The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George Calderon c.1901
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon, 1912
Captain of the 11
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Recent Comments
- Stuart Randall on 4 June 1915: The Third Battle of Krithia Thank you for your kind words, Patrick. On Wednesday morning, I reminded my three brothers that the 110th anniversary of the battle was upon us, and pointed them towards this... (June 7, 2025 at 9:07 pm)
- Patrick Miles on 4 June 1915: The Third Battle of Krithia Thank you for leaving this wonderful comment. I am so moved: you have brought the very spot almost unbearably close on this the 110th anniversary. Like George Calderon, your... (June 6, 2025 at 9:34 pm)
- Stuart Randall on 4 June 1915: The Third Battle of Krithia Thank you so much for putting this online. My great-uncle, Private William Pitt, served with the 4th Btn. Worcestershire Regiment. He was posthumously mentioned in despatches... (May 21, 2025 at 5:29 pm)
- Stephen Rust on Guest post by John Pym: Games Ancient and Modern A wonderful post. John, I've always adored your writings about Merchant Ivory and would love to chat more about them someday. I teach cinema at the University of Oregon,... (May 16, 2025 at 6:45 pm)
- Patrick Miles on Source? Dear Katy, it's lovely to hear from you again! I hope you are well down there in Kent. Would you believe it, I too typed in that first line, as I thought it was perhaps the... (May 12, 2025 at 11:45 am)
Category Archives: Personal commentary
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 again
The other ‘st’ word of the Edwardian period is ‘stout’, as in ‘stout fellows’ (used by soldiers of their comrades). It is described in dictionaries today as ‘arch.‘, and meant ‘dauntless’ — another word that today surely qualifies as ‘archaic’. … 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
Writer’s self-block?
There is no evidence that Calderon wrote anything new in 1914 after signing up. Yet the previous seven months had been packed with literary-theatrical work: he had written or assembled most of his posthumous best-seller Tahiti, finished a pantomime The Brave Little … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary
Tagged Ballets Russes, Clara Calderon, comments, Diaghilev, George Calderon, Il'ia Tolstoi, Inns of Court Officer Training Corps, Inns of Court Regiment, Laurence Binyon, Lev Tolstoy, Martin Shaw, Michel Fokine, Tahiti, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, William Caine, World War I
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A biographer worries…
A big challenge for the biographer when his subject died in the trenches is, frankly, stylistic: should he/she go with the deepening muffled drums, the lugubrious blanket that descends on your prose as the end draws closer? No, in my … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged 'real time', 4 August 1914, biographies, biography, comments, death, endings, George Calderon, style, The Great War, World War I
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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
A biographer writes…
The main object of ‘Calderonia’ is to post events and documents in a kind of ‘real time’ ; exactly a hundred years after they happened. And judging by the emails I have received, that’s what people appreciate. This timeline approach … Continue reading
A correction?
It was perhaps a bit glib to say in the blog for 30 August that the B.E.F. ‘simply had to regroup’ etc. However, Arthur Moore in The Times was certainly wrong to describe the B.E.F. as a ‘broken army’, and Sir John … Continue reading →