P.G. Wodehouse at Hunstanton Hall

I belong to a History Book Club, and a few weeks ago we were looking at the L’Estrange family in the 16th and 17th centuries, and how they managed their extensive estates at Hunstanton (pronounced Hunston) near King’s Lynn in Norfolk.

Our reading turned up a delightful nugget from a much later period, which I thought I would look into further. P. G. Wodehouse was distantly related to the L’Estrange family and spent a considerable amount of time at Hunstanton Hall during the 1920s and early 1930s, sometimes as a guest and sometimes as a seasonal tenant. With the burgeoning success of his novels, and with plays running in the West End and on Broadway, he badly needed a quiet refuge where he could write undisturbed.

​He described Hunstanton Hall as “one of those enormous houses, about two-thirds of which are derelict. There is a whole wing that has not been lived in for half a century […] thousands of acres, park, gardens, moat, etc., and priceless heirlooms, but not a penny of ready money.” In the summers, he would place his typewriter on a bed table, balance them both on the seat of a punt, and drift around the shallow moat, working undisturbed.

Biographer Sophie Ratcliffe wrote that “the house, an eclectic mix of rambling carstone and pebble, with its surrounding grounds, also acted as an imagined set … Genteel poverty, dusty heirlooms, and brooding butlers inform so much of his fiction.”

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See the Getty image of Wodehouse at Hunstanton Hall​

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​Blandings Castle owes some of its make-up to Hunstanton Hall, as does Rudge Hall in Money for Nothing, which he wrote there in 1926.

The impecunious owner of the Hall was Charles L’Estrange, whom Wodehouse called “a weird bird.” He was a “keen breeder of Jersey cows,” and Wodehouse bestowed “elements of his host’s interest in livestock on his hero Lord Emsworth. The Hunstanton pigsty was likely to have been the inspiration for the most impressive of all Wodehouse’s characters, the Empress of Blandings.” (P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters, 2011, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe.)

The first Jeeves stories were published early in 1923, and the first full novel, Thank You, Jeeves, appeared in 1934. Wodehouse maintained a keen interest in butlers. In a letter from May 1929 he wrote:

“Things are not so frightfully cheery just at the moment, as host has had a row with butler, who has given notice. The butler is a cheery soul who used to join in conversation at meals and laugh heartily if one made a joke, but he now hovers like a spectre. Still, I’m hoping peace will be declared soon.”

As he became more successful, Hunstanton could no longer compete with his increasingly international lifestyle. By 1933, the romance was well and truly over:

“We are getting thoroughly fed up with rural life and are counting the days till we can get back to Norfolk St [his address in London]. What a dull place the country is really.”

He complained about the formality of the white-tie dinners and that the county set “turn up in gangs of twenty for tea,” with conversation revolving entirely around who was related to whom. Wodehouse had had enough — but, of course, it was that very inbred and inward-looking county set that provided inspiration for some of his most memorable characters, and made his fortune.