A few years after the Second World War, Miss Jane Marple went to stay at Bertram’s Hotel in London. Settling into a leather armchair, she enjoyed a perfect afternoon tea. The crumpets were crisp and brown without, soft and chewy within, as crumpets so rarely manage to be. The scones foamed in the mouth, while avoiding any bitter aftertaste of soda. Bishops and country squires, up in town on business, exchanged murmured comment among the quiet rustle of newspapers. The chief waiter knew everyone, and how they liked their tea. Cocooned from cataclysmic events, nothing had changed here. Surely anything real would change? There was something exaggerated, ossified. Miss Marple smelt a rat.
In Agatha Christie’s novel At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), what had been a comfortable staging post for the shabby genteel before the War is transformed after the War into a stage act. Most of its aging, fixed-income clientele are unaware that there are other rooms and other people, backstage, who are using the hotel as a cover. Behind the scenes, in the areas where the guests don’t go, the struggle for money rattles on, intense, unbounded, unexamined….
Our desire for everything to stay the same, or to get back to how it was, is of course still used and abused by politicians and money makers. As I write, the latest Radio Times has an insert advertising ‘museum gifts’ for ‘country house living’. The slogan ‘Make Britain Great Again’ has ushered in massive disruption in the supply of goods and labour and made it harder to get our real needs met (as opposed to daydreams of ‘greatness’). The richest fifth of Brits earn about five times the poorest fifth, the Equality Trust calculates, and the difference in the ability to own a house is even more extreme than that, with half the working population now renting, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out in its trends report of November 2022. We take comfort in ITV’s Downton Abbey, set in the 1910s and 1920s, which seems to suggest that people who have polarised incomes can yet live as a harmonious whole. Perhaps Queen Elizabeth II herself, born in 1926, was a nostalgic distraction from the real machinations of power between multi nationals and governments far more influential than ours.
Those on the Right are not the only ones who long to escape into the past. Nicholas Lezard told us in the New Statesman that he cast about for comfort-reading after Brexit and hit on PG Wodehouse, most of whose comic characters came of age between the Wars. I too, forced further and further into quietism by Lib Dem defeats, single motherhood and lockdown, found myself after kiddie bed-time in the bubble of my bedroom surrounded by stacks of my grandfather’s red leather-bound PG Wodehouses; or in the car with son in the back and Martin Jarvis’ wonderful vocal modulations of another great Twenties comic writer, Richmal Crompton.
2022 marked the 100th anniversary of Richmal Crompton’s eternal naughty schoolboy, Just William, celebrated by Palgrave Macmillan with a new biography of Crompton by Jane McVeigh, and anniversary editions bristling with the original illustrations of Thomas Henry and a forward by Sue Townsend, creator of the equally funny, but not equally bold, Adrian Mole of the 1980s. David Schutte has also published a collection of less well known Just William stories entitled The House in the Wood.
Meanwhile Penguin has celebrated the 120th anniversary of Wodehouse’s first novel, The Pothunters, with a reprint, and has begun re-publishing a series of his creme de la creme. The first of their choice is Carry on Jeeves (1925), containing some of the earliest Jeeves stories, which curtseyed in a new edition in October, trailing bouquets of praise from writers ranging from Stephen Fry to Caitlin Moran.
Ironically, given her recoiling from the ossification of Bertram’s Hotel, Marple is the heroine of twelve new but nostalgic stories. The old lady has been detecting crimes since 1927. Marple: Twelve New Stories, published by HarperCollins, sends the hound sniffing among a wide variety of scenes, mainly retro, abounding in vicars and maids, although the messages underneath may be more modern. For example, Jean Kwok’s Marple comments: ‘I was guilty of a fault which many of us share. I didn’t notice the staff.’
