George Grossmith - The Diary of a Nobody

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when John Major was first compared with Pooter but the idea probably came from the satirical magazine Private Eye which usually produces a spoof diary as the popular caricature of the prime minister of the day might write it. Soon after John Major took office in November 1990 the Eye began running ‘The Secret Diary of John Major aged 47¾’ undisguisedly based on Sue Townshend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾. Since Mole is obviously a younger, 1980s version of Pooter, commentators eventually began comparing the prime minister with the hero of The Diary of a Nobody . One of the first to do so was Roy Hattersley who nearly became prime minister himself in the 1980s. He made the comparison in his Guardian column in 1991 after seeing Major on TV telling a desert prince that the coffee was ‘extremely agreeable’.

These comparisons continued until the end of Major’s premiership. Andrew Moncur in the Guardian Diary for 31 March 1997 wrote: ‘It would be interesting to hear what John Major, the Mr Pooter of Downing Street, has to say on the topic of ritzy hotels.’ A Financial Times review of Anthony Seldon’s Major, A Political Life on 14 November 1997 was headlined ‘Mr Pooter’s Place in History’.

Keith Waterhouse, The Collected Letters of a Nobody (London: Michael Joseph, 1986).

Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (London: Putnam & Co, 1951).

Keith Waterhouse, Mrs Pooter’s Diary (London: Michael Joseph, 1983). Also see Further Reading.

This led J. B. Priestley to describe Padge as ‘the most laconic character in English Literature’ in English Humour (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 98.

George Grossmith published his own recollections, A Society Clown (Bristol: Arrowsmith’s Bristol Library, 1888) that same year. Ironically, since he never kept a diary, it was done largely from memory.

Faber & Faber Book of Diaries , edited by Simon Brett (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), p. 23.

Ibid., p. 271.

Ibid., p. 308.

Raymond Chapman, The Victorian Debate: English Literature and Society 1832–1901 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968).

David Thorns, Suburbia (London: Paladin, 1972), p. 38.

Ibid., p. 38.

The London Encyclopaedia , edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (London: Macmillan, 1983).

As Jenni Calder explained in The Victorian Home (London: Batsford, 1977), by the 1880s ‘vast tracts of London’s suburbs were created for the growing army of clerks who were needed to maintain the running of business’.

Quoted by F. M. L. Thompson in The Rise of Suburbia , 1982.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1997), Book The First, Chapter 4.

Walter Besant, London in the 19th Century (London: A&C Black, 1909).

Weedon Grossmith, From Studio to Stage (London: John Lane, 1913).

In Pooter’s day suburbs like Holloway may have been mocked as parvenus but within such places many of the most influential new movements, such as women’s rights, germinated, as T. W. H. Crosland identified in The Suburbans (London: John Lane, 1905). This well of new ideas evaporated when suburbia was forced out to the London fringes in the 1930s. Since then suburbia has become associated with a dearth of ideas and a particularly reactionary lifestyle as captured in countless television sitcoms.

which runs down to the railway : Which railway line lies at the bottom of the Pooters’ garden? As there would have been no terrace of houses by the main King’s Cross line which runs through southern Holloway it is far more likely that the Laurels is situated alongside the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction spur of the North London Line in Upper Holloway. This spur is barely used now and even then was far from rich in passenger traffic. But it has always been used for freight, especially after dark, which must have caused the Pooters a few sleepless nights, although only Lupin (in Chapter VI) admits as much. Ironically, Pooter could have taken a property only half a mile away in Drayton Park for a similar rent, without any loss of social standing and lived by a railway line which would have afforded him a quicker connection to the City than the horse-drawn omnibus he takes daily. Only a Pooter would be so badly prepared in choosing a new address.

and took £2 off the rent : The Pooters are happy to rent. The idea of owning one’s own home did not apply so widely then. See Jenni Calder, The Victorian Home (London: Batsford, 1977). Nor was renting confined to the lower-middle classes. Charles Dickens, for instance, rented nearly all his London addresses.

in the Bank at Oldham : Oldham, 200 miles north of London and several degrees colder, was then at the hub of England’s cotton-spinning industry.

APRIL 3 : Beginning the Diary on 1 April would have been too obvious, but starting around this time is appropriate. The beginning of April is also the beginning of the financial year, as Pooter, and Lupin, particularly, would have been aware.

(April 10) It is disgraceful how late some of the young clerks are at arriving : In 1879 George Grossmith had appeared in an adaptation of the farce Cox and Box by Punch editor F. C. Burnand in which he had to perform a song which opened ‘My master is punctual always in business.’

(April 11) Sarah, our servant : By 1890 the number of servants in Britain had peaked at around one and a half million.

(April 15) a good long walk over Hampstead and Finchley : Weedon Grossmith talks about going on such a walk in From Studio to Stage . Even today such a walk, from Upper Holloway to Hampstead and Finchley, would be pleasant, taking in Highgate Village, Ken Wood and Hampstead Garden Suburb (not built when The Diary of a Nobody was written). The last stretch, to Finchley, across the North Circular Road would however be rather irksome.

(April 15) Gowing suggested that we should make for ‘The Cow and Hedge ’: The Cow and Hedge is an obvious pun on The Old Bull and Bush, a perennially popular pub on North End Road by Hampstead Heath with which the Grossmiths, having been raised locally, would doubtless have been acquainted, and which at the time the Diary was written would have been one of the few buildings in the area. The pub, a favourite of Hogarth, David Garrick, Reynolds and Dickens, was immortalized in Florrie Ford’s 1903 song ‘Down at the Old Bull & Bush’, now considered to be a standard from the period.

(April 15) ‘ That’s all right – bona-fide travellers ’: Until 1914 the law allowed only those who had travelled more than three miles a drink out of hours on Sundays. Only those of the lowest morality, i.e. not Pooter, would fib about the distance they had come.