PG Wodehouse’s ‘Bertie Wooster’ satirical reflections on life were at odds with MI5 during war years
BRITISH comedy-of-errors author Pelham Grenville Wodehouse’s amusing reflections on life as a civilian prisoner in Nazi Germany branded him a traitor, facing arrest and trial if he returned to his homeland.
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FROM across the globe it is hard to comprehend how the British security service could interpret wartime “Bertie Wooster” observations by their favoured comedy-of-errors author as treason. But Pelham Grenville Wodehouse’s amusing reflections on life as a civilian prisoner in Nazi Germany branded him a traitor, facing arrest and trial if he returned to his homeland.
Idle-rich gentleman-about-town Wooster, reintroduced by comedian Hugh Laurie in early-1990s British television series Jeeves and Wooster, opposite Stephen Fry as his overly competent valet Reginald Jeeves, steps out at the Opera House Drama Theatre from Tuesday.
Jeeves and Wooster In Perfect Nonsense, based on Wodehouse’s 1938 novel The Code Of The Woosters, won playwrights David and Robert Goodale the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2014 after its English premiere in October 2013.
Jeeves and Wooster appeared in Wodehouse’s short stories from 1915, with The Code Of The Woosters their third novel, although Wodehouse had already published about 40 titles. Their next title, Joy In The Morning, was written while Wodehouse was interned in Germany and published in 1947, after MI5 investigations into Wodehouse’s broadcasts and wartime residency in Berlin and Paris. After arguing his Berlin broadcasts of 1941 merely adopted the “flippantly cheerful attitude” of British internees, Wodehouse evaded arrest by moving to America in 1946 with his US-born wife Ethel.
As British libraries removed his books, with one adopting the Nazi practice of destroying the novels, Wodehouse supporters, including George Orwell, insisted the broadcasts were born of political indifference and naivete.
“The world has never been farther away from a war than it is at present,” Wodehouse had argued in 1939. In his first broadcast from Berlin, Wodehouse explained how German soldiers came to take over his French home.
“I was strolling on the lawn with my wife, when she lowered her voice, and said, ‘Don’t look now, but here comes the German army’,” he recounted, embodying the unworldly self-absorption of his fictional Wooster.
Born on October 15, 1881, in Guildford, the third son of Hong Kong-based British magistrate Ernest and his wife Eleanor, Wodehouse was raised by a Chinese nurse, alongside his brothers, until age two when all were returned to England and put in the care of an English nanny. Their parents returned to Hong Kong. Wodehouse later estimated that from age three to 15, he saw his parents for a total of six months. Biographers note he became a storyteller in response to the absence of parental affection, which induced him to create an imaginary world, drawing his own comforts and generating his own laughs.
Educated at Dulwich College, London, Wodehouse worked in a bank before taking a job as a humour columnist on the London Globe in 1902. He also wrote freelance for several other publications and from 1909 lived and worked for periods in the US and France.
As war rumbled across Europe, Wodehouse and Ethel lived as tax exiles at Le Touquet, an English-styled French beach resort 100km south of Calais, developed by a British investor in 1903. At times home to Noel Coward and H.G. Wells, the Wodehouses arrived in 1934, and on May 22, 1940, were apparently surprised to spot a “fine body of men, rather prettily dressed in green, carrying machineguns”. In his first radio broadcast, Wodehouse explained that “The first time you see a German soldier over your garden fence, your impulse is to jump 10 feet straight up into the air, and you do so. About a week later, you find that you are only jumping five feet.”
Arrested in July 1940, Wodehouse spent about a year in “four Ilags”, including a prison, a barracks, a fortress and finally 42 weeks at a “local lunatic asylum at Tost in Upper Silesia”.
Released in June 1941, apparently because of his age, MI5 later found he spent the next couple of years living at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, where he agreed to do “non-political” broadcasts over German radio. Although the first broadcast in June 1941 was an interview with US Columbia Broadcasting’s Berlin correspondent Harry Flannery, later broadcasts were made with ex-Hollywood film extra- turned-Nazi propaganda official Werner Plack.
Although Wodehouse remarked that “internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will eventually win”, indications that he had not been ill treated and bore no malice caused an uproar in England. MI5 documents released in 1999 detailed travelling expenses, access to German embassy rations of cigarettes and soap, and what appeared to be monthly payments of £150 a month to Ethel when they lived at the Hotel Bristol in Paris from September 1943.
Wodehouse became an American citizen and died in the US in 1975.
Originally published as PG Wodehouse’s ‘Bertie Wooster’ satirical reflections on life were at odds with MI5 during war years
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