A Literary Connection

 posted by John Winn

Dear Mr Ryder                                                                             Oct 26 1967

                        Yes, you are quite right. It must have been 1913 that I paid a visit to my parents in Cheltenham and went to see Warwickshire play Glos on the Cheltenham College ground. I suppose Jeeves's bowling must have impressed me, for I remembered him in 1916, when I was in New York and starting the Jeeves and Bertie saga, and it was just the name I wanted.

                                                      Yours sincerely PG Wodehouse, New York

And sure enough on page 174 of the 1914 Wisden there appears an account of the match between Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, the third and last of three games played in the Cheltenham Festival that year, and which for the first time all ended in victory for Gloucestershire. The Jeeves referred to is Percy Jeeves who did not have a distinguished match, 1 and 0 with the bat and only one wicket to show for 24 overs with the ball. Undistinguished on paper perhaps but good enough to impress one of English literature's greatest humorous writers, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse who as we shall see was a decent cricketer himself.  

Percy Jeeves

The stars of the 1913 match for 'Glos' were AG Dipper with a hundred in the first innings and fifty second time around. The man who did the damage with the ball was left arm spinner George Dennett who took 13 wickets in the match. It is perhaps a little surprising that it was Jeeves who impressed Wodehouse rather than Dennett but conditioned as enthusiasts have been for over 100 years to the name Jeeves conjuring up an image of the great valet 'Carry On, Dennett' does not sound quite right. 

Percy Jeeves was born near Dewsbury in 1888 from where the family moved to Goole and whilst a professional with Hawes in Wensleydale Jeeves was spotted by Warwickshire Secretary Rowland Ryder (the man to whom Wodehouse's letter is addressed) and he began his career at Edgbaston in 1911 but it was not until two years later that he qualified for championship cricket. In that season Jeeves finished top of the bowling averages with 106 wickets, good enough for Wisden to describe Percy as 'an absolute prize' for in addition to his haul of wickets he also scored over 700 runs. 'On the fast side of medium....he makes the ball come off the ground with plenty of life'. 

In 1914 Jeeves was selected for the Players v The Gentlemen at The Oval but played his last first class match during the last week in August 1914 by which time WW1 had been underway for a month.Wisden again sang his praises but as he left the field on August 29th having taken seven wickets in the match to assist Warwickshire to a win over Surrey by 80 runs he must have known that military service lay ahead of him. Just six weeks later he volunteered to join what came to be known as the 15th battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment who in November 1915 were deployed to France. 

Private Jeeves, aged 28, was killed in action on the Somme the following July. His name is on the Thiepval memorial and the Goole Cenotaph. There are also mementoes of his cricketing career, the ball with which he achieved his best analysis, 7 for 34 v Worcestershire in 1913, a match in which he also made valuable runs, is displayed in the Edgbaston pavilion, on the centenary of his death in 2016 a blue plaque was unveiled in Goole and in the same year a tree was planted in his memory at Cheltenham College by his great nephew and Wodehouse's grandson. 

My interest in Jeeves, the cricketer not the valet, has come from a book I have read recently, 'Wodehouse at The Wicket', the first ever compendium of Wodehouse's writings on cricket. The lengthy introduction, perhaps too lengthy, describes Wodehouse's playing career beginning with reference to page 409 in the 1901 Wisden where his name appears in the averages for Dulwich College, bottom of the list of batsmen but fourth among the bowlers. Top of the bowlers is NA Knox later to play for England. Some of the more interesting cricket PGW played was for the Authors' XI which included six games at Lord's and on the main ground, not the Nursery pitch. The authors' opponents included publishers and actors and Wodehouse was captained by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who one hopes was a mystery spinner. The matches came to an end in 1912 but Wodehouse does appear in Wisden as recently as 1976 when a three line obituary marks his death on Long Island the previous year. Alongside his appearances for Dulwich College he is noted as being a famous novelist and the godfather of Mike Griffith, the former captain of Sussex. There is no reference to Jeeves who almost sixty years earlier had received a much longer obituary in Wisden.