The version of Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ published in The Times (see my post of 21 September) seems to contain a misprint in line 11: ‘stanch’ instead of ‘staunch’ (‘to the end against odds uncounted’). Last week I was in the Chapel of Trinity College, Oxford, to see the College’s manuscript of the poem, and this confirmed Binyon had written ‘staunch’. But, well, the idea of a misprint in The Times in 1914 seems incredible!
I now discover from The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles that at that time there were not only two spellings for the adjective, but two pronunciations: ‘stawnsh’ and ‘starnsh’. I would have said that ‘stanch’ is used today only for the verb, and, incidentally, that the consonant combination ‘ch’ is pronounced in both spellings as in ‘church’. However, I see from The Chambers Dictionary (2009) that I would be wrong on both counts…
In his letter of 29 September 1914 George Calderon starts to tell Kittie that ‘the Ritz Hotel at Paris is somehow at our disposal and we can have things sent, which will reach us’, but then breaks off: ‘I am too bewildered with tabloids and cigarettes to go into the details.’
Tabloids? Were the Northcliffe press onto him for impersonating a soldier?
It turns out that in Edwardian times Tabloid was a registered trademark for medicines manufactured in compressed/concentrated form by Wellcome and Co, but then (rather like ‘hoover’) it dropped the capital letter in order to be used of such drugs in general. The idea of George having taken so many of these ‘tabloids’ (what were they for?) and smoking so much as to be ‘bewildered’ casts an interesting light on his state.
Next entry: 3 October 1914
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Captain of the 11
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon, 1912
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George Calderon c.1901
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Language issues again
The version of Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ published in The Times (see my post of 21 September) seems to contain a misprint in line 11: ‘stanch’ instead of ‘staunch’ (‘to the end against odds uncounted’). Last week I was in the Chapel of Trinity College, Oxford, to see the College’s manuscript of the poem, and this confirmed Binyon had written ‘staunch’. But, well, the idea of a misprint in The Times in 1914 seems incredible!
I now discover from The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles that at that time there were not only two spellings for the adjective, but two pronunciations: ‘stawnsh’ and ‘starnsh’. I would have said that ‘stanch’ is used today only for the verb, and, incidentally, that the consonant combination ‘ch’ is pronounced in both spellings as in ‘church’. However, I see from The Chambers Dictionary (2009) that I would be wrong on both counts…
In his letter of 29 September 1914 George Calderon starts to tell Kittie that ‘the Ritz Hotel at Paris is somehow at our disposal and we can have things sent, which will reach us’, but then breaks off: ‘I am too bewildered with tabloids and cigarettes to go into the details.’
Tabloids? Were the Northcliffe press onto him for impersonating a soldier?
It turns out that in Edwardian times Tabloid was a registered trademark for medicines manufactured in compressed/concentrated form by Wellcome and Co, but then (rather like ‘hoover’) it dropped the capital letter in order to be used of such drugs in general. The idea of George having taken so many of these ‘tabloids’ (what were they for?) and smoking so much as to be ‘bewildered’ casts an interesting light on his state.
Next entry: 3 October 1914
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