Early years Wodehouse was born in
Guildford, Surrey, the third son of Henry Ernest Wodehouse, a magistrate resident in the British colony of Hong Kong, and his wife, Eleanor, daughter of
John Bathurst Deane. The Wodehouses belonged to a
cadet branch of the family of the
earls of Kimberley. Eleanor Wodehouse was also of ancient aristocratic ancestry. She was visiting her sister in Guildford when Wodehouse was born there prematurely. , where Wodehouse was christened The boy was baptised at the
Church of St Nicolas, Guildford, and was named after his godfather,
Pelham von Donop. Wodehouse wrote in 1957, "If you ask me to tell you frankly if I like the name Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, I must confess that I do not.... I was named after a godfather, and not a thing to show for it but a small silver mug which I lost in 1897." The first name was rapidly elided to "Plum", the name by which Wodehouse became known to family and friends. Mother and son sailed for Hong Kong, where for his first two years Wodehouse was raised by a Chinese
amah (nurse), alongside his elder brothers Philip Peveril John (1877–1951) and Ernest Armine (1879–1936). When he was two, the brothers were brought to England, where they were placed under the care of an English
nanny in a house adjoining that of Eleanor's father and mother. The lack of parental contact, and the harsh regime of some of those
in loco parentis, left permanent emotional scars on many children from similar backgrounds, including the writers
Thackeray,
Saki,
Kipling and
Walpole. Wodehouse was more fortunate; his nanny, Emma Roper, was strict but not unkind, and both with her and later at his different schools Wodehouse had a generally happy childhood. His recollection was that "it went like a breeze from start to finish, with everybody I met understanding me perfectly". Another biographer,
Frances Donaldson, writes, "Deprived so early, not merely of maternal love, but of home life and even a stable background, Wodehouse consoled himself from the youngest age in an imaginary world of his own." sea air was prescribed, and the three boys were moved to
Elizabeth College on the island of
Guernsey. In 1891 Wodehouse went on to
Malvern House Preparatory School in Kent, which concentrated on preparing its pupils for entry to the
Royal Navy. His father had planned a naval career for him, but the boy's eyesight was found to be too poor for it. He was unimpressed by the school's narrow curriculum and zealous discipline; he later parodied it in his novels, with
Bertie Wooster recalling his early years as a pupil at a "penitentiary... with the outward guise of a prep school" called Malvern House. Cheney Court,
Ditteridge, a large 17th-century house near
Box in Wiltshire, was one of Wodehouse's homes while his parents were living in Hong Kong. His grandmother died in 1892, after which he was largely brought up by his aunts, including the writer
Mary Bathurst Deane, the original of Bertie Wooster's fictional
Aunt Agatha. In 1955 Wodehouse wrote "Aunt Agatha is definitely my Aunt Mary, who was the scourge of my childhood." Throughout their school years the brothers were sent to stay during the holidays with various uncles and aunts from both sides of the family. In the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Iain Sproat counts twenty aunts and considers that they played an important part not only in Wodehouse's early life, but, thinly disguised, in his mature novels, as the formidable aunts who dominate the action in the Wooster,
Blandings, and other stories. The boys had fifteen uncles, four of whom were clergymen. Sproat writes that they inspired Wodehouse's "pious but fallible curates, vicars, and bishops, of which he wrote with friendly irreverence but without mockery". At the age of twelve in 1894, to his great joy, Wodehouse was able to follow his brother Armine to
Dulwich College. He was entirely at home there; Donaldson comments that Dulwich gave him, for the first time, "some continuity and a stable and ordered life". He loved the camaraderie, distinguished himself at cricket,
rugby and boxing, and was a good, if not consistently diligent, student. The headmaster at the time was
A. H. Gilkes, a respected
classicist, who was a strong influence on Wodehouse. Wodehouse's six years at Dulwich were among the happiest of his life: "To me the years between 1894 and 1900 were like heaven." In addition to his sporting achievements he was a good singer and enjoyed taking part in school concerts; his literary leanings found an outlet in editing the school magazine,
The Alleynian. For the rest of his life he remained devoted to the school. The biographer Barry Phelps writes that Wodehouse "loved the college as much as he loved anything or anybody".
