Women, Wine and Song from The Globe (UK)
Women, Wine and Song! is a playful, madcap pastiche of Victorian melodrama and the cliff-hanging adventure serials of P. G. Wodehouse’s youth. Add to that the sparkling wordplay and crisp, inane dialogue for which Wodehouse was to become world-famous and we have one of his funniest early works. In this effort, he has great fun as he parodies the contrived theatricality of the mystery-drama and rubs elbows a few personalities of the day. Wodehouse never wrote anything quite like it again.
Thanks goes to John Dawson for providing the transcription, as well as the annotations. We are further indebted to Tony Ring for securing the "no objection" from the Estate. Ian Michaud did yeoman work in proof reading the text. Norman Murphy did his bit in helping John with some of the annotations. Lastly, we would like to express our gratitude to the Wodehouse Estate in graciously allowing us to publish this extract from The Globe.
6. The Blue Ribbon Of The Turf. Derby Day!
10. A Way They Have In The Army
The Globe, UK
Founded in 1803, The Globe was one London’s oldest evening papers. After a succession of owners over the years that eventually that saw the paper turn into a conservative organ, Sir George C. H. Armstrong took over in 1871 and edited the paper for some years. The jocular "By the Way" column started in 1881 and was conducted principally by E. Kay Robinson (?-1928) and then Charles Larcom Graves (1856-1944). After Armstrong’s death in 1907, the paper was sold to Hildebrand Harmsworth of the Harmsworth press dynasty.
William Thomas Madge (1845-1927) became manager of the Globe in 1866 and served in that position through most of Wodehouse’s tenure. It was during his tenure that the pink newsprint since associated with the paper was started (1868).
Completing the dramatis personae at the Globe were Edward Harold Begbie (1871–1929) and William Beach Thomas (1868-1957). Begbie was an author/journalist who published nearly 50 books on a wide variety of topics including political satire, science fiction, plays, poetry, and children’s literature. He had joined the paper as Kay Robinson’s assistant editor on By the Way and assumed the editorship of the column when Robinson left.
William Beach Thomas (1868-1957) was an educator and writer who had taught at Dulwich in 1897-98 and had been Wodehouse’s form master in the Upper Fourth in 1897. Having forsaken teaching for a career in writing, he began submitting contributions to Begbie, who hired him to become his assistant on the By the Way.
Vis a vis his submissions to the Globe, Beach Thomas and Wodehouse were in touch–Wodehouse had written separately to him as well–and Beach Thomas was clearly impressed with what his former pupil had shown him. He agreed to keep him in mind on the occasional days a substitute was needed in the office to fill the column and suggested the possibility of a permanent job. (John Dawson.)
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