OA News
Bradley Goldberg (07-10) signed for newly promoted National League side, Bromley FC. The team are currently sitting mid-table, having performed well considering their first year in a league above. Bradley has added a couple of goals to his name in the season so far. Joshua Ibuanokpe (07-14) has been continuing to play part-time for Harlequin FC whilst studying Physics at Bristol University. Chris Jordan (06-07) represented England in the Test Cricket Series against the West Indies and took two stunning catches at slip to dismiss K. Braithwaite and D. Bravo. Roger Knight OBE (57-66) was appointed the new President of MCC as of 1st October 2015.
Conrad Manning (09-11) gave a talk at the Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC), entitled ‘There’s No Such Thing as Solo’. He shared his experiences of sailing the Round Britain and Ireland Race. Tom Mountain (04-11) competed in the Temple Albert Challenge Cup for Newcastle University and represented British Universities at EUSA in Hanover [European Universities Rowing Championship]. Alastair Neden (09-14) and Thomas O’Flaherty (05-12) were both named in England IPF Rugby 7’s Squad. Antonio Shinebourne (04-12) won the Greater London Powerlifting Championship in the U23 u93kg category; he has qualified for the British Championships which will take place this summer. and also of his broadcasts from Nazi Germany in June-July 1941. Wodehouse’s life-long best friend, Bill Townend, is quoted (p.45) in this connection, conceding that Wodehouse ‘has always lived in a kind of unpractical dream’. It seems a strange coincidence that another legendary O.A. author, A.E.W. Mason, won fame for his 1902 adventure novel The Four Feathers , concerning a young regimental officer’s disgrace for cowardice in evading active service. First-class scholarship yields fascinating material, but no less important is Dr. Piggott’s imaginative liveliness. He describes the adolescent Wodehouse’s development, and his enthusiastic working at his Classics set-texts when preparing for the Oxford Entrance exams - exams he was destined never to take. Young Pelham’s actual future, to become a clerk in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, though confining him to bourgeois routine, freed his ambition: all before him lay a tempting field: School Stories. This book has two parts. The first, ‘Wodehouse and Dulwich College’, is concerned mainly with the remarkably close modelling of his fictional schools on the real Dulwich College. The second part of the book (pp.55ff.) is headed ‘The Dulwich Novels and Tales’. Here Dr Piggott’s new contribution seems to me most penetrating: first analysing Public School culture in general and also particularly at Dulwich under the influence of A.H. Gilkes, its famous master (see pp.96ff., especially p.102); and second, providing fascinating analysis of the burgeoning Wodehouse literary style, something that is in the end, for many readers, his most precious gift.
Dr. Jan Piggott
Jan Piggott, Wodehouse’s School Days: Dulwich College and the School Stories 2015. £20. (Available from the Commissariat and on Amazon.co.uk) Reviewed by Professor Brian Gibbons, OA (48-56), General Editor of The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Dr. Jan Piggott, after teaching at Dulwich College for thirty years, has today a second distinguished career as a writer and lecturer on J.M.W. Turner; his major studies, Palace of the People: the Crystal Palace at Sydenham 1854-1936 and Dulwich College, a History, 1616-2008 firmly established him also as a social and
cultural historian. In 2000 Dr. Piggott had curated the exhibition Shackleton , the Antarctic and Endurance , and written its catalogue; here he turns for his subject to another legendary Old Alleynian, one who, though born only seven years later than Shackleton, was of a very different stripe. This O.A. is P.G. Wodehouse, and Dr. Piggott’s book is Wodehouse’s School Days: Dulwich College and the School Stories (2015). Dr. Piggott’s history is illuminated by period evidence from the Dulwich College Archives (he being the former Keeper). Distributed through the text is a brilliant series of colour illustrations, reproduced from such boys’ magazines as the young Wodehouse cut his teeth on: also many black and white illustrations to stories and many period photographs, including Wodehouse the schoolboy cricketer on the 1st XI outfield, with Dulwich College in the distance (this image is excellently adapted to make the book’s period-style cover-design by James Alexander, OA (77- 84). In addition to sources in the Dulwich archives, a variety of other valuable historical materials enrich the study. Dr. Piggott gives a judicious account of Wodehouse’s retention of civilian status and residence in America throughout World War I,
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