All Comments

Let us all take a deep breath – er – before we waft away entirely on a fluffy cloud of sentiment. I feel I would be failing in my professional duty as an archivist if I didn’t make one or two hard-nosed points here. My sincere apologies in advance if I come across as a bit sniffy…

Patrick, you are spot on in your desire to keep the Calderon archive exactly as Kittie arranged it. As soon as a person’s papers are reorganized or added to, they cease to be an archive at all, but that much more sterile entity, a ‘collection’. Kittie however did not purchase rusty paperclips especially for the purpose of leaving damaging marks on Archie and George’s precious letters! You therefore should set about procuring some brass replacements forthwith. (Readers at home, this goes for you too. And if any of you are using rubber bands to hold your treasured bundles together…. Please don’t; in 50 years they will be like fossilized worms glued fast to the paper. What you need is cotton tape.)

Clearly the conditions in that Scottish attic were rather on the damp side. And I’m guessing also rather dusty. Your description of inhaling the aroma of George Calderon’s cigarettes (or pipe) is wonderfully, beautifully, evocative – Archie’s death bed too. But no matter how one’s brain interprets it, the mustiness that pervades archival documents is usually just good old-fashioned dirt, and the top notes are soot, and mould.

I like the sound of those archive boxes and folders. These really are the ideal way to store and transport archives; they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and can be made-to-measure to house individual items, books, and albums. Archive boxes offer valuable protection against sudden changes in air temperature and humidity, and are an additional line of defence against smoke and water if disaster strikes. Unlike those highly-acidic brown manila envelopes that were so favoured by the Victorians and Edwardians, modern archival packaging is pH neutral. (Readers again: if your old letters are turning brown even though you keep them in the dark, then your conditions are too acidic. Rectify this before the paper becomes brittle and friable.) It shouldn’t really be harming the Calderon letters to get them out and look at them from time to time – a change of air is as beneficial for documents as it is for us humans, and you can check that none of those mould spores has sprung to life.

Oh dear. While I am on my archivist’s soap box, I must just mention photographs too. They are the most fragile and vulnerable documents of all. Quite likely Kittie stuffed hers into brown envelopes – it’s what most people did in 1940. If those within the Calderon archive are not already in individual polyester sleeves, may I recommend these too? The inert plastic allows each photograph to be examined without being touched; it stops previously bent corners from snapping off; and it prevents any risk of abrasion to the surface of the image. (Readers: Not in possession of any Edwardian photographs? Then think back to the 1970s, 80s, 90s… Do you have early colour prints, stuck so lovingly into those albums with the sticky plastic pages? Nasty. You will never retrieve the original colours, but if you have the negative strips in the back of a cupboard get them out and have them digitized. This service is offered at all the High Street photography shops. And then – whether you print them again, create a photo-book, or send them to the cloud – MAKE A RECORD OF WHO THE PEOPLE ARE! Your descendants, or your future biographer, or the poor neighbourhood archivist who gets to write the catalogue, will be very, very grateful indeed.)

Thank you all who read this comment to the end. I got my husband to check it for me. He said, ‘No wonder you’re such a wow at parties!’

Another excellent post, vividly capturing an evocative moment that links us to long forgotten times.

Smell … so evocative, calling on our distant memories. I remember sniffing pomegranate bubble bath and suddenly transporting back 45 years in time to see pomegranates at my great aunt’s flat. But smell links us physically to the past as well, as active and vital molecules float upwards from their past embodiments and into our noses. Sadness sometimes, as the molecules flee and the smell fades with all else … leaving words and their semantics to last the longest. Thanks once more, Patrick, for writing your blog for all of us.

Smells of the archive
are his petite madeleine,
bringing back lost lives.

Patrick: considerably less a war historian than your modest self, I nevertheless hazard a ‘literary’ comment on the alleged instruction, once over the top, to ‘walk’ towards the enemy. My hazy impression is that I have never seen such a practice described, in prose or poetry. What one remembers, from writers who have tried to convey the immediacy of actual conflict, is the two-time effect of either rapidity or paralysis; never, that I can think of, the deliberation of walking. I cite just one example, from Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive:’

So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed…

Isn’t this the image we always have? And Owen would surely have known; he’d been there and done it. Of course, this is only an impression; and ‘only’ from literary sources. It would indeed be interesting to have some counter-evidence; and as you say, only the military historian would have the authoritative references.

Your description of the ‘dog days’ sounds depressingly familiar. The final stages of my Tyutchev biography were a soul-destroying slog that seemed to go on for ever. Repeated proofreading still failed to prevent several typos and errors getting through under the radar, and in the event I had to paste in an ‘Errata’ slip listing the worst of them. Are you compiling your own index, or farming that task out? I did my own, and can only say that wasn’t much fun either, especially as I’d decided to give dates and very brief biographical data for all the individuals listed in it. After the elation of (apparently) completing the book comes the suddenly realisation that there’s still all this boring nitty-gritty stuff to be done!
Your experience with the Calderon quote re Chekhov’s plays must be a fairly common phenomenon. It probably explains why so many famous quotes become known to the wider world in an incorrect (yet sometimes arguably improved) version.I had a similar experience myself recently, when I emailed my MP about the referendum result, only to realise after sending it that I’d reversed ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ in the final sentence, thus making nonsense of the whole argument! The possibility that it was a Freudian slip is somewhat disturbing. Anyway, all I could do was send a second email pointing out the error.
I hope it may be of some comfort to know that your current travails are not unusual. All I can say is, keep at it: it will be worth it in the long run!

A very powerful and moving account, Patrick

Oh Patrick! However much one thinks one knows about World War One, there really is no end to the horror of it all…

I am glad that Ben Hattersley had kind people looking after him in the last years of his life. This anecdote has reminded me of your post about visiting the Sandham Memorial Chapel (26 October 2015); specifically, your reaction to Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Resurrection of the Soldiers’. [One can see this immense painting online – search on artuk.org – although only through a glass darkly, as it were.] Spencer spent much of the War as a hospital orderly. You can just tell from the faces in his paintings that he treated the maimed and injured servicemen in his care with great tenderness – and surely he listened to them too. How many, like Ben Hattersley, were haunted by the Apocalyptic screaming of the horses?

Spencer’s white crosses and granite blocks are disturbingly reminiscent of the memorial cross and grave markers that extend beneath the Thiepval memorial to the missing of the Somme. You remarked that ‘in the centre [of ‘The Resurrection of the Soldiers’] are two mules waking from death and craning their necks round to look at the almost unnoticeable white figure of Christ.’ But Spencer’s two horses are also white, and for every man rising up from the ground, a fallen horse is stirring too. You quoted from the National Trust brochure, that Spencer’s frescoes ‘celebrate the human companionship of war.’ But the message of this painting has to be more than that – Spencer is representing the equality of men and horses in their soldiering, in their suffering, in their sacrifice – and in the immortality of their souls. No wonder the Bishop suspected Spencer of heresy!

Did Kittie Calderon ever visit the Sandham Memorial Chapel? I guess she knew instinctively what humans who talk about ‘dumb animals’ have forgotten. Her dog Bunty may have been unpleasant and smelly, but I bet nobody understood or comforted Kittie quite so well as she did!