Reluctant banker; budding writer: 1900–1908 Wodehouse expected to follow Armine to the
University of Oxford, but the family's finances took a turn for the worse at the crucial moment. Ernest Wodehouse had retired in 1895, and his pension was paid in
rupees; fluctuation against the
pound reduced its value in Britain. Wodehouse recalled, "The wolf was not actually whining at the door and there was always a little something in the kitty for the butcher and the grocer, but the finances would not run to anything in the nature of a splash". Instead of a university career, in September 1900 Wodehouse was engaged in a junior position in the London office of the
Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He was unsuited to it and found the work baffling and uncongenial. He later wrote a humorous account of his experiences at the bank, but at the time he longed for the end of each working day, when he could return to his rented lodgings in
Chelsea and write. At first he concentrated, with some success, on serious articles about school sports for
Public School Magazine. In November 1900 his first comic piece, "Men Who Missed Their Own Weddings", was accepted by
Tit-Bits. A new magazine for boys,
The Captain, provided further well-paid opportunities, and during his two years at the bank, Wodehouse had eighty pieces published in a total of nine magazines. In 1901, with the help of a former Dulwich master,
William Beach Thomas, Wodehouse secured an appointment—at first temporary and later permanent—writing for
The Globes popular "By the Way" column. He held the post until 1909. At around the same time his first novel was published – a school story called
The Pothunters, serialised incomplete in
Public School Magazine in early 1902, and issued in full in hardback in September. He resigned from the bank that month to devote himself to writing full-time. Between the publication of
The Pothunters 1902 and that of
Mike in 1909, Wodehouse wrote eight novels and co-wrote another two. The critic R. D. B. French writes that, of Wodehouse's work from this period, almost all that deserves to survive is the school fiction. Looking back in the 1950s Wodehouse viewed these as his apprentice years: "I was practically in swaddling clothes and it is extremely creditable to me that I was able to write at all." From his boyhood Wodehouse had been fascinated by America, which he conceived of as "a land of romance"; he "yearned" to visit the country, and by 1904 he had earned enough to do so. In April he sailed to New York, which he found greatly to his liking. He noted in his diary: "In New York gathering experience. Worth many guineas in the future but none for the moment." This prediction proved correct: few British writers had first-hand experience of the US, and his articles about life in New York brought him higher than usual fees. He later recalled that "in 1904 anyone in the London writing world who had been to America was regarded with awe and looked upon as an authority on that
terra incognita.... After that trip to New York I was a man who counted.... My income rose like a rocketing pheasant." Wodehouse's other new venture in 1904 was writing for the stage. Towards the end of the year the librettist
Owen Hall invited him to contribute an additional lyric for a
musical comedy,
Sergeant Brue. Wodehouse had loved theatre since his first visit, aged thirteen, when
Gilbert and Sullivan's
Patience had made him "drunk with ecstasy". His lyric for Hall, "Put Me in My Little Cell", was a
Gilbertian number for a trio of comic crooks, with music by
Frederick Rosse; it was well received and launched Wodehouse on a career as a theatre writer that spanned three decades. Although it made little impact on its first publication, the 1906 novel
Love Among the Chickens contained what French calls the author's first original comic creation:
Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge. The character, an amoral, bungling opportunist, is partly based on Wodehouse's
Globe colleague
Herbert Westbrook. The two collaborated between 1907 and 1913 on two books, two
music hall sketches, and a play,
Brother Alfred. Wodehouse would return to the character in short stories over the next six decades. In early 1906 the actor-manager
Seymour Hicks invited Wodehouse to become resident lyricist at the
Aldwych Theatre, to add topical verses to newly imported or long-running shows. Hicks had already recruited the young
Jerome Kern to write the music for such songs. The first Kern-Wodehouse collaboration, a comic number for
The Beauty of Bath titled "Mr
Joseph] Chamberlain", was a show-stopper and was briefly the most popular song in London.
