Madame Eulalie - Daily Express (UK)

Poems and Articles from The Daily Express (UK)

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Terry Mordue for tracking down scans of many of these rare items, and for annotations. Thanks also to Parthasarathy Uppilisrinivasan for part of the transcription. These items have been freshly compared with the originals, reformatted, corrected, and updated with additional annotations in January 2015.

The Parrot verses — September 30–December 21, 1903 *

Screech Day — December 18, 1903

A Fiscal Pantomime: The Sleeping Beauty (with B. Fletcher Robinson) — December 28, 1903 *

Fiscal Problems for Breakfast — February 6, 1904

Election Songs (verse) — January 11, 1906

It Was the Stout Progressive on the Tram (verse) — February 8, 1907 **

To Thomas, Songster (verse) — March 15, 1907

Diabolo — October 1, 1907

The Dustbin (verse) — January 26, 1909 †

“The Island of Lots-of-Time” (Wodehouse letter to the editor) — March 12, 1912 ***

The New Drama (verse) — January 13, 1913 ****

“Supplementary” (Wodehouse letter to the editor) — July 19, 1921 †

* With annotations by Terry Mordue

** McIlvaine lists this as “The Professor on the Train”, misreading Wodehouse’s entry “The Progressive on the Tram” in his account book

*** Discovered January 2015 by Neil Midkiff

**** Discovered January 2015 by John Dawson

† Discovered January 2025 by AK

Daily Express (UK)

The Daily Express was founded in 1900 by Sir Arthur Pearson. Pearson sold the title after losing his sight and it was bought in 1916 by the future Lord Beaverbrook. It was one of the first papers to carry gossip, sports, and women’s features, and the first newspaper in Britain to have a crossword. The Russian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote despatches for the paper following his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929. (from Wikipedia)

Arthur Pearson was the first editor from 1900–1901, followed by Betram Fletcher Robinson who edited it till 1904. It was during this time that PGW wrote a series of satirical political poems entitled “The Parrot.” While they did not appear under P.G.W.’s name, at least one of his biographers has written that it was an open secret in Fleet Street that PGW was the author. McIlvaine does not list all of the parrot poems, only half. We present the full series here, for what it’s worth.