Pooter crossed with Wooster
Hugh Massingberd THE ADVENTURES OF MR THAKE by J. B. Morton Old Street Publishing £9.99, pp. 194, ISBN 1905847033 © £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 J. B. Morton, a bluff Old Harrovian survivor of the Somme, succeeded his fellow Bellocian Roman Catholic convert D. B. Wyndham Lewis (the wrong Wyndham Lewis', according to the tiresome Sitwells) as 'Beachcomber' in 1924 and wrote the 'By the Way' column in the Daily Express for more than 50 years. He eventually signed off in 1975, aged 82, and died four years later.
To Morton and Wyndham Lewis (who later became 'Timothy Shy' on the lamented News Chronicle) we must give thanks for introducing to newspapers what Michael Frayn, editor of The Best of Beachcomber, described as 'the superb anarchy of the English nonsense-writing tradition, the brief, devastating parody and the permanent stuff of characters'. Many of Morton's creations have deservedly passed into legend: the Huntingdonshire cabmen; Dr Jan Van Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht; Lady Cabstanleigh, the amply proportioned socialite; the explorer Big White Carstairs; the unscrupulous bounder Captain de Courcy Foulenough; the killjoy sub-editor Prodnose; Dr Smart-Allick, the dubious headmaster of Narkover School; and the dozen dwarfs who plague the life of poor Mr Justice Cocklecarrot ('Who on earth are those little red-bearded gentry?'). An excellent Radio 4 series in 1989, starring Richard Ingrams, John Wells, Patricia Routledge and John Sessions (lending his best Edward Fox impression to Colonel Wretch, husband of the retired circus performer, Utta), brought them joyfully to life.
I confess that I was hitherto unfamiliar with Oswald Thake, an Old Etonian bachelor whose letters to Beachcomber from his chambers in Jermyn Street and elsewhere (together with the odd contribution from aggrieved women) form the contents of this welcome reprint. The publishers do not give any bibliographical history, but judging from the Twentyish tone of the material Mr Thake would seem to have been among Morton's early cast.
As Beachcomber says, 'You will find the whole man in his letters.' Thake is a blinkered bore who proudly parades all the prejudices of the Englishman abroad CI find I am able to make myself understood in shops by talking English,' he reports from Nice). His innocence and idiocy are irresistibly funny. His pedigree is a cross between The Diary of a Nobody and Carry On, Jeeves — a sort of Bertie Pooter, though his own valet, Saunders, is an incompetent bungler. Like Wooster, Thake's chivalry towards the fair sex (women are odd') lands him in ticklish situations. 'Oh, woman is a mockery,' he is driven to complain, 'and bites off the hand outstretched to her in adoration.' One of his fancies, Honoria Boltone, is reminiscent of Madeline Bassett: 'She called a daisy a dream that had fallen from Paradise.'
Thake's blissful ignorance that the joke is on him is a constant source of pleasure. Having been invited to play in a jazz band, he is told by the conductor that its female patron 'always put pepper into things'. He asks if she had been a cook. The conductor laughs, and says `No'. As a chorus girl observes of this 'boob of a gent', 'What a simp. he sounds' — but he is surely a singularly endearing one.
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