Fifty years ago today PG Wodehouse died in hospital in Long Island aged 93. The anniversary will not go unmarked.
On BBC Radio 4 Extra yesterday there is Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and Meet Mr Mulliner, and in Great Lives Stephen Fry and Sophie Ratcliffe make the case for Plum’s great life. To mark this anniversary the P G Wodehouse Society (UK) has commissioned a series of podcasts that will be published weekly. The first, by the Society’s President Alexander Armstrong, is published today and can be sourced on the Society’s website or on Facebook, P G Wodehouse Society (UK), or Instagram, @pgwodehousesocietyuk. Then there are eight more by other well known lovers of Wodehouse. Of course Plum wouldn’t have known what a podcast is, I’m not sure I do.
While you are on the Society’s website you might as well join. It’s a snip at £22 a year. You will receive four copies of Wooster Sauce (each about 28 pages) a year; three meetings a year at the Savile Club, and every two years a formal dinner, usually at Gray’s Inn (this costs extra, quite a lot extra, but is always a memorable, star-studded beano with cabaret and browsing and sluicing aplenty). Wooster Sauce is published online with a three year lag. To give some idea of the range of subjects covered flick through the Index.
It’s going to be a Wodehouse weekend for me, from soup to nuts.