I am standing outside 15 Berkeley Street, a stone’s throw from Green Park tube station in Mayfair, and looking up at the third floor. So this is where Bertie Wooster lived, I think triumphantly. Then I walk on, because actually the whitewashed building is not all that special.
Admittedly, most people probably struggle with more pressing issues, but my great hero Norman Murphy, the first chairman of the British PG Wodehouse Society, spent years wondering where exactly Bertie Wooster had lived. He found the answer (otherwise I would not have stopped in front of 15 Berkeley Street) and the way he discovered it deserves some telling.
Murphy is certain that Wodehouse did not make up the locations in his stories. In one of his letters Wodehouse wrote that he always based his stories on existing houses and places that he knew well. It was, according to Wodehouse, “the only way to prevent someone from entering a room on the left in Chapter Five and leaving it on the right in Chapter Thirteen.”
In his Wooster & Jeeves books, Wodehouse gives two names for the apartment where Wooster lived, Berkeley Mansions and Crichton Mansions, Berkeley Street. Murphy was convinced that these were based on one address in Berkeley Street.
The problem was that, in the period when Wodehouse wrote the first Wooster & Jeeves stories – in the 1920s – he spent most of his time in the United States. Using Kelly's Directory (a kind of Yellow Pages), telephone directories from those years, and the addresses on the electoral register, Murphy tried to uncover where Wodehouse had spent his time in London during those years.
He came up with nothing. Then Murphy had a brilliant idea. He would look for the gentlemens’ club where Wodehouse had been a member during those years, or better yet, had become a member. He was successful at the Savage Club, where members included W. Somerset Maugham and the actor Peter Ustinov (later). The register of members shows that Wodehouse was introduced as a member in February 1922. The address he gives is: Ducie Mansions, 15 Berkeley Street.
Riddle solved.
Searching the internet, it turns out that the motto of the Savage Club is ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’. It suits the author Wodehouse, whose death fifty years ago was recently commemorated with a theatre show called ‘A Homage to Happiness’. Remembering this as I looked up at Wooster house, a small smile curled across my face.