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Tribute to Percy Jeeves at the Brewin Dolphin Cheltenham Cricket Festival

15 July 2016

On 14 July 2016 the P G Wodehouse Society planted a tree at the Brewin Dolphin Cheltenham Cricket Festival in memory of Percy Jeeves, a young cricketer whose skill impressed the author P G Wodehouse, and whose name he later chose for a new short story character.

That character became Wodehouse’s most famous creation, Jeeves, the all-knowing gentleman’s personal gentleman, a central character along with Bertie Wooster in some of the most popular books in the English language.

The tree was planted during the interval of the Specsavers County Championship match between Gloucestershire and Essex at the College Ground where Wodehouse once watched Percy Jeeves play for Warwickshire.

The poplar tree was planted jointly by members of Jeeves’s and Wodehouse’s families: Mr Keith Mellard, Percy Jeeves’s great-nephew, and Sir Edward Cazalet, Wodehouse’s grandson. Members of younger generations of both families will also be present. A memorial stone in the shape of a book will sit alongside the tree.

The cricketer Percy Jeeves volunteered for Army service and was one of
thousands killed in the assault on High Wood on 22 July 1916. His body was
never found, lost in the mud and the horror of the Somme. His name is one of
72,000 inscribed on the Thiepval Monument, Jeeves’s only memorial until this
centenary event.

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