On p34 of his superb biography, McCrum gives us a quick snapshot of Townend, though of course he crops up frequently throughout most of the book.
Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life; Viking, 2004; p34
Tall, pale, undernourished and eventually quite deaf ...
After Dulwich, ... Townend rejected the opportunity to go to Cambridge. He enrolled in a London art school, whence he tried and failed to have a career as a commercial artist ...
To help his friend, Wodehouse commissioned him to draw the (rather wooden) illustrations to his sixth novel, The White Feather, ...
Thereafter, Townend became an itinerant freelance writer, working on a lemon farm in California, knocking about the American West, and ending up in Vancouver, where he met Irene Ellam, known as 'Rene', whom he married in 1915. His first novel, A Light for his Pipe, was published in 1927.