'Plum' Wodehouse wrote nearly two hundred novels, as well as plays, lyrics and short stories.
He spent his early childhood in Hong Kong, where his father (a cousin of the Earl of Kimberley) was a magistrate. He was sent back to England to go to Dulwich College, a well-known boarding school, then spent two years as a bank clerk at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (which still survives as HSBC). He then got a job on The Globe newspaper as a sports reporter and began to write school stories for a magazine called The Captain, then moved on to writing books for
… More boys and lyrics for musical comedies. In 1914 he married Ethel Newton, an American widow of 29 with a small daughter, Leonora, whom he doted on and soon legally adopted. Leonora married Peter Cazalet, a famous race-horse trainer, in 1932. She had two children, Sheran (now Lady Hornby) in 1934 and Edward (now Sir Edward Cazalet, a retired High Court judge) in 1936. At the outbreak of War in 1939, Plum and Ethel were living at Le Touquet, in France. When France fell, they were captured by the Germans and put in a series of prisons (at Loos, Liege, Huy and Tost, in Upper Silesia). Goebbels ensnared Plum into giving some radio talks, and the British soon wanted to see him charged with treason. To his horror, his old school, Dulwich College, expunged his name from its records and roll of honour. To add to the grief this caused, Leonora died during an operation in 1944.After the war, Plum and Ethel returned to the U.S. to live in New York, later in Remsenburg, and Plum became a U.S. citizen in 1955. In 1975, at the almost unprecedented age of 93, he was knighted, in a gesture which forgave the wartime ill-feeling, and died soon after. Ethel lived on until 1984.
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