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<\/p>\nOn 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.<\/p>\n
The first name of Bertie Wooster\u2019s sidekick was, in fact, Reginald, not Percy, although that wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Hilaire Belloc said Jeeves was Wodehouse\u2019s lasting contribution to civilisation, his Sistine Chapel, arguing that if the name faded from memory \u201cwhat we have so long called England will no longer be\u201d. Half a century on from his creator\u2019s death, England survives. Jeeves remains famous for quiet, professional competence and dry observational wit.<\/p>\n
As the Wodehouse biographer Paul Kent has noted, the Jeeves brand has been taken by \u201ca 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\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n
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PG Wodehouse with his dog in 1965<\/p>\n
HULTON ARCHIVE\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n
Jeeves is technically not a butler, although he can \u201cbuttle with the best of them\u201d, but a valet or gentleman\u2019s personal gentleman. Wodehouse loved to write about that species \u2014 Kent counts 82 butlers and 36 valets in his works \u2014 and soon gave Jeeves top billing. Of the eleven novels, seven have his name in the title, along with four volumes of short stories.<\/p>\n
This is rare. Sidekicks are often more loved than their social superior but they don\u2019t usually supplant them on the dust jacket. We do not have Herg\u00e9\u2019s 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 \u2014 or, worse, matrimony \u2014 Jeeves appears as a domesticus ex machina to save him. <\/p>\n
\u2022 How PG Wodehouse shaped Stephen Fry, Britain \u2014 and me<\/a><\/p>\n Jeeves was not born a genius. On his first appearance in the 1915 short story Extricating Young Gussie, he has two lines: \u201cMrs Gregson to see you, sir\u201d and \u201cVery good, sir. Which suit will you wear?\u201d 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. \u201cI suddenly thought: \u2018Why not make Jeeves a man of brains and ingenuity and have him do it?\u2019 After that, it was all simple.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n This is not because many of them have \u201cupdated\u201d the setting to the modern day, when deference is dead. After all, Wodehouse\u2019s essence is in the spirit, not the social situation. His gentle humour can endure change. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1961: \u201cMr Wodehouse\u2019s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.\u201d Don\u2019t we all need a Jeeves now?<\/p>\n Frank Skinner kicks it off with the pair thawing out after Bertie had bet a professor he couldn\u2019t 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. \u201cI didn\u2019t sleep that long when I was at Eton,\u201d Bertie says, mournfully reflecting on his missed dinner plans: \u201cWell that\u2019s ta-ta to the tarte tatin.\u201d The culture shock of landing them in 2025 starts well, with some good observations about our time, but the story fizzles out and Skinner\u2019s Wodehouseisms are sometimes overbasted. <\/p>\n \u2022 Join The Sunday Times Get Britain Reading campaign<\/a><\/p>\n Scarlett Curtis goes the other way. Her tale of the making of Aunt Agatha has as many overt laughs as one of Ibsen\u2019s less frivolous plays, but it is beautifully poignant. John Finnemore\u2019s Second World War story, with Aunt Dahlia prancing about in a siren suit, has a twist that leaves you with a smile. <\/p>\n Roddy Doyle makes Bertie an Irishman who has won the EuroMillions and hired an English servant. When Jeeves quotes \u201cthe Bard\u201d, Bertie asks if he means Christy Moore and he compares his countrymen\u2019s loquacity with Jeeves\u2019s concision. \u201cAsk the average Irish person if their flight was okay and you might as well write off the rest of the day,\u201d Bertie says. \u201cI had to keep reminding myself that he was the butler, not one of the lads.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s fascist adversary that \u201cquotes\u201d Chips Channon, George Orwell, Tony Benn and Peter Blake. The latter reveals that Spode was John Lennon\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He gets the Wodehouse voice better than the rest and, like him, deploys a classical learning for humour 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 Laoco\u00f6n sculpture, while another character is described as having \u201cthe gloomy look of a St Petersburg commuter whose trip has just been irretrievably gummed by the unexpected de-platforming of Anna Karenina\u201d.<\/p>\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/c68cae6a-59b5-4f04-b96c-3c4cbd8f0144.jpg\")
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