Uncle Fred

‘I don’t know if you happen to know what the word “excesses” means, but these are what Pongo’s Uncle Fred from the country, when in London, invariably commits.’

Uncle Fred – or Frederick Altamont Cornwallis, fifth Earl of Ickenham, to give him his full title – brings chaos whenever he visits. When he does, it is his nephew Pongo Twistleton who invariably suffers. You would expect it to be the younger man getting into scrapes and being in trouble; with Uncle Fred Wodehouse, as so often, swaps the normal rules. Nephew follows uncle as if through a densely packed minefield.

Uncle Fred says there is nothing he cannot achieve in the spring and as he sears through the stories, it is like a rocket let off horizontally rather than vertically.

He loves impersonations, jumping nimbly from character to character. In Uncle Fred Flits By, he is not content with sheltering under a tree or umbrella from the rain. Instead he enters a house pretending to be a vet who has come to clip the parrot’s claws. Driven blithely by circumstance he then becomes Mr Roddis and then Bulstrode inside an hour. In another story, he is effortlessly impersonating a famous explorer when a policeman from Uncle Fred Flits By recognises him. But the key to Uncle Fred is that the more dangerous his predicament, the more surrounded he is, the happier he is at the challenge to escape.

With enough money not to worry, a bossy American wife and the house in the country with ‘too many nude statues’, his explosive energy clearly builds up till Uncle Dynamite, as one of the novels is titled, is ready to detonate.

Uncle Fred probably does not hold with the  ‘if I’d known then what I know now’ way of thinking. He is the school boys who broke out of bounds and liked to see the rules and regulations disrupted. The difference is that he now has the means, experience and confidence to carry the caper off.

He hates meeting old school-mates because they remind him he has perhaps aged – slightly.  In many ways he can be seen as what became of some of the larger-than-life characters from the school books or the ‘buzzers’ from the romantic novels. Certainly, Wodehouse describes him as a ‘sort of elderly Psmith’.

He loves helping the people he loves, particularly when it comes to match-making. But he also looks after himself and even everyday pleasures are imbued with grandeur. There is no better way of summing Uncle Fred up than his legendary sponge, Joyeuse.