Literary Connections
Various locations within Hanley Castle and Hanley Swan have provided inspiration for authors including P.G. Wodehouse, Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, and David Mitchell. Local historian Malcolm Fare has researched the connections as described below.
P.G. Wodehouse
Hanley Castle is popular with P G Wodehouse enthusiasts because Severn End House was the model for Brinkley Manor, the setting for several Jeeves stories, and the country seat of Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia.
Bertie and his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle attended Market Snodsbury Grammar School, in reality Hanley Castle Grammar School. The scene in Right Ho, Jeeves in which Gussie, thoroughly inebriated due to Jeeves lacing his orange juice with gin, gives a speech at the school is among the finest vignettes of English comic literature.
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PG’s real-life aunt, Lucy Apollonia Wodehouse, was married to the Rev. Edward Isaac (1837-1915), vicar of Hanley Castle, and Wodehouse memorial plaques are to be found in St Mary’s church.
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In Meet Mr Mulliner Wodehouse describes a wonder tonic called Buck-U-Uppo, said to have been based on a concoction once given to the Rev Isaac by the chemist in Upton-on-Severn. When a bishop who came to stay complained of not feeling well, Isaac recommended his tonic and had some to keep the bishop company. Apparently the service that evening had to be cancelled due to the inability of either the vicar or the bishop to do more than totter and smile vaguely.
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Just as old Hanley Castle influenced P.G. Wodehouse, so P.G. Wodehouse has influenced modern Hanley Castle; there is now a Brinkley Drive and Wooster Cottage to keep the connection alive.
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Further references: https://loonyliterature.com/tag/p-g-wodehouse/
Charles Dickens
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In 1798 began a series of lawsuits that were to last for seventeen years to establish the heirs of William Jennens, who died intestate, leaving a fortune, one-third of which eventually passed to the Lygon family of nearby Madresfield Court.
These protracted disputes gave Charles Dickens the inspiration for the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Bleak House.
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Evelyn Waugh
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Evelyn Waugh is said to have modelled Brideshead Revisited on life at Madresfield Court and the Marchmains on the Lygon family. A branch of the Lygons lived in the parish of Hanley Castle for 70 years from 1937 when the Hon. Richard Lygon, youngest son of William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, renamed a house in Hanley Swan, Pyndar Lodge (Pyndar is an old Lygon family name) and lived there with his wife Patricia and their daughters Lettice and Rosalind. In 1954 they moved to what had been the vicarage in Hanley Castle, the former home of P G Wodehouse’s uncle and aunt, which they renamed Pyndar House and where Patricia and Lettice lived until 2007.
David Mitchell
Hanley Swan forms the backdrop to David Mitchell’s novel Black Swan Green, which brilliantly evokes a year in the life of a 13-year-old boy, Jason Taylor, poet, and school misfit, in the 1980s.
Jason’s home in Kingfisher Meadows is based on the house in Westmere, where Mitchell lived as a child. From Kingfisher Meadows, a bridle path leads towards the Malvern Hills and is said to end at the mouth of a lost tunnel that comes out in Herefordshire, near the Obelisk. But Jason’s friend Moran tells him there are three tunnels.
One was built by the Romans to invade Hereford. “How else could they keep out the blinkin’ Vikings?” Another is the rail tunnel, “…haunted by an engineer in orange overalls with a black stripe where the train ran him over.” The third was dug by the Ministry of Defence for a nuclear bomb shelter. “The entrance is in the garden at Woolworths in Great Malvern. Gospel. One of the garden centre walls is a fake wall what hides a vault door, like in a bank. When the four-minute warning goes off, the Ministry of Defence lot at the RSRE’ll be ferried up to Woolies by the military police. Councillors from Malvern Council’ll be allowed in… Then the military police – who’ve kept out all the panicking shoppers with their guns – they’ll be allowed in. They’ll grab one or two of the prettier assistants for breeding.”
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The school bus runs via Guarlford, Blackmore End, Black Swan and Drugger’s End (actually signposted near Castlemorton, but transported by Mitchell to the village) and on to Welland and Upton before reaching the school (Hanley Castle High School). The village shop is run by a Mr Rhydd. At one point Jason moans, “I’d like a can of Tizer and a Toblerone, but Mr Rhydd’s shop’s shut on Saturday afternoon. Black Swan Green’s shut on Saturday afternoons. All pissing England’s shut.”
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A girl he meets on holiday asks, “Is Black Swan Green famous for black swans or green swans or something?” “There aren’t even any white swans there”, he replies. “So there’re no swans in Black Swan Green?” “Yeah, it’s sort of a local joke.”
Margaret Tufton
As readers of the Parish Link will know, Margaret Tufton was a gifted writer (Margaret edited the Link early on in its history).
When one of her children became depressed because he thought himself less bright than the others, Margaret's response was to write an adventure story based in Hanley Castle, where he was the hero. Granny Apple was the result. As Margaret had no agent, she sent it up to Penguin Books herself, and they published it in both hardback and paperback in the 1970s.
Names of the villagers were changed and it became a local sport to guess who was who. It's an exciting story, though dated now, and the barn which features strongly near the castle site was demolished many years ago.
Did it help her son? He refused to read it for several years, but his street cred undoubtedly went up considerably, so it probably did.
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Phillip Tufton