Herbert Westbrook

Herbert Wotton Westbrook, also referred to as Herbert Wetton Westbrook (?? – 22 March 1959), was an author best known for having been an early collaborator of P.G. Wodehouse, including becoming his assistant in writing the “By the Way” column for The Globe, before Wodehouse went to live in the United States. Westbrook was also, at least in part, the model for Wodehouse’s character Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge.

Through Westbrook, Wodehouse would also be introduced to the names "Emsworth", "Threepwood" and "Beach", names which would feature in some of his most famous novels. Together they also co-wrote some musicals and, under the pen name Basil Windham, a serial for Chums, "The Luck Stone".

Meeting at Wodehouse's bedsit in London in 1903, Westbrook, a teacher of Latin and Greek at Emsworth House, a prep school in Emsworth, near Portsmouth, would invite Wodehouse to come down and stay with him. The school was run by Baldwin King-Hall, to whom Wodehouse would write the dedication in Indiscretions of Archie, published in 1921. In 1912, Westbrook married Ella, Baldwin King-Hall’s sister, with whom Westbrook and Wodehouse had written an unsuccessful "musical sketch", The Bandit’s Daughter, which only played for a few days at the Bedford Theatre in Camden Town in 1907. Shortly after their marriage, Ella set up a literary agency and became, until her retirement in 1935, Wodehouse’s literary agent for his contracts in the UK.

As well as referring to him as "Brook", Wodehouse would also write a dedication to Westbrook, "that Prince of Slackers", in The Golden Bat (1904). A later dedication to A Gentleman of Leisure (1910), read "To Herbert Westbrook, without whose never-failing advice, help, and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time".

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