Life as a Potter Pundit is a curious thing. I woke up this morning determined to draft an introduction to a long overdue book project. I wound up, as you’ve probably guessed from the post title, well afield of that good intention on the hunt of two supposed sources for Rowling’s character names in the Hogwarts Saga.
It wasn’t a wasted effort, in fact, there was a reward at trail’s end I never would have expected, but it was still a day gone sideways.
It started with a note in e-owlery from a Serious Reader named ‘Mia.’ She believes that John Nettleship, Rowling’s chemistry teacher at Wyedean Comprehensive and the model for Severus Snape per comments the author made in October 2007 on the Open Book Tour, is also the model for Jonny Rokeby in the Strike-Ellacott novels. I asked her to make an argument for that remarkable claim and she obliged me with a compelling list of coincidences today. Having asked for that evidence, I felt obliged to check out her list and verify what I could. [You can read our back-and-forth on the comment thread here.]
Which required a deep dive into the life of John Nettleship. If you want to review my effort, here are the best links I found to material about the remarkable man’s life: his Wikipedia page, ‘This Is Gloucestershire’ Nettleship profile (2009), Southwest Wales Argus obituary (2011), and a Wales Online obituary (2011). The best resource I found for other resources was the WikiWand Nettleship page, which had in its references three treasures:
- “Rowling’s teacher who inspired Harry Potter’s Prof Snape dies at 71”. Western Mail. 17 March 2011.
- “Rowling’s ‘spell’ on science teacher”. BBC News. 28 December 2001.
- Jordan, Claire M. “A true original: John Nettleship and the roots of Severus Snape”. madasafish.com.
That last piece, the one by Claire Jordan, is of epic length for an online post and is all over the map. Nettleship had a variety of interests, from the history of south Wales and western England and a cappella singing in ancient churches (hear Snape sing!), to a lifetime of participation in Labour Party canvassing and campaigning — and, of course, after he learned that he was part of Rowling’s inspiration for the Potions Master Severus Snape, with all things Harry Potter.
Jordan’s piece makes a few remarkable claims that I had not heard before and which I hope Nick Jeffery, our man at the Welsh-English border, will be able to confirm or deny. Most notably, Nettleship claimed that it was known among the Wyedean Comprehensive faculty that young Rowling was writing whilst a student a schoolboy story using her teachers as models. He also told Jordan, one of “the Sisterhood” of Potter fans that corresponded with Nettleship frequently in the last five years of his life, that Rowling had signed up for a voluntary astronomy class with him; this was part of his argument in his own defense that he wasn’t the sadistic monster that Snape could be.
Most disturbing to me — and I have no idea how Nick Jeffery will be able to check up on for veracity — was the sheer brutality in the Comprehensive classrooms of that era. Nettleship, aka “Stinger,” if he is to be believed, was something of a punching bag and pin cushion for his students and his supposed “bullying” was little more than self-defense in an environment crowded with bi-pedal wild animals.
I hope to be reading Mr Jeffery’s take-aways from all that in the coming weeks, especially if he can get a copy of Nettleship’s Harry Potter’s Chepstow, a booklet he sold locally and in which he shared many of the local sources for Rowling’s Wizarding World.
Today, I want to share the search I made through two books that Claire Jordan’s mini-biography of Nettleship suggested I should read. She wrote:
I know that some fen feel that it is some sort of crime to suggest that there might have been real life inspirations for some people and events in the Potterverse, but you only have to compare Rowling’s own drawings with the real staff at Wyedean to see that it was so, and the books are full of in-jokes about real items of British politics and folklore and sly clever references to other authors – Tinworth, for example, is the name of a fictional Cornish village in the murder-mystery Safer Than Love by Margery Allingham, which takes place in a boys’ boarding school, and Umbridge and Tonks are the names of two of the teachers at St Trinian’s. In any case this essay is about John, and it is a fact that John made a very active hobby out of spotting likely real-life inspirations for the books, lectured about it and wrote a book and many essays about it, and that at least three other members of the Wyedean staff shared his interest.
