ONE hundred years ago this month on the Somme, Pte Percy Jeeves, 28, of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment was cut down and killed.

Of course, thousands of privates died during this bloodiest of battles, but Jeeves lives on as he gave his name to one of the most enduring characters in English literature.

He was a Yorkshireman, born near Dewsbury, and had trials with the county cricket club in 1910. They didn’t come to anything, so he answered an advert in Athletics News placed by Hawes Cricket Club for a professional.

Up the top of the dale, he was a great success – he took 65 wickets at an average of 7.5, he hit 77 against Leyburn, and he tended the wicket well. The club captain, Hugh Arden Crallan, of Stone House (now a hotel) befriended him and gave him some additional income as a gardener.

During the summer of 1910, the secretary of Warwickshire County Cricket Club, Rowland Ryder, holidayed in the village – he may even have been put up in Stone House.

One morning, he cut himself while shaving with a cut-throat razor and called the Hawes doctor to stem the bleeding. Once the emergency had passed, the doctor prescribed a restful afternoon at a local cricket match as a perfect antidote, and there Ryder was so impressed by the “effortless grace” of Jeeves that he signed him up.

Jeeves had to live in Warwickshire for two years before he was eligible to play for the county, so it wasn’t until the 1913 season that he could make his debut. It was worth it: he took 106 wickets at an average of 20.88 and scored 765 runs at an average of 20.13.

He wasn’t quite so successful in 1914, taking only 90 wickets, but having impressed during a Players versus Gentlemen match at the Oval, it was considered that he was on the verge of an England call up.

Probably Jeeves’ worst match of that season was against Gloucestershire at Cheltenham, where he scored a measly run and took a single wicket, but his effortless grace impressed a certain spectator, PG Wodehouse, whose parents lived around the corner from the ground.

At the end of the 1914 season, Jeeves volunteered for his local regiment and on July 22, 1916, he was killed at Montauban on the Somme.

At about the same time in New York, sickened by news of the bloodshed, Wodehouse was retreating into his own comical world where his aristocratic creation, Bertie Wooster, had a stylish butler who was in need of a name. The effortless grace of the Hawes bowler immediately sprang into his mind and so Jeeves was born, although Jeeves himself was dead.