Patrick: Thank you once again for your vivid recollection from your time working in the mental hospital, and Ben Hattersley’s memory of the screaming of the horses. Frustratingly (but not untypically), I can’t lay my hands on my copy right now, to confirm and give the reference, but I’m pretty sure there’s a chapter in Barbusse’s Le Feu, pub 1916 (trans as Under Fire 1917) which focusses likewise on the screams of suffering horses; and also the logistical difficulty of dealing with the mountain of horse corpses on the roads. (I’d be glad if someone could confirm this!). Of course, Morpurgo’s War Horse (and the blockbuster film) made much of the horse, in a more sentimentalized way.

Back to the mental hospital: one is relieved to hear that you had a better time there than did Samuel Beckett in his, where his experience led him to identify with the patients (who had, it seemed to him, ‘escaped from a colossal fiasco’) rather than the doctors who were trying to keep the fiasco on the road.

You are no doubt familiar with Edward Elgar’s comment re. the war horses, written to a friend within days of the start of the First World War:

“Concerning the war I say nothing-the only thing that wrings my heart & soul is the thought of the horses-oh! my beloved animals-the men-and women can go to hell-but my horses;-I walk round&round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured-let Him kill his human beings but-how CAN HE? Oh, my horses.”

“There” [says biographer Northrop Moore] “spoke the man….with an overpowering sense that his world was being destroyed. Few indeed saw so far so quickly”

The Bishop of London in his address in Westminster Abbey pointed out something I had not realised. After going over the top the normal (and obvious) thing to do was to run a few yards, throw yourself onto the ground, then go on like that until you got close to the enemy lines. At The Somme the troops had been ordered to WALK across No Man’s Land, on the assumption they would not meet any opposition. To make matters even easier for the German machine-gunners, everyone blew their whistle at 7.30 to let them know we were coming. Madness!

What a fascinating phenomenon this chronotopia is! It must be unusual (perhaps unique?) for a biographer to run a day-to-day blog on their subject at the same time as writing the biography, so perhaps you’re the first to have encountered it. The article you quote (rather impenetrable to me, I must admit) suggests further research by neurologists could yield exciting results for understanding exactly how time works in biographical and other narratives

Patrick, you should take consolation in your affliction by apophenia and pareidolia — or perhaps, as you seem to fear, by a toxic mixture of the two so far unidentified by science. Mark Antony provides all the evidence of being a fellow-sufferer, as he laments the forfeiture of his ‘visible shape’ towards the end of the play:

Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked tower, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air…
That which is now a horse even with a thought
The rack disdains, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.

And Antony’s author was evidently a man who invested heavily in this condition; a man whose mind was a kaleidoscope of superimposed images, a privileged panopticon from whose vantage point all things in heaven and on earth were simultaneously visible and interchangeable, understood only and always in terms of each other. The condition is most memorably summarized by his man Theseus in The Dream, with his description of the ‘seething brains’ of the lunatic, the lover, and the poet; the poet whose privilege it is to give ‘to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.’

So do keep that brain of yours seething, making those connections for us which we expect a poet/biographer to provide. And don’t be afraid (as I’m sure you aren’t, really) by those long words wheeled in by Holofernes the schoolmaster. He and his like ‘have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps’!

Damian Grant

That Tom Murphy quote is great, yet so familiar.

“Tell me what it’s about, because I don’t know any longer”.

I thought I had read similar in a Terry Gilliam interview after shooting Brazil. Or maybe an Aaron Sorkin character says it somewhere…

However, google came up empty-handed. A Tom Murphy original! (?)

Foxwold – the house that Kittie visited in 1930 to advise my grandfather Evey on the marriage of his eldest son – was a home dominated by dogs: in iron-fenced outdoor kennels, in the kitchen, in the billiards room and in many of the spacious bedrooms. Some were quite respectable creatures, especially a succession of intelligent black Standard Poodles. But many were of doubtful parentage and a few were highly unpredictable: Willy the unprepossessing black ‘kitchen dog’ was one of these – though in old age he promoted himself from the kitchen and was allowed to sit beside Evey’s chair in the evening, where like all the other dogs he received his daily ration of three chocolate drops. The dogs’ habits were all known and tolerated – and it was assumed that even the smallest child knew which dog to steer clear of. They were all loved in a distinctively offhand English manner. No one seemed to mind unduly when they misbehaved or ran away (they usually came back of their own accord). ‘It is very good for a baby to be licked by a dog,’ Evey’s daughter Elizabeth said with authority, and no one said this was madness. One poodle, quite forgetting itself, consumed twelve portions of brown bread and smoked salmon laid out on the dining table just before the lunch-time guests sat down. The story of this incident was told with a smile for at least thirty years. Foxwold smelled of many things: linseed oil; lavender; dust on leather; apples; cigarette smoke; peat smoke; paraffin; beeswax; ladies’ soap; damp flannel sheets; the outdoors blowing in through an open window; old tennis rackets and broken lacrosse sticks – but above all it smelt of dogs, or so I remember it as a child in the 1950s. Kittie’s Bunty must have been a very singular companion indeed in a house full of free-spirited and sometimes frenzied dogs to have merited two references in my father’s letters. (Oh, and the rather primitive bathrooms of the house also of course smelt of Jeyes Fluid.)

How nice to hear that a “sort of son” (as Jack implies) sees Kittie as “extremely charming” and with “attractive qualities”. So she is not just good to him personally, but is someone who in general can be liked and admired. Your excerpts from Jack’s letters added a lot for me.
(I enjoyed the dog description too, probably because we have a Jack Russell terrier. Bunty is a dog to irritate visitors at times, but with enough character to get a mention.)

Yes, mourning. Why can’t/shouldn’t one mourn those one never knew and now long dead? Thank you (and Clare Hopkins) for writing so movingly about George Calderon who was only a name to me.
I want to pick up on Clare’s query about Robert Nichols’s strange usage of ‘Lead’ with a diacritic over the ‘a’ in his poem ‘The Assault’. Earlier in the poem occur the lines “A stream of lead raves / Over us from the left … (we safe under cover!)” in which ‘lead’ is rendered just like that without diacritic and obviously means ‘bullets’. The later lines (with the diacritic twice) read: “On, on. Lead. Lead. Hail. / Spatter. Whirr! Whirr!” Here ‘Lead’ seems to look both ways. Back to “On, on” (with the sense of the officer-speaker urging himself to lead his men), but also forwards to “Hail. / Spatter” etc (ie a hail of bullets and hence ‘lead’ in that sense). I wish I’d discussed this fascinating detail of the poem in my group-biography “Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War” (Pimlico, 2012) in which Nichols appears in several chapters along with his more famous contemporaries. For what it’s worth, I think Clare is right that Nichols put the diacritic there deliberately to elongate the word (as ‘Leeed. Leeed’), emphasising that he means here the officer’s self-injunction to ‘lead’ his men notwithstanding the hail of bullets, and thus distinguishing the word from the other sense. During his brief time at the Front, Nichols never did ‘lead’ his men in this kind of brave crazy attack (“Cool madness” as he calls it in the poem), but at some level he desperately wished he had and imaginatively allowed himself to in the poem, just as he allowed himself more extended service etc in other poems in “Ardours and Endurances”, the sequence in which ‘The Assault’ appears. This imaginative compensation has its own poignancy, I think, and gives a glimpse of one aspect of the extraordinary pressure those who served were under (have you been ‘over the top’, shown your mettle under fire?).
When Nichols read the poem aloud as I imagine he did at war-charity and other readings (though I found no definite record of him delivering this particular poem), the meaning of the word would have been clear. As it stands on the page, however, ‘Lead’ with a diacritic visually remains a pun, suggesting both of its possible senses. Which is perhaps fitting. It is ‘lead’ after all into which the officer is ‘leading’ his men.

