Wharton's Characters
See also List of Peter Simple's characters.
The column satirized what Wharton saw as modern, fashionable ideas and readers often claimed to recognize his invented characters in real people. The columnar Dr Spacely-Trellis was the keenly progressive bishop of Bevindon, part of Stretchford, a fictional conurbation somewhere in the English Midlands, possibly named after Stechford, the area of Birmingham once represented in Parliament by Roy Jenkins, a figurehead of the political ideas Wharton despised.
The progress of the local football team, Stretchford United ("The Deckchairmen"), was regularly reported. With their lethargic, goal-conceding goalkeeper, Albert Rasp, United generally did not win games at their subsidence-plagued Effluent Road ground and inspired the similarly hapless Neasden F.C. in Private Eye. Elsewhere in Stretchford was lovely, sex-maniac-haunted Sadcake Park with its resident, council-subsidised Indian hermit, but the conurbation was also roamed by dangerous gangs of middle-aged women affiliated to rapidly changing fan-clubs and anti-fan-clubs. Of the resulting violence, the expert psychoanalyst "Dr. Heinz Kiosk" was always ready to assure journalists that "We are all guilty!" The nearby Mountwarlock Estate, with its deadly wyverns, gorgons and upas tree, was owned by the eight-foot, cyclops-eyed Earl of Mountwarlock and overseen by his butler Phantomsby, "one of the few practising werewolves left in the Midlands".
Wharton also regularly chronicled the life of the august Alderman Foodbotham, perpetual chairman of the Bradford City Tramways and Fine Arts Committee, who was said to be buried in the grounds of his country seat Green Garth just outside town and awaiting a glorious resurrection. Not fictional was the column's presiding spirit, Colonel Sibthorp, an eccentric and reactionary Victorian Member of Parliament, about whom Wharton made a BBC radio documentary in 1954.
Read more about this topic: Michael Wharton
Famous quotes containing the words wharton and/or characters:
“After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others.”
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
“The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)