‘Exemplar’, not ‘exemplary’, because John Stanhope Baines, son of the Herbert Stanhope Baines who features in Laurence Brockliss’s recent guest post, would not have wanted anyone to regard him as an exemplary young officer of World War I. When he is invalided home from Ypres with a light wound in July 1915, and his nerves are suffering, he almost falls out with his fiancee-to-be Elisabeth Wicksteed over this very issue:
I felt that she admired me an awful lot & I couldn’t help feeling that it was the good she saw in me she was loving […] and that she mightn’t care so much about me if she realised that I wasn’t a hero after all. (p. 115)
Moreover, coming from four generations of the Baines family to edit the Leeds Mercury, he clearly had journalism in his blood: he described a military action so well in a diary he sent Dear Mother that she could not resist sending it to The Times as a more accurate account than their own, and when they published it he was hauled over the coals by a General (p. 71). He later got into trouble with the censor, too, for describing his billet in ‘highly dangerous’ detail (p. 103). He liked his whisky, he liked his pipe, he played bridge for money, winning at one point nearly £400 at today’s prices (p. 159), and in 1918 he even became, as the editors of his letters interpret it, ‘tired and disenchanted’ (p. 222).
But an exemplar he is. Born in 1894, he was a classical scholar at Winchester, went from school into the Royal Engineers (‘Sappers’), and at the age of twenty was a lieutenant on the Western Front. Here he shows himself to be a complete professional, hard-working, always retaining his humour, brave on perilous ‘wiring’ expeditions, sociable, very able at managing his men, given to attending church, curious about everything going on around him. In three adjectives, he is clean-living, gallant and stalwart. I cannot recall ever reading a better portrait of the archetypal young British officer of the Great War.
The editors of this 270-page volume, John Baines’s grandchildren Andrew Baines and Joanna Palmer, have done a magnificent job in presenting his letters: on the right hand page you have the letter, on the left hand a whole article about something touched on in its text, and these are very readable and entertaining in themselves. Their subjects range from bully beef, trench construction, military chaplains and malaria to…the recipe for traditional Yorkshire parkin, ‘wire obstacles’, and Raphael Kirchner’s pin-ups (illustrated). Those articles that explain the military campaigns John Baines is part of, and the wider background of the war as it unfolds, are outstandingly lucid and informative. In short, this book is not only about John Baines, it is a whole education in the realia of the 1914-18 War.
For me, two aspects of the book were a revelation. First, as reviewer Angela Holdsworth has put it, this is ‘at last a book outlining the dangerous and vital work of the Sappers, so often overlooked in accounts of the war’. I now understand their mind-boggling contribution to warfare. Second, I had always thought that the Salonika campaign, aimed at breaking the Germans’ Macedonian front, was another failure like Gallipoli, but this book shows it was quite the opposite. With maps and brilliant analyses on the left hand pages, Baines’s letters detail a crushing endgame that in Ludendorff’s words ‘sealed the fate of the quadruple alliance’, i.e. precipitated the armistice.
Having married Elisabeth Wicksteed (‘my Betsy’) whilst on leave in April 1916, John Baines was posted to Salonika in 1917 for the rest of the war. Here he was engaged less in frontline sapper work than building a network of roads behind the lines. These were a vital element in the eventual rout of the Bulgarians facing the British section of the Macedonian front. If anyone thought soldiering is not about people, this part of the book would convince them otherwise. Baines displays an extraordinary ability to get on with the local mixed races and organise and pay large numbers of women, men and children to construct his roads. The post-war tributes paid to the conduct of the British troops are glowing. Here is Baines writing to his mother on 26 May 1918:
A lot of my women bring their babies to work with them and leave them under a hedge somewhere. The hail was rather rough on the babies & the Sappers put their own coats over them as far as possible. The women were awfully pleased and brought them eggs next morning. Some of the Sappers are just like the head of a large family — say 20 wives and 20 daughters — and their family is very fond of them. They bring flowers for them and sometimes make them little bead purses or similar things to send home. (p. 217)
After the Bulgarians surrendered, John revisited the Turkish village he had been based at in Macedonia and was very honourably received. The villagers feared greatly for their future under post-war Greek rule. A panel on the opposite page explains that they were right to: the terrible history of Macedonia in the twentieth century was concluded by independence only in 1991. Despite the fact that Turkey was our war enemy, Baines had come greatly to admire the Turks, started to learn Turkish, and wanted after the war to continue with it at the London School of Oriental Languages so that he would be ‘in a position to agitate strongly for a job in some place inhabited by Turks’ (p. 243).
