E. C. Bullock, a housemaster at Malvern who may have acted as cicerone during Wodehouse's visit. Bullock's House had opened in 1898, and in 1900 was home to the second of the six Wodehouse brothers I mentioned before. All later representatives of the family went to Bullock's too. It may be guessed that Mr. Bullock noticed the coincidence and asked our PGW if they were any relations.]

The author could also be an Old Malvernian, although contributions by these usually have "O.M." added to their signatures. But there is a bit of evidence to the contrary in the epigraph "A chiel's amang ye takin' notes," which is a well-known line from the poem "On The Late Captain Grose's Peregrinations Thro' Scotland" by the poet Burns:

Hear, Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots,
Frae Maidenkirk to Johny Groats;—
If there's a hole in a' your coats,
I rede you tent it:
A chiel's amang ye takin' notes,
And, faith, he'll prent it.

["Listen up, Scotland, and brother Scots, / From Maidenkirk to John o' Groats; / If there's a hole in any of your coats, / I advise you to fix it: / A guy is among you taking notes, / And, in faith, he'll print it."]

Burns wrote this poem for the English antiquarian Francis Grose (1731-1791), whom he met in 1789 when Grose was touring the country collecting materials for his Antiquities of Scotland. It was first published in the Edinburgh Evening Courant on August 11, 1789 under the title "Address to the People of Scotland, respecting Francis Grose, Esq." and then collected in the 1793 edition of Burns' Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect with its new title. It is a humorous warning to his countrymen that there is a stranger in their midst taking notes that will be presented to the world at large, so they had better fix or at least hide any flaws they don't want to see publicized. It is often quoted accompanying travel notes and similar works where the author puts down his or her impressions of foreign parts.

The implication for the piece under discussion is that the writer is not local (a current student, a staff member, or an O.M.) but a "foreigner," and outsider visiting the school with the express purpose of writing about it. This however does not apply to the subject matter of the piece (country cricket, not Malvern-related), but fits admirably Wodehouse's commision by the PSM of writing his two articles, his own Antiquities of Malvern.

———

This is all the evidence, either positive (mostly negative), internal or circumstantial I've been able to collect concerning the possibility that the article was written by P. G. Wodehouse. I don't believe it is conclusive but, putting it all in the balance, I'm inclined to think the article is genuine. Still, I would like to see further evidence. Meanwhile, there are a few unsigned articles in the Malvernian from 1900 which deserve attention, but which I have to leave for the subject of another post.