It should be clear from my posts of 18 and 27 August that Kittie Calderon felt deeply frustrated by her husband’s ‘finality’, as she called it, about going to the Front when no-one was asking him to enlist at the age of forty-five.
Since they married in November 1900 they had become a very close couple indeed, almost symbiotic (Kittie was also his literary agent). The thought that George might actually get killed was, I believe, terrifying to her.
But she had always claimed to take the view that a man must do what a man must do. During the London Dock Strike of 1912 she fretted that he was risking his life, and he was. Nevertheless she wrote that there would have been ‘no smallest use’ in her saying ‘is it fair to me that you should risk your life?’, because ‘it was his job — he saw it — he had to do it’.
When Calderon went on recuperative cruises, or on a six-month anthropological quest to Tahiti, she did not accompany him, because she felt ‘Adventure was essential for George — and a man can’t have completeness of adventure if he has got a woman with him’.
One of the biggest difficulties of understanding a past and writing the biography of someone who lived in it, is that people used words which still exist in our language but now carry a completely different weight. For the Edwardians, ‘staunch’, or ‘stalwart’, or ‘gallant’ (of an officer), or ‘charming’ (of literature) embodied very important values that we have lost. Kittie Calderon was ‘staunch’ and ‘stalwart’.
Her friends, however, were appalled at what George was doing. Kittie had lived with her mother Mary Hamilton all her life, even when married, but her mother had died in 1906, and because of a geographical split in her father John Hamilton’s large family Kittie was left with hardly any relations in mainland Britain.
Next entry: 30 August 1914
Related
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Captain of the 11
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon c.1901
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon, 1912
Kittie
It should be clear from my posts of 18 and 27 August that Kittie Calderon felt deeply frustrated by her husband’s ‘finality’, as she called it, about going to the Front when no-one was asking him to enlist at the age of forty-five.
Since they married in November 1900 they had become a very close couple indeed, almost symbiotic (Kittie was also his literary agent). The thought that George might actually get killed was, I believe, terrifying to her.
But she had always claimed to take the view that a man must do what a man must do. During the London Dock Strike of 1912 she fretted that he was risking his life, and he was. Nevertheless she wrote that there would have been ‘no smallest use’ in her saying ‘is it fair to me that you should risk your life?’, because ‘it was his job — he saw it — he had to do it’.
When Calderon went on recuperative cruises, or on a six-month anthropological quest to Tahiti, she did not accompany him, because she felt ‘Adventure was essential for George — and a man can’t have completeness of adventure if he has got a woman with him’.
One of the biggest difficulties of understanding a past and writing the biography of someone who lived in it, is that people used words which still exist in our language but now carry a completely different weight. For the Edwardians, ‘staunch’, or ‘stalwart’, or ‘gallant’ (of an officer), or ‘charming’ (of literature) embodied very important values that we have lost. Kittie Calderon was ‘staunch’ and ‘stalwart’.
Her friends, however, were appalled at what George was doing. Kittie had lived with her mother Mary Hamilton all her life, even when married, but her mother had died in 1906, and because of a geographical split in her father John Hamilton’s large family Kittie was left with hardly any relations in mainland Britain.
Next entry: 30 August 1914
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