Calderonia

Future biographers of George Calderon…

Posted on August 30, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Even at this late stage, ‘things keep coming up’. It took me, as predicted, two pretty full days to input to the text of my biography (167,000 words) the 1000+ corrections and revisions that emerged from my two complete readings of the printout, and I am now going into the process of assembling and writing my Afterword. But a fortnight ago, just before I went on holiday, my eye happened to light on the last page of George’s Introduction to his translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard in the last volume of his selected works posthumously edited by Kittie. In my chapter on George and Chekhov I always quote from the first edition of his translations (1912), or if I am referring to his revisions, then the second edition (1913), but on this occasion I happened to be consulting this volume of the selected works (1924) about something else.

I think the concluding paragraph of George’s Introduction (dated 1911) was extremely important to him, because he had not expressed any personal ‘wider’ views about Chekhov’s beliefs anywhere else. In this last section of the Introduction, entitled ‘Symbolism’, he mocked contemporary Russian critics who were ‘sure that there is a message of substantial hope in Tchekhof’s plays’ and that Chekhov believed ‘we may confidently look for the Millenium’ (this became the politically approved view of Chekhov in the USSR). George ends:

Surely it is another piece of Symbolism. Each generation believes that it stands on the boundary line between an old bad epoch and a good new one. And still the world grows no better; rather worse; hungrier, less various, less beautiful. That is true; but there is consolation in the assurance that whatever becomes of this husk of a planet, the inner meaning of it, hope itself, God, man’s ideal, continually progresses and develops. If that is not what Tchekhof meant, it seems at any rate the best interpretation of what he wrote.

Suddenly I noticed that instead of ‘the inner meaning of it’, the 1924 edition has ‘the meaning we put into it’. The vocabulary and cadences of this concluding paragraph are very carefully weighed, in my opinion, and if George himself changed ‘the inner meaning of it’ to ‘the meaning we put into it’, it would be revealing. It would suggest that instead of we humans having to attune ourselves to the tao of the ‘given’ world, instead of our having to discover the meaning hidden in the natura naturata, we project our meaning upon it, which we might take from anywhere, including theistic systems, scriptures and revelations. In other words, this change of words could imply that in the two years since George wrote the first version of his Introduction he had retreated from his Taoism to a more human-centred belief — I don’t say Humanism or Christianity, but at least to a more person-based, individual, existential form of faith. And this would tally with the impression I have that at Gallipoli he drew comfort from the established religion practised around him for all the troops by army padres.

But I said ‘if George himself’ made this change. When its implications hit me, my first reaction was to suspect that Kittie had made it when editing the 1924 volume in which I spotted it — and I will give my reasons for thinking that in my next post.

Ruminating further, though, I realised that if George himself had made this change, it would be in the second and last edition published in his lifetime, the one of ‘1913’. Here there was a slight problem. I don’t actually have that edition and had always taken my 1927 Jonathan Cape edition to be a reprint of it, since a footnote in it implies it was printed from the second edition; but equally, the 1927 edition could have been reprinted from Kittie’s 1924 edition… To ascertain, then, whether it was Kittie who made this significant change in George’s final, declarative word on Chekhov, there was no alternative but to obtain the second edition. I knew there was only one copy advertised in Britain, so I hit the phone and bought it. It was not cheap and should arrive within a week. Also, although advertised as ‘second edition, 1913’, a conversation with the bookseller established that the words on the verso of the title-page are ‘second edition, October 1912’! (The first edition was published on Chekhov’s birthday, 29 January 1912.)

I had long ago compared the texts of the translations in the first edition and the ‘second’ edition (i.e. my 1927 copy). The differences are very interesting. A footnote in the ‘second’ edition says that ‘Prince Kropotkin’ pointed out some errors in the first edition (he was a close friend of Lydia Yavorskaya, who played Nina in the 1912 London production) and that George had corrected them ‘since the first edition’. Some errors, however, had still got through, and it never occurred to me that George might have changed his Introduction as well. Now the possibility arises that Kittie made changes that were perpetuated in the 1927 edition and editions ever since, without George’s approval. It seems unlikely, but the only way to find out is to compare the first and second editions (now both dated as 1912), and then the real second edition with hers of 1924.

