In a letter to the TLS (9 July 2010) I appealed for unpublished letters or works of George Calderon, but also asked readers to contact me if they had ‘come across references to him in obscure publications’. My thinking was that I would be reading the biographies and autobiographies of George’s closest friends, for instance William Rothenstein, Henry Newbolt and Laurence Binyon, but with someone as sociable as George he might well feature in books of memoirs by people I had never heard of.
The response was magnificent. Even very recently, I received a reference from an old friend to an autobiography that I would certainly never have come across on my own, namely the journalist Michael Davidson’s The World, the Flesh and Myself (1973). Davidson, born in 1897, joined up at the age of seventeen and in the winter of 1915 was training to be an officer at Fort Brockhurst in Hampshire, where Lieutenant Calderon was stationed with the 9th Battalion Ox & Bucks:
I can recall only two of my fellow-officers at Fort Brockhurst — both three times my age and both, in intellect and outlook, delightfully unsoldierly. Neither, obviously, need have joined the Army at all, each could have found some cushy, opulent ‘war-work’. Yet, old as grandfathers, they chose to be junior combatant officers: it’s hard to think of a higher chivalry.
George Calderon, an important dramatist and member of that Hispano-English family renowned in art and letters, was nearly 50 and a subaltern in my regiment: a gay, whimsical, slightly ironical person, bubbling with wit and good humour and ever ready with kindness and the sensible solution of some tiresome military problem. His slim, Iberian good looks were made martial by a little black moustache. In less than a year’s time he was dead at Gallipoli.
This is a very interesting glimpse of George by a young person in the period between January and May 1915 covered on Calderonia in posts exactly a hundred years later; one, for instance, to add to the information conveyed in his letter to Kittie of 10 May 1915 that he had benefited from being welcomed into the family of a fellow ex-Oxford officer, Robert Peel, whose pretty, 24-year-old wife Helen he particularly liked.
The other older officer Davidson mentions was a certain Heneage, from the Grenadier Guards, of whom no more is known.
Davidson was wounded in 1916. He subsequently became a Communist, an anti-Nazi writer, and fairly eminent foreign correspondent. He died in 1976.
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George Calderon, 1912
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Captain of the 11
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon c.1901
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
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
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
‘bubbling with wit and good humour’
In a letter to the TLS (9 July 2010) I appealed for unpublished letters or works of George Calderon, but also asked readers to contact me if they had ‘come across references to him in obscure publications’. My thinking was that I would be reading the biographies and autobiographies of George’s closest friends, for instance William Rothenstein, Henry Newbolt and Laurence Binyon, but with someone as sociable as George he might well feature in books of memoirs by people I had never heard of.
The response was magnificent. Even very recently, I received a reference from an old friend to an autobiography that I would certainly never have come across on my own, namely the journalist Michael Davidson’s The World, the Flesh and Myself (1973). Davidson, born in 1897, joined up at the age of seventeen and in the winter of 1915 was training to be an officer at Fort Brockhurst in Hampshire, where Lieutenant Calderon was stationed with the 9th Battalion Ox & Bucks:
This is a very interesting glimpse of George by a young person in the period between January and May 1915 covered on Calderonia in posts exactly a hundred years later; one, for instance, to add to the information conveyed in his letter to Kittie of 10 May 1915 that he had benefited from being welcomed into the family of a fellow ex-Oxford officer, Robert Peel, whose pretty, 24-year-old wife Helen he particularly liked.
The other older officer Davidson mentions was a certain Heneage, from the Grenadier Guards, of whom no more is known.
Davidson was wounded in 1916. He subsequently became a Communist, an anti-Nazi writer, and fairly eminent foreign correspondent. He died in 1976.
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