Joyce Haines, who presented her paper on P.G. Wodehouse at the recent Fredonia Shakespeare Club meeting, is pictured.

FREDONIA — The first meeting of the 2020-2021 Fredonia Shakespeare Club year was held virtually recently with Mary Croxton, president, welcoming 15 members.

Secretary Gail Crowe read the minutes from the annual picnic and from the opening tea. The minutes were approved as written.

Presentations around this year’s theme, “Humor and Humorists,” began with a paper on P.G. Wodehouse, presented by Joyce Haines. A summary of Ms. Haines’ paper is as follows:

Plum, known by his friends and family, was the nickname of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (pronounced woodhouse). He was born in 1881 in England and lived until the age of 93. Although his birthplace was England, he spent most of his life in America. He has been credited as a comic novelist, short story writer, lyricist, who wrote more than 90 novels, a plethora of short stories, more than 20 film scripts and collaborated on more than 30 plays and musical comedies. Our local college recently performed one his works “Anything Goes.”

His writings contained many similes, mixed metaphors, pulpit sentences deflated by slang, mad logic, clashes of cliches, botched quotations, absurd imagery, all of which made him a literary craftsman according to the author Richard Usborne. Usborne wrote “Plum Sauce…a P. G. Wodehouse Companion” which describes Wodehouse as a happily married man for 61 years to Lady Ethel May Rowley, a widow who had a daughter Leonora. Wodehouse had great affection for Leonora and adopted her as his own daughter. He was a very private man who worked hard and loved working. He was described as being kind, generous, straightforward, modest, quiet…a genuinely good man.

His roots were in England and his youth was spent there in prep schools, Dulwich college, of which he dearly loved, and his work life included working a short time in a bank followed by years of free-lancing, writing as a journalist, short-story writer and playwright. He had a series for the Saturday Evening Post for several years. Later he preferred to write about English people in English settings and was even working on a novel when he died in 1975.

During the 1940s, Wodehouse was caught up with the Nazi invasion while he was living in France. A fascinating account of this tumultuous period for him is “Wodehouse at War” written by a journalist, Lain Sproat. Sproat spent many years trying to persuade the home office in Britain to reveal the secret dossier of interviews and letters pertaining to the accusation that Wodehouse was a traitor and coward for the five broadcasts he made on the German radio. In 1980 Sproat finally was granted access to the secret files and discovered enough evidence to prove Wodehouse’s innocence after 40 years.

Wodehouse had unknowingly made the broadcasts oblivious of the repercussions that might occur. He thought it was a way to thank his American readers for the generous notes and gifts they sent him in appreciation of his writing. The BBC made a broadcast accusing him of collaborating with the enemy and using the broadcasts for spreading propaganda. The original texts included in Sproat’s book showed the broadcasts were merely humorous accounts of his interment at the time.

Immediately following the war, he was investigated for charges of treason but through letters and interviews they proved his innocence.

But it wasn’t until Sproat’s publication that the world was able to learn of this innocence. It was a dark time in Wodehouse’s career not to be forgotten, but it seems that Britain had finally believed in his innocence since the Queen Mother bestowed knighthood on him in 1975 just before his death.

For further reading about P. G. Wodehouse, several of his books are available at the LVCC Next Chapter Bookstore in Fredonia.