This raises a general point, I think. Nearly a hundred years have passed since Percy Lubbock’s ‘life’ (as Kittie described it) of George. I really do hope that my own biography of George leads to others tackling theirs before another hundred years go by. Even at this late stage, I simply had to follow up this question of the variants in the last paragraph of George’s Introduction, because the latter is so important to George’s achievement, but there are other late-arising issues that I have decided not to pursue. I think these might be useful avenues for future biographers to investigate, so I will mention some of them.

Although I searched twenty-three literary journals by hand for the period 1895-1915, and discovered stories and articles by George that were not already known, future biographers should surely be able to search more widely in online versions. Then, I would go down to the British Library (avoiding the brickstacks in the courtyard), locate the voluminous manuscript of George’s and William Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor, which by then will surely have been catalogued, and compare it scrupulously with Caine’s published narrative version of 1923. I would spend weeks in France trying to find George’s lost letter to Professor Paul Boyer in which he, George, explains to Boyer how Edwardian Englishmen and Englishwomen commonly have a ‘T’other’ in their private/sexual lives, and that this is accepted. And I would go to the department of the British Library in which Laurence Binyon worked, and I would turn over everything of the period 1920-23 looking for the originals of George’s sketches and paintings made on Tahiti and trying to discover what happened to the manuscript of Tahiti. And…and…and…

Someone will ask: ‘Why aren’t you doing those things, if you’re writing the definitive biography of George Calderon?’ To which I can only reply: ‘Give me a break!’ There can never be a ‘definitive biography of George Calderon’. I will have spent about eight years on mine by the time it appears, and I am firmly opposed to EPMOS, i.e. ‘Ever-expanding Post-retirement Magnum Opus Syndrome’. No-one will believe this, but: there are other things I want to write too.

If I have shown future writers about George some inviting avenues for their research, which lead to new material that even refutes some of my own interpretations, I shall be posthumously more than happy. I was very pleased to have done this with my publications about Chekhov on the British Stage. Dozens of younger researchers out there now know far more about this subject than I do. I have left the subject behind, and they have moved it on. That is how it must be.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, British Library, Christianity, comments, Dardanelles, EPMOS, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Grant Richards, Humanism, Kittie Calderon, Kropotkin, Laurence Binyon, Lydia Yavorskaya, Paul Boyer, Percy Lubbock, Petr Kropotkin, Spinoza, Tahiti, Taoism, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, theism, Third Battle of Krithia, William Caine, World War I | 2 Comments

From the diary of a countrywoman

Posted on August 25, 2016 by Patrick Miles

In December 1922 Kittie moved from Hampstead with her housekeeper Elizabeth Ellis to ‘Kay’s Crib’, a Victorian three-bedroomed house with a fair amount of ground to it at Sheet, near Petersfield, in Hampshire. She told a friend of Percy Lubbock’s: ‘Bad times have descended on my head with a wump and I have cast myself out of London.’ In a memoir from the 1940s she even wrote of the move: ‘My beloved London I had left forever, but for two whole years I had loathed living there.’

Why?

After accepting in May 1919 that George had been killed at the Dardanelles on 4 June 1915, she threw herself into producing a memorial volume, Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921), editing Tahiti for its first publication (1921), and bringing out two volumes of George’s plays (1922). These were all overwhelmingly positively reviewed and Tahiti became a bestseller. Constance Sutton wrote to Kittie that she could now ‘feel that George’s personality and genius are safe to be recognised for all time’. But on 5 August 1921 the other love of her life, Nina Corbet, died suddenly of peritonitis at Lugano. Nina had always kept a pied-à-terre in London from where she could visit Kittie. George’s London-based widowed mother had also died in 1921, the Sturge Moores, the Masefields and other neighbours of Kittie’s in Hampstead had now left, and her own house in Well Walk was, of course, a constant reminder of her life with George. By the end of 1921 she must have felt miserable.

