Continuing with this blog’s insistence that PG Wodehouse was not a novelist, simply a hugely talented documentarist (unlike Moore who appears to be a fantasist) I present further evidence from that chronicle of an England past, the Telegraph obituary page on Nicholas Phipps (no, I didn’t know who he was either.):

He had impressed the paper’s proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, by appearing for an interview in a huge beaver coat that had belonged to his Buccleuch grandfather and by announcing that he was not a creative writer, only an efficient hack. “Thank God,” replied the press baron. “Creative writers are two a penny. Efficient hacks are very rare.”

Following the death of his father in 1960, Phipps returned to England where he took over the family seat in Wiltshire, which was now saddled with massive debts and galloping dry rot, its staff reduced to a 90-year-old parlourmaid, Maud, and a land-girl, Lee, who kept a sheep in her bedroom.

Phipps was a voracious reader, able to gut a book in 10 minutes and then to quote from it verbatim. He wrote dazzling 10-page letters in a forceful italic hand on black-bordered paper over-ordered on his grandfather’s death in 1913.

All his life he had enjoyed polishing his shoes; he kept a special box of marrow bones, old toothbrushes and bits of his wife’s tights for this purpose. Wooden boot trees preserved his shoes, but porters learned to avoid his luggage. His wardrobe included underpants with ducal monograms and a cream silk suit made for his father in Paris in 1911. In modern times, he supplemented these items with pastel striped silk jackets, pink trousers and yellow socks bought off-the-peg on annual trips to Palm Beach.
Despite these indulgences, Phipps remained personally abstemious. He had a cold bath every morning of the year, never took taxis, and during Lent denied himself not only alcohol, coffee, cream and sugar in all forms but also fried bread.

Reading those excerpts can anyone honestly say that Plum made things up?