Norman Murphy – Part Two

Here is Norman’s obituary, published in The Daily Telegraph:

Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Murphy, who has died aged 83, was the founder in 1997 of the British branch of the international PG Wodehouse Society and a literary sleuth whose researches over four decades showed that Wodehouse’s 98 comic novels were not solely the fruit of his romantic imagination, as claimed by Evelyn Waugh and others; they were based on real people, places and incidents.

Tracing his way through a cocktail of fact and fiction Murphy showed that the innocent Bertie Wooster was a mixture of the steeplechase jockey Lord Mildmay of Flete and the actor George Grossmith; that Lord Emsworth was the probably the pig-loving 6th Earl of Dartmouth; and the scapegrace Ukridge an amalgam of two schoolfriends at Dulwich and a sponger who ran a chicken farm.

Murphy discovered that Wodehouse employed a butler called Robinson who was “a walking Encyclopedia Britannica”, and unearthed a family pedigree with a full cast of aunts while combing through Debrett’s and Kelly’s county directories.
He started working on Wodehouse’s origins in the early 1970s, while employed by the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, spending 40 minutes of his hour’s break at the British Library. His In Search of Blandings was first printed privately in 1981.

When it became a bestseller for Secker & Warburg five years later, Murphy proved a natural addition to the publishers’ publicity circus. Not only would his tall figure, often topped by a bowler, have been at home in the legendary Drones Club; he was also an electrifying speaker, full of arcane knowledge delivered at a speed which members of his stunned audiences likened to a machine gun jammed on automatic.

An Irish doctor’s son, Norman Thomas Philip Murphy was born at Croydon on May 20 1933, and educated by the Jesuits at Wimbledon College, where he was chosen to play Lord Emsworth’s sister, Lady Constance Keeble, in a production of Leave it to Psmith, because he stood up straight.

The effect of seeing almost every building near St Paul’s Cathedral flattened by bombing during the Blitz prompted in him an intense enthusiasm for the surviving detail of London, so that he was often the first person to be found peering down a hole after a raid. More than 50 years later this became material for his book of walks, One Man’s London.

Murphy did his National Service with the Green Howards, which sent him to command a fort in the Egyptian desert on Coronation Day, then read Law for three years at University College, Oxford. His schoolfellow John Keegan, the future Telegraph defence editor, offered to find him a military lectureship in America. Instead he taught Latin and History at the Dragon School in Oxford then sold typewriters for IBM, which he hated.

But having remained in the Territorials, he recognised his true calling, and returned to the Army. Joining the Ordnance Corps in 1959 he was soon posted to the MoD in Whitehall, where his many contacts came to be known as “Spud’s mafia”.

He carved out a career in logistics, which, he later told friends, was largely based on the principle that if he could talk faster than his competitors in the Navy and Air Force could think, he would win the battle for resources. Despite sometimes pushing his superior officers further than was wise he moved steadily up the promotion ladder, serving unenthusiastically in Northern Ireland (before the Troubles) under General Sir John Hackett, then in Germany and Aden.

During the 1972 switch to metric currency he took pride in having saved the government some £50 million over 20 years by pointing out that the new size for camouflage nets would be better rounded to the nearest square half-metre rather than the nearest metre.
Murphy claimed that it was as a member of the tri-Service Central Staff, for whom he represented Britain on several Nato committees, that he cut his biggest dash, implementing the theory that the British role was to explain America to the Europeans and vice versa. On one occasion, when an American chairman wanted to extend the decision-making period because he and his wife wanted extended shopping trips to Europe, Murphy came up with a motion to conduct all subsequent meetings in Latin. Matters were drawn to a speedy conclusion.

After retiring from the Army, he and his wife Charlotte moved to Gosforth in Cumbria, where he became a local councillor but was briefly recalled to write Nato’s first logistics manual. It contained all the telephone numbers and functions of people in the organisation and provoked the question of how the world’s largest military alliance had managed previously.

He also campaigned successfully to have the site of a proposed nuclear dump removed from his village and started to write letters to The Daily Telegraph, beginning with one praising military nicknames (about which the Editor entertained doubts) in the new obituaries column.

When the Murphys moved to London to be near their new grand-daughter he was able to write The Reminiscences of the Hon Galahad Threepwood (1995). This drew on Buck’s Club and also the Pelican, one of the models for the Drones. The book skilfully constructed the life of Lord Emsworth’s young brother though without quite matching the magic of Wodehouse’s prose.

Murphy became a figure on the literary landscape, leading tours of the locations and organising talks and entertainments at the Savage Club in Northumberland Avenue. Ever collecting material, he recounted in the first volume of his hefty Wodehouse Handbook (2006) the discovery of a photograph of the black pig that inspired Empress of Blandings at Hunstanton Hall, Norfolk; the location of the Junior Ganymede, the upper servants’ club, in a Mayfair pub; and the cameo appearance of the 17th Duke of Norfolk as a gardener sweeping leaves in the film of Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. The second volume was devoted to the facts and cultural allusions that bemuse modern readers.

Two years after his first wife’s death in 1999, Norman Murphy, now chairman of the British Wodehouse Society, married Elin Woodger, president of the American Wodehouse Society, on Long Island, and announced it at a Wodehouse convention in Philadelphia. They had met when he was leading a walk in London. She survives him with his son.

Lt-Col Norman Murphy, born May 20 1933, died October 18 2016

Copied from The Daily Telegraph.