While the new collection certainly entertains, it is far less modern than Christie. ‘Christie to her first readers wasn’t ‘nostalgic’ or anything to do with ‘heritage”, fulminates Lucy Worsley in her biography published by Hodder & Stoughton in September. Similarly, while the younger writer Evelyn Waugh declared that all Wodehouse’s novels were set in ‘an idyllic world’, Wodehouse himself disagreed: That world ‘was going strong between the Wars,’ he told Gerald Clarke of The Paris Review (1975).
Crompton, Wodehouse and Christie continued to send their 1920s heroes and heroines on adventures for decades after the world of their origin had faded or disappeared. Can we readers, like Miss Marple, scent out the changes nevertheless? Is it possible to tell by listening to a Just William story, or a Jeeves and Wooster story, whether it is pre or post War?
The joke of Jeeves and Wooster is as old as the existence of servants. Orderliness says that the master should be cleverer than his servant. The Saturnalian spirit turns the world upside down: the servant is cleverer than the master. The joke was used in Ancient Greek comedies, for example in Aristophanes’ Frogs, when the slave of Dionysos, god of wine, turns out to be a lord of misrule in his own right. Servants also run the show in Shakespearian comedies such as Twelfth Night and Comedy of Errors.
Jeeves, whose head bulges at the back, uses vocabulary and concepts the master has never heard of – ‘the psychology of the what was it?’ ‘The individual, sir.’ ‘Oh, ah. Well, biff along then and apply the grey matter in spades.’ There is a repressed strain of the servant’s vengeful malice in Jeeves. His solutions make the master suffer. Wooster finds himself forced to steal silver cow creamers or be beaten up in a friendly way by rugby-playing vicars.
After WW2, middle class households, and even upper class households, could no longer afford servants. Wodehouse remained in high demand but, perhaps unwittingly, the emphases shift. There is no longer a shock of surprise or rueful recognition when the servant is clever. The surprise post war, in a socially mobile world, is that Bertie can hang on to so much money while being so stupid. Jeeves and Wooster attract us in their otherness, as an eccentric menage. We post war generations escape into Bertie’s enviable world of manicured lawns, cocktail trays in the library and – oh! – leisure. His days do not run by the ordinary necessities of life.
The exotic language of the dialogue and narration, its juxtaposition of old-fashioned slang and literary and biblical quotations, now produces much of the humour. Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves(1963) opens with a luxurious scene of breakfast in bed: ‘I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish, and I don’t suppose I have ever come much closer to saying “Tra-la-la” as I did the lathering….’
Carry on Jeeves (1925) begins more plainly, in what seems to me to be more ordinary 1920s speak: ‘Now, touching this business of old Jeeves – my man, you know – how do we stand? Lots of people think I’m much too dependent on him.’
The early stories often end with Jeeves receiving a generous tip – ‘How much is on the dresser? Bag it all!’ There is no embarrassment or pride involved in this naked display of financial superiority. In the later tales, other rewards eclipse money. ‘You propose to burn this Alpine hat, Jeeves?’ The suppression of the commodified aspect continues with Stephen Fry’s gentle hints of erotic love in the 1990s TV series Jeeves and Wooster.
Early Just William stories also often end with a tip from father, when 11 year old William has managed to get Dad out of a situation which social obligation and politeness had forced upon the adult. William wears out tedious guests and sends them haring for the station. The patriarch administers carrots and (literal) sticks at whim.
Just William started out as a vehicle for Crompton to highlight the follies and hypocracies of the educated middle class adults she lived among and who read her books. Her crowd, she suggests, are too airy fairy. Muddy, unbookish William brings them down to earth. Her ’20s and ’30s stories pour scorn on egotism and convention: the boredom of desk jobs (compared with being a chimney sweep), of classical music, and societies for self improvement; the empty boasts of big game hunters allegedly back from the empire’s fringes, older women’s hypochondria and desire for attention, and philanthropy that uses other people’s property.