Psmith, Blandings, Wooster and Jeeves: 1908–1915 , drawn by T. M. R. Whitwell for first edition of
Mike (1909) Wodehouse's early period as a writer came to an end in 1908 with the serialisation of
The Lost Lambs, published the following year in book form as the second half of the novel
Mike. whose creation both
Evelyn Waugh and
George Orwell regarded as a watershed in Wodehouse's development. Wodehouse said that he based Psmith on the hotelier and impresario
Rupert D'Oyly Carte—"the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a silver plate with watercress around it". Psmith featured in three more novels:
Psmith in the City (1910), a burlesque of banking;
Psmith, Journalist (1915) set in New York; and
Leave It to Psmith (1923), set at Blandings Castle. In May 1909 Wodehouse made his second visit to New York, where he sold two short stories to
Cosmopolitan and ''
Collier's for a total of $500, a much higher fee than he had commanded previously. He resigned from The Globe'' and stayed in New York for nearly a year. He sold many more stories, but none of the American publications offered a permanent relationship and guaranteed income. Wodehouse was in New York when the war began. Ineligible for military service because of his poor eyesight, he remained in the US throughout the war, detached from the conflict in Europe and absorbed in his theatrical and literary concerns. '', 1920 edition Wodehouse experimented with different genres of fiction in these years;
Psmith, Journalist, mixing comedy with social comment on slum landlords and racketeers, was published in 1915. In the same year
The Saturday Evening Post paid $3,500 to serialise
Something New, the first of what became a series of novels set at Blandings Castle. It was published in hardback in the US and the UK in the same year (the British edition being retitled
Something Fresh). It was Wodehouse's first
farcical novel; it was also his first best-seller, and although his later books included some gentler, lightly sentimental stories, it was as a farceur that he became known. Later in the same year "Extricating Young Gussie", the first story about Bertie and
Jeeves, was published. These stories introduced two sets of characters about whom Wodehouse wrote for the rest of his life. The Blandings Castle stories, set in an English stately home, depict the attempts of the placid
Lord Emsworth to evade the many distractions around him, which include successive pairs of young lovers, the machinations of his exuberant brother
Galahad, the demands of his domineering sisters and super-efficient secretaries, and anything detrimental to his prize sow, the
Empress of Blandings. The Bertie and Jeeves stories feature an amiable young man-about-town, regularly rescued from the consequences of his idiocy by the benign interference of his valet.
Broadway: 1915–1919 , Wodehouse,
Guy Bolton,
F. Ray Comstock and
Jerome Kern, c. 1917 A third milestone in Wodehouse's life came towards the end of 1915: his old songwriting partner Jerome Kern introduced him to the writer
Guy Bolton, who became Wodehouse's closest friend and a regular collaborator. Bolton and Kern had a musical,
Very Good Eddie, running at the
Princess Theatre in New York. The show was successful, but they thought the song lyrics weak and invited Wodehouse to join them on its successor. This was
Miss Springtime (1916), which ran for 227 performances—a good run by the standards of the day. The team produced several more successes, including
Leave It to Jane (1917),
Oh, Boy! (1917–18) and
Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918), and Wodehouse and Bolton wrote a few more shows with other composers. In these musicals Wodehouse's lyrics won high praise from critics as well as fellow lyricists such as
Ira Gershwin. Unlike his original model, Gilbert, Wodehouse preferred the music to be written first, fitting his words into the melodies. Donaldson suggests that this is the reason why his lyrics have largely been overlooked in recent years: they fit the music perfectly, but do not stand on their own in verse form as Gilbert's do. Nonetheless, Donaldson adds, the book and lyrics for the Princess Theatre shows made the collaborators an enormous fortune and played an important part in the development of the American musical. In the
Grove Dictionary of American Music Larry Stempel writes, "By presenting naturalistic stories and characters and attempting to integrate the songs and lyrics into the action of the libretto, these works brought a new level of intimacy, cohesion, and sophistication to American musical comedy." The theatre writer
Gerald Bordman calls Wodehouse "the most observant, literate, and witty lyricist of his day". The composer
Richard Rodgers wrote, "Before
Larry Hart, only P. G. Wodehouse had made any real assault on the intelligence of the song-listening public."
1920s In the years after the war, Wodehouse steadily increased his sales, polished his existing characters and introduced new ones. Bertie and Jeeves, Lord Emsworth and his circle, and Ukridge appeared in novels and short stories; Psmith made his fourth and last appearance; two new characters were the Oldest Member, narrating his series of golfing stories, and Mr Mulliner, telling his particularly tall tales to fellow patrons of the bar at the Angler's Rest. Various other young men-about-town appeared in short stories about members of the
Drones Club. The Wodehouses returned to England, where they had a house in London for some years, but Wodehouse continued to cross the Atlantic frequently, spending substantial periods in New York. He also wrote non-musical plays, including ''The Play's the Thing
(1926), adapted from Ferenc Molnár, and A Damsel in Distress'' (1928), a dramatisation of his 1919 novel. Though never a naturally gregarious man, Wodehouse was more sociable in the 1920s than at other periods. Donaldson lists among those with whom he was on friendly terms writers including
A. A. Milne,
Ian Hay,
Frederick Lonsdale and
E. Phillips Oppenheim, and stage performers including
George Grossmith Jr.,
Heather Thatcher and
Dorothy Dickson.