However, she found it difficult to settle in her new home. She spent the summer of 1923 visiting friends in various parts of the country, came back to Sheet in the autumn, then left again on 8 December and returned only three times in the next two years. Much of that period was spent with Nina’s mother, ‘Mrs Stewart of Torquay’. In 1925 Kittie took up permanent residence at The Croft, Torquay, and nursed Mrs Stewart through her final illness. Mrs Stewart died on 24 November 1925. Completely drained, Kittie retired to Foxwold, at Brasted Chart in Kent, to spend Christmas with the Pyms. Alan and Helen Lubbock, who themselves lived near Sheet, also spent Christmas at Brasted, and brought Kittie back to Sheet by car on New Year’s Day, 1926.

It is possible that Kittie kept a pocket diary every year, but I incline to the view that, like George, she kept one only when she was trying to give structure to her life — when she had a programme of action that she was determined to see through. 1926 was one of those years, and I thought it might be interesting ninety years later to post occasional extracts from her Charles Letts’s Diary for that year.

11 February
Planting seedlings from The Croft all day. Weeds in Garden even worse than feared. Sent S.O.S. to Gertrude Corbet asking her to come and help me clear it.

19 February
Gertrude Corbet came, nobly to help me cope with awful condition in garden.

[The two women worked in the garden for a fortnight, then the diary records that Kittie ‘gardened hard’ on her own for another three weeks; note the month!]

11 May
End of [Coal] Strike. One hardly dares to believe it…but one thanks God and prays the Country may remain steady.

19 May
Bunty completely off her food — eaten nothing all day. Elizabeth says Bunty is like that each time she gets over her period.

[Elizabeth Ellis presumably looked after Bunty on many of the occasions when Kittie was away.]

20 May
Tried to write a letter that would prevent idiot kink in village socialities — but could not condense it. Will sleep on it.

[One of Kittie’s numerous retiree neighbours at Sheet, a Captain Gilbert Piggott, did or said something that she took great exception to.]

21 May
Have decided not to write at all — and just if ever chance comes get over the man’s idiotcy [sic]. Syringed all roses.

22 May
Got a certain amount of annuals in. Worked on till dark, breaking off for dinner. After all wrote to Mrs Piggott, seemed more right.

(To be continued)

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Kay's Crib', Alan Lubbock, biographies, biography, Brasted, Bunty, Captain Charles Evelyn Pym, Captain Gilbert Piggott, Charles Letts's Diary, Clara Calderon, comments, Dardanelles, diary, Eliza Stewart, Elizabeth Ellis, Foxwold, Gallipoli, gardening, George Calderon, Gertrude Corbet, Hampshire, Hampstead, Helen Lubbock, Kittie Calderon, Mrs Stewart of Torquay, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Percy Lubbock, Petersfield, Sheet, The Croft, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Torquay, Violet Pym, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest post: John Pym, ‘A bit of fun with Calderon’

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Patrick Miles

On 7 May 2016 Patrick Miles wrote a post on George Calderon and William Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor in which he reproduced the cover of the published version (1923) and also Caine’s Preface – the first paragraph of which read:

During the winter of 1913 Calderon asked me to write a pantomime with him. Naturally I agreed, though I had little expectation of ever seeing the thing finished. That didn’t seem to matter. What did matter was that I should be engaged upon a bit of fun with Calderon. Together we were to concoct absurdities. There would be laughter.

