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The Feast of All Saints marks the declaration of the great St John Henry Newman as a Doctor of the Church. It is also three weeks since his Feast Day, 9 October, and which happens to coincide with the anniversary of the publication of the classic collection Carry On Jeeves written by his cousin Plum – P.G. Wodehouse to the rest of us – on 9 October 1925.
That publication date happened to also be the 80th anniversary of John Henry's reception into the Catholic Church at Littlemore near Oxford on 9 October 1845. (Rather understandably, the Anglican Communion has opted for the traditional date choice – of his death – as his Feast Day on 11 August.)
John Henry and Plum's grandmother Louisa Fourdrinier were, in fact, first cousins. Being two generations removed meant that when Plum was born, cousin John Henry had been a cardinal for two years and when His Eminence died in 1890, Master Wodehouse was only 8 years old. There is, alas, no evidence that these legendary kinsman ever met.
In any case, given John Henry's “apostasy” and the lamentable estrangement his conversion caused with his own siblings, it is unlikely that there would have been much interaction with or affection from the extended family – four of Plum’s fifteen uncles also happened to be Anglican clergymen.
According to the late Oratorian, Fr Paul Chavasse, John Henry's very first sermon was delivered in the little church at Over Worton, near Banbury, on 23 June 1824. His sermons, delivered in a low, soft, strangely thrilling voice, left the congregation breathless. Matthew Arnold spoke of “words and thoughts which were religious music – subtle, sweet, mournful”. There was nothing dramatic about the Rev’d Newman’s delivery – but the effect was mesmeric.
These sermons were as significant as the Tracts that Newman and his fellow Oxonian theologians produced between 1833 and 1841. The central theme was apostolic succession – that the Church’s bishops were the true successors to Christ. Newman espoused Via Media – the middle way between the two Churches – with Rome on one side and Protestantism on the other.
But by the end of 1839, close and constant study of the early Church led him to lose confidence in an Anglican Via Media. This was reinforced, for him, by the bishops’ condemnation of his Tract 90 (February 1841) in which he suggested that the articles of the Anglican Church were “patient of a Catholic interpretation”.
The final blow for him was a law confirming an agreement between the Prussian and British governments to establish a bishopric in Jerusalem alternating between an Anglican and a Lutheran or Calvinist. For Newman, it was Catholicism or disbelief.
In February 1843, he preached the last of his Oxford University sermons and retreated to cottages near the church of St Mary’s, Littlemore. In those nineteen years, it is said he had entered the pulpit around 1,270 times. The average length of his sermons was 45 minutes.
The length of the homilies conjures up cousin Plum's classic short story "The Great Sermon Handicap". Here, from Lord Wickhammersley’s Twing Hall, Eustace Wooster, one of Bertie’s twin cousins, along with a dubious acquaintance, Rupert Steggles, come up with a variation on the standard horse race: the Sermon Handicap.
“There are about a dozen hamlets within a radius of six miles, and each hamlet has a church and each church has a parson and each parson preaches a sermon every Sunday,” they explain. Each parson's Sunday sermon is then timed, and the parson who preaches the longest wins. They came up with a field of ten: from Rev. Alexander Jones and Rev. G. Hayward from Upper and Lower Bingley, to Rev. Francis Heppenstall from Twing and his nephew, Rev. James Bates from Gandle-by-the-Hill.
His Eminence may well have come close to outlasting the winner, the Rev’d James Bates. Bates preached for a full fifty minutes on Brotherly Love having borrowed the sermon from his uncle – Rev. Heppenstall – who had cancelled with hay fever. And of course, Jeeves and Lady Cynthia Wickhammersley (Bates’s secret fiancée) cleaned up.
Although this story is missing from Carry On, Jeeves, it did appear in the earlier collection, The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), but it is so good it should have appeared again – especially given the date.
In an heroic homage to the master wordsmith, Jimmy Heineman commissioned translations of the story into no less than 59 languages – including Catalan and Afrikaans, Old Norse and Pidgin English, Sanskrit and Somali. Even into Latin: “Bingo, ‘Jaevio enim’ inquit, ‘animus aleandi non inest’."
Some may recall the tale of Paddy Leigh Fermor emerging triumphantly from his study – his guests hoping he had made some progress on the much-awaited last volume of his "Great Trudge" – only for him to announce he had just translated "The Great Sermon Handicap” into Ancient Greek.
Another fascinating tribute was the re-enactment in 1930 by Cambridge’s Wooster Society of the "Great Sermon Handicap". There were four preachers: the Bishops of Ely and Singapore; a Rev'd HC Read (described as a missionary); and the other brilliant celebrated convert, Ronald Knox (who gave a memorable centenary sermon at the Birmingham Oratory on the centenary of Newman’s conversion in October 1945).
Alas, their themes and the odds involved have eluded the investigations of this writer – though it is known that the Rev’d Read won for his homily from Cambridge’s St Andrew The Great.
Although Plum constantly dipped into the Bible – the Wodehousean scholar, Paul Kent counted 2,500 quotes from Scripture in his oeuvre – and into the Book of Common Prayer, he was not conventionally religious or a regular churchgoer, and he probably lacked settled religious convictions.
He was baptised an Anglican, lived an agnostic and had his funeral at a Presbyterian church. When asked about his religious beliefs, he said "it was 'awfully hard to say” if he had religious beliefs. “It varies from day to day. Some days I have, and other days I haven't.”
In the world of Wodehouse, as his publisher puts it, the English clergy offers some of the richest sources of good-natured good humour: no bishop is more endearingly plump and pompous than a P.G. Wodehouse bishop, no vicar more a pillar of his community.
There is one nod to his venerable cousin in Plum’s Thank You, Jeeves (1934), where Bertie’s “plastered” and mercifully interim valet, Rupert Brinkley, is heard singing (“in a meditative sort of voice”) John Henry’s splendid hymn “Lead Kindly Light” as he banged on the door of Chuffnell Hall, the seat of Bertie’s old school chum and fellow drone, Lord Chuffnell.
“Lead Kindly Light” was the last hymn John Henry Newman wrote and it is still sung today. He would celebrate his last Mass five decades later – on Christmas Day 1889. There was something satisfying about his last days.
His final visitor (and the recipient of his last letter) was Grace Langford, his niece, daughter of his late, long-estranged sister Harriet. Grace had returned briefly to England, having wed and emigrated to Australia. They had not met since 1843 and Uncle John Henry held his hand in hers for the whole visit.
He died on 11 August 1890 at the Birmingham Oratory. His funeral procession attracted 15,000 mourners.
Cousin Plum would die, aged 93, 85 years later – and just six weeks after he was so belatedly knighted. It was 14 February 1975 (Valentine’s Day). The timing was as perfect as his prose – it was invariably love that underpinned his fiction.
As Bertie reflected: “I wonder if you have observed a rather rummy thing about it ... that it is everywhere. You can’t get away from it. Love, I mean. Wherever you go, there it is, buzzing along in every class of life.”
As cousin John Henry so sublimely put it, “Heart speaks to Heart.”
Photo: A woman looks at the memorial stone dedicated to P. G. Wodehouse in Westminster Abbey, London, England, 20 September 2019 (Photo by Simon Dawson - Pool/Getty Images)
