Bludleigh prototype?

An update to Life and death in Bludleigh.

There's just been a thread on LibraryThing's "Name that Book" forum: ghost story -- England -- couple changed by house. The work sought sounded remarkably like PG Wodehouse's Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court - which features a young artistic couple who become hunting-obsessed due to the malign influence of a country mansion belonging to one of their relatives. Collective effort, however, tracked it to John Buchan's story Fullcircle: Martin Peckwether's Story.

This concerns an earnest young intellectual couple ...

"Julian and Ursula Giffen. . . . I daresay you know the names. They always hunt in couples, and write books about sociology and advanced ethics and psychics--books called either 'The New This or That,' or 'Towards Something or Other.' You know the sort of thing.

... who move into a small Restoration manor house inherited from one of their relatives, and become benignly altered by it until their attitudes are in tune with those of its amiable Catholic originator, Lord Carteron.

It's the final story of Buchan's The Runagates Club, his 1928 anthology of stories connected by the framing device of storytelling by dining club members (who include Richard Hannay and other Buchan heroes). Given the date and strong similarity in premise and plot, I think it's very likely that the 1929 Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court is a pastiche of Fullcircle.

Wodehouse was, after all, a skilled parodist. This isn't generally remembered because - compare Stella Gibbons and Cold Comfort Farm - the objects of his parody have gone into obscurity. Jaime J. Weinman sums it up well:

Almost everything he wrote began life as a parody of some then-popular genre of stories. Stories about idle young men who belong to clubs (the Drones Club stories, the Bertie and Jeeves stories), "frame" stories told by old adventurers (Mr. Mulliner; the golf stories), stories about stern Aunts who won't consent to their niece's marriage (the Blandings series); these were all familiar to readers when Wodehouse started doing funny versions of them ... At the time Wodehouse started writing for the Saturday Evening Post, these were types of stories that were being told seriously in the Post and many other magazines, and Wodehouse basically made his name by writing stories that took those elements and rechannelled them into farce.

- Wodehouse the parodist, Something Old, Nothing New: Thoughts on Popular Culture and Unpopular Culture, Jaime J. Weinman

Jaime goes on to mention, for instance, the connection with Ethel M Dell, who appears in Wodehouse works as Rosie M Banks.

Addendum. More complex, it seems. In a follow-up - Reciprocal Wodehouse Linkage - Jaime points out that the 'malign house' theme is widespread, and also appears in Wodehouse's earlier Honeysuckle Cottage (1925) in which a writer of hardboiled crime novels, James Rodman, moves into the cottage of a late aunt who was a successful romantic novelist, and finds himself increasingly under the malign influence of sentimental fiction.

Judging by The Figure in the Carpet of "Honeysuckle Cottage": P. G. Wodehouse and Henry James, Wernsman, Marijane R. Davis, The Henry James Review, Volume 26, Number 1, Winter 2005, pp. 99-104), Honeysuckle Cottage draws strongly on Henry James and The Turn of the Screw, which it even mentions:

"Do you believe in haunted houses? Do you believe that it is possible for a malign influence to envelop a place and work a spell on all who come within its radius?" ...
"Of course, ... one has read stories. Henry James's Turn of the Screw ...

Then again, I just found that Buchan's Fullcircle first appeared in magazine form in 1920, putting it among the many possible precursors to Honeysuckle Cottage too.

- Ray

Life and death in Bludleigh

The plot thickens. Previously - Life and death in Budleigh - I mentioned the apparent unverifiability, as reported by Devon Perspectives, of a connection between PG Wodehouse and Budleigh Salterton. I thought I'd cracked the problem on finding references to a story called Unpleasantness at Budleigh Court (see Google, which finds multiple hits, including the filming of the story in the 1975 Wodehouse Playhouse series). However, a more thorough search on plot details finds that the story is actually titled Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court in primary sources such as the original Strand Magazine appearance: the mutation of the name to "Budleigh" in various secondary and tertiary sources may well be the explanation.

