“P.G. Wodehouse is recognized as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. In 2000, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, he was published for the first time in Everyman. There are now forty titles in the series ….Four new titles are published in the Everyman Wodehouse in Spring 2005: … Money in the Bank” – quoted from the cover leaf of the Everyman edition of Money in the Bank.

From quite an early age I knew that P.G. Wodehouse was not an author to be read in the Chambers family – for some vague grown-ups reason he was in bad odour.  This didn’t affect me much since I knew almost nothing of the man nor of his writings.  It wasn’t until much later in life, when I began to run across stories about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, that my interest was reawakened  – why was Wodehouse to be vilified?   I vaguely remembered a book title, Money for Jam or some such thing, in which my grandfather was supposed to have been cruelly characterized, but could never find a book of that name in listings of Wodehouse’s work nor in bookstores.

I knew that my grandfather, Max Enke, had been interned with Wodehouse in WWII but I had few details about the dates and locations.  Some of the details later emerged in notes that my grandfather prepared describing his experiences from May, 1940 until his release in 1945.  Those notes are incorporated as an appendix in my mother’s autobiography and as a separate page in this blog.

In the early 1980s while visiting my wife’s (of the time) parents in North Hatley, Quebec, I came across, in their library, a biography of Wodehouse and decided to read more about the man.  In it were transcriptions of excerpts from notes that P.G. had made during his period of internment including mention of a man named, according to the author of the autobiography, Erike who acted as chef de camp and interpreter (issuing German notices in Flemish, English and French).  For some reason I immediately realized that the notes, probably written on thin onion skin paper, had been incorrectly transcribed and the correct name was Enke – my grandfather.  Here was proof positive of the connection. [Note: my further current (2010) research has led me to rediscover the  book, Frances Donaldson, P.G. Wodehouse: The Authorized Biography, Futura 1983, in which the name Erike is consistently used but the descriptions (e.g. talking about chess) make Erike clearly recognizable as my grandfather Max Enke.]

My interest languished until I was in London in 2010, at Blackwell’s, one of the best bookstores in the City. There, ranged row on row, were newly republished Wodehouse novels, as well as an autobiography of the man, written by Robert McCrum, entitled Wodehouse – A Life (Norton, 2006).  I quickly skimmed the portion that dealt with PG’s internment experience and there indeed was mention of my grandfather, Max Enke, as a dormitory mate.  Moreover the book identified Max as the model for the character of Lord Uffenham in Money in the Bank.  Notes in that book identified another book, by N.T.P. Murphy entitled In Search of Blandings, as the source of the character model’s identification.   Neither Money in the Bank nor In Search of Blandings was available at Blackwell’s but upon returning to our hotel I was able to order up copies from Amazon.ca for delivery after our return home.

McCrum’s description of Wodehouse’s time in internment – which, lasting only from June, 1940 until June, 1941, was considerably shorter than the time spent by Max in internment – brings home to one just how awful it must have been. Hunger was a constant companion as there simply was never enough food for the many hundreds of inmates (these of course were civilians, most of them over fifty).   Conditions in the first few places they were lodged, actual prisons, were primitive.  The Germans really didn’t know what to with them, were poorly prepared for their arrival and incarceration, and transportation arrangements often involved long trips in over-crowded train carriages with almost no food (half a loaf of bread and half a sausage per man per day).  Most of the difficulties are glossed over in Max’s accounts (see another page).

Here I have collected together excerpts from the various book sources. The interested reader is directed to the complete book for more details.

The Character Lord Uffenham

The following excerpt is from N.T.P. Murphy, In Search of Blandings, Penguin Books, 1981, pps118-12

“Lord Uffenham himself is one of the few characters who I knew was based on fact; Wodehouse said so without equivocation in his letter to Townend of 24 February 1945 (Performing Flea):

In camp you don’t see much of people who aren’t in your dormitory. Did I tell you that Lord Uffenham in Money in the Bank was drawn from a man in my dormitory? It isn’t often that one has the luck to be in daily contact with the model of one’s principal character.

The problem was that there were dozens of names mentioned in Wodehouse’s journal of his captivity and unless I had an unusual stroke of luck, it seemed as if Lord Uffenham’s source would remain unknown. Guy Bolton, when I met him, did not know the name, there was no reason why he should, and the trail went cold for several months till I read a newspaper article by Anthony Lejeune, who mentioned that his uncle had been the original of Lord Uffenham. My stroke of luck had turned up. [Note: Anthony Lejeune is a nephew of Max; his mother Caroline, a well-know movie reviewer, was Max’s wife Marion’s sister.]

Anthony Lejeune made time to see me, gave me some excellent suggestions on the Drones Club and told me of his uncle. The characteristics Wodehouse emphasized were Lord Uffenham’s size and his habit of going into trances on thoughts that seemed important to him and irrelevant to everybody else. A typical passage from Money in the Bank reads:

Lord Uffenham came suddenly out of his coma, and at once gave evidence that, though the body had been inert, the brain had not been idle.

‘Hey,’ he said, once more subjecting Jeff to that piercing stare.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you know how you can tell the temperature?’

‘Look at a thermometer?’

