George Dennis Martin was an architect most of whose work is in London but one of his most spectacular commissions is The Majestic Hotel in Harrogate.
It opened in 1900 and has had a slew of famous guests among whom are Winston Churchill, GB Shaw and Errol Flynn (I wonder if he was doing location shots for Robin Hood). Last weekend some fifty members of the PG Wodehouse Society stayed for the inaugural UK Wodehouse convention: Wodehouse in the Springtime.
A witty logo was rustled up, evoking cocktails, formal wear and springtime; anyone for a swift one? Not wanting to waste such a good bit of design a real Martini glass adorned with the logo was included in the delegates’ swag bags – classy and glassy.
The current edition of quarterly Wooster Sauce is No 101 so you may wonder if there’s something fresh to say about Plum; there is. Speakers were limited to thirty minutes and were remarkably obedient. Appropriately a Yorkshireman gave the first talk introducing us to Yorkshire and Harrogate (Plum in the Pump Room) and telling of Plum’s visits to take the disgusting water. Subsequent talks were A Variety of Verse, Lawyers in Wodehouse, Wodehouse’s Greatest Novel (Leave it to Psmith), Imagining the Wooster Bookcase, Romantic Novelists in Wodehouse and Real Life and Something Borrowed: what Wodehouse Checked Out from the New York Society Library.
Plum and Ethel lived in Manhattan for forty-nine months between 1951 and 1955 before moving to Long Island. He borrowed an astonishing 895 books in that period. He cannot have had time to read them all as he was writing Barmy in Wonderland, Pigs Have Wings, Ring for Jeeves and Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit. He liked detective stories and thrillers so plenty of Edgar Wallace but the author whose books he most often took out is Rex Stout. Some seventy years later members of the New York Society Library can still find 446 of Plum’s choices on the shelves. An excellent bit of literary detection by Tad Boehmer, Curator of Rare Books at Michigan State University.
To round off the afternoon there was a fiendish quiz and the day closed with a jolly dinner followed by a fiendish hangover yesterday morning. I hope it will become a bi-annual fixture in my diary; convention not hangover.
To a newly joined member of the PG Wodehouse Society, this all looks fantastic. The logo is especially brilliant.