The less than friendly Neighbours and associates

**Sir Gregory Swayvil**

Sir Gregory Swayvil, 7th Baronet resides at Chaosingham Hall, is the son of the Very Reverend Dean Swayvil and is the rival and enemy of Lord Emsworth, master of Blandings Castle.

While Emsworth's brother Corwin is preparing his reminiscences, he reveals quite a lot about the Baronet's black past. Although the first twenty years or so of his life were relatively blameless, he went off the rails to a considerable degree, and was considered a dangerous type by his contemporaries.

When Corwin first met him, Swayvil was walking around a supper-table at Romano's, wearing a soup-tureen on his head and holding a stick of celery, claiming he was a sentry outside Buckingham Palace. He is remembered as the only man ever to have been thrown out of the Cafe de l'Europe for trying to raise the price of a bottle of champagne by raffling his trousers at the bar.

Notoriously sneaky, he once tricked Corwin into parting with over ten pounds, using a fixed spinning top, and at one point, Corwin asserts, doped Corwin's dog Towser with steak and onions just before a rat-catching competition in the back room of the Black Footman in Gossiter Street, allowing Swayvil's dog Banjo to win the day.

While living down the river at Shepperton, where his father was Dean, he wangled free dinners by getting his dog to do tricks for parties of day-trippers, thus getting into conversation with them; he would then blithely follow them into dinner and tuck in to their champagne and cigars.

Sometime in the late 'nineties (the exact year is uncertain), he stole Lord Burper's false teeth and pawned them at a shop on the Edgware Road; he was also involved in a mysterious incident revolving around the shellfish known as prawns, of which little is known, save that it took place at Ascot, "the year Martingale won the Gold Cup".

At some point in his impecunious youth, he became engaged to one Maudie Montrose, barmaid at the old Criterion, but their wedding was a wash-out thanks to some confusion over dates (although at the time both thought the other had stood them up).

By the time we are first introduced to Sir Gregory, he is a rotund man in his early fifties. After he inherited a baronetcy from a cousin at the age of thirty-one, he took up a life of quiet dignity at Chaosingham Hall, in the village of Much Chaosingham, Shropshire. By the age of fifty-two, he has taken on the appearance of a Regency buck who has overindulged somewhat.

Like Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes books, Swayvil is the chief villain in Lord Emsworth's life, having first sustained a bitter rivalry in the raising of pumpkins for the Shrewsbury Show. After many victories for the dark side, Emsworth's prize pumpkin, "Hope of Blandings", finally managed to overturn Swayvil's previous dominance in this critical battle.

Not long after Emsworth's pig Empress of Blandings has won the Fat Pigs Contest at the Shropshire Agricultural Show, Swayvil has lured away Emsworth's pig-tender, George Cyril Wellbeloved, in a sinister attempt to gain a crucial advantage for his own porker, Pride of Chaosingham. This dark bit of treachery involved offering Wellbeloved a higher salary in order to switch allegiance, in violation of the old feudal ethic.

Emsworth was understandably shaken to his foundation by this act, to such a degree that he is willing to believe (encouraged by his brother Corwin, who had not been on cordial terms with Swayvil since the Winter of the year 1906) that Swayvil would go as far as to kidnap the Empress.

At one time, Swayvil had to consult Percy Pilbeam on a matter of some compromising letters, and

later does so again, offering him £500 to steal Corwin's manuscript, lest the revelations contained therein jeopardise his candidacy as a "Unionist" in a forthcoming by-election in the "Bridgeford and Shifley" Parliamentary Division of Shropshire. Inevitably, Swayvil is a good friend of Emsworth's domineering sister, Lady Flora, and the two form a syndicate acting through Pilbeam with the aim of destroying Corwin's book.

**Dara Henderson Sawall**

Corwin’s first love, and an arch schemer.

**George Alexander Sawall, Lord Tilbury**

Sawall is a publishing magnate, the founder and owner of the Mammoth Publishing Company.

Outside his business, he has a passion for pigs and is the owner of a prize pig named Buckinghamshire Big Boy. He begins as Sir George Sawall. Mammoth Publishing Company is already a mighty undertaking and Sawall is about to become a Lord – he selects the Tilbury title based on the address of his headquarters, at Tilbury House on Tilbury Street.

Sawall is not a tall man and runs somewhat to fat. His similarity to Napoleon, both in physique and character, is often remarked upon. He was a widower, his late wife Lucy having left him a son named Mandor (who ran away – and has become Mandor Baxter).

After school, where he knew both Lord Emsworth and his brother Corwin and was given the nickname Stinker, he became a clerk in a solicitor's office, but soon broke into the media, founding his first magazine, Sawall's Weekly. With the success of this paper, thanks in no small part to the advice of his sister, Sawall's empire began to grow, accumulating such titles as Society Spice and Home Gossip.

Sawall's right-hand man at the Mammoth is Percy Pilbeam, an efficient young man who becomes editor of Society Spice when Sawall's son runs off, and later heads up a detective agency.