Happy Birthday, Sir Oswald (You Dirtbag)

Image courtesy of the Beeb

Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, born this day in 1896, became the leader of British Fascism in the 1930's.

He wouldn't mean a great deal to me today other than as an example of pond scum, except that he just so happened to be the source of one of Plum Wodehouse's great, albiet minor, comic villains, Sir Roderick Spode.

Wodehouse introduces Spode in The Code of The Woosters, easily my favorite Bertie and Jeeves novel:

"He caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if nature has intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment"

Early in the novel, Gussy Fink-Nottle informs Bertie that Spode is the leader of the Black Shorts, thus confirming Bertie's initial suspicions:

“The moment I had set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself ‘What ho! A Dictator!’ and a Dictator he had proved to be. I couldn’t have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living in Clapham.

‘Well, I’m dashed! I thought he was something of that sort. That chin … Those eyes… And, for the matter of that, that moustache. By the way, when you say “shorts”, you mean “shirts”, of course.’

‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’

‘Footer bags, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘How perfectly foul.’

‘Yes.’

‘Bare knees?’

‘Bare knees.’

‘Golly!’

‘Yes.’

In a climactic scene later on, Bertie, owing to plot twists too complicated to get into here, is able to overcome his terror of Spode's imposing bulk and let him have it:

"The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'"

This is one of the very few times Wodehouse ever gets political in his writing. It also is one of the very few times that he bases a character so obviously on a real person. At least in my mind, this severely damages the claims of his enemies after the War that Plum had been some kind of Fascist sympathizer himself (which I've never believed anyway).

So, although Mosley himself was a pretty unpleasant person, I still mark the day in honor of the sublime silliness that his unpleasantness inspired.