Every two years the PG Wodehouse Society holds a dinner to celebrate his birthday. Demand for places outstrips supply so I often don’t go, to give other members a look-in. This week I did attend but the evening was over-shadowed with sadness.
You may have read Norman Murphy’s obituary in The Times or The Daily Telegraph. If you haven’t you can read the Telegraph obituary here tomorrow. He died aged eighty-three on 18th October. I first met Norman properly when he took a small group of us on one of his famous Wodehouse Walks. The youngest member of the group was Mungo in a pushchair; he is now an undergraduate at Leeds, so it was a few years ago. I got to know him well enough to have him and his wife, Elin, to dinner at my club. In July this year I had the honour and pleasure of sitting beside him at the luncheon following the tree-planting in memory of Percy Jeeves. He was in fine form so his death this week came as a sad shock.
Before dinner our chairman, Hilary Bruce, said a few well-chosen words about Norman and we stood in silence for a minute before Grace.
I had the good fortune to sit between two Irish lassies. One, like me, now lives here and the other has retired with her husband to Sligo. The latter couple came especially to London for the dinner. If I may slip into Jennifer’s Diary mode – try stopping me – there was top tenor warbler Hal Cazalet, the Treasurer of the society and a splendid Swiss standard-bearer for PGW from Basle among others on my table. On other tables I glimpsed AN Wilson (he modestly introduced himself to me as Andrew) and HRH the Duke of Kent.
After a dinner which, frankly, would have tested the appetite of even such a trencherman as Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, entertainment was provided by Hal Cazalet, his sister Lara, Nigel Rees, Ann Briers and others including HRH the Duke of Kent. I reluctantly headed homewards at midnight only to be accosted by a Frenchman on the Piccadilly line platform at Holborn who complemented me on my appearance. He must have left his specs at home.
And the morning after? Did I have one of Jeeves’s pick-me-ups of which Norman was fond when liberally laced with brandy? Hell, no – as some Prime Ministerial candidate didn’t say. I had a drop of Cinzano 1757 – my new favourite hair of the dog – gosh it’s empty.