This post made me feel desperately sad. Sad for George, dying as he did; sad for you, Patrick, mourning him as you are; saddest of all, perhaps, for those whom nobody mourns at all.

In the last few days I happen to have been reading Robert Nichols’ poem ‘The Assault’. These lines are about the Western Front battlefield of Loos in September 1915, but I was powerfully struck by the universality of the junior officer’s experience in every theatre of the First World War:

I hear my whistle shriek
Between teeth set,
I fling an arm up,
Scramble up the grime
Over the parapet!

I’m up. Go on.
Something meets us.
Head down into the storm that greets us.
A wail!
Lights. Blurr.
Gone.
On, on. Lead. Lead. Hail.
Spatter. Whirr. Whirr.
‘Toward that patch of brown,
Direction left.’ Bullets: a stream.
Devouring thought crying in a dream;
Men, crumpled, going down….
Go on. Go.

I would be very interested to know how other Calderonians read ‘Lead. Lead.’ I originally took it as a reference to the hail of bullets, but of course ‘lead’ is also an imperative verb. Is this young poet – against his every natural instinct – urging himself to lead his men to their deaths? Robert was one of Trinity College’s ‘Class of 1913’, of whom more than a quarter fell in WW1. He was terrified by the intense bombardment that preceded Loos; but he was even more terrified at the thought of failing to play the part expected of him as an Edwardian officer.

When I looked at the ‘The Assault’ in Nichols’ first edition, I was taken aback to realise that this word was so important to him that he gave it a diacritic: ˘. But what, then, does it mean? It is a ‘breve’ – so is this therefore the short syllable ‘led’ referring simply to bullets as I had initially assumed? But it is positioned, somewhat oddly, above the letter ‘a’ – so is it thereby extending the diphthong into an even longer, two-syllable word, in order to emphasise the impossible agony of leadership?

We will never know George Calderon’s thoughts as he led the way out of that crumbling trench at Krithia. Following the last days of his life a year ago, I remember thinking that he didn’t seem particularly bothered about the men in his platoon. But I realise I was mistaken in this view. It was very moving to re-read your account of how, just before the attack began, he ‘picked the leaf of a certain shrub, and told the men to do the same and to chew the leaves, as these were said by the Turks to give vigour.’ That was the act of a thoughtful and intuitive individual. It was kind. And somehow, I am glad to know that, somewhere in that awful place, something green was growing.

Excellent advice indeed from your anonymous e.p. of English Literature – ‘It all depends on how you speak the line.’

On Remembrance Sunday 2014 I heard a very memorable lecture on Laurence Binyon and ‘For the Fallen’, given at Trinity College by Michael Alexander, former Berry Professor of English Literature at St Andrews. Professor Alexander played a recording of Binyon himself reciting the poem (albeit some fifteen years after he wrote it) – and the good news is that we can all listen to it and decide for ourselves via Jim Clark’s ‘Poetryincarnations’ channel on youtube.

Grow-not old? Or Grow not-old? Calderonians, please post your verdicts or email your vote to Patrick now!

Your theme of sacrifice is particularly resonant at this season of Passover and Easter, and also in the aftermath of the recent suicide bomb attack in Brussels. Thank you for a post which has provided much food for thought.

I haven’t read Adrian Gregory’s The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, but like you, I rather baulk at the idea of ‘redemptive sacrifice being second nature to the British population’ of a century ago. Your conclusion that ‘distance from events…makes it seem to us now that George was driven by self-sacrifice as an ideal’ is more plausible. Even so, the more I think about this, the less convinced I am. Could it be that the belief that soldiers willingly sacrificed their lives is simply one that we have inherited from the bereaved survivors of the War?

I wonder if Kittie Calderon’s papers include the ‘dead man’s penny’ and commemorative scroll that she would have been sent as George’s next-of-kin. (See, for example, http://www.greatwar.co.uk/memorials/memorial-plaque.htm.) The illuminated text that accompanied every fallen soldier’s memorial plaque read:

“He whom this scroll commemorates was numbered among those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom. Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.”

‘The path of duty’ was surely very clear to the British population of 1914. The letters and diaries of the fallen of George’s alma mater Trinity College are full of it. (My apologies for my Oxford-centric focus here; I hope that one college’s alumni are not too unrepresentative of the Edwardian officer-and-gentleman class as a whole.) One particularly explicit exposition of duty comes in a letter from John Harley (an archivist in civilian life) who, as it happens, was serving alongside George Calderon with the Oxford & Bucks in Gallipoli. Two days before the Third Battle of Krithia John wrote to his father:

“You cannot think how one longs for home and the feeling of peace – I certainly have never in my life realised what it means as I do now. I am certain there is not a man here, private or officer, who would not give anything if only the war would come to an end, although of course they all realise that until Russia is crushed it is impossible…’ Then, in a postscript dated June 3: ‘…we are going up to the firing line tonight. There is something very big indeed coming – and one feels one must be prepared for anything… It may be that before you get this letter I may be killed… What the future has in store is simply in God’s hands. One just has one’s duty to do.’ [Imperial War Museum, Papers of Lieutenant John Harley, Document 17434.]

Acceptance that doing one’s duty may lead to death is not self-sacrifice. The closest reference I know of to that comes from Trinity’s English tutor, Reginald Tiddy: “It seems to me that officers will stand a very poor chance of surviving this war, but I can’t really see how I can stay out of it, having had quite a fair amount of happy life, when these poor kids are being shot like this’. (Quoted in ‘R.J.E. Tiddy – a Memoir’, in R.J.E. Tiddy, The Mummers’ Play, (Oxford 1923).) But Reginald Tiddy was thinking about enlisting in order to spare the life of an individual, albeit a hypothetical one. I cannot think of any examples of officers voicing their intention of dying for a cause.

That concept however is ubiquitous in tributes to the fallen, obituaries, memorial volumes, and perhaps most of all, in the letters from the parents of young men. There was great comfort in believing that a precious life had not been wasted; and the bigger the cause, the greater therefore the value of their loved one. Surely Laurence Binyon knew this instinctively as, so early in the War, he penned the line that you quote, ‘fallen in the cause of the free’. (What propaganda this is! As is, in his next stanza, the implication that death in war is intrinsically heroic: ‘they fell with their faces to the foe’.)

The royal scroll defined each man’s death as a sacrifice, it confirmed his importance, and it demonstrated the nation’s gratitude. But I do wonder what Kittie made of it. George had indeed fallen with his face to the foe, running as hard as he could towards the Turkish lines, and he ‘passed out of the sight of men’ just as the scroll so euphemistically describes. But she never wanted him to go to War. The most compelling of the various motives you have proposed for George enlisting is that he planned to write about the experience. To this end, he instructed Kittie to preserve his letters, and, as you regularly illustrated on the blog, what brilliant letters they were. Kittie did her best to ‘see to it that his name be not forgotten’. She brought out his book about Tahiti to great acclaim –

– but his great work on the Great War never appeared. With the safe distance of a hundred years now passed, is there not an argument to be made for concluding that George Calderon died in vain?

Thank you for such a kind comment — I do find it constructive!

This isn’t a constructive comment as such, but I thought you may like to know that at least one of your readers (surely one of many!) has much enjoyed the whole blog-biography experience, and has found the visibility of the research, discovery and writing processes to be one of the excellent parts of this. Your latest remarks on deadlines remind me of the truism “you have to have a plan to be able to change it”, i.e. a big writing project needs some kind of a plan to make it doable. Looking forward to the book … when it’s ready S:)

Very interesting post. Particularly so Heaney’s provocative line of discussion. “Over-written” is one of my favourite backhanded descriptors, but I think I agree that it was not truly valid here.

