About 90 years ago a young Warwickshire allrounder impressed two people called "Plum". Pelham Warner, (England manager for the Bodyline series several years later) saw a potential England cricketer in this man. And Pelham Grenville Wodehouse found the perfect name for the perfect butler: Jeeves.
Percy Jeeves' picture — hung on the walls in the Wyatt pavilion at Edgbaston — is easy to miss. What with the England v Australia business going on. But stories about Jeeves' whippy action, and a six he hit on to Edgbaston road are easy to come by.
Accounts of how he came to impress Wodehouse differ in the details.
Wodehouse was a keen cricket follower, and one (popular) version has it that he saw Jeeves in a game between Gloucestershire and Warwickshire in 1913. Jeeves didn't do much (just the one wicket for the game) but did enough, apparently, for Wodehouse to settle on the name for Bertie Wooster's salaried saviour, to be introduced in 1917 in The man with two left feet. (Incidentally, Wodehouse didn't adopt the cricketer's first name — his Jeeves' first name, Reginald, first appears only three years before his last book in 1974.)
But there's another lesser known account of how Jeeves impressed Wodehouse. Percy Jeeves was a working class lad from Yorkshire, and also played cricket for the Hawes cricket club, founded by Hugh Crallan, a friend of Wodehouse.