On July 22, 1916, a private in the Warwickshire Regiment was killed on the Somme. His body was never found and he never knew the influence he had on literature. Three years earlier he had been bowling for his county at the Cheltenham cricket festival and caught the eye of a spectator. When PG Wodehouse needed a name, Percy Jeeves came to mind.
The first name of Bertie Wooster’s sidekick was, in fact, Reginald, not Percy, although that wasn’t revealed until 1971 in Much Obliged, Jeeves. For the first 56 years of their partnership, he was known, with deference to the feudal spirit, only by his surname.
Hilaire Belloc said Jeeves was Wodehouse’s lasting contribution to civilization, his Sistine Chapel, arguing that if the name faded from memory “what we have so long called England will no longer be”. Half a century on from his creator’s death, England survives. Jeeves remains famous for quiet, professional competence and dry observational wit.
As the Wodehouse biographer Paul Kent has noted, the Jeeves brand has been taken by “a chain of London dry cleaners, a taxi-booking app, a concierge service, an e-credit card, an artisan teasmith, a medical robot, a liqueur cordial and an internet search engine”. When a couple advertised in 2019 for a butler, they told applicants to watch the 1990s Fry and Laurie take on Jeeves and Wooster for tips.
Jeeves is technically not a butler, although he can “buttle with the best of them”, but a valet or gentleman’s personal gentleman. Wodehouse loved to write about that species — Kent counts 82 butlers and 36 valets in his works — and soon gave Jeeves top billing. Of the eleven novels, seven have his name in the title, along with four volumes of short stories.
This is rare. Sidekicks are often more loved than their social superior but they don’t usually supplant them on the dust jacket. We do not have Hergé’s The Adventures of Haddock. But Jeeves is the hero, his brain beefed up (or should that be mackereled up?) by lashings of omega-3. When Bertie faces ruin — or, worse, matrimony — Jeeves appears as a domesticus ex machina to save him.
Jeeves was not born a genius. On his first appearance in the 1915 short story Extricating Young Gussie, he has two lines: “Mrs Gregson to see you, sir” and “Very good, sir. Which suit will you wear?” Wodehouse wrote in 1948 that it never occurred to him that he would do anything except announce people. Then he put Bertie in a pickle and felt it would be out of character to pull himself out. “I suddenly thought: ‘Why not make Jeeves a man of brains and ingenuity and have him do it?’ After that, it was all simple.”
Simple, eh? Many try to copy him and drown in pastiche, although Sebastian Faulks made a good fist of Jeeves and the Wedding Bells and I enjoyed Ben Schott’s spy capers Jeeves and the King of Clubs and Jeeves and the Leap of Faith. Now a new Woostershire XI (plus scorer) has been selected to take on the challenge, with mixed success. Jeeves Again, a collection of 12 new short stories, is full of fizz and variety, but not every googly lands on the button.
This is not because many of them have “updated” the setting to the modern day, when deference is dead. After all, Wodehouse’s essence is in the spirit, not the social situation. His gentle humor can endure change. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1961: “Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.” Don’t we all need a Jeeves now?
Frank Skinner kicks it off with the pair thawing out after Bertie had bet a professor he couldn’t be frozen in a block of ice for an hour without perishing. (Jeeves, naturally, spotted the flaw as to how he would collect his winnings.) In fact, he and Jeeves have been frozen for a century. “I didn’t sleep that long when I was at Eton,” Bertie says, mournfully reflecting on his missed dinner plans: “Well that’s ta-ta to the tarte tatin.” The culture shock of landing them in 2025 starts well, with some good observations about our time, but the story fizzles out and Skinner’s Wodehouseisms are sometimes over-basted.
Scarlett Curtis goes the other way. Her tale of the making of Aunt Agatha has as many overt laughs as one of Ibsen’s less frivolous plays, but it is beautifully poignant. John Finnemore’s Second World War story, with Aunt Dahlia prancing about in a siren suit, has a twist that leaves you with a smile.
Roddy Doyle makes Bertie an Irishman who has won the EuroMillions and hired an English servant. When Jeeves quotes “the Bard”, Bertie asks if he means Christy Moore and he compares his countrymen’s loquacity with Jeeves’s concision. “Ask the average Irish person if their flight was okay and you might as well write off the rest of the day,” Bertie says. “I had to keep reminding myself that he was the butler, not one of the lads.” I also enjoyed Fergus Craig making himself a corpse in a story about Wooster being a C-list influencer, while Ian Moore provides the textbook Wodehouse ending of a lose-lose situation being saved by a flash of Jeevesian inspiration.
The most unexpected take is by Dominic Sandbrook, who sets a history essay question on the Age of Spode 1896-1988 and provides source material about Bertie’s fascist adversary that “quotes” Chips Channon, George Orwell, Tony Benn and Peter Blake. The latter reveals that Spode was John Lennon’s first choice for the Sgt Pepper cover but they had to drop him because he belonged to the same club as the head of EMI.
Silver medal for him, but the laurels go to Andrew Hunter Murray for a joyous modern adventure in which Jeeves has become a self-driving, talking car, a sort of Kitt from Knight Rider with better taste in menswear. I mean it only as a compliment when I say that his short story feels much longer than it is: the narrative has plenty of meat.
He gets the Wodehouse voice better than the rest and, like him, deploys a classical learning for humor so that readers who know the references appreciate the jokes more, in the way that Monty Python and Asterix also did, which I thought was banned in our anti-elitist age. Bertie, for instance, compares his posture as he puts on a dressing gown while answering the telephone to the Laocoön sculpture, while another character is described as having “the gloomy look of a St Petersburg commuter whose trip has just been irretrievably gummed by the unexpected de-platforming of Anna Karenina”.
Others struggle to get the two-seater out of second gear. It is hard to copy an old master. That is no bad thing. It reminds us how good the originals were. If Wodehouse were reading this collection while sipping a hot scotch and lemon in Elysium’s Angler’s Rest, he would probably say “good show”, for he was a kindly cove, but he need not fear having to give up his prime parking space outside the humorists’ pantheon.
Patrick Kidd has been a writer for The Times of London since 2001
