While planning "Thank You, Jeeves", Wodehouse wrote a letter to his friend William Townend about ideas for the novel. In the letter, dated 1 April 1932, Wodehouse wrote that he was writing "a Jeeves novel where Bertie, who is blacked up like a nigger minstrel, is scouring the countryside for butter to remove his blacking". According to the letter, Wodehouse was considering ideas that do not appear in the final novel, including an idea of Bertie breaking into an animal breeder's house for butter and being confronted by a number of animals, and another idea in which Bertie ends up at a girls' school, gets chased by a Games Mistress (a woman who teaches sports), and subsequently hides in a dormitory, where the kids welcome him enthusiastically because they think he is a blackface minstrel.