Oh the shame of it. It turns out I have been self-isolating for years, living in social Siberia if you will. Anyone of any consequence has caught the virus but it hasn’t sneaked into No 56 yet. The Prince of Wales has had a royal flush.
I have bought a new edition of Who’s Who. A friend who was an editor of that plump, red book, used to pass on her out of date editions. Not being in it myself I never rated it highly. On the other hand I looked with favour on Debrett’s People of Today, until my entry was dropped. This is an affliction known to doctors as Pooterism.
I have bought Who’s Who in Wodehouse (third expanded edition) by Daniel H Garrison and Neil Midkiff, names with a Wodehousian flavour. The A-Z part, a satisfying 328 pages, is stupendous and any reviewer would have to work long and hard to spot an omission. Here are the alpha and omega:
“Alice (“Toots”), Lady Abbott, sister of Sam Bulpitt in Summer Moonshine (1937), wife of Sir Buckstone Abbott and mother of Jane. A large, blonde, calm woman, formerly a New York chorus girl from the era when showgirls were tall stately, and statuesque.
I J Zizzbaum, Beverly Hills dentist who attends to Reggie Havershot’s wisdom tooth in Laughing Gas (1936), shares a waiting room with B K Burwash. His receptionist is Ann Bannister.“
As if this isn’t enough, there are appendices. Forty-five members of the Drones Club, butlers and their employers, valets ditto, and the crowning glory – Who’s Not Who in Wodehouse. This is two lists: “the first is of characters who are going about (or merely writing) under a name not their own; the second is of characters who are not what they pretend to be, even though they are, as far as we know, using their own names”.
When you are deep in Wodehouse, as many of us are these days, it’s good to be able to refresh our memories. Eric Newby’s father had another method.
”There was little room to move in my father’s room, except to the window with its wash basin and to the roll-topped desk at which my father sat, for the whole floor was piled deep with newspapers. He kept every copy of the Observer and the Morning Post as they were published. In the cellars below they were piled high in the transepts, going back with their prophecies of doom and their sudden fits of optimism that were invariably wrong to a period infinitely remote, before 1914. What hedged him in here in his office were the editions of the last five years or so. “I remember reading something about it,” he used to say when confronted with some topic that interested him and in the succeeding weeks he could be found, bent double, grunting as he untied the careful knot with which he had secured a bundle twenty years before, in search of the quotation in question. To my knowledge he never succeeded in finding what he was looking for, but at any rate he always found something else of interest that tended to deflect him from his original course.” (Something Wholesale, Eric Newby)
How does coronavirus spread? Let’s take some advice from Tom Lehrer.
Apparently once entered in Who’s Who one is there until death ( and then in Who was Who), unlike Debrett’s People of Today which is transitory. It once included me until, like you, I was dropped when, presumably, we had become yesterday’s men.
I suspect HRH The Prince of Wales was somewhat relieved to have tested positive, as he now can claim to be suffering with his people. His grandmother had a similar sense of public spirit when Buckingham Palace was bombed during the second war claiming ‘she could now look the east end in the eye’.
Unfortunately things are never elementary for Charlie boy, as questions have been raised as to how he acquired a test when he was only ‘displaying mild symptoms’ while others on the NHS front line have been denied it. Then there is the fact that most of the Royal Company have decamped from London to various other properties, against the explicit instruction of the Prime Minister for people not to be travelling to second homes for the duration of the lock down.
I have examined the criteria for inclusion in Who’s Who, and I feel that Christopher Bellew categorically deserves an entry, if only because in these days of disquiet, he provides a daily dose of jollity. (Though his ‘recreation’ entry would be rather extensive).
Although you may lament the fact that you have been expunged from Debretts & spurned by Who’s Who, you may console yourself that you are most definitely U, and feelings of Pooterism are very non-U. What matters most is ‘who you know’, or in your case, ‘whom one knows’.