And I should preface the following remarks – sparked by the sentence, ‘What did matter was that I should be engaged upon a bit of fun with Calderon’ – with the disclaimer that these remarks are no more than pure conjecture…

* * *

What caught George Calderon’s fancy when he browsed the shelves of Horace Pym’s library at Foxwold, during his several visits with his wife Kittie to that large family house on Brasted Chart in Kent – on visits to Horace’s son Evey and his wife Violet, Kittie’s kinswoman – in the early years of the twentieth century? Horace, a successful London solicitor and passionate bibliophile, had died in 1896, aged 51, but the house he had built for himself and his family in the 1880s would have been fresh with his memory at the time of the Calderons’ visits – and the room in which it remained freshest was undoubtedly the large L-shaped library (or ‘Book Room’) filled with thousands of leather-bound volumes of literature, history and science that were bathed during the day in an almost soporific blue half-light from a row of leaded panes.

Perhaps George looked through Horace’s own guide to the library, A Tour round my Book-shelves (1891) – and there came upon an account of a visit to Foxwold by the Scottish folklorist and man-of-letters Andrew Lang on 14 December 1889. Lang, it appears, discovered that Horace’s close friend the novelist and humourist Anstey Guthrie had written a parody of Lang’s literary criticism and that this squib had found its way into a privately printed book called The Boy who fought for England (1886). Not to be outdone, Lang sat down on 15 December and dashed off a parody of a parody — as he noted, ‘much more like Andrew Lang than Guthrie’s’: a pre-Christmas jeu d’esprit that one of Horace’s heroes, Charles Dickens, would surely have applauded.

T. Anstey Guthrie (‘F. Anstey’)

Only one bound copy of The Boy who fought for England exists. For more than a hundred years it was kept in a place of honour in the library and if a guest happened to take it down Horace had thoughtfully added a few words explaining how the book had come about:

NOTE BY ONE OF THE PUBLIC

The Author of this little book is an invalid child of 8 years, and after a recovery from nearly three years of severe illness, he lately had a relapse, which necessitated his again lying flat on his back. During this time of retirement, he amused himself by writing little stories, which upon being read to him, he enlarged and amended in many ways.

On sending his first completed novelette to his beloved friend, the Author of “Vice Versâ” [the comic novel of 1882 in which a father and son exchange bodies], Mr. Anstey Guthrie most kindly had it printed, to the intense gratification of his small ally, and afterwards drew for him the capital illustrations bound up with this copy, as well as writing the following delightful press notices. A few additional pictures are added to complete this little Lad’s first attempt at a “Granger,” and his original MS. sketch before alteration is also added.
H.

To which Horace later wrote in pencil:

Dec 1889 Mr. Andrew Lang has since added a capital M.S. burlesque criticism on the book, written in delightful caricature of his own method.
H.

The Boy who fought for England is a breathless tale of derring-do cast as the memoir of an old man, Tom Wilkins. It involves accidental parricide, some short sharp sanguinary battles, the cursory slaying of several wild animals and the unexpected discovery of two long-lost brothers, and it was written by Julian Tindale Pym (1877–98), Horace Pym’s first-born son.

Julian Pym, 1880s

Mr Guthrie corrected Julian’s spelling but retained some of its more humorous examples, such as ‘grelor’ for gorilla – and also performed a little judicious silent editing. He wrote eleven parody press notices, some of them lengthy, sending up the style of among others John Ruskin and Julia Wedgwood (and not forgetting Andrew Lang). And he ended these with a droll report from The Brasted Intelligencer and Chevening Chanticleer: ‘Without being quite able to re-echo the tone of somewhat extravagant laudation which has been perhaps too hastily raised by our fellow-organs in the Metropolis, we find much in this book to commend and little, comparatively, to condemn.’

Julian was a keen naturalist and had, as his book-plate designed by the artist Molly Evans attests, a particular interest in reptiles and amphibians. He had been an invalid since the age of five, when the family was then living at 100 Harley Street in London. He fell, it is said, from a pony trap near the London Zoo and severely injured his back.

caption here

The book that Horace and Mr Guthrie contrived from Julian’s ‘novelette’ of nine short chapters is above all perhaps – as an artefact of the late nineteenth century – an expression of love, a most touching example of a wish to help and entertain an invalid child for whom medicine could do little, but it is also – more significantly, perhaps, when thinking about it in relationship to George Calderon, and the quote that sparked this conjecture – an example of a certain irrepressible desire of the Victorians to have fun, to scoff in the face of adversity, to embark, one might say, when the opportunity presented itself, on a Pickwickian adventure. This was the air George Calderon breathed as a child, and an aspect of the nineteenth century that he carried with him into the Edwardian era.

