27/4/16. By the time you read this, I shall either be poring over George Calderon’s uncatalogued manuscript (typescript?) of The Brave Little Tailor and Kittie’s letters to Laurence Binyon at the British Library, or I shall have done so, in which case I will be reporting on the results in next week’s post.
I have lost count of the number of archives I have worked in whilst researching this biography, but I have never worked in those at the British Library in Euston Road before. Frankly, I was rather relieved not to have had to, as some colleagues have found it a daunting experience. Either I have become Bewildered of Cambridge in my sixty-eighth year, or one has to be resigned to the website of a very large institution being complex; but I have been using computers for over thirty years and I do find the BL’s website labyrinthine and not very user-friendly. Again, I suppose a very large library has to cover every eventuality, but there are vast walls of words to get through. After taking well over an hour to pre-register as a Reader, receive email responses and register for a BL online account, I lost my way trying to pre-order my items and gave up.
But the staff are STELLAR! Once I had contacted PEOPLE in the Rare Books & Music Reference Service, and Western Manuscripts and Music Manuscripts, things moved at top speed. Not only did Andra Patterson, Curator of Music Manuscripts, find George’s manuscript in the voluminous uncatalogued Martin Shaw Collection — a feat in itself — and Zoe Stansell in the Manuscripts Reference Service clear my access to the Binyon Archive most unfustily, both immediately ordered the items for me on their own initiative and thus spared me the electronic quagmire. Bewildered of Cambridge cannot thank them enough for their fantastic service.
Since my last post, we have established from his military file that the first name of Onslow Ford, the fellow-officer of George’s in the 9th Ox & Bucks who knew Sir Ian Hamilton and wrote to him in July 1915 for news of George, was Wolfram. He was a portrait painter and moved in the highest social circles. I was able yesterday, then, to write a new paragraph for chapter 15, explaining that Hamilton was the source, or authority, for the idea that George might have been wounded, given first aid by the Turks, and become a prisoner.
Amongst Sir Ian Hamilton’s papers in the Liddell Hart Military Archives there are two letters pertaining to George’s fate. In the long one to Onslow Ford, Hamilton tells him that ‘one might fairly suggest there is quite a glimmer of hope still’ — and back in England Onslow Ford must have passed this on to Kittie. However, in the short letter that he wrote the same day to George’s commanding officer at the Third Battle of Krithia, Hamilton inadvertently refers to Kittie as George’s ‘widow’.
Meanwhile (see last week’s post) we are trying to trace descendants of the young man from Kennington, with a wife and children, who was killed by a landmine at Hythe in the year (1941) that Kittie stayed there, and whom Kittie probably knew…
I am fervently hoping that in the next seven days I shall be able to complete the penultimate revision of my typescript and proceed to writing the Introduction.
Related
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George Calderon c.1901
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Captain of the 11
Watch this Space
27/4/16. By the time you read this, I shall either be poring over George Calderon’s uncatalogued manuscript (typescript?) of The Brave Little Tailor and Kittie’s letters to Laurence Binyon at the British Library, or I shall have done so, in which case I will be reporting on the results in next week’s post.
I have lost count of the number of archives I have worked in whilst researching this biography, but I have never worked in those at the British Library in Euston Road before. Frankly, I was rather relieved not to have had to, as some colleagues have found it a daunting experience. Either I have become Bewildered of Cambridge in my sixty-eighth year, or one has to be resigned to the website of a very large institution being complex; but I have been using computers for over thirty years and I do find the BL’s website labyrinthine and not very user-friendly. Again, I suppose a very large library has to cover every eventuality, but there are vast walls of words to get through. After taking well over an hour to pre-register as a Reader, receive email responses and register for a BL online account, I lost my way trying to pre-order my items and gave up.
But the staff are STELLAR! Once I had contacted PEOPLE in the Rare Books & Music Reference Service, and Western Manuscripts and Music Manuscripts, things moved at top speed. Not only did Andra Patterson, Curator of Music Manuscripts, find George’s manuscript in the voluminous uncatalogued Martin Shaw Collection — a feat in itself — and Zoe Stansell in the Manuscripts Reference Service clear my access to the Binyon Archive most unfustily, both immediately ordered the items for me on their own initiative and thus spared me the electronic quagmire. Bewildered of Cambridge cannot thank them enough for their fantastic service.
Since my last post, we have established from his military file that the first name of Onslow Ford, the fellow-officer of George’s in the 9th Ox & Bucks who knew Sir Ian Hamilton and wrote to him in July 1915 for news of George, was Wolfram. He was a portrait painter and moved in the highest social circles. I was able yesterday, then, to write a new paragraph for chapter 15, explaining that Hamilton was the source, or authority, for the idea that George might have been wounded, given first aid by the Turks, and become a prisoner.
Amongst Sir Ian Hamilton’s papers in the Liddell Hart Military Archives there are two letters pertaining to George’s fate. In the long one to Onslow Ford, Hamilton tells him that ‘one might fairly suggest there is quite a glimmer of hope still’ — and back in England Onslow Ford must have passed this on to Kittie. However, in the short letter that he wrote the same day to George’s commanding officer at the Third Battle of Krithia, Hamilton inadvertently refers to Kittie as George’s ‘widow’.
Meanwhile (see last week’s post) we are trying to trace descendants of the young man from Kennington, with a wife and children, who was killed by a landmine at Hythe in the year (1941) that Kittie stayed there, and whom Kittie probably knew…
I am fervently hoping that in the next seven days I shall be able to complete the penultimate revision of my typescript and proceed to writing the Introduction.
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