P.G. Wodehouse, Financial Shenanigans and the Great Depression: Big Money, Big Laughs?

Dreams and mothers, and now horned toads …. It was too much for a nobleman of limited intellect to be expected to endure with composure.

From Big Money, P.G. Wodehouse

It was in this post from

What to read if

that I learned that P.G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and Wooster, had also written comic novels featuring the world of finance. As Between the Wars, the Great Depression and the intersection of economics and fiction is an interest of mine – and a theme of this substack – my antennae were immediately prickling. I thought some Wodehouse would make light-hearted festive fare, and picked Big Money as my Christmas read.

Big Money was published in 1931, not long after the Wall Street Crash which heralded the Great Depression of the 1930s. At first sight, there’s not a lot of this background in evidence in what is, in many ways, a typical Wodehouse caper. There’s a cast of familiar Wodehouse comic types: a well-born, not very bright, but kind-hearted bachelor, Lord Biskerton (“The Biscuit”); a formidable aunt, Lady Vera; an Old Retainer with more gumption than her employer; an impecunious young man, “Berry” Conway; and an eligible young lady on the London marriage market whose romantic notions of love cause concern to her nearest and dearest, Ann Moon.

There’s also an American millionaire financier who now operates out of the City of London. He’s called Torquil Patterson Frisby, and as he gets a minor romantic plot line of his own, this made him the second romantic-comedy Torquil I’ve encountered in the last month (the other is in I Know Where I’m Going, a Powell and Pressburger film from 1945). Romantic susceptibilities aside, though, he isn’t very nice. But then he is suffering from dyspepsia, caused by over-indulgence in roast duck – greed is without doubt his defining characteristic.

London and the Suburbs

The settings though are a bit different from the usual Jeeves and Wooster country house and clubland world. Admittedly the whole thing kicks off at the Drones club (Wodehouse’s watering place for feckless, upper class young men) but some of the action also takes place in Pudding Lane, E.C. 4 – in other words, the City of London, where Berry Conway is the reluctant secretary to the avaricious Frisby, and also his financial dupe.

The other unlikely backdrop is the suburbs: Valley Fields, where the inpecunious Berry has been forced to take residence with his faithful Old Retainer in The Nook, and commute each day by train. He is soon joined in the adjoining semi by The Biscuit, on the run from his creditors, and tangled love affairs and financial duplicities follow, eventually culminating in a showdown involving two rogues with “gats” and various comic injuries.

No Swan So Fine, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The suburbs were mushrooming between the wars, reflecting wider changes in the British economy. For many of their inhabitants, they represented a considerable step up. For many British elites, however, the suburbs were regarded with a kind of horror, as representing aspects of modernity they most disliked. For Berry and The Biscuit, they are in the suburbs because of their financial precarity, in different ways that are both products of their time.

Financial Disaster

Berry is plunged into poverty when the wealthy aunt who brought him up dies and it turns out she has invested all her money in dud shares and other financial schemes.

As Berry tells The Biscuit:

“I don’t know if she ever endowed a scheme for getting gold out of sea-water, but, if not, that’s the only one she missed. Anybody who had anything in the way of a speculation so fishy that nobody else would look at it, used to come frisking up to her, waving prospectuses, and she would fall over her feet to get at her cheque-book.”

Bear in mind this is written just after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, when so many were desperate to speculate on the stock market, and came unstuck. In London, there was also the Hatry Affair. This was fraud on a massive scale perpetuated by Clarence Hatry, who used his social status to attract investors, and when confidence ran out forged municipal bonds. Hatry’s collapse has sometimes been credited as one cause of the Wall Street Crash itself.

So Berry’s aunt was not alone.

Impoverished Aristos

Berry’s old school friend Lord Biskerton, “The Biscuit”, is also impecunious – the novel begins with him visiting his bank manager to extend his overdraft – but for different reasons. In his case, he is a member of the impoverished aristocracy following the war. The Biskertons’ country pile costs a fortune to run: a fortune they no longer have, and the government is imposing all manner of taxes in the wake of the financially ruinous Great War of 1914-18.