I’m with you on the “grow not old” vs “not grow old” interpretation, and Binyon’s intention in wording it precisely the way he did.

These are the sorts of examples I use with non-native speakers to illustrate importance of word order in English, and the subtleties of meaning they can carry.

…but, sometimes, even native speakers fail to recognise the distinctions.

What excellent advice, Patrick, ‘to stand back a little’ from this on-going discussion of commemoration. It is indeed difficult to maintain any sense of perspective when thinking about the horrors and losses of World War One. Thank you for your response to my latest comment, and for such an interesting summary of David Reynolds’ lecture. [See ‘Watch this Space’, 16 December 2015. PM]

I was sorry to learn that what I said previously may have annoyed some followers of Calderonia. I should have explained more clearly that my suggested stages of the commemorative process were only ever meant to be descriptive. And my prediction that World War One will come to be remembered only as history was no more than that – just me speculating about how future generations will see the conflict. I would be very glad to consider alternative conjectures, although I really don’t believe that anyone reading this in 2015 will live long enough to see whether we are right or wrong. I hope though that we all agree that it would be daft to expect future generations to engage with World War One exactly as we do. Consider the obsession with the Napoleonic Wars of, say, the Brontë sisters, and compare that with George’s light-hearted plan to celebrate the anniversary of Waterloo. If I am honest about my own position, I’m not sure ‘I feel enough about it’ – as you yourself once said about Agincourt – to bother to commemorate it at all. In 2015 we have a very restricted view of Waterloo, obscured as it is by two global and many lesser wars, and by two centuries of social change and technological advances. Many of us alive today feel a powerful connection with 1914–18 through the experiences of our grand- and great-grandparents; but by the time our grandchildren have become grandparents themselves, they will look back across a cultural and social landscape that will have been radically transformed by the War on Terror, or by catastrophic global warming, or by [Readers, please insert your own ideas here]. And if you will forgive my flippancy, our descendants may have a fixation not with Wilfred Owen or Ivor Gurney, but with great and resonant poetry that is yet to be written. ‘The last polar bear…’ anyone?

Perhaps others have emailed answers to your question as to whether ‘the “Great War” will achieve a supreme status in the “commemorative canon” as the exemplar of war’s “senseless” waste…’ As it happens, since posting my controversial suggestion that World War One would not achieve ‘stage five’, I have attended a lecture by Professor Anne Curry, who spoke at the Gwent Record Office about that supreme exemplar of canonisation, the Battle of Agincourt. Her expert view was that it has been remembered for purely political reasons – exhortatively rolled out by everyone from the Tudors to George Osborne. This has heartened me to stand by what I said: for why would any future national leader want to draw the attention of the electorate to negative images of the ‘senseless waste’ of a war that failed to achieve its goal – even if it was a just one?

I found your summary of David Reynolds’ explanation of why as a nation we are not at peace with World War One very helpful indeed. Where I take issue with him though is with the implication that we need to do something to achieve closure. My instinct is that Britain just needs to wait a bit – a lot – longer and the peace he hopes for will, eventually, descend. Again, it seems useful to compare commemoration with grieving. In one of your temporary posts you questioned whether the bereaved are harmed by being forced to accept closure before they are ready. Most people would agree that they are (pace George and his robust treatment of Kittie after Archie’s death. Here’s a new train of thought – did that interference make it harder for her to cope when she was widowed for the second time?) Where was I? Ah yes. Perhaps it is the very definition of closure that has caused the problem: immediately the achievement of it becomes pass/fail. It might be more helpful to see grieving as an open-ended and life-long process; this would for instance reduce social pressure on the families of murdered children to ‘move on’. Most but not all of us do manage to arrive at ‘acceptance’ of bereavement, but only after working through numerous stages – anger, denial, depression, bargaining, whatever – in our own time and order. Similarly, why should Britain compare itself with France or Germany as we collectively, and over many generations, come to terms with World War One?

Let’s hear it for historians! The Agincourt we feel we know is very different from the actual battle that Anne Curry reconstructed for her audience. I was to say the least startled by your remark that you ‘fear the historicisation of the Great War like the devil’! Given a choice between a patriotically sentimental view of World War One and a rigorous understanding of its causes and course, is not the latter better? But perhaps here too we should see the shift from memory to history as something fluid and on-going, with over-lapping stages which cannot be rushed and which will last for generations. On 3 July you said that the ‘process [of that commemorative staple, empathy] should be towards understanding’. And surely it is historians who with their impartial research and objective analysis can lead Britain towards that understanding – even if it does require us to ‘clamber out of the trenches and escape from poet’s corner’…

As I reflect further on ‘my’ stages of commemoration, it strikes me how long each one takes to run its course. Examples of present-day honouring and memorialising of World War One abound, while the flow of new histories shows no sign of abating. Here at Trinity College – George Calderon’s alma mater – we are actively remembering our fallen members, German as well as British, in a monthly display of their names alongside the earliest surviving manuscript of Laurence Binyon’s poem, ‘For the Fallen’. In April this year we unveiled a new memorial – to the College’s five fallen German and Austro-Hungarian members – in a very moving ceremony attended by the Austrian ambassador and the German chargé d’affaires. The impact of World War One on this small Oxford College was huge, and its effects are still being felt. The equivalent of more than three years’ intake of undergraduates was wiped out, while the 20th Century saw a surge of benefactions from their parents and others who found comfort in supporting an institution where the young men never did grow old, as they who were left grew old… At the risk of undermining my own argument, I have to confess that if ‘canonisation’ of World War One is going to happen anywhere, I think it will probably be here! I wonder what George Calderon would have made of that?

And as for our debate on this engrossing subject – will it really all be over by Christmas? Seasons Greetings, one and all!

Thank you for replying so comprehensively to my remarks about Commemoration. Just as psychologists have identified several distinct phases that people go through when a loved one dies, so I have come to think that there is a series of stages in the process of commemoration. The first is the ‘untrammelled empathy’ and the ‘subjective, holistic-empathic response’ that you describe. This happens at a personal level and we could call it Mourning; for many individuals it can last a lifetime. In this category are those elderly veterans of the Battle of Britain and D-Day who so moved the nation as they recalled their fallen comrades on our TV screens earlier this year. It seems to me that this is where you are with regard to George. As his biographer you have known him intimately; ‘alive’, he was a constant presence in your life, and now, very understandably, you are experiencing some of the emotions of the bereaved. I wonder if this is why you feel unable to stand in a crowd at Krithia – you would almost certainly be the only person there feeling that way.

Stage two of the commemorative process you have also identified: the ‘ceremony, ritual, more impersonal, rational and objective forms’ of cherishing the dead. This echoes the funerary rites that follow the death of any loved one. Done well, this stage is comforting because it provides reassurance that the deceased have value and deserve to be remembered. Let us call it Honouring. Examples of this stage include the crowds that lined the streets of Wootton Basset to greet the flag-draped coffins of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, the enumeration of names at Ground Zero on the anniversary of 9/11, and all local Armistice Day ceremonies. The emotions of Honouring encompass respect, reminiscence, and regret.

