Abstract
Avid readers of Plum will be familiar with Sir Roderick Glossop, school friend of Lord Emsworth and Society Psychiatrist who treated the aristocracy. A teetotaller with a morbid fear of cats, Glossop is convinced by Jeeves that Bertie Wooster is mentally unstable and fortuitously sunders Wooster's hasty engagement with daughter Honoria. What is not so well known is that Wodehouse often based the details of his characters, the places they visit and even their adventures upon real life examples.
The young Wodehouse (1881–1975) stayed frequently with his maternal grandmother and her four unmarried daughters (no doubt explaining his continued aversion to aunts) at Cheney Court, situated in the village of Box in Wiltshire. Dr MacBryan LRCS, described as having an enormous bald head and bristling eyebrows, ran a private mental home a short distance away at Kingsdown House. Clearly he had an effect upon the boy since Dr MacBryan became the model for Sir Roderick. 1
Records concerning the doctor are scarce and so we cannot be sure how much of the original made its way into the literary character. Dr MacBryan made application to run a private asylum in West Derby in Lancashire, and also appeared on the staff list of the Hanwell County Asylum in 1884. 2 His name is given at the quarterly meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland that attended at 11 Chandos Street in May 1906. 3 In the early 20th century the establishment at Box was recorded as being well run with 43 patients who were charged between two and five guineas per week. 4 This would have helped to send his son Jack to Cambridge where he became a cricket blue, later capped for England and went on to win a hockey Gold Medal at the 1920 Olympics. Dr MacBryan is known to have written to Jack when he was incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp at Magdeburg and it may be the name of another son, Edward, that is recorded on the Box War Memorial as having been killed in action in 1917. The gates of the former mental home are thought to have become the entrance to the Swindon Borough Council Crematorium.