As described here, the story concerns a budding romance between two gentle poets, Aubrey Trefusis and Charlotte Mulliner, that is interrupted by the malign effects of a country house - Bludleigh Court, Lesser Bludleigh, near Goresby-on-the-Ouse, Bedfordshire - that afflicts everyone who stays in it with a lust for hunting. Charlotte thinks she has been unaffected until she finds herself aggrieved that one of her poems has been rejected by The Animal-Lovers' Gazette

Good Gnus
(A Vignette in Verse)

When cares attack and life seems black,
How sweet it is to pot a yak,
Or puncture hares and grizzly bears,
And others I could mention;
But in my Animals "Who's Who"
No name stands higher than the Gnu;
And each new gnu that comes in view
Receives my prompt attention.

When Afric's sun is sinking low,
And shadows wander to and fro,
And everywhere there's in the air
A hush that's deep and solemn;
Then is the time good men and true
With View Halloo pursue the gnu;
(The safest spot to put your shot
is through the spinal column).

To take the creature by surprise
We must adopt some rude disguise,
Although deceit is never sweet,
And falsehoods don't attract us;
So, as with gun in hand you wait,
Remember to impersonate
A tuft of grass, a mountain-pass,
A kopje or a cactus.

A brief suspense, and then at last
The waiting's o'er, the vigil past;
A careful aim. A spurt of flame.
It's done. You've pulled the trigger,
And one more gnu, so fair and frail,
Has handed in its dinner-pail;
(The females all are rather small,
The males are somewhat bigger)

Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court first appeared in the Strand Magazine, Volume LXXVIII, January-June, 1929. It can be read online in A Wodehouse Bestiary. Although it's comic in tone, its premise is quite Lovecraftian, and the story was reprinted in The Magazine of fantasy & science fiction in 1952.

Addendum, 21 Sept 2009. There's just been a thread on LibraryThing's "Name that Book" forum: ghost story -- England -- couple changed by house. The work sought sounded remarkably like Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court, but collective effort tracked it to John Buchan's story Fullcircle: Martin Peckwether's Story. It concerns an earnest young intellectual couple ...

"Julian and Ursula Giffen. . . . I daresay you know the names. They always hunt in couples, and write books about sociology and advanced ethics and psychics--books called either 'The New This or That,' or 'Towards Something or Other.' You know the sort of thing.

who move into a Restoration mansion and become altered by the house until their attitudes become those of its amiable Catholic originator, Lord Carteron. It's the final story of Buchan's The Runagates Club, his 1928 anthology of stories connected by the framing device of storytelling by dining club members (who include Richard Hannay and other Buchan heroes). Given the date and strong similarity in premise and plot, I think it's very likely that the 1929 Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court is a pastiche of Fullcircle.

- Ray

Life and death in Budleigh

And so to Budleigh. On Sunday we walked the Budleigh Salterton to Exmouth section of the South West Coast Path; the above picture shows the view back across Budleigh and Lyme Bay from the highest point at that section, West Down Beacon. Budleigh, especially on a Sunday, lives up to its quiet, genteel style that was ridiculed by Noel Coward in Blithe Spirit:

Elvira: Nobody but a monumental bore would have thought of having a honeymoon at Budleigh Salterton.
Charles: What's the matter with Budleigh Salterton?
Elvira: I was an eager young bride, Charles - I wanted glamour, and music and romance — all I got was all I got was potted palms, seven hours of every day on a damp golf course and a three-piece orchestra playing "Merrie England".

Its chief famous connection is, of course, that Sir Walter Raleigh was born near East Budleigh and brought up there (as famously depicted at a still-recognisable location in The Boyhood of Raleigh by Millais). Raleigh was, it's often forgotten, a writer as well as explorer: see The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt : Miscellaneous works. Other literary connections are harder to find. The forthcoming Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival will focus on Thomas Adolphus Trollope (journalist, travel writer and brother of Anthony Trollope - check out Villino Trollope) who spent his later years in Budleigh. George Gissing, who spent time in Budleigh for his health, used it as a setting for his novel Born in Exile (Gutenberg EText-No. 4526), though the book is conversation-heavy and little interested in location descriptions. One might almost suspect Gissing of sending his hero up West Down Beacon at night to avoid having to describe the view:

Early in the evening there was a temporary lull in the storm; rain no longer fell, and in spaces of the rushing sky a few stars showed themselves. Unable to rest at the hotel, Peak set out for a walk towards the cliff summit called Westdown Beacon; he could see little more than black vacancies, but a struggle with the wind suited his temper, and he enjoyed the incessant roar of surf in the darkness. After an hour of this buffeting he returned to the beach, and stood as close as possible to the fierce breakers. No person was in sight.

