On Tuesday, Harry Hutton of “Chase Me Ladies“‘s Killer Fact was that “P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler had the same English teacher.” I suspect my dad might have had the at least two ring leaders of future military coups in different West African states study under him, but it’d take some doing to compete with a register like that.
“Wodehouse?”
“As healthy as a horse, sir!”
“Chandler?”
“Ain’t dead yet, mister!”
Sadly, my inner pedant is compelled to point out that Wodehouse (b.1881) was nearly a decade older than Chandler (b.1888), so if they ever shared a register it would have to be because one was vastly more precocious (or backward) than the other.
As coincidence would have it, the age gap is about the same as that between Hugh Grant and myself… and we also shared the same English teacher, though almost certainly not the one that you mention unless he was implausibly well preserved.
I’ve no idea who this English teacher might have been, but the “Chandler and Wodehouse were at the same school” trope has never surprised me — there’s something so satisfying about the way that both of them write English prose that it doesn’t seem surprising that they’re from the same stable.
As I get older I like Chandler more and more, and Wodehouse perhaps a little less, but that’s probably just me. And they’re still both splendid.
According to this, the likely (though not conclusive) candidate is one A.H.Gilkes, the headmaster of Dulwich College. The piece also confirms my suspicion that the two didn’t overlap – Wodehouse left in about 1899 at eighteen, while Chandler started in 1900 at about twelve.
I think the shared English teacher idea is over-rated. One of the virtues of their schooling was the emphasis on languages. Also the really salient fact is that neither went to university. I’m sure that tertiary education has killed the prose of several writers. Also in the university-free camp are Shakespeare, Johnson, Dickens, Orwell, and Pinter, to name just a few.
But did Chris Brooke and Michael Brooke go to the same school?
We did, though I don’t think Chris was ever taught by the English teacher I’m thinking of (I know he also taught Hugh Grant because he popped up as a talking head in a recent documentary!)
Incidentally, this particular English teacher’s cultural credo was something I’ve never forgotten (not least because I firmly subscribe to it as well) – which is that “everything is worth doing, though sometimes it’s only worth doing once”.