Hollywood: 1929–1931 There had been films of Wodehouse stories since 1915, when
A Gentleman of Leisure was based on his 1910 novel of the
same name. Further screen adaptations of his books were made between then and 1927, but it was not until 1929 that Wodehouse went to Hollywood where Bolton was working as a highly paid writer for
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Ethel was taken with both the financial and social aspects of Hollywood life, and she negotiated a contract with MGM on her husband's behalf under which he would be paid $2,000 a week. This large salary was particularly welcome because the couple had lost considerable sums in the
Wall Street crash of 1929. The contract started in May 1930, but the studio found little for Wodehouse to do, and he had spare time to write a novel and nine short stories. He commented, "It's odd how soon one comes to look on every minute as wasted that is given to earning one's salary." Even when the studio found a project for him to work on, the interventions of committees and constant rewriting by numerous contract authors meant that his ideas were rarely used. In a 2005 study of Wodehouse in Hollywood, Brian Taves writes that
Those Three French Girls (1930) was "as close to a success as Wodehouse was to have at MGM. His only other credits were minimal, and the other projects he worked on were not produced." Wodehouse's contract ended after a year and was not renewed. At MGM's request, he gave an interview to
The Los Angeles Times. Wodehouse was described by
Herbert Warren Wind as "politically naive [and] fundamentally unworldly", and he caused a sensation by saying publicly what he had already told his friends privately about Hollywood's inefficiency, arbitrary decision-making, and waste of expensive talent. The interview was reprinted in
The New York Times, and there was much editorial comment about the state of the film industry. Many writers have considered that the interview precipitated a radical overhaul of the studio system, but Taves believes it to have been "a storm in a teacup", and Donaldson comments that, in the straitened post-crash era, the reforms would have been inevitable. Wind's view of Wodehouse's naïveté is not universally held. Biographers including Donaldson, McCrum and Phelps suggest that his unworldliness was only part of a complex character, and that in some respects he was highly astute. He was unsparing of the studio owners in his early-1930s short stories set in Hollywood, which contain what Taves considers Wodehouse's sharpest and most biting satire.
Best-seller: 1930s During the 1930s Wodehouse's theatrical work tailed off. He wrote or adapted four plays for the West End;
Leave it to Psmith (1930), which he adapted in collaboration with Ian Hay, was the only one to have a long run. The reviewer in
The Manchester Guardian praised the play, but commented: "It is Mr Wodehouse's own inimitable narrative comments and descriptions in his own person of the antics of his puppets that one misses. They cannot be got into a play and they are at least half the fun of the novels." In 1934 Wodehouse collaborated with Bolton on the book for
Cole Porter's
Anything Goes (Porter wrote his own lyrics), but at the last minute their version was almost entirely rewritten by others at the instigation of the producer, who disliked the original script. Concentrating on writing novels and short stories, Wodehouse reached the peak of his productivity in this decade, averaging two books each year, and grossing an annual £100,000. His practice of dividing his time between Britain and America caused Wodehouse difficulties with the tax authorities of both countries. Both the UK
Inland Revenue and the US
Internal Revenue Service sought to tax him as a resident. The matter was settled after lengthy negotiations, but the Wodehouses decided to change their residential status beyond doubt by moving to France, where they bought a house near
Le Touquet in the north. In 1935 Wodehouse created the last of his regular cast of principal characters, Lord Ickenham, otherwise known as
Uncle Fred, who, in Usborne's words, "leads the dance in four novels and a short story... a whirring dynamo of misrule". His other books from the decade include
Right Ho, Jeeves, which Donaldson judged his best work,
Uncle Fred in the Springtime, which the writer
Bernard Levin considered the best, and
Blandings Castle, which contains "Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend", which Rudyard Kipling thought "one of the most perfect short stories I have ever read". Wodehouse regarded Belloc's plaudit as "a gag, to get a rise out of serious-minded authors whom he disliked". Wodehouse was never sure that his books had literary merit as well as popular appeal, and, Donaldson suggests, must have been overwhelmed when the University of Oxford conferred an honorary doctorate of letters on him in June 1939. His visit to England for the awarding ceremony was the last time he set foot in his native land.
