Westminster Abbey’s plans to dedicate a memorial to PG Wodehouse 43 years after his death have been welcomed by the Wodehouse Society and by Ben Schott, who described the Jeeves and Wooster creator as the “personification of a very specific breed of English writing”.
Schott is author of the bestselling trivia collection Schott’s Original Miscellany, and his officially sanctioned “Wodehouse” novel Jeeves and the King of Clubs will be published next month. He said that when the news was announced to the Wodehouse Society dinner that the Dean of Westminster had given permission for a memorial to Wodehouse in the abbey, “there was a ripple of joy that it was happening, but also puzzlement that it hadn’t happened before”.
“Not that his cap needs any more feathers, but if it did, then here is the highest honour in the land,” said Schott. “He would have been absolutely delighted to be there. He is the personification of a very specific breed of English writing”.
The author of almost 100 books, and the creator of characters from Jeeves and Wooster to Psmith, Wodehouse died in 1975, shortly after he was knighted at the age of 93 in what his publishers called a “long overdue” knighthood. Wodehouse had made a handful of ill-advised radio broadcasts in Berlin after he was released by the Germans in 1941. They led to his investigation by MI5, and to his vilification in Britain. He moved to the US and never returned to the UK.
The plans, which the abbey said were at a very early stage, will see Wodehouse honoured with a stone. No decision has yet been made on the exact location of the memorial, said a spokesperson for the abbey. More than 100 poets and writers are buried or have memorials in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner, from Jane Austen to CS Lewis.
Wodehouse Society chairman Hilary Bruce called the decision “a recognition of Plum’s place in the literary pantheon” and said that “his stone will deservedly lie among those of some of the greatest writers in this country’s history and his own literary heroes”.
“People think of his writing as light comedy, but light comedy takes heavy work. It takes tremendous skill to wield words in a light-hearted way,” added Schott. “It’s fitting he will be there with his heroes, such as Trollope, Dickens and Shakespeare, but also alongside Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Both of the latter are like Wodehouse, in that you only have to read a line of them and you know exactly who it is. Literature has always spanned the high and the low, and it’s a mistake to think there is a huge chasm between them.”