I was able to read Safer than Love online today (via the Web Archive) and then the online St Trinian book by Ronald Searle which wasn’t just a collection of his cartoons, The Terror of St. Trinian’s (also via the Web Archive), a story written by Timothy Shy, pen-name for D. B. Wyndham Lewis. Join me after the jump for my findings!
Safer than Love is one of two novellas by Margery Allingham, a known Rowling favorite and literary influence, which were published together in 1954 as No Love Lost. For a glimpse into how important a source Allingham was to Rowling, read The Origin and Meaning of ‘Voldemort:’ Allingham’s ‘The Tiger in the Smoke’? For the sort course, this answer to a Val McDermid question at the Harrosgate Festival should suffice:
Val McDermid: How did that love affair with crime start for you?
JKR: Probably…I know I was reading Christies when I was quite young. All of the Big Four – Marsh, Allingham, Christie and Sayers – I’ve read and loved. My very favorite of those four is Allingham and she’s the least known. It’s The Tiger in the Smoke, which I think is a phenomenal novel. I read that when I had a newborn baby and I was so tired, I’ll never forget how that book held my attention. Every night I would go to bed absolutely exhausted, but I had to read, and it’s the only book I’ve ever read literally page by page because I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Because it gripped me so much. So anyone wanting an amazing atmospheric…this taut narrative….a genuinely terrifying villain …The Tiger in the Smoke.
I’d never heard of Safer than Love and had never heard anyone make a connection between Tinworth, the magical community in Cornwall mentioned twice in Deathly Hallows (Shell Cottage is just outside the town) and an Allingham story. So I promptly found it on the web archive and dove in.
True confessions: I didn’t read the Jordan paragraph closely and, when I started Safer than Love, I was expecting to find names like Umbrage and Tonks, the ones mentioned in connection with St Trinian’s. Which was a very good mistake to have made it turns out.
If I had just been looking for Tinworth, my search would have stopped on page one. Looking for names, I ploughed on — and found this:
One of the characters is a young doctor who decides he needs to do the right thing by the woman he loves, now married to another man, and leave Tinworth. He elects to have another intern, Dick Pettigrew, take his place and migrate overseas for a fresh start. We never meet or hear about Dick Pettigrew again but I think it’s a decisive hit and match with Peter Pettigrew.
Another Rowling known influence used the name ‘Pettigrew’ for a side character as well. P. D. James, a rich source of Rowling names, used Pettigrew for a solicitor “cursed with a name like that” in her Unnatural Causes (1967). I suspect that James either came up with it on her known or got the joke implicit in Allingham’s usage.
Tyndale books made me cut out the explanation of Peter Pettigrew’s name from the Names chapter in Looking for God in Harry Potter. They convinced me that the Christian book stores who sold their books would be sending it back if it included that exegesis with a note saying, “Don’t send us ‘penis’ books.” I decided they probably knew their audience and circumcised my page proofs.
‘Peter’ is a schoolboy name for ‘penis,’ ‘Pettigrew’ parses to ‘didn’t grow very large’ (petite-grow), and, if you don’t see it, the Harry Potter character most lacking the masculine virtue of courage was called ‘Wormtail’ by his friends. Not especially subtle, right?
Well, Dick Pettigrew is even less subtle. That find and the joy of reading a Margery Allingham novella made it an hour well spent. Rowling changed ‘Dick’ to ‘Peter’ though they mean the same thing on the playground or locker room for the alliterative effect, to add a shade of obscurity, and to use her father’s first name. See Christmas Pig 1: Jack Jones, Peter, John for how meaningful uses of her father’s name are to those working to understand the Lake inspiration as well as the Shed artistry of Rowling’s work.
Having made that find and realized my mistake — Claire Jordan clearly pointed to Ronald Searle’s St Trinian cartoons for the names ‘Umbridge’ and ‘Tonks’ — I found an online copy of Terror at St Trinian’s and dove in.
