I have returned from holiday fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November and get copies to the interested publishers immediately afterwards. This means writing the Afterword (‘Who George Calderon Was’), radically improving the ill-fated Introduction, producing the Bibliography, and composing voluminous and fulsome Acknowledgements. I think it is possible to do this without ‘O fallacem hominum spem!‘ [27 July 2016] striking, as I am on course to start writing the Afterword next week…
A blog is a very wonderful thing; or at least, it has proved so for me. As I explained last year, I was very sceptical about its value to begin with, but it led to incredibly enriching dialogues with followers by both Comment and email, it even led to the discovery of new Calderoniana, and in a way it produced a new form of biography (‘blography’). Most recently, it has enabled me to moot on the screen some key issues of my Afterword, such as the ‘nastiness factor’ and the ‘hero complex’, and impelled three subscribers to recommend further reading on the Edwardians that I have found useful. Thank you!
I will touch on only one more aspect of George’s character as an Edwardian, and that will be on Saturday, 8 October. Meanwhile, though, I think it would be appropriate to address some issues concerning Kittie.
The principal one must be that to the modern woman she seems not remotely modern. Her failure to ‘get a life of her own’ must indeed seem exasperating and sad. Her support for anti-suffragism would appear to confirm her lamentable ‘backwardness’. In her memoirs she describes utterly convincingly how George needed her when he was based at home; if she had to go away, ‘he at once seemed to feel left and lost’. Yet when he had to go away on a solo adventure, e.g. to Tahiti, it looks as though she simply waited patiently and meekly at home like a doormat to welcome him back. As a trained artist and believer in the Arts and Crafts Movement, why did she not exhibit paintings, make and sell handicrafts, design things? Why does her work as a VAD during the war seem so half-hearted? Why couldn’t she put all that dynamism of hers into nursing or hospital administration? She was only forty-eight when George disappeared at Gallipoli, so why didn’t she do something full-time on the Home Front that might have opened into a career, as it did for many women? Was Kittie’s identity, her life, her ‘fame’, entirely and only derived from her devotion to George, who manifestly did not need her as much as she thought?
Let me briefly address these points. There was nothing unusual about Kittie not wanting the parliamentary vote. The overwhelming majority of upper/middle class women didn’t want it either, because they did not like what they saw of men’s political life, they wanted their own separate sphere, and they wanted to do the maximum good for society through voluntary caring and nurturing, particularly in local communities and politics, where they already had the vote. (Edwardian society would have fallen apart without them.) We know that as soon as George left on one of his ‘adventures’ Kittie went to stay with Nina Corbet, or at least in a Corbet property where Nina could visit her, or with another of her woman friends. Her relationship with Nina always has to be taken into account in her relationship with George; it entirely complements it. Although in her late twenties Kittie worked terrifically hard at her painting, she came to acknowledge that she did not have the originality or technique to pursue it professionally. She did, however, encourage many younger artists, and her contacts in Arts and Crafts were invaluable to her in designing the posthumous edition of George’s works. We know from George’s letter to William Rothenstein of 1 January 1915 that throughout the war Kittie was chronically ill (at first gynaecologically, then with pernicious anaemia). She had bursts of energy, but I don’t think she could have sustained full-time work in the Red Cross. However, dare I say it, nursing is not a job, it’s a lifetime vocation, even a way of life and a spiritual belief. She had nursed her first husband for three years, her mother for about six years, and was all her friends’ counsellor and nurse in sickness, miscarriages and stress. Her personality was not self-advancing or political, it was kenotic.
But underlying modern, perhaps feminist disappointment with Kittie is, I believe, the feeling that she should have earned her own living. This, of course, would have meant having a career, and for reasons I have already given it’s difficult to see how that would have been possible, even if she had wanted it, which I think before she married Archie Ripley she did. Financially, however, she did not need to work because in 1906 she inherited a large house in Hampstead and some capital from her mother (i.e. it was Simson money, not Hamilton money, because her father died penniless), and after 1898 she had an income from Ripley’s trust fund. This, surely, is the aspect of Kittie’s life that we find most difficult to accept today, whether we are feminists or not. So few of us have any experience of a private income that we may automatically protest that it is wrong. Yet the idea that Kittie did not ‘work’ because she did not ‘need’ to, would be simplistic. The fact is, she had so many altruistic commitments which her money enabled her to meet without paid employment, that she used her unearned income to do those things (i.e. work at them) all the time it lasted — which it only just did. She not only ran her own affairs very impressively after George’s death, she travelled all over southern England ministering care and advice to friends, the Pyms, Calderons, Mrs Stewart… By 1937 she was diagnosed as suffering from chronic exhaustion.