Stage three is a time of Memorialising – the creation or construction of something permanent that will outlast individual memory. After the funeral comes the gravestone, tree, or charity fund. Kittie Calderon threw herself into the production of books by, and about, George. The cover of Percy Lubbock’s A Sketch from Memory, you told us, is embossed in ‘real gold’, and certainly the motif still shines brightly on the copy in the Trinity College Library. I understand your distrust of the ‘imperial architecture’ of Great War cemeteries and memorials, and I sympathise with your objection to the ‘gigantism and marmoreal impersonality that made World War I possible’. On the other hand, the British Government had a choice. They could have followed the model of all previous European wars, dumping the bodies of private soldiers into anonymous pits, potentially to be used as fertiliser. After the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars, only officers could expect proper graves and inscriptions. But the insistence of the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the CWGC) that all ranks would be treated with equal respect and given identical memorials has always seemed to me a truly Great aspect of the War. This is the stage of commemoration when a soldier’s death is given meaning, and the emotions evolve into patriotic pride and gratitude. We appreciate what war memorials represent; we know that the fallen did their duty and gave their lives in the service of their country.

Stage four is when commemoration distils into History. Sooner or later memory and oral tradition fade away, to be replaced by facts known only from books or documentaries. You have identified this stage too, in the ‘educational’ visit to Auschwitz. The search for meaning in the deaths of the fallen is replaced by a thirst for knowledge of why and how wars happened. World War One seems easy to empathise with now, but it will all too soon slide away from future generations. As is already happening in Germany, the two World Wars seem destined to merge into a single historical event – with a short, failed peace in the middle, and outcomes that include the UN and the EU.

So where do art, music and literature fit into all of this? Artists and writers engage with every stage of commemoration. With regard to World War One, we might say that poets wrote to express their grief; ‘I vow to thee my country’ was composed to honour the fallen; Stanley Spencer created a lasting memorial to all combatants; while Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong has lifted the work of tunnellers from complete obscurity to an esteemed place in history.

There is a fifth stage in the commemoration process, and I am tempted to call it Canonisation. I was fortunate last week to attend the ‘national homage’ to the Battle of Agincourt, celebrated at Westminster Abbey by an impressive array of establishment figures: the Duke of Kent, the Bishop of London, the Lord Mayors of London and Westminster, plus actors, academics, and aldermen. The choir and the organ music were magnificent, and the tomb of Henry V was revered. But what was the point of it all? How did one unexpected victory become the only battle of the Hundred Years War to be singled out for commemoration? We could argue that Agincourt is remembered solely because of Shakespeare’s rendition of it; certainly the programme would have been rather thin without those stirring scenes from Henry V. But it is more than that. Somewhere, somehow, consciously or subconsciously, Agincourt has come to exemplify important qualities in the English (or British) character – and its commemoration therefore serves to define and reinforce our national identity. Agincourt evokes admiration of an inspirational leader and identification with the plucky underdog – ‘we few, we happy few’. The Battle of Britain – ‘never was so much owed by so many, to so few’ – does exactly the same, and in the fullness of time it will surely achieve similar status in the commemorative canon of our staunch little island. But what part, if any, of World War One will make the cut? Its four grinding years are resonant with uneasy alliances, false starts, inconsistent leadership, frightful inventions, and terrible, terrible waste… I rather suspect, none of it.

I expected to feel sad when this blog ended. But now the last day has come and I find the feeling is more akin to finishing a book that was so absorbing I wanted never to get to the final page. As with the closing of such a book, I am left with a sense of satisfaction and understanding, and pleasure that I have the option to read it again, and at a different speed.

Thank you for the tremendous amount of work you have put into this project. Calderonia has been unfailingly interesting and extraordinarily stimulating. It has also been at times painful, frustrating, and exhilarating. George has been regularly infuriating and Kittie, occasionally, exasperating. Other modifiers come to mind with regard to the Gallipoli campaign, and to the mores of our Edwardian forebears. In short, it has been a wonderful privilege to have had this unrestricted entree into the lives of such a remarkable couple at such a momentous time.

A year ago, all I knew about George Calderon was that he was the oldest graduate of Trinity College to fall in action in World War One. That tag gave him a tragic aura which resonated poignantly with many college members. Now I am aware of his tremendous energy and the richness of his life – indeed, his genius – and a more genuine and nuanced feeling of sadness comes from a deeper appreciation of his sacrifice. As you regularly remind us, ‘empathy has to be intelligent, critical….’ And now it can be.

I am sure I am not alone in feeling especially sad for Kittie in her long and dwindling widowhood. Thank you for finishing with this beautiful expression of George’s love for her. Are these words written in his hand on the back of her childhood photograph? Could we see that too?

There is a type of memorabilia that is regularly to be found amidst the remembrance of World War One: the sudden and apparently random token, or the small and inconsequential fact that combines with one’s awareness of a fallen soldier’s fate to evoke an unexpected surge of intense emotion. The response might be triggered by a line in a letter or an article retrieved from a dead man’s pocket; in the case of Jim Corbet it was the knowledge that his sister already had her frock for his wedding. It is such little details that, if we are susceptible, are most likely to make us cry. Books and documentaries that use killer storms and natural disasters for the purpose of entertainment are sometimes categorised as ‘weather porn’ and ‘disaster porn’; and following from these, I have come to think of this genre of commemorative material as ‘war porn’. To be moved by something so intrinsically unimportant can feel like falling victim to a cheap and manipulative trick. The empathy engendered is powerful, sometimes pleasurable, and, I suspect, addictive. It is not however intelligent or critical…

Choosing to conclude your blog with this tourbillionesque glimpse into George and Kittie’s courtship could almost be an experiment in war porn! But no… This is a photograph that Kittie chose to keep with her in old age, unlike much of her correspondence that she destroyed. As such, it suggests a tentative answer to your final question. Was Kittie really in denial that George was dead? Did she refuse ever to acknowledge the accounts of the Third Battle of Krithia that were provided by eye-witnesses? With our modern day enthusiasm for ‘closure’, we might wish her to accept that George had gone; or, more positively, to recognise that the grief she suffered was in direct proportion to the love that they had shared. In other words, we want her to be strong, realistic, sensible. But maybe there is another scenario. When Kittie told her goddaughter Lesbia that she ‘expected [George] to walk through the door one day’, was she just sharing a comforting fantasy, an exercise in imagination and memory that sustained her for 35 years without him at her side?

I have no doubt you are right that we think of time circularly because the rotations of our planet give us both the waking/sleeping rhythm of the day, and the seasonal pattern of the year. Like all living organisms we run on a 24 hour cycle. Religions have always provided an annual round of ceremonial rituals, whether linked to the movements of the stars (Stonehenge) or the fluctuations of distant rainfall (the Ancient Egyptians and the River Nile). The Jewish/Christian calendar nicely combines its major festivals with key agricultural tasks. And even before the sophistication of counting days, individual memory surely linked certain events with particular points in the cycle: a baby born at berry-picking-time or a tragic death at a midsummer vigil.

But our society’s obsession with the marking of national anniversaries feels like something else. We are all pawns in this game. There has been a rich diet of commemoration on our TV screens and in our newspapers in the past few months, ranging in time from the 7/7 bombings of ten years ago to the Battle of Waterloo, since when two centuries have passed. We have also been exposed to extensive coverage of the Battle of Britain – 75 years – while coming up in the autumn will be the sexcentenary of Agincourt. I suspect that, apart from those directly affected by terrorist attacks, few of us would have given much thought to these events if they had not been brought to our attention by reporters and journalists. On the other hand, editors are presumably providing fodder that they know their readers and viewers will appreciate.