A skim of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and NewsBank finds a few others, such as the Budleigh-born bibliographer Robert Proctor, inventor of the "Proctor order" for cataloguing pre-1500 books (see John Bowman on Robert Proctor at Tom Roper's Weblog); and the artist and author Joyce Dennys, who lived in Budleigh through both World Wars, drawing propaganda art in WW1 and turning to writing in WW2, when her long career began with the funny and somewhat subversive "Henrietta" ("a 1940s Adrienne Mole") letters about wartime life in a small Devon town. Written for the Sketch magazine, these were later collated as Henrietta’s War; news from the home front 1939-1942, shortly due for republication (see the Bloomsbury page).

There's also the prolific novelist (Henry) Hawley Smart, who also lived in Budleigh in later life. Smart was a career soldier who served in Crimea and in India during the Mutiny, bought his way out of the Army, then turned to novel-writing following gambling losses at horse races. At the Circulating Library has a partial bibliography of his some 38 novels, and some are online at the Internet Archive (search for creator "Hawley Smart"). Many draw on his turf experiences; he was a sort of Victorian Dick Francis. Another little-remembered writer who died in Budleigh is "Headon Hill" (Francis Edward Grainger, 1857-1927, author of the Holmesian "Zambra" detective stories).

A number of sources, such as the Rough Guide to England, say there's a PG Wodehouse connection to Budleigh, but as Devon Perspectives says, verification is yet to be found. See the following post, Life and death in Bludleigh, for a probable explanation.

Aside 1: Given Budleigh's reputation as a "waiting-room", it's probably appropriate that one of Hawley Smart's works is the 1881 short novel The Great Tontine (Internet Archive greattontine00smargoog), which tells of skulduggery surrounding the last survivors of a tontine, an obsolete investment system whose best-known form involves a mutual fund whose capital goes to the last surviving investor. To Victorian writers, this was a gift as a plot device - see, for instance, The Wrong Box, co-written by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (Gutenberg EText-No. 1585). But check out A Short History of Tontines (McKeever, Kent, A Short History of Tontines, February 9, 2009. Available at SSRN), an interesting paper which argues that the tontine doesn't deserve its shadowy reputation.

- Ray

Aside 2: Chine-spotting again. On the Isle of Wight, even the smallest of these delightful micro-valleys have names, and I find it surprising that in East Devon they mostly don't (or else they've been forgotten). The coastal path between Budleigh and Sandy Bay crosses two of these chines, neither of which are mentioned in geological accounts such as Ian West's Budleigh Salterton, and Littleham Cove, East Devon - Geology Field Guide. The botanist Edwin Lees, however, describes the terrain vividly in his Notices of the Flowering Time and Localities of some Plants observed during an Excursion through a portion of South Devon, in June, 1851.

The one here, just west of Budleigh, I've just discovered from Old Maps to be called Sherbrook Chine; it features on a few early postcards of Budleigh, and is called the "Sherbrook ravine" in the Devonshire Association's 1890 Notes on the parish of East Budleigh.  The pamphlet Budleigh Salterton - as it used to be (Richard D Woodall, 1954) shows that it provided access to the beach then ("In Victorian times ... Access to the beach at Sherbrooke Chine was then much easier").  Perhaps it's overlooked now because it's very overgrown with woodland, and its nature isn't obvious to the casual observer on the Coast Path. This other chine, pictured above, I haven't so far been able to name. Here, not far from the Sandy Bay mobile home park, the Coast Path dips into an amazing moist microclimate, all rustling leaves, ferns and birdsong, compressed into a tiny but deep valley only about 130 yards long that ends abruptly at the cliff edge above Littleham Cove. It's most surprising that such a distinctive and charming location has no name.

- Ray