Second World War: internment and broadcasts At the start of the Second World War Wodehouse and his wife remained at their Le Touquet house, where, during the
Phoney War, he worked on
Joy in the Morning. With the advance of the Germans, the nearby Royal Air Force base withdrew; Wodehouse was offered the sole spare seat in one of the fighter aircraft, but he turned down the opportunity as it would have meant leaving behind Ethel and their dog. On 21 May 1940, with German troops advancing through northern France, the Wodehouses decided to drive to Portugal and fly from there to the US. Two miles from home their car broke down, so they returned and borrowed a car from a neighbour; with the routes blocked with refugees, they returned home again. , Belgium, where Wodehouse was imprisoned in 1940 The Germans occupied Le Touquet on 22 May 1940 and Wodehouse had to report to the authorities daily. The internees were placed four to a cell, each of which had been designed for one man. One bed was available per cell, which was made available to the eldest man—not Wodehouse, who slept on the granite floor. The prisoners were not kept long in Loos before they were transported in cattle trucks to a former barracks in
Liège, Belgium, which was run as a prison by the
SS. After a week the men were transferred to
Huy in
Liège Province, where they were incarcerated in the
local citadel. They remained there until September 1940, when they were transported to
Tost in
Upper Silesia (then Germany, now Toszek in Poland). On 21 June 1941, while he was in the middle of playing a game of cricket, Wodehouse received a visit from two members of the
Gestapo. He was given ten minutes to pack his things before he was taken to the
Hotel Adlon, a top luxury hotel in Berlin. He stayed there at his own expense; royalties from the German editions of his books had been put into a special frozen bank account at the outset of the war, and Wodehouse was permitted to draw upon this money he had earned while staying in Berlin. He was thus released from internment a few months before his sixtieth birthday—the age at which civilian internees were released by the Nazis. Shortly afterwards Wodehouse was, in the words of Phelps, "cleverly trapped" into making five broadcasts to the US via German radio, with the Berlin-based correspondent of the
Columbia Broadcasting System. The broadcasts—aired on 28 June, 9, 23 and 30 July and 6 August—were titled
How to be an Internee Without Previous Training, and comprised humorous anecdotes about Wodehouse's experiences as a prisoner, including some gentle mocking of his captors. The German propaganda ministry arranged for the recordings to be broadcast to Britain in August. The day after Wodehouse recorded his final programme, Ethel joined him in Berlin, having sold most of her jewellery to pay for the journey.
Aftermath: reactions and investigation The reaction in Britain to Wodehouse's broadcasts was hostile, and he was "reviled ... as a traitor, collaborator, Nazi propagandist, and a coward", In the House of Commons
Anthony Eden, the
Foreign Secretary, regretted Wodehouse's actions. Several libraries removed Wodehouse novels from their shelves. Wodehouse's biographer,
Joseph Connolly, thinks the broadcast "inaccurate, spiteful and slanderous"; Phelps calls it "probably the most vituperative attack on an individual ever heard on British radio". The broadcast was made at the direct instruction of
Duff Cooper, the
Minister of Information, who overruled strong protests made by the BBC against the decision to air the programme. Most of those defending Wodehouse against accusations of disloyalty, including
Sax Rohmer,
Dorothy L. Sayers and
Gilbert Frankau, conceded that he had acted stupidly. Some members of the public wrote to the newspapers to say that the full facts were not yet known and a fair judgment could not be made until they were. The management of the BBC, who considered Wodehouse's actions no worse than "ill advised", pointed out to Cooper that there was no evidence at that point whether Wodehouse had acted voluntarily or under compulsion. When Wodehouse heard of the furore the broadcasts had caused, he contacted the Foreign Office—through the Swiss embassy in Berlin—to explain his actions, and attempted to return home via neutral countries, but the German authorities refused to let him leave. In
Performing Flea, a 1953 collection of letters, Wodehouse wrote, "Of course I ought to have had the sense to see that it was a loony thing to do to use the German radio for even the most harmless stuff, but I didn't. I suppose prison life saps the intellect." The reaction in America was mixed: the left-leaning publication
PM accused Wodehouse of "play[ing] Jeeves to the Nazis", but the
Department of War used the interviews as an ideal representation of anti-Nazi propaganda. He was subsequently visited by
Malcolm Muggeridge, recently arrived in Paris as an intelligence officer with