The coverage is broadly the same: facts, dates, statistics, and stories of individuals’ experiences. But our empathetic response to each is rather different. In a previous post you wrote about the ‘catch of emotion’ engendered by the process of commemoration. That catch seems particularly exquisite when we reflect on the events of ‘exactly 100 years ago’. Let us consider the poppies at the Tower, or the innumerable WW1 forums run by military enthusiasts – or even, just now, our feelings as we lingered over these new and harrowing details of the Third Battle of Krithia, and recognised the immense courage that George Calderon must have shown in the final moments of his life. Britain it seems cannot get enough of World War One… I would like to suggest that this is an example of the Goldilocks Principle at work.

It is right that we remember and reflect on the horrors of 7 July 2005, but the victims’ stories are shocking; the injuries are all too obviously life-changing; the grief is raw; and it is frightening to remember the unfolding of that day, because it may well happen again. We experience great empathy, but it is painful. The anniversary of 7/7 is Too Recent. Re-enactments of Waterloo on the other hand may be extremely interesting and important for our understanding of European history, but the commemoration is emotionally dry and we find it hard to connect with soldiers who lived and fought in that pre-combustion engine world. The Napoleonic Wars are (were?) Too Long Ago.

The battles of World War One however belong to the generation of our grand- and great-grandparents. We do not have to look in the eyes of the maimed and traumatized soldiers who returned, and nor do we meet with the widows and mothers of those who fell. But we know a great many intimate details of their lives. The world they inhabited was (is!) not so very different from ours. Only a little imagination is needed to put ourselves in George and Kittie’s shoes. Postmen still deliver letters; news organisations pump daily updates and propaganda directly into our homes; machine guns remain standard weapons of war. Intense empathy is easy; and, if we are honest with ourselves, the personal-but-not-too-personal relationship that we have with World War One even makes that empathy an enjoyable sensation. Exactly 100 years ago, then, is Just Right.

It will not always be so. If we roll forwards to 2115, the grim attrition of trench warfare will probably seem as distant and strange to our descendants as the cavalry manoeuvres of 1815 are to us. And perhaps the term ‘9/11’ will have replaced ‘the First Day of the Somme’ as that terrible historical event that needs no explanation…

Well, I’m not sure what to conclude from these musings. Except that this year is surely Just The Right Time to publish a life of George Calderon!

‘Tourbillions in time’ (a powerful concept) is surely enough to explain the differences in the narratives. But I was also made to think of Captain Pat(t)erson and others recounting in 1915 the events which had devastated relatives back home. Pat(t)erson wouldn’t have wanted to tell Kittie that George had led his platoon over the top through numerous warm and bleeding bodies of men slaughtered only moments before. And, even without considering the impact on relatives of an appallingly messier version of history, I’m thinking that an account where orders were “rigidly followed” would seem to be the most appropriate to honour the sacrifice of the dead, avoiding any stain of doubt on these men and perhaps safeguarding the award of posthumous medals.

Here in 2015, these new perspectives add a shocking twist. I’d just like to add my thanks, as a non-historian, for this astonishing blog. I’ve been riveted by the still-unfolding tale since the start of June.

There is something peculiarly tantalising about a correspondence of which only part survives. Percy is replying to a ‘missing’ letter that Kittie wrote on June 16. Can we infer any of her letter’s contents from what he says here?

l rolled back through the blog and see that on that day Kittie received a letter from George’s former adjutant – causing you to wonder whether she was cheered or depressed by the fact that the Oxford & Bucks had had news of Captain Hogan’s injury but nothing at all about George. We know that Gertrude Bell (with Kittie’s connivance) had already instructed Percy to travel to Alexandria to look for George – on June 17 you blogged about Percy’s letter of June 15, in which he confirmed that he was about to depart for Egypt. Given the excellence of the Edwardian postal service, even in wartime, we might assume that Kittie’s letter of June 16 was in reply to Percy’s of the day before. (It makes little difference to this attempt at reconstruction if their letters crossed.)

‘I scrawl one line to go to you at once,’ he says; no doubt Kittie has begged him to write immediately. And ‘you must know by this time where and how George is. He is not in Egypt,’ is surely a response to ‘Have you found him?’ So far, so obvious. I would like to postulate further that Kittie then proposed that she herself could –or should or would – follow him to Alexandria. Percy is emphatic – ‘don’t think of coming here’; he repeats this advice – ‘don’t come here’; and he reinforces it with reasons why ‘you command the whole field best from home.’ Why would he say these things if not to deter her from a risky and in all probability futile impulse? Percy’s detailed arguments about the possible destinations of a man wounded at Gallipoli (he is resolutely not considering death or capture) incline me to think that she suggested making the journey whether George had been found or not.

You tell us that Percy’s letter of June 15 was ‘scrumpled’. Did Kittie first hurl it into the wastepaper basket before picking up her pen? In reply to your question as to how she felt on June 16, I might posit the answer ‘desperate’. What do other followers think?

The Catch of Emotion

‘Aunt Kittie’ Calderon occupied a particular spot in the heart of my father, Jack Pym (1908–93), who is mentioned in passing in Patrick Miles’s post of July 3. It is not too much to say, I believe, that this was a unique spot, not least for Kittie’s loving kindness to Jack after the death of his mother Violet in 1927. Jack also valued – I am certain – Kittie’s emotional intelligence, which has been much remarked upon during the last year. Having said that, however, it must be added that Jack himself regarded, throughout his life, any overt display of emotion with a mixture of distrust and fearfulness. Kittie, on the other hand, was a shining example of how and why one should not be afraid of one’s emotions: she showed Jack, a tall shy young man, what perhaps he had hidden within himself – but which he was never entirely able to bring to the surface.

Jack’s father’s experience in the First World War, at Gallipoli and in France, was never spoken of within the family, except in the most general terms, and only once, as far as I can remember, did Jack, an architect by profession, speak in any detail of his own experience as a sapper building bridges in Burma during the Second World War (he was only once called upon to fire his rifle in anger – at a faraway Japanese plane passing overhead: ‘But thankfully I missed…’).

What lessons my father drew from the two world wars of the twentieth century, one of which he had lived through as a boy and the other he had experienced for six years at first hand, I never discovered and he never told me. He never revealed the need (or the taste) for any sort of public commemoration of the wars. On the whole he preferred to look forward rather than back. He did, however, tell me one revealing story that I have never forgotten.

In September 1939, my father was at the top of a ladder in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, West London, helping to mount a large oblong plaque dedicated to the soldiers of the old Fifth Army. The plaque, which can still be seen, commemorates two new wards to which the soldiers had subscribed (but in the event were never built). While he was on the ladder, screwdriver in hand, word came of the invasion of Poland. ‘There I was,’ he told me, ‘screwing up a memorial to the last war, when news of the new one arrived…’ He told the story in a matter-of-fact tone, but I have never been able to recall it without a ‘catch of emotion’ – an ironic catch of emotion.

John Pym

But… But… But Patrick….

I found this an extremely persuasive hypothesis – until I got to your comment on the last paragraph of Percy’s letter. His tone seems extraordinarily, even inappropriately, chirpy. Surely Percy knew exactly why he was going to Alexandria. Is it not significant that – as an Edwardian gentleman who therefore did not tell lies – he gives no reason at all for such a sudden and potentially risky foreign trip? What a lark indeed!

I would dare to conjecture that Gertrude had given him very specific instructions: George is either dead, missing, or so badly injured that he cannot even dictate a message to his wife. Go AT ONCE to Egypt and Find Out. But DO NOT Tell Kittie My Fears.

