New followers of the blog deserve an explanation, I feel, of why the last four posts have been purely military and what stage ‘Calderonia’ is at.
The main object of the blog is to follow the last year of writer George Calderon’s life in a kind of ‘real time’, i.e. by posting events and documents exactly a hundred years after they happened. We need to contextualise these by keeping track of other, simultaneous developments — military, social, political — that impacted, however obliquely, on Calderon’s life. Concurrently, when there is time I discuss any theme that arises, e.g. Edwardian semantics, George’s Chekhov translations, or the writing of my 160,000-word biography, which is now almost finished. (Another theme is, please consider Leaving a Comment on the blog rather than e-mailing me or writing, so that your views can be shared directly with other followers.)
On 9 January 1915, at the age of forty-six, George was given a commission as lieutenant with the 9th Ox and Bucks. Shortly after he moved with them into Fort Brockhurst at Gosport, the whole battalion went down with flu and tonsilitis, and he was very ill. About the middle of February 1915 he was well enough to come home to Hampstead on sick leave. My guess is that he returned to Fort Brockhurst and his military training in the first week of March 1915 (see post of 3 March 2015).
Unfortunately, we have no personal documents relating to Calderon’s life between the beginning of February and the middle of April 1915. This could be because, as his wife Kittie’s memoirs tell us, he was home Friday-Monday every weekend. However, George was a pretty prolific letter-writer and one of the purposes of his letters home from military service was to provide a record of his experiences for a later book. It seems quite possible, therefore, that he wrote home in this period but that some of his letters were concerned with Kittie’s attempts to persuade him to give up active service and work on the home front. He was unresponsive to her arguments, and those of many of his friends. So she may well have destroyed this part of their correspondence.
Rest assured, from the middle of April we can resume the story of George’s life in much more continuous ‘real time’, with some wonderful personal documents. Meanwhile, my supposition is that on weekend leave, amongst other things, George worked on a synopsis of his travel book Tahiti which would enable Kittie to assemble it if he did not return from the War, and on his last play The Lamp, which she was similarly able to complete for publication. Tomorrow, then, I will look at aspects of Tahiti (see also my blogs of 27 February and 1 March), and subsequently I shall discuss The Lamp.
On the military front, my priority will be to keep in step with developments at the Dardenelles. For a superb recent interview on the subject, go to:
http://www.historyanswers.co.uk/history-of-war/the-blunder-of-gallipoli-a-failed-campaign-dissected/
Next entry: Tahiti: an imagined world?
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Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George Calderon c.1901
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Captain of the 11
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon, 1912
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
‘Calderonia’: an update
New followers of the blog deserve an explanation, I feel, of why the last four posts have been purely military and what stage ‘Calderonia’ is at.
The main object of the blog is to follow the last year of writer George Calderon’s life in a kind of ‘real time’, i.e. by posting events and documents exactly a hundred years after they happened. We need to contextualise these by keeping track of other, simultaneous developments — military, social, political — that impacted, however obliquely, on Calderon’s life. Concurrently, when there is time I discuss any theme that arises, e.g. Edwardian semantics, George’s Chekhov translations, or the writing of my 160,000-word biography, which is now almost finished. (Another theme is, please consider Leaving a Comment on the blog rather than e-mailing me or writing, so that your views can be shared directly with other followers.)
On 9 January 1915, at the age of forty-six, George was given a commission as lieutenant with the 9th Ox and Bucks. Shortly after he moved with them into Fort Brockhurst at Gosport, the whole battalion went down with flu and tonsilitis, and he was very ill. About the middle of February 1915 he was well enough to come home to Hampstead on sick leave. My guess is that he returned to Fort Brockhurst and his military training in the first week of March 1915 (see post of 3 March 2015).
Unfortunately, we have no personal documents relating to Calderon’s life between the beginning of February and the middle of April 1915. This could be because, as his wife Kittie’s memoirs tell us, he was home Friday-Monday every weekend. However, George was a pretty prolific letter-writer and one of the purposes of his letters home from military service was to provide a record of his experiences for a later book. It seems quite possible, therefore, that he wrote home in this period but that some of his letters were concerned with Kittie’s attempts to persuade him to give up active service and work on the home front. He was unresponsive to her arguments, and those of many of his friends. So she may well have destroyed this part of their correspondence.
Rest assured, from the middle of April we can resume the story of George’s life in much more continuous ‘real time’, with some wonderful personal documents. Meanwhile, my supposition is that on weekend leave, amongst other things, George worked on a synopsis of his travel book Tahiti which would enable Kittie to assemble it if he did not return from the War, and on his last play The Lamp, which she was similarly able to complete for publication. Tomorrow, then, I will look at aspects of Tahiti (see also my blogs of 27 February and 1 March), and subsequently I shall discuss The Lamp.
On the military front, my priority will be to keep in step with developments at the Dardenelles. For a superb recent interview on the subject, go to:
http://www.historyanswers.co.uk/history-of-war/the-blunder-of-gallipoli-a-failed-campaign-dissected/
Next entry: Tahiti: an imagined world?
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