‘Simpler than that. Count the number of chirps a grasshopper makes in fourteen seconds and add forty.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Jeff, and awaited further observations. But the other had had his say. With the air of a man shutting up a public building, he closed his mouth and sat staring before him, and Jeff returned to Anne.

Wodehouse based Lord Uffenham on the man who acted as interpreter for their group in camp – Max Enke. He is mentioned often in Wodehouse’s account of his internment and his daughter, Mrs Ruth Chambers, has provided the following information, including an answer to my specific question: did Max Enke know that Wodehouse had used him to create Lord Uffenham?

You ask about my father, Max Enke. He was born March 12, 1884 in Manchester, England and died January 29, 1971 in Victoria (B.C.). His parents were born in Germany, moved to England and became naturalized citizens. They moved to Belgium in the 1890s and had a factory there, buying rabbit skins and treating them, selling to the felt hat trade. After my grandfather died and my father’s elder brother retired, my father managed the factory and was in charge of it in 1940 when Hitler broke through the Netherlands and Belgium. My father tried to escape through the south of France but left it too late and failed to get through….He turned himself in in July 1940 as the Nazis were rounding up all British citizens. And that was it until 1945.

Yes, I read Money in the Bank. Lord Uffenham was a cruel caricature of my father, who read the book, chuckled ruefully that Wodehouse had caught some of his peculiar ways.

Max was very large, over six feet, 270 lbs when first interned but lost 70 lbs in the first two months. He was also very deaf, very bald, had a beautiful brain, very interested in chess, mathematics and scientific matters. He was never bored as he could always amuse himself working out maths or chess problems.

He emigrated to Canada in 1907, bought a farm on Galiano Island and eventually gave a tract of land to the people of the island to be held in trust and perpetuity as a park….

He was an eccentric but true, honest and utterly dependable.

To make a man funny is not necessarily to make fun of him, and a moment’s reflection on Money in the Bank or Something Fishy shows that Lord Uffenham is the hero.  There is a young man who wins the heroine but he is not the hero.  In Lord Uffenham we see another of the elderly gentlemen, led by Gally Threepwood and Uncle Fred, who from about 1933 are the centre of the novels.  It is Gally, Uncle Fred and Lord Uffenham who find answers and thwart villains, not the young men.  It is Lord Uffenham who finds the diamonds in Money in the Bank, Lord Uffenham who makes his nieces see where true love lies.  It is Lord Uffenham we remember as the genius who solves everyone’s problems in Something Fishy by his inspiration of facing Roscoe Bunyan with our old friend Battling Billson.

[Note: There are two observations which can be made about the above.  First, my mother loved her father very much and was always loyal and very protective of him.  Second, Wodehouse’s description of Lord Uffenham (see below in addition to the above) is actually quite an apt description of my grandfather (whom I also loved)!]

These excerpts are the introduction of the character Lord Uffenham in Money in the Bank:

Anne says, in response to Jeff’s efforts at cleaning dust from guest chairs:

‘Much better. And now would you mind dusting another? My uncle should be arriving in a moment. I thought he was coming up the stairs behind me, but he must have stopped to sniff at something. He has rather an enquiring mind.’

As she spoke, there came from outside the door the slow booming of feet on the stone stairs, as if a circus elephant in sabots were picking its way towards the third floor: and as Jeff finished removing the alluvial deposits from a second of Mr Twist’s chairs, the missing member of the party arrived.

‘Come in, angel,’ said Anne. ‘We were wondering where you had got to. This is Mr Adair. My uncle, Lord Uffenham.’

The newcomer, as the sound of his footsteps had suggested, was built on generous lines. In shape, he resembled a pear, reasonably narrow at the top but getting wider and wider all the way down and culminating in a pair of boots of the outsize or violin-case types. Above these great, spreading steppes of body there was poised a large egglike head, the bald dome of which rose like some proud mountain peak from a foothill fringe of straggling hair. His upper lip was very long and straight, his chin pointed. Two huge, unblinking eyes of palest blue looked out from beneath rugged brows with a strange fixity.

……………………..

With which encomium, he lowered himself into a chair, with such an air of complete withdrawal from his surroundings and looking so like something which Gutzon Borglum [sculptor of the presidents’ heads on Mount Rushmore] might have carved on the side of a mountain that Jeff had an odd illusion that he was no longer there.

In  Robert McCrum’s book, Wodehouse – A Life, he comments that Wodehouse had become very attached to Max.  I wrote to McCrum, asking how he arrived at that conclusion; his response indicated that the so-called Camp Note Book, which has never been published, makes the nature of their relationship much more clear.  As far as I can make out, the Camp Note Book is still in the possession of the Cazelet family.  One other piece of evidence is that Wodehouse, having entered internment with insufficient cash, was forced to borrow money from his fellow internees.  From Max, Wodehouse borrowed the equivalent of $20 and gave instructions to his American agent, Paul Reynolds, to issues two cheques, one to Ruth Chambers for $15 and one to Stephen Enke for $5.

The above information, I think, makes it clear that the character of Lord Uffenham is, in fact, a fond portrait of Max and that my mother’s reaction to Money in the Bank was based upon a mistaken impression.