Julian’s book (27cm x 36cm) is bound in half-leather with swirling green, gold and blue endpapers and cover; and is thoroughly ‘Grangerised’ (i.e., extra-illustrated to the max) not only with Guthrie’s humorous pen-and-ink drawings, but W.P. Frith’s engraved portrait of Charles Dickens at forty-seven at the peak of his confidence, a watercolour of a sea scene by Edoardo De Martino, an engraving of a tiger by Thomas George Cooper, Mrs Gamp beside her hearth, and several more. Julian must have been delighted with it!

Illustration by Anstey Guthrie, with Foxwold in the distance

Horace reprinted The Boy who fought for England in full at the end of A Tour round my Book-shelves and included with it his own ‘Note by One of the Public’ – what he omitted, however, was a letter from Anstey Guthrie that he had bound in to his son’s Grangerised novelette.

Here is what Julian’s beloved friend wrote:

6 Phillimore Gardens
Kensington
5 : April : 1886

My dear Pym
I am sending you with this the Tatter [Julian’s MS?] and some assorted Press notices of the work. If after looking them through, you have any doubts whether they may some day hurt Julian’s feelings in the least, please tear them up – I only did them at Mrs. Pym’s request & for the fun of the thing. Of course he will not be affected by them one way or the other at present.
With kindest regards & best love to Julian, Evelyn, Carol & Via
Yours always very truly
T. Anstey Guthrie

If George Calderon had happened to take down The Boy who fought for England – and perhaps shown it to Kittie with a smile – he would have read Anstey Guthrie’s letter and he would, I am sure, have recognised the spirit in which it was written.

To which Patrick Miles adds a Footnote: As an aspiring young humourist himself, George Calderon would definitely have known and admired the work of F. Anstey (the name under which Guthrie wrote). Indeed, George recited Guthrie’s ‘Burglar Bill’ at a Trinity College, Oxford, Smoking Concert on 29 November 1890 and Guthrie’s parodies Mr Punch’s Pocket Ibsen probably influenced his own Cinderella: An Ibsen Pantomime. George and Kittie coincided with Guthrie at Foxwold on 27 December 1905, when the Calderons were perhaps staying with the Lubbock family at Emmetts in Ide Hill. Guthrie came to lunch with the Calderons at Heathland Lodge on 7 January 1912, and wrote Kittie a long letter when they were in Glasgow in the autumn of 1909 for the first commercial performance of The Fountain and the British premiere of The Seagull in George’s translation.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Lang, Anstey Guthrie, biographies, biography, Burglar Bill, Captain Charles Evelyn Pym, Charles Dickens, Cinderella: An Ibsen Pantomime, comments, Emmetts, F. Anstey, Foxwold, fun, George Calderon, Horace Pym, John Pym, Julian Pym, Kittie Calderon, The boy who fought for England, The Brave Little Tailor, Victorian humour, Violet Pym, William Caine | 5 Comments

Guest posts on ‘Calderonia’

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Patrick Miles

The next post, which will appear on Monday 15 August, will be by Mr John Pym, son of Jack Pym (1908-93) who featured as a child in my very first post of 30 July 1914 (30 July 2014) and was the eldest son of Sir Charles Evelyn Pym (1879-1971) and Violet Pym (1881-1927), née Lubbock. Violet and ‘Evey’ lived at Foxwold, Brasted Chart, Kent, and were close friends of George and Kittie Calderon, as Violet was a niece of Kittie’s through Kittie’s first marriage to Archie Ripley.