“It all comes down to this,” said Lord Biskerton summing up. “If England wants a happy, well-fed aristocracy she mustn’t have wars. She can’t have it both ways.”

The Biscuit’s solution is one typical of his class and time: he hooks a rich American. This was something the British aristocracy had been doing for a while: using its social cachet, and trading it in for hard lucre from the new rising economic empire across the sea. Wodehouse puts a comic twist on this undeniably grasping behaviour: it is the glamour of his country seat in the gloaming that hooks Ann Moon to Biscuit, and in fact both of them soon get cold feet.

Wodehouse and Waugh

In some ways Wodehouse is treading similar territory here to Evelyn Waugh. Waugh was also concerned with the downtrodden Between the Wars aristocracy and their struggles to maintain their status and stately piles. In Handful of Dust, the hapless Tony battles to keep up his crumbling home, while in Brideshead Revisited, Julia Flyte also looks to an American (Rex Mottram) as a solution to her marriage problem. Waugh, though, endows Tony with a kind of noble heroism, and in Brideshead Revisited, the Flytes’ main problem is made one of catholicism rather than hard lucre, which makes for a much more romantic glow (although Charles Ryder’s horror of Hooper or of Bridey’s suburban bride is surely pure snobbery).

Unlike Waugh, Wodehouse makes his aristocrats neither dignified nor heroic, even if they are often likeable. The Biscuit’s father, the Earl of Hoddesdon, briefly channels the valour of his ancestors at Crecy, when faced with the horrors of gat-wielding adversaries, but essentially he is a coward, and greedy enough to try and scrounge off his sister and intended in-laws. Meanwhile the suburbs themselves are rather attractive in Wodehouse’s depiction: “bright with lilac, almond, thorn, rowan and laburnum” and with a lake with two resident swans. Admittedly the yellow bricks “look like they are recovering from jaundice” and there are stucco sphinxes by the door, but I can see why The Biscuit – who meets his true love in Valley Fields – declares it “practically a Garden of Eden” only five miles from Hyde Park Corner!

The villains of the piece are those whose insatiable greed overtakes their human kindness. Foremost among them is Torquil Frisby, who despite his immense wealth is prepared to fleeece even his impecunious secretary. For The Horned Toad is not, as you might expect if you have read the Jeeves and Wooster books (and encountered newt-fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle) an actual amphibian, but a copper mine, and the focus for skullduggery and intrigue.

Financial Shenanigans

Some of the intrigue undoubtedly includes what we would call insider trading. Although I don’t want to give away the resolution of the book, it’s not clear that any of the characters’ behaviour is strictly ethical or would today be legal. In this again, Wodehouse is probably reflecting his times. The City of the 1920s and 30s was run on gentlemanly lines, on notions of trust not regulation, some of which probably were pretty threadbare if you poked at them.

A contemporary commented on economist (John) Maynard Keynes that he was a successful investor:

“partly because he never stopped, partly because his forecasting … was generally accurate , partly because he obtained a lot of inside information. He never used direct inside information in a improper way …”¹

In this world, ethical behaviour was a complex choice for individuals. Keynes avoided selling British assets in the early 1930s because he did not want to benefit from his country’s losses – especially as he was advising the UK government at the time. As the decade proceeded, he took a Warren Buffet-style approach – investing long-term in a few companies, mainly American, whose fundamentals he believed in. Maybe part of the attraction of this strategy was it removed conflicts of interest.

As for Big Money, leaving aside the avarice and financial skullduggery is it a book you might want to read? I’d say that while it does offer a fair bit of Wodehouse charm, comic capers and convoluted plot, it’s not in the league as e.g. The Code of the Woosters. It lacks the idiotic Bertie and his extraordinary narration, packed full of upper class slang and literary allusion, which is just so captivating. And perhaps also Wodehouse comedy works best when it is not vast fortunes and copper mines at stake, but something as daft and trivial as a cow creamer.

1. Nicholas Davenport, Memoirs of a City Radical