Local women breaking stones for road making 1917 (IWM Q32693)
A final quality to mention of John Stanhope Baines — one that we don’t perhaps associate with young public school officers in World War I — is empathy. It is tempting to think he acquired it as a result of losing his father when he was two and developing very deep relationships with his mother Elizabeth and sister Honor (who is the other recipient of his war letters published here). He seems to be able to tell his mother anything, for example that some of the Kirchner ladies ‘in various stages of dress or undress’ are ‘really rather nice’, and that he is ‘wildly in love’ with an 18-year-old called Salonina, who has ‘very nice hair’, depicted on a Roman coin he has dug up! This is well after his marriage to the rather severe-looking Betsy, to whom none of his letters seem to have survived. He sends his mother hefty chunks of his pay and winnings. When she protests, he writes: ‘You shouldn’t write that you’ve “no one to bring your troubles to”. What else is a son for?’ (p. 213).
Dearest Mother is both militarily and humanly a dramatic narrative, and I am not surprised that a successful theatrical entertainment has been made from it:
The editors, Andrew Baines and Joanna Palmer, appearing as John and ‘Dearest Mother’ in a presentation of their book in the Guildhall, Windsor, as part of The Windsor Spring Festival 2016
The book is a wonderfully fresh and readable contribution to the literature of World War I and I’m delighted to have come across it long after completing my own research on George Calderon’s war. Dearest Mother was published by Helion in 2015, the first edition sold out, and the second is now obtainable directly from the editors at joannaps2015@gmail.com
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George Calderon c.1901
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon, 1912
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Captain of the 11
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
John Baines: exemplar of a young officer
Available priced £10 including postage from joannaps2015@gmail.com
‘Exemplar’, not ‘exemplary’, because John Stanhope Baines, son of the Herbert Stanhope Baines who features in Laurence Brockliss’s recent guest post, would not have wanted anyone to regard him as an exemplary young officer of World War I. When he is invalided home from Ypres with a light wound in July 1915, and his nerves are suffering, he almost falls out with his fiancee-to-be Elisabeth Wicksteed over this very issue:
Moreover, coming from four generations of the Baines family to edit the Leeds Mercury, he clearly had journalism in his blood: he described a military action so well in a diary he sent Dear Mother that she could not resist sending it to The Times as a more accurate account than their own, and when they published it he was hauled over the coals by a General (p. 71). He later got into trouble with the censor, too, for describing his billet in ‘highly dangerous’ detail (p. 103). He liked his whisky, he liked his pipe, he played bridge for money, winning at one point nearly £400 at today’s prices (p. 159), and in 1918 he even became, as the editors of his letters interpret it, ‘tired and disenchanted’ (p. 222).
But an exemplar he is. Born in 1894, he was a classical scholar at Winchester, went from school into the Royal Engineers (‘Sappers’), and at the age of twenty was a lieutenant on the Western Front. Here he shows himself to be a complete professional, hard-working, always retaining his humour, brave on perilous ‘wiring’ expeditions, sociable, very able at managing his men, given to attending church, curious about everything going on around him. In three adjectives, he is clean-living, gallant and stalwart. I cannot recall ever reading a better portrait of the archetypal young British officer of the Great War.
