W. Townend

Bill Townend (1881-1962) is nowadays chiefly known as the friend and correspondent of P.G. Wodehouse, addressee of the "Dear Bill" letters in Performing Flea. He met Wodehouse when they were at Dulwich College together. When Townend was trying to establish himself as a painter, Wodehouse helped to fund a trip to Romania on a tramp steamer: he returned without much artistic inspiration, but with notebooks filled with stories he had heard from the crew of the ship. Unfortunately, no-one wanted to publish them, so he set off to become a lemon-sorter in California. As an intrepid traveller, he is often suggested as the model for the Wodehouse "man of action" characters, the various Sams, Bills and Jeffs who cross the oceans in tramp steamers, were boxing champions at school, and impress girls by stopping dogfights.

This collection of stories of life in the merchant marine was eventually published in 1930, but it is set in 1906, when he made his first voyage. The stories are told to the narrator by Mr Harrington, the second engineer. The style is rather Kiplingesque: we are made to laugh at Harrington's vivid style of talking at the same time as being shocked by the harsh reality of life on turn-of-the-century merchant ships, which Townend does nothing to romanticise. There is plenty of booze, incompetence, and savage vengeance, and a fair bit of black comedy. For modern tastes, the dialect gets a bit wearing after a while. You probably won't want to read too many of these stories at one sitting.

Conclusion: the stories are a historical curiosity, and provide an interesting sidelight on P.G. Wodehouse, but are not of enormous interest in themselves.… (mehr)