Unlike Bertie Wooster’s menage, William Brown’s family move with the times. After the war, cook and maid depart, to be replaced by home help. William braves successive novelties: TV, the NHS, pop stars, space travel. But somewhere in the time travel the satirical tang diminishes to a half life. In William’s Foggy Morning (1968), some spiritualists plan to set up a commune in the village, but this is a niche activity; whereas when William and his Outlaws are mistaken for spirits in The Haunted House (1925), seances were almost mainstream, welling from a ground of universal bereavement following The Great War. In the later story, Crompton is biting shadows.
Perhaps a sign of the wane of the satirical element in Crompton’s humour is the way her books were taken up as children’s books or, at best, ‘cross-over’ lit after the war. In her biography, McVeigh perceptively evokes Crompton’s suppressed disappointment, reminding us of a late interview in which Crompton dismissed her own work as ‘not literature with a capital L… working on something that isn’t going to be a mastepiece – More tea?’ Crompton interrupts herself as writer to play lady host to the journalist. McVeigh the biographer sets out to answer back to that bitterness, as the journalist should have done, instead of accepting a second cup.
Satire was possible earlier because the readership were a cohesive socio-eocnomic group, reading about themselves. The later readership are a disparate group brought together by a love of William. If the opinion of an eight year old is anything to go by, Crompton continued to tickle to the end. My son Leo’s favourites are her first (1922) and her last (1968). In William goes to the Pictures, William comes home from the cinema fired up and tries to talk like a romantic hero to the little girl next door: ‘Have you missed me while I’ve been away?’ to which his inamorata replies: ‘What are you talking so funny for?’ And the last – Violet Elizabeth runs away. Maybe it’s just something Leo would like to do. And he doesn’t like mince either.
The turning point is the war. The Brown family find that they have to share a bomb shelter with a chatty nouveau riche family who are only too delighted to be rubbing shoulders. After the war, the whole class system melts gently in the sun of opportunitys we hear in Ring for Jeeves (1953):
If you had asked William Egerton Bamfylde Ossingham Belfy, ninth Earl of Rowcester – pronounced Roaster – what the English countryside had to smile about these days, he would have been unable to tell you. Rowceser Abbey’s architecture was thirteenth century, fifteenth century and Tudor, its dilapidation twentieth century post-World War Two.
With social mobility, people don’t know each other any more, which makes mistaken identities ever more credible. In one of my favourite scenes (1963), Wooster turns up to return an amber statue to Plank, another big game hunter. Despite all Wooster’s class trappings, Plank takes him for a thief. Wooster is rescued just in time by Jeeves striding through the French doors, impersonating Inspector Witherspoon of Scotland Yard. Jeeves arrests Wooster.
Anonymity comes in quickly with the war. In Crompton’s wartime stories, William succeeds in impersonating an evacuee with adenoids and escorts a comedian who was supposed to be entertaining the troops to a meeting of well-heeled but ignorant villagers, where the comedian impersonates a speaker from the Brains Trust.
William’s exploits sometimes unwittingly sort out other people’s problems: criminals are apprehended, lovers are united. This tendency increases post war, perhaps reflecting the opportunities and interaction and unpredictablity of post war life. Or a yearning to feel that we are all interconnected, even though we no longer all know each other.
The contrast between neighbourliness as an everyday and neighbourliness as an ideal comes through strongly in this conversation in William the Superman (1968):
“My aunt kept on an’ on about doin’ service to the community,” said Ginger.
“What’s the community?” said William.
“It’s people,” said Ginger earnestly. “It’s anyone. Helpin’ the community means helpin’ people. Anyone. An’ this aunt of mine promised me ten shillings if I did somethin’ to help the community.”
“Oh,” said William. “That’d be jolly useful. We could do a lot with ten shillin’s…”
But would we really want to return to the world before WW2? According to data presented by the Equality Trust, in 1938, the richest ten percent of Brits collected 35% of the nation’s income. Then for four golden decades, wealth equality steadily increased, with a corresponding drop in income share for the richest from 35% to 20%. Since 1977, the gap has widened again, with the richest 10% of Brits climbing back up to 30% of our collective income.
