Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
George Calderon c.1901
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Captain of the 11
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon, 1912
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)Recent Comments
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Category Archives: Heroism and Adventure
Remembrance
I wrote a piece for the parish magazine of my home town, Sandwich in Kent, about Laurence Binyon’s visit there in 1921 (see www.stclementschurchsandwich.org.uk and follow links to ‘The Signal’), and I’ve just received my copy. The issue, for November, … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged George Calderon, The Great War, World War I
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30 October 1914
Percy Lubbock says that Calderon was writing today from ‘a casualty clearing station’, but George himself calls it ‘the hospital’. Whichever it was, it presumably had X-ray facilities, because in the X-ray below the damage looks sufficiently fresh for the … Continue reading
29 October 1914: ‘toothache in the ankle’
The German bombardment began at 5.30 a.m. and was concentrated on the Gheluvelt crossroads on the Menin Road (see map below). Falkenhayn’s plan was that having pushed the salient further in here, on 30th a general attack would be unleashed … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure
Tagged Anton Chekhov, Army Group Fabeck, Belgium, Erich von Falkenhayn, General Fabeck, George Calderon, Gheluvelt Crossroads, Hollebeke, Ian F.W. Beckett, Kittie Calderon, Klein Zillebeke, Major-General Thompson Capper, map, Menin Road, Messines, military interpreters, Percy Lubbock, Royal Horse Guards, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, The Blues, The Great War, World War I, Ypres, Zandvoorde
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28 October 1914
George wrote his long letter to Kittie today at supper time. There had been two developments during the day that directly led to attaining his object of becoming combatant, but he left them until the end of his letter. During … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure
Tagged Belgium, Colonel Gordon Wilson, Dixmude, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, military interpreters, Nieuport, Royal Horse Guards, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Surgeon Major Pares, The Blues, The Great War, World War I, Ypres, Yser
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‘Stellenbosched’
For those who know only of Stellenbosch’s fine wines or distinguished university, I should explain that after the Second Boer War the British Army turned it into a verb meaning to park someone military in a job where their incompetence … Continue reading
They enter Ypres
Clearly the Blues were not the vanguard of the 3rd Cavalry Division on the march (this Division, incidentally, possessed only 12 field artillery pieces). That honour seems to have fallen to the Life Guards, who had a far more ‘interesting’ … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure
Tagged Belgium, British Expeditionary Force, Bruges, Geluwe, General Edmund Allenby, George Calderon, Izegem, Kemmel, Life Guards, Menin, Royal Horse Guards, Sint Eloois Winkel, Sir Henry Rawlinson, Sir Richard Sutton, Taube aeroplane, The Blues, The Great War, Tielt, World War I, Ypres
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Blood is spilt
Presumably B Squadron of the 7th Cavalry Brigade of the Blues also bivouacked last night near Lendelede. Reveille this morning, Tuesday 13 October 1914, was at four, and two hours later the squadron was moving south again, towards Gullegem, where … Continue reading
15 September 1914
On this day, Calderon was thrown from his horse at the riding school. He was quite a short man (five foot nine and a half), slightly built. The horse tossed him against a wall and his back was very badly … Continue reading
The Peter Pan Factor
If ‘Adventure’ was essential to Calderon, as Kittie said, what part did this play in his so desperately wanting to get to the Front? Probably quite a lot, as my last quotation in ‘Thirty Quotes from George Calderon’ on this … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Confusion, or subtlety?
From a hundred years on, it is difficult to make sense of Calderon’s new situation. If he was taking Hedley’s advice that the quickest way of getting to the Front was as a military interpreter, why was he continuing his … Continue reading
25 August 1914
On this day the first accounts of the Battle of Mons started appearing in British newspapers. The Times headed its main report ‘Namur Lost, German Success in Belgium’ and led off: ‘The battle is joined and has so far gone … Continue reading
Determined
Calderon’s approach to issues of the day (Russia, suffragism, unionism) was to study them in depth, analyse them, then decide what was the right course of action for him and stick to it through thick and thin. This was why … Continue reading
A biographer dreads…
A very successful biographer asked me how George Calderon died. I replied that he disappeared in the smoke of battle. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s lucky for you: you’ve got a clean ending, not long years of decline, dementia etc.’ As … Continue reading
3 August 1914
Of course the Adjutant turned him down – saying he was far too old. It must have been a bitter blow to Calderon, yet it is very unlikely that he showed it. He may have tried to reason, perhaps he … Continue reading
The military situation (2)
The military situation in the Calderon household had worsened, from Kittie’s point of view. She could see that George’s wound was not fully closed, but he had managed to get down with her to Brasted and back on 29 November, … Continue reading →