Markham my words
Sir: Charles Moore tells us (The Spectator’s Notes, 17 May) that property prices in Markham Square, Chelsea, have rocketed from £7,800 in 1955 for the house in which his wife was born, to £2.25 million for a flat today. The rise is even more impressive than that. In P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘Ukridge’s Accident Syndicate’, written in 1923, the narrator refers contemptuously to Markham Square as ‘a dismal backwater’ where the chronically penniless Stanley Ukridge was once obliged to subsist. Indeed, it may have been in the very room of the future Mrs Moore’s birth that the unfortunate Victor Beamish was bitten by the dog placed there by Ukridge in a doomed attempt to earn a fortune. I shall leave it to Mr Wodehouse to explain how Ukridge was planning to make his fortune.
Maritz Vandenberg
London SW15
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