Of course, having a private income was a very Edwardian phenomenon. To what extent, then, was Kittie herself an unreconstructed Edwardian? As far as I know, she never used the adjective Edwardian of herself, but a memoir that she wrote at the end of her life contains a very strong attack on the Victorian age. She felt that it was rooted in the love of money. She disapproved of the poverty, squalor and ignorance that it produced, and she was convinced that Victorian imperial hubris would end in disaster. As I have said before, I believe that the Edwardian period witnessed the greatest explosion of democratic discourse — in politics, on the streets, in the theatre, in print — that Britain has ever known (and it nearly blew the country apart). I think that both George and Kittie saw themselves as part of the great democratic experience. Perhaps because of the long post-WW1 Left consensus, it is difficult for us now to see that. In historical party political terms, George and Kittie were almost certainly Liberals, but today their views on suffrage, trade unionism, the Community, or defence, approximate them more to radical Conservatism. Kittie followed national and international politics closely in the 1930s. I think she felt that her and George’s politics were ‘progressive’ because they were ahead of their socialistic times — she several times implies that in her memoirs.
In my opinion, a very important point is that many of Kittie’s activities (her ‘work’) were enabled by her being a Hamilton, i.e. the scion of an English family that could trace its ancestry to Edward I; a member of a top Anglo-Irish family; the daughter of John Hamilton the Good (see my post of 3 August 2016). She moved very confidently in society, networking came naturally to her, and this was the source of her success as George’s agent. She very rarely comes across as bossy, but her manipulative and diplomatic skills were inbred and her social authority recognised everywhere. She usually got her way. This enabled her to play a leading role in charitable ventures at Hampstead, Petersfield and Kennington. Although she always had ‘Mrs George Calderon’ emblazoned on her suitcases, in a sense she was really always Katharine Hamilton.
I have written the above somewhat off the top of my head, thinking onto the screen — as has been so beneficial whilst mulling over my Afterword about George as an Edwardian. I don’t know whether I shall discuss Kittie as an Edwardian or anything else in the Afterword. To some extent, the life and personality of Kittie embrace the whole book; and this is intentional. It starts with her marriage to George’s friend Archie Ripley (whilst George was in Russia), it covers the whole of her fifteen-year marriage to George, and it continues for another thirty-five years without him. I don’t know about attempting to sum her up. The temptation to ‘defend’ her in the Afterword may prove irresistible, but really the whole book should show what she was: a vibrant, long-suffering, lovable, and emotionally intelligent woman. Numerous people, including a great-niece of hers, have told me that ‘really’ I am most interested by Kittie and the book is ‘really’ about her! Well, I don’t know about that. As a theatre person and ex-Russianist, I was naturally first drawn to George, but after their marriage I became more and more conscious of their symbiosis.
However, I do think — no, I know — that when Kittie died in the Hove nursing home on 30 January 1950, having given instructions that her funeral should be private, with no flowers, and her ashes scattered (we don’t know where), she felt that she had done all that she wanted with her life, that she was completely fulfilled.
Related
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Captain of the 11
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George Calderon c.1901
George Calderon, 1912
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Kittie Hamilton
I have returned from holiday fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November and get copies to the interested publishers immediately afterwards. This means writing the Afterword (‘Who George Calderon Was’), radically improving the ill-fated Introduction, producing the Bibliography, and composing voluminous and fulsome Acknowledgements. I think it is possible to do this without ‘O fallacem hominum spem!‘ [27 July 2016] striking, as I am on course to start writing the Afterword next week…
A blog is a very wonderful thing; or at least, it has proved so for me. As I explained last year, I was very sceptical about its value to begin with, but it led to incredibly enriching dialogues with followers by both Comment and email, it even led to the discovery of new Calderoniana, and in a way it produced a new form of biography (‘blography’). Most recently, it has enabled me to moot on the screen some key issues of my Afterword, such as the ‘nastiness factor’ and the ‘hero complex’, and impelled three subscribers to recommend further reading on the Edwardians that I have found useful. Thank you!
I will touch on only one more aspect of George’s character as an Edwardian, and that will be on Saturday, 8 October. Meanwhile, though, I think it would be appropriate to address some issues concerning Kittie.
The principal one must be that to the modern woman she seems not remotely modern. Her failure to ‘get a life of her own’ must indeed seem exasperating and sad. Her support for anti-suffragism would appear to confirm her lamentable ‘backwardness’. In her memoirs she describes utterly convincingly how George needed her when he was based at home; if she had to go away, ‘he at once seemed to feel left and lost’. Yet when he had to go away on a solo adventure, e.g. to Tahiti, it looks as though she simply waited patiently and meekly at home like a doormat to welcome him back. As a trained artist and believer in the Arts and Crafts Movement, why did she not exhibit paintings, make and sell handicrafts, design things? Why does her work as a VAD during the war seem so half-hearted? Why couldn’t she put all that dynamism of hers into nursing or hospital administration? She was only forty-eight when George disappeared at Gallipoli, so why didn’t she do something full-time on the Home Front that might have opened into a career, as it did for many women? Was Kittie’s identity, her life, her ‘fame’, entirely and only derived from her devotion to George, who manifestly did not need her as much as she thought?
