All Comments

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.