The editors of this 270-page volume, John Baines’s grandchildren Andrew Baines and Joanna Palmer, have done a magnificent job in presenting his letters: on the right hand page you have the letter, on the left hand a whole article about something touched on in its text, and these are very readable and entertaining in themselves. Their subjects range from bully beef, trench construction, military chaplains and malaria to…the recipe for traditional Yorkshire parkin, ‘wire obstacles’, and Raphael Kirchner’s pin-ups (illustrated). Those articles that explain the military campaigns John Baines is part of, and the wider background of the war as it unfolds, are outstandingly lucid and informative. In short, this book is not only about John Baines, it is a whole education in the realia of the 1914-18 War.
For me, two aspects of the book were a revelation. First, as reviewer Angela Holdsworth has put it, this is ‘at last a book outlining the dangerous and vital work of the Sappers, so often overlooked in accounts of the war’. I now understand their mind-boggling contribution to warfare. Second, I had always thought that the Salonika campaign, aimed at breaking the Germans’ Macedonian front, was another failure like Gallipoli, but this book shows it was quite the opposite. With maps and brilliant analyses on the left hand pages, Baines’s letters detail a crushing endgame that in Ludendorff’s words ‘sealed the fate of the quadruple alliance’, i.e. precipitated the armistice.
Having married Elisabeth Wicksteed (‘my Betsy’) whilst on leave in April 1916, John Baines was posted to Salonika in 1917 for the rest of the war. Here he was engaged less in frontline sapper work than building a network of roads behind the lines. These were a vital element in the eventual rout of the Bulgarians facing the British section of the Macedonian front. If anyone thought soldiering is not about people, this part of the book would convince them otherwise. Baines displays an extraordinary ability to get on with the local mixed races and organise and pay large numbers of women, men and children to construct his roads. The post-war tributes paid to the conduct of the British troops are glowing. Here is Baines writing to his mother on 26 May 1918:
After the Bulgarians surrendered, John revisited the Turkish village he had been based at in Macedonia and was very honourably received. The villagers feared greatly for their future under post-war Greek rule. A panel on the opposite page explains that they were right to: the terrible history of Macedonia in the twentieth century was concluded by independence only in 1991. Despite the fact that Turkey was our war enemy, Baines had come greatly to admire the Turks, started to learn Turkish, and wanted after the war to continue with it at the London School of Oriental Languages so that he would be ‘in a position to agitate strongly for a job in some place inhabited by Turks’ (p. 243).
Local women breaking stones for road making 1917 (IWM Q32693)
A final quality to mention of John Stanhope Baines — one that we don’t perhaps associate with young public school officers in World War I — is empathy. It is tempting to think he acquired it as a result of losing his father when he was two and developing very deep relationships with his mother Elizabeth and sister Honor (who is the other recipient of his war letters published here). He seems to be able to tell his mother anything, for example that some of the Kirchner ladies ‘in various stages of dress or undress’ are ‘really rather nice’, and that he is ‘wildly in love’ with an 18-year-old called Salonina, who has ‘very nice hair’, depicted on a Roman coin he has dug up! This is well after his marriage to the rather severe-looking Betsy, to whom none of his letters seem to have survived. He sends his mother hefty chunks of his pay and winnings. When she protests, he writes: ‘You shouldn’t write that you’ve “no one to bring your troubles to”. What else is a son for?’ (p. 213).
Dearest Mother is both militarily and humanly a dramatic narrative, and I am not surprised that a successful theatrical entertainment has been made from it:
The editors, Andrew Baines and Joanna Palmer, appearing as John and ‘Dearest Mother’ in a presentation of their book in the Guildhall, Windsor, as part of The Windsor Spring Festival 2016
The book is a wonderfully fresh and readable contribution to the literature of World War I and I’m delighted to have come across it long after completing my own research on George Calderon’s war. Dearest Mother was published by Helion in 2015, the first edition sold out, and the second is now obtainable directly from the editors at joannaps2015@gmail.com
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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