Our February 2025 report on the talk about P,G. Wodehouse.
Wodehouse is still rightly considered to be one of the UK’s literary immortals, As a 20th century comic
novelist and writer of short stories he is probably unrivalled. But like so many other of our literary heroes
he had feet of clay.
His reputation, at least on this side of the Pond, has been more than somewhat clouded by what happened
to him during the Second World War. He was living in Le Touquet when the Germans invaded France.
They arrested him in May, 1940, and interned him, along with over a thousand others, in a Polish
internment camp, Ilag VIII. Tost, now Toszek, is in Upper Silesia. The camp buildings had formerly housed
lunatics. En route there, he and many other hapless internees, had been temporarily held captive, in
atrocious conditions, at Liège, Loos and Huy Citedal. The overcrowding, hunger, cold and filth to which
they had all been subjected while in transit had meant that Tost seemed like a comparative oasis in a
desert of ill treatment.
Most of his companions were immured there for four whole years. Not Wodehouse, however. The Nazis
saw him as a useful tool of propaganda. They secured more comfortable conditions for their famous
British author: he even was provided with a separate writing room. Then they moved him to the luxurious
Adlon Hotel in Berlin, on condition that he broadcast a series of programmes about how kindly they were
treating him. The Gestapo were behind this cunning plan; and Wodehouse was sublimely foolish enough
not to cotton on. To say that he was naïve is an understatement.
Dr Berberich has been researching this whole subject for some time. She read to us the text of a lecture
that she has presumably given recently at Portsmouth University. Much of it consisted of diary accounts
written contemporaneously by Wodehouse’s fellow prisoners, detailing the privations that they endured.
This was accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation which included many interesting photographs.
Apart from briefly mentioning his pre-War career as a writer of school stories, comic novels, and musical
comedies on Broadway, as well as his own much later unpublished account of what had happened to him
during this period of his life, we were treated to little about the man’s actual writings. Instead Dr
Berberich focused on the detailed history of his internment.
The infamous broadcasts themselves, contained jaunty passages like the following: “Young men, starting
out in life, have often asked me `How can I become an Internee?’ Well, there are several methods. My
own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along.
This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest . . . . One’s
reactions on suddenly finding oneself surrounded by the armed strength of a hostile power are rather
interesting. There is a sense of strain. The first time you see a German soldier over your garden fence,
your impulse is to jump ten feet straight up into the air, and you do so. About a week later, you find that
you are only jumping five feet. And then, after you have been living with him in a small village for two
months, you inevitably begin to fraternize and to wish that you had learned German at school instead of
Latin and Greek. All the German I know is ‘Es ist schönes Wetter’
. I was a spent force, and we used to take
out the rest of the interview in beaming at one another.”
All very jolly, what, what? But given the many hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths that had occurred
when the Germans invaded Poland, and the many other such deaths that were occurring as the British
Expeditionary Force retreated to Dunkirk at more or less the same time as Wodehouse’s first arrest, as well as the fact that many French regiments had just been decimated on the battlefield—not to mention
the not too distant proximity to Tost of Auschwitz, also in Upper Silesia (though Wodehouse could not
have known of this)—these witty sallies do rather pall in retrospect. Personally, I always found the TV
situation comedy ‘’Allo, Allo’ in decidedly poor taste, and still do, even though that at least had the excuse
of having been broadcast many years after the war had ended.
Wodehouse was never forgiven by many of the other Tost captives; nor was he forgiven by many of the
Britons who were lucky enough to have survived that epic conflict: it was a war in which approximately
60 million people perished. Not a few regarded him as having been a traitor.
Nevertheless his books continued to sell on both sides of the Atlantic, and indeed world-wide. We can all
remember with affection the TV adaptations (Ian Carmichael and Dennis Price; Hugh Laurie and Stephen
Fry). Tost had no appreciable effect on sales.
We’re grateful to Dr Berberich for sharing her research with us. It provided a fascinating insight into a
little-known episode of wartime history.
Our thanks to Kevin Maynard for this report.