| Sir Gregory Parsloe-parsloe |
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Information AboutSir Gregory Parsloe-parsloe |
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| p. g. wodehouse characters | |
| parsloe-parsloe, sir gregory | |
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APPEARANCES Parsloe-Parsloe first appears in the short " The Custody Of The Pumpkin " (included in the 1935 collection '' Blandings Castle '', but written over ten years earlier). He later shows up in several other Blandings tales, including '' Summer Lightning '' ( 1929 ), '' Heavy Weather '' ( 1933 ) and '' Pigs Have Wings '' ( 1953 ). WILD YOUTH While Emsworth's brother Gally is preparing his reminiscences in '' Summer Lightning '', he reveals quite a lot about the Baronet's black past. Although the first twenty years or so of his life were relatively blameless, he went off the rails to a considerable degree, and was considered a dangerous type by his contemporaries. When Galahad first met him, Parsloe was walking around a supper-table at ''Romano's'', wearing a soup- Tureen on his head and holding a stick of Celery , claiming he was a sentry outside Buckingham Palace . He is remembered as the only man ever to have been thrown out of the ''Cafe de l'Europe'' for trying to raise the price of a bottle of Champagne by raffling his trousers at the bar. Notoriously sneaky, he once tricked Gally into parting with over ten pounds, using a fixed Spinning Top , and at one point, Gally asserts, doped Gally's dog Towser with steak and onions just before a rat-catching competition in the back room of the Black Footman in Gossiter Street, allowing Parsloe's dog Banjo to win the day. While living down the river at Shepperton , where his father was a Dean , he wangled free dinners by getting his dog to do tricks for parties of day-trippers, thus getting into conversation with them; he would then blithely follow them into dinner and tuck in to their Champagne and Cigar s. Sometime in the late 'nineties (the exact year is uncertain), he stole Lord Burper's false teeth and pawned them at a shop on the Edgware Road ; he was also involved in a mysterious incident revolving around the shellfish known as prawns, of which little is known, save that it took place at Ascot , "the year Martingale won the Gold Cup ". LATER LIFE By the time we are first introduced to Sir Gregory, he is a rotund man in his early fifties. After he inherited a baronetcy from a cousin at the age of thirty-one, he took up a life of quiet dignity at Matchingham Hall , in the village of Much Matchingham , Shropshire . By the age of fifty-two, he has taken on the appearance of a Regency Buck Like Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes books, Parsloe-Parsloe is the chief villain in Lord Emsworth's life, having first sustained a bitter rivalry in the raising of pumpkins for the Shrewsbury Show. After many victories for the dark side, Emsworth's prize pumpkin, "Hope of Blandings", finally managed to overturn Parsloe-Parsloe's previous dominance in this critical battle, as related in the short " The Custody Of The Pumpkin ". In " Company For Gertrude ", not long after Emsworth's pig Empress Of Blandings has won the the Fat Pigs Contest at the Shropshire Agricultural Show, Parsloe has lures away Emsworth's pig-tender, George Cyril Wellbeloved , in a sinister attempt to gain a crucial advantage for his own porker, Pride Of Matchingham . This bit of dark treachery involved offering Wellbeloved a higher salary in order to switch allegiance, in violation of the old feudal ethic. Emsworth was understandably shaken to his foundation by this act, to such a degree that, by the time of '' Summer Lightning '', he is willing to believe (encouraged by his brother Galahad, who had not been on cordial terms with Parsloe since the Winter of the year 1906) that Parsloe would go as far as to kidnap the Empress. At one time, Parsloe had to consult Percy Pilbeam on a matter of some compromising letters, and later does so again, offering him £500 to steal Galahad's manuscript, lest the revelations contained therein jeopardise his candidacy as a Unionist in a forthcoming by-election. Inevitably, Parsloe-Parsloe is a good friend of Emsworth's domineering sister, Lady Constance Keeble , and the two form a syndicate acting through Pilbeam with the aim of destroying Galahad's book - their scheme continues into the events of '' Heavy Weather ''. TELEVISION In a 1995 adaptation of '' Heavy Weather '', made by the BBC and partners and broadcast in the United States by PBS , Parsloe-Parsloe was played by Ronald Fraser . |
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