The Oldest Member is a fictional character from the short stories and novels of P. G. Wodehouse. He narrates the majority of Wodehouse's golf stories from the terrace of a golf club whose location is unclear, and he never has a proper name. We don't even know whether the Golf Club is located in England or in the United States. In The Clicking of Cuthbert, it appears to be in England. In The Heart of a Goof, it seems to be in the United States, but then, some characters will talk about pounds instead of dollars, and Marvis Bay is mentioned in one of the story. And we know that Marvis Bay is one of the favorite fictional English seaside resorts of Wodehouse.
While the club's members enjoy having drinks in the clubhouse after a brisk eighteen holes, they do so fully aware of the risk that the Oldest Member, who, though he has long since given up golf, has seen all and knows all, might pick up on their conversation and begin to relate a story from his experience. Once he has started talking, he cannot be stopped. These stories are often told to another character, 'the young man', who, for some reason, seems eager to leave before the story has even started.
BBC Radio 4 aired an adaptation of some of the short stories and novels. Maurice Denham starred in three series between 1994 and 1999.
Read more about Oldest Member: Stories
Famous quotes containing the words oldest and/or member:
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)