The butler, without batting an eyelid, corrected,“Lord Chum-ley, sir.” “Oh, all right,” said Bottomley, who would be a journalist, a journeyman and be jailed for fraud. “Tell him that Mr Bumley would like to speak to him.”
No scene from a P.G. Wodehouse story this, but a real-life encounter that took place in pre-war or inter-war England when old notions of social class and pronunciation were beginning to be challenged. By then Thomas Hardy of the Victorian world had woven a woeful tragedy in Wessex around the d’Urberville family, labelling the wealthy branch as d’Urberville, and the one to which the miserable Tess belonged as Durbeyfield. Wodehouse of a newer world had made Bertie a simple Wooster instead of a Worcester, and George Bernard Shaw, who would notoriously pronounce ‘ghoti’ as ‘fish’, had staged Pygmalion, which was all about pronunciation and social class.
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A golden girl
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