My enthusiasm was not just a consequence of the ‘Pettigrew’ find in the Allingham story. It was knowing that Searle, in the Molesworth books he illustrated and Geoffrey Willans wrote, was a known source of Rowling’s names for people and things in her Hogwarts Saga. As I explored in 2016’s Whence ‘Hogwarts’? Rowling, Molesworth, Influence and Intertextuality, Rowling all but certainly lifted Hogwarts, Scrimgouer, Wizard Wheezes, “and brainy girls named Hermione” from the Searles-Willans send-up of schoolboy stories in the 1950s.
Searle’s ‘St Trinian’ cartoons are schoolgirl rather than schoolboy story send-ups. They were among the first things he drew to be published in a UK magazine. His memory of first seeing that publication in Lilliput is worth sharing:
Lilliput accepted the cartoon, and it was published in October 1941. It shows a group of schoolgirls gazing bemusedly at an official noticeboard, bare flesh showing between the tops of their stockings and their gym slips. The cartoon’s caption, slightly reworded by Webb, reads: “Owing to the international situation, the match with St Trinian’s has been postponed.” (In fact, of course, the girls must have belonged to another school, but the drawing is always known as the first St Trinian’s cartoon.) Searle, however, had been posted abroad before publication, arriving in Singapore in January 1942. By the end of the month the British forces had withdrawn from Malaya to the island, but this was not enough to stop the Japanese from invading, which they did on 9 February 1942. On 13 February, under enemy fire, Searle found a copy of the October issue of Lilliput amongst debris in a Singapore street, and saw his cartoon in print for the first time. Two days later the British forces surrendered, and Searle was listed as “missing”, his career also postponed “owing to the international situation”. No more was heard of him for almost two years, until the Red Cross finally informed his family that he was alive on 29 December 1943.
Searle’s wartime experiences in Japanese POW and work camps are the stuff of nightmares. The more than 300 sketches that he made and which survived the war are some of the only records of life, the living death, in these camps (they’re now held in the Victoria War Museum).
Incredibly, on his return he found the market for St Trinian’s schoolgirl cartoons was if anything more vibrant than before his deployment overseas. It became his primary source of income from 1946 to 1952 and the subject of four published collections of the satirical cartoons sold to individual magazines. I chose to read Terror at St Trinian’s today because it was the only illustrated story book by Searle about the horribly jaundiced teachers and students at his imaginary girl’s school. My guess was that it would have a lot of names, to include ‘Umbridge’ and ‘Tonks.’
The Headmistress of St. Trinian’s is Miss Umbrage and the reader meets her on the first page. Other Hogwarts pick-ups or hints of echoes in Terror include “Mo Muckstein and his Merry Marauders,” a “Widget merger” attempted by the story’s Dursley-esque industrialist, a “basilisk gaze,” and a character named “Madge Scattermole,” which was just close enough to “Mrs. Cattermole” in Deathly Hallows for me to include it.
But no “Tonks” in the St Trinian’s faculty of Terror. Frustrated by that absence — and after two hours of reading that was not nearly as enjoyable as Safer than Love — I did a simple DuckDuckGo search for ‘Tonks St Trinian’s.’ And the solo cartoon in which she is mentioned pops right up. The caption for the 1951 cartoon to the right reads: ‘Well actually, Miss Tonks, my soul is in torment’, The original drawing sold at auction in 2022 for £3,825.
Was that a day well spent? I suppose, if I worked at the Harry Potter Lexicon website and could update the ‘Peter Pettigrew,’ ‘Tinworth,’ ‘Dolores Umbridge,’ and ‘Nymphadora Tonks’ pages with fairly definitive sources for Rowling’s name choices, then I’d consider this a very productive day.
I don’t work there, though, and, as much as I admire the achievement of the Lexicon archives, that’s not my schtick. Back to that tomorrow, God willing!