Let me briefly address these points. There was nothing unusual about Kittie not wanting the parliamentary vote. The overwhelming majority of upper/middle class women didn’t want it either, because they did not like what they saw of men’s political life, they wanted their own separate sphere, and they wanted to do the maximum good for society through voluntary caring and nurturing, particularly in local communities and politics, where they already had the vote. (Edwardian society would have fallen apart without them.) We know that as soon as George left on one of his ‘adventures’ Kittie went to stay with Nina Corbet, or at least in a Corbet property where Nina could visit her, or with another of her woman friends. Her relationship with Nina always has to be taken into account in her relationship with George; it entirely complements it. Although in her late twenties Kittie worked terrifically hard at her painting, she came to acknowledge that she did not have the originality or technique to pursue it professionally. She did, however, encourage many younger artists, and her contacts in Arts and Crafts were invaluable to her in designing the posthumous edition of George’s works. We know from George’s letter to William Rothenstein of 1 January 1915 that throughout the war Kittie was chronically ill (at first gynaecologically, then with pernicious anaemia). She had bursts of energy, but I don’t think she could have sustained full-time work in the Red Cross. However, dare I say it, nursing is not a job, it’s a lifetime vocation, even a way of life and a spiritual belief. She had nursed her first husband for three years, her mother for about six years, and was all her friends’ counsellor and nurse in sickness, miscarriages and stress. Her personality was not self-advancing or political, it was kenotic.
But underlying modern, perhaps feminist disappointment with Kittie is, I believe, the feeling that she should have earned her own living. This, of course, would have meant having a career, and for reasons I have already given it’s difficult to see how that would have been possible, even if she had wanted it, which I think before she married Archie Ripley she did. Financially, however, she did not need to work because in 1906 she inherited a large house in Hampstead and some capital from her mother (i.e. it was Simson money, not Hamilton money, because her father died penniless), and after 1898 she had an income from Ripley’s trust fund. This, surely, is the aspect of Kittie’s life that we find most difficult to accept today, whether we are feminists or not. So few of us have any experience of a private income that we may automatically protest that it is wrong. Yet the idea that Kittie did not ‘work’ because she did not ‘need’ to, would be simplistic. The fact is, she had so many altruistic commitments which her money enabled her to meet without paid employment, that she used her unearned income to do those things (i.e. work at them) all the time it lasted — which it only just did. She not only ran her own affairs very impressively after George’s death, she travelled all over southern England ministering care and advice to friends, the Pyms, Calderons, Mrs Stewart… By 1937 she was diagnosed as suffering from chronic exhaustion.
Of course, having a private income was a very Edwardian phenomenon. To what extent, then, was Kittie herself an unreconstructed Edwardian? As far as I know, she never used the adjective Edwardian of herself, but a memoir that she wrote at the end of her life contains a very strong attack on the Victorian age. She felt that it was rooted in the love of money. She disapproved of the poverty, squalor and ignorance that it produced, and she was convinced that Victorian imperial hubris would end in disaster. As I have said before, I believe that the Edwardian period witnessed the greatest explosion of democratic discourse — in politics, on the streets, in the theatre, in print — that Britain has ever known (and it nearly blew the country apart). I think that both George and Kittie saw themselves as part of the great democratic experience. Perhaps because of the long post-WW1 Left consensus, it is difficult for us now to see that. In historical party political terms, George and Kittie were almost certainly Liberals, but today their views on suffrage, trade unionism, the Community, or defence, approximate them more to radical Conservatism. Kittie followed national and international politics closely in the 1930s. I think she felt that her and George’s politics were ‘progressive’ because they were ahead of their socialistic times — she several times implies that in her memoirs.
In my opinion, a very important point is that many of Kittie’s activities (her ‘work’) were enabled by her being a Hamilton, i.e. the scion of an English family that could trace its ancestry to Edward I; a member of a top Anglo-Irish family; the daughter of John Hamilton the Good (see my post of 3 August 2016). She moved very confidently in society, networking came naturally to her, and this was the source of her success as George’s agent. She very rarely comes across as bossy, but her manipulative and diplomatic skills were inbred and her social authority recognised everywhere. She usually got her way. This enabled her to play a leading role in charitable ventures at Hampstead, Petersfield and Kennington. Although she always had ‘Mrs George Calderon’ emblazoned on her suitcases, in a sense she was really always Katharine Hamilton.
I have written the above somewhat off the top of my head, thinking onto the screen — as has been so beneficial whilst mulling over my Afterword about George as an Edwardian. I don’t know whether I shall discuss Kittie as an Edwardian or anything else in the Afterword. To some extent, the life and personality of Kittie embrace the whole book; and this is intentional. It starts with her marriage to George’s friend Archie Ripley (whilst George was in Russia), it covers the whole of her fifteen-year marriage to George, and it continues for another thirty-five years without him. I don’t know about attempting to sum her up. The temptation to ‘defend’ her in the Afterword may prove irresistible, but really the whole book should show what she was: a vibrant, long-suffering, lovable, and emotionally intelligent woman. Numerous people, including a great-niece of hers, have told me that ‘really’ I am most interested by Kittie and the book is ‘really’ about her! Well, I don’t know about that. As a theatre person and ex-Russianist, I was naturally first drawn to George, but after their marriage I became more and more conscious of their symbiosis.
However, I do think — no, I know — that when Kittie died in the Hove nursing home on 30 January 1950, having given instructions that her funeral should be private, with no flowers, and her ashes scattered (we don’t know where), she felt that she had done all that she wanted with her life, that she was completely fulfilled.
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