John Pym is familiar to followers of this blog from his numerous contributions of fact and photographs, his Comments, and above all his poem to George’s memory posted on 2 July 2015. I feel sure that his guest post now, which is based on family archives, will be found not only delightful but suggestive, as it touches on the important subject of what the Victorians and Edwardians understood by ‘fun’. I was particularly pleased to receive it, because George’s conception of ‘fun’ is something I have to address in my Afterword. My profuse thanks to Mr Pym for offering me this post and taking such pains over it.

I would like to feature a guest post on ‘Calderonia’ once a month. If you feel there is something you would like to say that is in any way related to the issues addressed on the blogsite over the past two years, do contact me through my website www.patrickmileswriter.co.uk . The preferred length is about 1000 words and all you will need to do is email me the text and images as attachments.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, Captain Charles Evelyn Pym, comments, Edwardians, Foxwold, fun, George Calderon, guest posts, Jack Pym, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, Victorians, Violet Pym | Leave a comment

‘Solved!’

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I am so relieved to have completed the re-hoover of my 165,000-word typescript in six working days — approximately a fifth of the time my disastrous ‘final’ hoover took (see ‘O, fallacem hominum spem!’ of 27 July). I must say, closely re-reading the last three chapters (i.e. 1914-50) in one day was a rather adult experience.

As I read the typescript, I highlighted more or less at random forty points where I might have transcribed manuscripts inaccurately, misquoted, written the wrong date, and so on. I’m glad to say that it turned out I had made only one, minor and insignificant, error in that set. This is quite hopeful. I will do some more random checks at a future date, but I can now install the 1000+ changes that these two hooverings have produced. This will surely take me two days, and after that I would normally go straight into writing the Afterword…

But I haven’t done anything to the Introduction since my very experienced biographer friend gave version 6 his treatment!

Well, like Eeyore I have taken out the tatters a few times, contemplated them, stared into space and put them back, but I have had very few ideas about where I take the Introduction from here. A complete rewrite looms.

Suddenly, however, I realise that I am ready to go straight into the Afterword because the whole book is still fresh from this last reading, I have my notes already, and I have relatively little relevant recent literature to read for it. And then the penny drops: I have always agreed with people who say that the Introduction should be the last thing you write, so I will write the Afterword first, then go back to the Introduction. Problem solved!

Actually, I do have a hunch this is best and could work. Even so, I place on record that unfortunately I have always been worst at writing introductions. It is probably because you can’t really write them ‘freely’, so much in them has to be dictated by ‘market forces’, the ‘needs’ of imaginary readers, publishers, etc etc etc. In other words, you have to write them under a form of censorship. For instance, my friend tells me perfectly reasonably: ‘The start of an introduction needs to be striking or seductive, or both, but in any case BOLD. You’ve got to grab attention straight away.’ I have always known this was the conventional wisdom, so I started with:

The Edwardians have had a bad press since the Great War in whose centenary I find myself writing. Even Downton Abbey hardly improved their image. We don’t, basically, like them.

This, my friend tells me, is ‘unhappy’ and ‘jars’. Er…no, it’s me that’s unhappy, because I never wanted to write this kind of naffery in the first place! As long-term followers will recall, I planned the whole Introduction around what six ‘normal’ readers told me should go into it. This seemed the right ‘market-oriented’ approach, but perhaps it was a mistake? Perhaps, after writing the Afterword, which I really do want to write, I shall find an Introduction that I also positively want to write, in a way that I personally choose.

The Afterword is currently subtitled ‘Who George Calderon Was’. It will look briefly at his complicated, very chiaroscuro character; why after his death journalists and others began to call him ‘a genius’; why he was then consigned to our ‘Edwardian past’; and what indeed makes him an Edwardian genius, of whom there are very few. It will also have to look at who Kittie was, as the two of them were such a synergy. Was she just a conventional, dutiful, anti-feminist, ‘career-less’ upper class Edwardian wife?

