Percy Jeeves Killed on the Somme — The Cricketer Who Inspired Wodehouse's Butler, July 1916

Jeeves was born in Earlsheaton, Yorkshire, in 1888. After failing to break into the Yorkshire side he qualified for Warwickshire by residency.

Wodehouse later told Vanity Fair that he had been watching cricket at Cheltenham and had been taken with the name of the bowler. Jeeves was bowling for Warwickshire against Gloucestershire that day in August 1913.

Percy Jeeves was a Yorkshire-born professional who joined Warwickshire in 1912. By 1914 he had taken 106 first-class wickets in a season and was being talked about as a future England bowler. P.G. Wodehouse, on a visit to Cheltenham to watch a county match in summer 1913, was struck by Jeeves' name and elegant bowling action. The first Jeeves story, 'Extricating Young Gussie', was published in 1915. The cricketer Jeeves had by then enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was sent to France in 1915 and promoted to lance-corporal. On 22 July 1916, in the second wave of attacks on High Wood — one of the bloodiest sectors of the Somme — Jeeves was killed by a shell. His body was never recovered. He is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial. Wodehouse, who wrote his Jeeves stories for the next sixty years and never publicly acknowledged the source until much later, was reportedly distressed when told of the cricketer's death.

“He had a beautiful action and could bowl all day.”

Jeeves' name is on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. Warwickshire CCC named a stand at Edgbaston after him in 2018, more than a century after his death.