MI6. The young officer quickly came to like Wodehouse and considered the question of treasonable behaviour as "ludicrous"; he summed up the writer as "ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict". On 9 September Wodehouse was visited by an
MI5 officer and former barrister, Major Edward Cussen, who formally investigated him, a process that stretched over four days. On 28 September Cussen filed his report, which states that in regard to the broadcasts, Wodehouse's behaviour "has been unwise", but advised against further action. On 23 November
Theobald Matthew, the
Director of Public Prosecutions, decided there was no evidence to justify prosecuting Wodehouse. In November 1944 Duff Cooper was appointed British ambassador to France and was provided accommodation at the
Hôtel Le Bristol, where the Wodehouses were living. Cooper complained to the French authorities, and the couple were moved to a different hotel. The Wodehouses were subsequently arrested by French police and placed under preventive detention, despite no charges being presented. When Muggeridge tracked them down later, he managed to get Ethel released straight away and, four days later, ensured that the French authorities declared Wodehouse unwell and put him in a nearby hospital, which was more comfortable than where they had been detained. While in this hospital, Wodehouse worked on his novel
Uncle Dynamite. While still detained by the French, Wodehouse was again mentioned in questions in the House of Commons in December 1944 when MPs wondered if the French authorities could repatriate him to stand trial. Eden stated that the "matter has been gone into, and, according to the advice given, there are no grounds upon which we could take action". Two months later, Orwell wrote the essay "In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse", where he stated that "it is important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity". Orwell's rationale was that Wodehouse's "moral outlook has remained that of a
public-school boy, and according to the public-school code, treachery in time of war is the most unforgivable of all the sins", which was compounded by his "complete lack—so far as one can judge from his printed works—of political awareness". On 15 January 1945 the French authorities released Wodehouse, but they did not inform him, until June 1946, that he would not face any official charges and was free to leave the country.
American exile: 1946–1975 Having secured American visas in July 1946, the Wodehouses made preparations to return to New York. They were delayed by Ethel's insistence on acquiring suitable new clothes and by Wodehouse's wish to finish writing the novel
The Mating Season in the peace of the French countryside. In April 1947 they sailed to New York, where Wodehouse was relieved at the friendly reception he received from the large press contingent awaiting his arrival. Ethel secured a comfortable penthouse apartment in
Manhattan's
Upper East Side, but Wodehouse was not at ease. The New York that he had known before the war was much changed. The magazines that had paid lavishly for his stories were in decline, and those that remained were not much interested in him. He was sounded out about writing for Broadway, but he was not at home in the post-war theatre; he had money problems, with large sums temporarily tied up in Britain, and for the first time in his career he had no ideas for a new novel. He did not complete one until 1951. Although Ethel made a return visit to England in 1948 to shop and visit family and friends, Wodehouse never left America after his arrival in 1947. It was not until 1965 that the British government indicated privately that he could return without fear of legal proceedings, and by then he felt too old to make the journey. The biographers
Benny Green and Robert McCrum both take the view that this exile benefited Wodehouse's writing, helping him to go on depicting an idealised England seen in his mind's eye, rather than as it actually was in the post-war decades. During their years in Long Island, the couple often took in stray animals and contributed substantial funds to a local animal shelter. In 1955 Wodehouse became an American citizen, though he remained a British subject, and was therefore still eligible for UK state honours. He was considered for the award of a
knighthood three times from 1967, but the honour was twice blocked by British officials. In 1974 the British prime minister,
Harold Wilson, intervened to secure a knighthood (
KBE) for Wodehouse, which was announced in the January 1975
New Year Honours list. The following month Wodehouse entered
Southampton Hospital, Long Island, for treatment of a skin complaint. While there, he suffered a heart attack and died on 14 February 1975 at the age of 93. He was buried at Remsenburg Presbyterian Church four days later. Ethel outlived him by more than nine years; Leonora had predeceased him, dying suddenly in 1944. ==Writing==