So Percy here is doing his best to sound reassuringly light-hearted. As George did rather better in his masterful description of the delights of camping on the Turkish coast. The irony of course is that Kittie had asked, even paid, Gertrude to send him. And presumably he knew that she knew that he knew…

Edwardian mores are certainly difficult to understand at times. It always seems paradoxical that Kittie was resourceful, proactive, and possessed of considerable inner strength, yet she accepted and welcomed the way all her friends conspired to protect her. On the other hand it is easy to see why this upbeat cheerfulness was comforting when she was undoubtedly worried sick. That illogical dread that if you express your fears out loud they might become true is surely timeless.

By golly, I do enjoy contentious essays like this. There is only one thing I remember from one of the Germanists at Cambridge, whose course I soon dropped: he said the purpose of research is to rescue forgotten reputations. He admitted he’d failed to achieve this through his own Ph.D., but didn’t regret trying. I’m amazed that you say friends have said you are wasting your time writing about someone obscure. What the hell do they think academic research is all about? Do they think we must just accept that worthwhile scholars, writers, critics, thinkers disappear into obscurity and should be allowed to remain there? You make a very strong case for Calderon, and I do not have the knowledge to dispute anything you say. That’s not the point. The quality of the argument is absolutely splendid, and I hope it will be noticed, and that it will rescue his reputation.

Rest in Peace George.

Him now as of old I see
Carrying his head with an air
Courteous and virile,
With the charm of a nature free,
Daring, resourceful, prompt,
In his frank and witty smile.

By Oxford towers and streams
Who shone among us all
In body and brain so bold?
Who shaped so firm his themes
Crystal—hard in debate?
And who hid a heart less cold?
(Laurence Binyon)

http://www.dbolitho.co.uk/gallipoli.html

The new dawn lights the eastern sky;
Night shades are lifted from the sea,
The Third Brigade with courage storm
Thy wooded heights, Gallipoli
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
Australians tread Gallipoli.

Thunderous bursts from iron mouths –
Myriad messengers of death,
Warships ply their deadly fire
Watching comrades hold their breath
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
There’s hell upon Gallipoli.

Serried ranks upon the beach,
Courage beams in every eye
These Australian lads can face
Giant Death, though e’er so nigh,
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
There’s death upon Gallipoli.

On they press in endless stream,
Up the heights they shouting go;
Comrades fall; but still press on
They press the now retreating foe
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
The Turks flee on Gallipoli.

One by one the brave lie low,
Machine Guns, shrapnel do their work;
Brave Australians know no fear,
Never have been known to shirk,
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
Their names carved on Gallipoli.

Reduced, cut up, there numbers show
The murderous fire that swept thy field;
But still victorious they stand,
Who never have been known to yield
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
Thick dead lie on Gallipoli.

For days they hold with grim set grip,
Their feet firm planted on the shore,
Repelling every fierce attack
And cheerfully they seek for more
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
Their trenches line Gallipoli.

For thirty weary days they fight,
For Britain’s sake they give their best;
With uncomplaining voice they stand
And neither look nor ask for rest
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
They’ve conquered thee, Gallipoli.

The waves break on thy wave swept shores,
The breeze still blows across thy hills;
But crosses near and far abound,
A sight that deepest grief instils
Gallipoli! Gallipoli !
Their graves lie on Gallipoli.

For those brave hearts that died to show
Australia’s worth in this dread war,
The far off tears and sighs for those
Who sleep beneath the cannons roar
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
Thou still, shalt pay, Gallipoli.

The few that valiant still remain,
War worn but grim and anger yet
To hurl full vengeance on the foe.
Because they never can forget
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
They ask the price, Gallipoli.

Gallipoli I warn you now,
Australia’s sons and Turks shall meet
Once more, and then our onslaught yet
Shall sweep the ground beneath your feet
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
Thy end’s in sight, Gallipoli.

Upon the Graves of those that sleep,
Upon thy wooded slope and vale,
We shall avenge. Remember then,
Australians cannot, will not fail,
Gallipoli ! Gallipoli !
Thy doom is sealed, Gallipoli.

Staff Sergeant Sydney Bolitho
6th Battalion A.I.F

Not so much a comment as a question.

Several times, as I have followed this excellent blog, I have found myself wondering both about Kittie’s childless state, and whether her ‘unnamed’ illness is in fact the menopause. The latter was presumably too unmentionable ever to appear in a lady’s letters. But did Kittie ever touch on her desire to have children – the evidence suggests she enjoyed their company very much – or did she express regret that she did not? The fact that she had none by either of her two husbands suggests she may have had a gynaecological problem. Was Jim Corbet the son she wished she had had? Or was she glad not to have had sons, given their likely fate in the War? And moving into the realms of speculation, if George had had step-sons of military age or younger children of his own, would he have felt differently about enlisting himself?

Several questions in fact!

Patrick Miles alludes to Percy Lubbock’s ‘Earlham’ (Jonathan Cape, London: 1922) and ‘its great influence down the generations’. It is true that Lubbock’s memoir of his Norfolk childhood was notably well received by both readers and critics, even in some quarters rapturously received, when it first appeared. And by 1923, when Kittie was writing to Gladys Raikes about Percy’s ‘George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory’ (1921), the author’s slightly later exercise in exquisite remembrance was enjoying its fifth imprint. Indeed, up until quite recently, you could be fairly certain of finding in any self-respecting English second-hand bookshop a durable copy of Cape’s 1926 reprint of ‘Earlham’, No.6 in the unmistakable Travellers’ Library series. ‘”The Travellers’ Library” is one of the most startlingly cheap series I have come across since the War,’ a writer for ‘The Daily Graphic’ reported. ‘The binding is blue and gold, the type is admirable, the books slip into the pocket like sea-lions into water, and best of all, the books are just the ones that everyone wants to keep, but most of us have mislaid.’ Since Percy’s death in 1965, however, I think it is true to say that until it came out of copyright (and into the tender mercies of the internet) no publisher thought it worthwhile to issue a new edition of ‘Earlham’ – a book that, perhaps, ninety-three years after its first publication, deserves reassessment…? (No, not ‘perhaps’, make that ‘surely’!) Consider Sir Edmund Gosse’s estimation of its author: ‘He is in the front rank of living prose artists. If this has not been said before, I take the liberty to say it now, and to invite examination of my claim, which I am ready to rest upon a passage from any chapter of “Earlham”.’

Hi, I recently purchased some items from a charity shop in Deal and amongst them found an original letter in it’s original envelope to a Mrs Raikes from Katharine Calderon. In it there are references to ‘Percy’,(on doing some research, I believe to be Percy Lubbock) and George. There is also a reference to Earlham. If you are interested in the letter, please send me an email. I really enjoyed researching the letter and finding out all about the life of George and Katharine.
Katy George.

