Yesterday’s Observer and today’s Independent both reported on the emergence of a previously unpublished letter from PG Wodehouse to his publisher David Grimsdick. The letter which, is being auctioned this week, gives an insight into his pain at being branded a traitor during WWII. In 1940, Wodehouse was resident in Le Touqet in France. When it was overrun by the Germans he was interned in a camp in Silesia. He subsequently made a number broadcasts from Berlin which tarnished his reputation and led to his vilification in wartime Britain. The journalist William Connor, better known as the Mirror columnist Cassandra, was commissioned to denounce him both in print and a prime time radio address. In the House of Commons, Quintin Hogg, who later became Lord Hailsham, demanded he should be punished as a traitor and shot. His most bitter detractor was A A Milne a former classmate and friend. Milne's attacks on Wodehouse led the author to later comment: "Nobody could be more anxious than myself ... that Alan Alexander Milne should trip over a loose bootlace and break his bloody neck."
Wodehouse was interrogated by officers from MI5 who found no sign of treasonable conduct and cleared him of any wrongdoing. In a letter to the Home Secretary in September 1944, Wodehouse admitted he had been "criminally foolish" but said the broadcasts were "purely comic" and designed to show a group of captured Englishmen keeping up spirits. But he failed to shake off the stigma of traitor and he spent the rest of his life in Long Island, America.
Robert McCrum, author of Wodehouse: A Life, hailed the letter as an important find: "First it shows his obsession with the issue of the broadcast and his time in the camp. Second, he refers to his MI5 interrogator as an ass, which is unusual because he normally diplomatic and insouciant... Ten years on, he was still fighting a rearguard action against his detractors. I think he was really hurt by the row over the broadcasts. "
Wodehouse was finally knighted just before his death in 1975.
There is no question that Wodehouse was a traitor. He was foolish yes, but his broadcasts cannot be compared to those of Joyce, or the small number of Britons who worked willingly for the Reich.
The Transcripts of his broadcasts can be read here. They are pretty innocuous stuff.
Heil Wodehouse , deals with Wodehouse’s broadcasts in depth.