The BBC’ssixth series of Peaky Blindersfinished in June and has shown us the grim side to the so-called ‘roaring twenties’ which steam-rollered into the Depression of the Thirties. Even in the cheery worlds of Compton and Wodehouse, the spectre of poverty stalks: poverty without a safety net. In William the Pirate(1932), William meets a Punch and Judy artist who is wandering the countryside sadly with his little dog. People don’t want Punch and Judy any more. He and his dog perform for William in the middle of the field they happen to be in and William invites them to display their tricks at the posh party being thrown by Mr and Mrs Botts (of Botts Sauce). William gives the two of them literally a new lease of life.
Rich Wooster is sought out by con men who claim to have known him ‘at the old school’ or to be the vicar of some tiny parish in the Welsh borders. Wonderfully for Bertie, his aunt Agatha (‘the one who eats broken bottles’)is taken in by a particularly goody-goody brother and sister duo, who steal her pearls, allowing her nephew to crow over her for a few weeks. They lived in a world to which we seem to be returning, in which wealth is not earned but had. It was extremely difficult to shift serious money out of the hands of the ‘haves’, other than through gambling, marriage or borrowing or, for the lucky few, writing.
Poor old Ukridge, the would-be entrepreneur,hits obstacles at every turn. The moral seems to be, don’t try. Wodehouse fills a whole eponymous book (1924) with his projects: a college to teach dogs circus tricks, an accident syndicate and, for some reason best known to Wodehouse and his circle, most laughable, a chicken farm. It ‘laid an egg’.
Even for the well-to-do, life was constrained. Arguably it’s the restrictions that create the tension, like rules for a game, and so the humour. Clothes matter enormously. Crompton can write a whole story, White Satin (1922), about the hell for children dressed up as bridesmaids and pages. When they ruin their clothes deliberately, there is no option but to leave them at home. Wooster’s timid gestures towards personal expression in attire are squashed by his valet: ‘A trifle too bizarre, sir.’ My grandparents came of age in the Twenties and I remember my grandmother taking as much pride as Jeeves in the immaculacy of her husband’s sober tweeds; and Grandpa at 80 was happy to walk six miles on Cornish footpaths, but the horror if he muddied his shoes!
As with my grandparents, so in these stories, a silence surrounds The Great War. Some things cannot be joked about. The war’s legacy are the aunts. Every family has its bevy of unmarried aunts: meddling, hypochondriac, goody-goody. As Wodehouse declares, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen. They are a Force. The new Marple collection quotes Christie saying that she wanted through Marple ‘to give old maids a voice’.
William longs to escape from his so-called ‘idyllic’ world. In William’s Happy Days (1930), he dreams of his ideal home:
When we become millionaires we’ll buy a decent sort of house, with no carpets or anythin’ like that in, so that they can’t say you’ve made ’em muddy with not wiping your boots, an’ we can break anythin’ we want to ’cause it won’t matter ’cause we can pay for it. I’m goin’ to break ten windows every day….. I’m not goin’ to have any flowers in the garden. I never see any sense in flowers. An’ I’m goin’ to have a sweet shop in the house too so’s we can get sweets whenever we like. We’ll all be livin’ together in this house….. An’ I’m goin’ to have a water-shute from the roof right down to a pond in the garden. An’ I’m goin’ to have one room with insects all over it: snails an’ caterpillars crawlin’ all over the walls,-so’s we can watch ’em. An’ they’ll look a jolly sight nicer than what wallpaper does. Seems queer to me, that people have been buildin’ houses all these years an’ never thought of a few sens’ble things like that.
Sounds like my house. Architecture, 1960s. Dilapidation, 2020s. An’ I’ve got someone living here who’s jus’ like you. Drop by, William, any time.
With gratitude to Gabriel Kanter-Webber’s exhaustive summary of William stories: www.justwilliamsyear.co.uk
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