Dear Jennifer, thanks so much for this, and for introducing me to your really delightful website/blog. It may sound ‘naff’ of me to say this, but I assure you it’s lovely and very interesting for me. I’d always assumed Fort Brockhurst was ‘in the country’ in 1915, but I see now I was wrong, and this has affected how I see Kittie coming to stay at Brockhurst in May. All v.b., Patrick

Am Gosport born and bred, and it is actually IN Gosport. Interesting post, love learning about our local history 🙂

Evan Connell’s ‘elasticated biography’ of George Armstrong Custer, Son of the Morning Star (North Point Press, San Francisco: 1984), ends with a Bibliography of 12 tight-packed pages but a mere nine lines of ‘thanks’ (including one line deprecating the Denver Public Library for not admitting visitors) in which an ‘indebtedness’ to only two named individuals, the historians John M. Carroll and Charles K. Mills, is acknowledged – deadpan – ‘for much informative correspondence’. The book, in other words, is Connell’s and Connell’s alone. The responsibility is the author’s; he was beholden to no one and received wisdom meant nothing to him: with the result that the sheer freedom with which the book is written and structured is both immense and awe-inspiring. There are no footnotes: the reader is required to take on trust the veracity of every fact, every reported spoken sentence. (‘I could never,’ Connell once said, ‘trust anyone again who lied to me.’) Evan Connell began his research into the life of General Custer, once the most famously identifiable American soldier of all time and one of the most written about figures in American history, with the idea he might compose a brief life, in the manner perhaps of one of his biographical essays gathered in the collections A Long Desire (1979) and The White Lantern (1980). But the deeper he delved into the primary source material and as his knowledge grew of the multiple unresolved controversies surrounding Custer’s life, the more it became clear to this solitary American author – an author who all his life wrote exactly what he pleased, disdaining any thought of a ‘publisher’s contract’ before he sat down to his task – that he would have to drive his own wagon along a track that he had cut himself. The result is a wholly singular work of history, memory and biography (multiple biographies, in fact); and it is one which – through the medium of a ‘life of Custer’ – simultaneously, and without strain, illuminates the mind, personality and beliefs of Evan Connell. An unforgettable book: a work of art.

Me again. Come on – all you other followers of Calderonia – I’d be very interested to read your comments too!

You ask if there was a connection between the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry and Calderon’s old College, Trinity. There was not, although five officers of that regiment are listed on the Board of Honour in the College’s War Memorial Library. One of these is Reginald Tiddy (1880-1916), the College’s first fellow and tutor in Oxford University’s new-fangled school of English Literature. Like Calderon, Tiddy appears in the Dictionary of National Biography. And like Calderon, he had considerable difficulty getting accepted for active service. My source for his life and military career is the biographical memoir that forms the preface of Tiddy’s only book, the posthumously published ‘The Mummer’s Play’ (1923). The author of the memoir was his close friend David Pye.

Reginald Tiddy was 34 at the outbreak of war and he had a muscular physique. He was a keen Morris dancer and enthusiastic member of the English Folk Dance Society. But he was also severely asthmatic and very short-sighted – ‘almost helpless without his glasses’.

He had no desire to fight. To Tiddy, Pye explained, War meant ‘the annihilation of all he valued’. But as early as September 1914 he wrote resolutely of his intention ‘to go to the army doctors and see if they will have me for a commission. I cannot honestly say I hope they will, as it seems to me that officers will stand a very poor chance of surviving this war, but I cannot really see how I can keep out of it, having had quite a fair amount of happy life, when these poor kids of twenty are being shot like this.’

Like Calderon, Tiddy went into training. In the autumn of 1914 he drilled with the Oxford University OTC, and while preparing for a series of lectures on Folk Literature at the British Museum, he joined with the Inns of Court OTC. Again, like Calderon. The two men had at least one mutual friend, Herbert Blakiston, President of Trinity College 1907–38. Did Calderon also know Tiddy’s fellow Morris enthusiast Cecil Sharp?

In December 1914 Reginald Tiddy was rejected for foreign service. He applied several times for a commission in a territorial battalion, but was rejected again. On December 12 he wrote to a friend, ‘Farquharson wants me to try for a Home Defence thing, so I’m going to, but unless one knows a Colonel there’s not much chance. I don’t!’ Tiddy was not entirely without influential friends however: Arthur Farquharson was a tutor at his undergraduate college, University, and a Lieutenant-Colonel in the OTC.

In January 1915 Tiddy travelled to Stockport where he was ‘once more ploughed for the Cheshires’. Still he did not give up. His next attempt was by means of ‘a deucedly strenuous time at Oxford in the “Special Course”, which starts at 7.40 a.m. every day. But I learn a great deal which might be useful some day… I was made to drill a squad and rather fetched the C.O. by the ferocity and swagger which I put on for his benefit, and by… my most brilliant smile.’ It worked. On 16 February 1915 Reginald Tiddy was gazetted as a second lieutenant and he joined the 2/4th battalion of the Oxford and Bucks at Northampton. Unlike Calderon, he was not a natural soldier. He found the training ‘devilish strenuous’ and had regular asthma attacks, and a long period of convalescence after flu. In November 1915 he was refused for overseas service by a medical board, and left the battalion. The published correspondence suggests that Farquharson tried hard to persuade his friend to transfer to the safer service of the Intelligence Corps – ‘where his faculties would be less wasted, and to leave the infantry work to others’ – but he was adamant. In January 1916 he wrote triumphantly, ‘I passed my medical board with great success, and my colonel tells me he will have me back if a vacancy occurs…’ He re-joined the battalion in March, and sailed for France in the middle of May.

Reginald John Elliot Tiddy was killed by a shell falling in the trenches near Laventie in Northern France on the night of 10 August 1916.

Happy New Year Patrick! Sorry to hear you have been laid low by flu.
I was interested in your two possible explanations for George’s statement that he could not visit William Rothenstein because of Kittie. Either that – after almost losing him in battle – she had become emotionally dependent on having him safe at home beside her. Or that – given her ongoing poor health – he felt too responsible for her welfare to leave her even for a visit to Gloucestershire.
But surely there is a third, simpler, explanation. Is not George just bringing out his wife as a polite excuse because he does not actually want to stay with William Rothenstein at all? Using his impeccable Edwardian manners he gushes, ‘I treasure your invitation to come and stay with you: a thing I should like to do of all things’ — but then brings out a cast-iron reason why he can’t come. No chivalrous gentleman could object to a husband staying at home to care for his wife. George ends his letter with a promise – to visit at ‘a more peaceful time’ – that is so vague as to be meaningless.
Does this mean that George is exaggerating Kittie’s fragile mental and/or physical state? Are there other possible reasons why he didn’t want to visit his old friend? I have no idea… How glad I am that I am not a biographer – what a difficult business it is!

Oh Patrick! I can see that being George’s biographer/blogger requires very similar levels of staunchness and stoutness as are being displayed by poor, long-suffering Kittie. Thank you on behalf of your readers for enduring all the slaughter, the destruction and most especially the stupidity of war in order that we can experience George’s life in such a vivid way. I for one appreciate your daily blog entries enormously.

I have to put my hand up and admit to being that historian (I’m not really, but thank you) who accused George of ‘prancing around on a horse’ when he could have been doing something useful like his old college friend, Laurence Binyon. I may even have used the words ‘he should have acted his age.’ In fact, as soon as George crossed the channel, my views on him started to change. This is very early for any man with no military background to be serving on the front line – surely almost all the other officers on active service in 1914 were either career or territorial army officers. So all credit to him for his determination to achieve his goal. And as your blog title reminds us, he was a writer – I am now willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe that he wanted to go to war not just to have fun but in order to write about it. And to do that properly, I can see why he wanted to fight rather than interpret from the sidelines. I hope somebody, soon, will refer to him as ‘that good egg”.

And as for Binyon – at the present date in the blog, he is strolling to work every day in the British Museum, and returning home to tea with his wife and daughters. He will not volunteer to scrub floors in a hospital in France until the summer of 1915. Perhaps it will be the example, or even the death, of his old friend George that inspires him…

Fine pic of the old chucker, Patrick.