I hope to raise some of these issues on the blog.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Afterword, biographies, biography, comments, Downton Abbey, George Calderon, Introduction, introductions, Kittie Calderon, readers, reading public, The Great War, World War I | Leave a comment

Somme: the ‘walking’ controversy

Posted on August 6, 2016 by Patrick Miles

When I read Harvey Pitcher’s Comment of 1 July about the Bishop of London’s address in Westminster Abbey commemorating the eve of the Battle of the Somme, I took it that the Bishop was quoting the order to WALK across No Man’s Land as a dire example of ‘lions led by donkeys’. Mr Pitcher has now emailed me to correct that impression, saying that the Bishop ‘listed having to walk through No Man’s Land as one of the many horrors the PBI [Poor Bloody Infantry] faced at the Somme’. The full text of the Bishop’s address is now available at http://www.london.anglican.org/articles/commemoration-eve-somme-westminster-abbey/ and confirms that; although the Bishop does set it in the context of Haig’s and his generals’ over-confidence.

Subsequent research by me swiftly revealed that ‘walking’ was in any case likely to be the predominant way in which the troops covered the ground, because (a) they were carrying 70 lbs and more of impedimenta, and (b) the distance to the enemy lines varied between 400 yards and 1500! The best analysis I have found of why they were carrying so much and what the actual tactics of the advance were meant to be, is by Stephen Tempest at https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-on-the-first-day-of-the-Battle-of-the-Somme-British-soldiers-were-mown-down-in-their-tens-of-thousands-because-they-were-ordered-to-walk-not-run-or-rush-towards-the-German-trenches-in-formation .

What no-one does, as far as I can see, is quote the actual words in which the ‘order to walk’ was expressed. The Bishop implies that Haig and his generals ‘decided that the inexperienced infantry should advance not by the tested method of “fire and movement”, with some lying down to cover the movement of their comrades with rifle volleys’ because they blithely believed the artillery barrage of the previous five days had completely destroyed the front line and the troops would encounter no resistance. But reference to the actual Order might elucidate whether the ‘tested method’ was positively forbidden, or commanders could change to it if necessary. In any case, footage and narrative reveal that in parts of the front, at least, the infantry did surge forward as we usually imagine them doing (see Damian Grant’s Comment of 27 July and Clare Hopkins’s of 5 June).

Since my posts about the Somme on 1 July, 8 July, 12 July and 21 July, I have actually read Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s recently published Somme: Into the Breach, whereas when I referred to it in my first and last posts I was only going by newspaper articles about it. It turns out that I was wrong when I said, citing Sebag-Montefiore, that Rawlinson, Haig’s second-in-command, had ‘ignored the opinion of his intelligence officers, formed from interrogating deserters, that the German machine-gun placements were still in one piece’. In fact, the information obtained from the German deserters did indicate that the redoubts and dugouts in the northern section of the line were still intact, but British intelligence officers jumped from the deserters’ statements that there were weaknesses at Mametz and Montauban (southern section) to the conclusion that the British bombardment had been effective along the whole German line! In Sebag-Montefiore’s words, ‘Haig and Rawlinson were given to understand that the dugouts had been destroyed all along the front, leading them to conclude, as they did: why not attack everywhere in that case with more or less equal force?’ (p. 198).

Sebag-Montefiore’s book has completely changed my perceptions of the first day of the Somme — the warfare was totally different from Ypres 1 and Gallipoli — and I heartily recommend it, although it is a bit loosely written. Let me qualify that last statement, though: since the perception of the battle that I am left with is itself of a much looser event over much bigger spaces than I had imagined it, Sebag-Montefiore’s open-weave technique is appropriate and effective.

As I read on, I became more and more aware of a syndrome at work compounded of amateurism, false optimism, inefficiency, rigidity, inhumanity, plain stupidity and other attitudes, that is all too familiar to me as ‘Edwardianism’. In an admirably short and concentrated appraisal in his last chapter (p. 513), Sebag-Montefiore writes:

My final judgement on Haig and Rawlinson is as follows: Both of them failed to give sufficient weight to what they were told by their artillery experts, and neither applied common sense when planning the first attacks. You didn’t need to be an inspired general to learn about the limitations of the artillery, which was the principal means of allowing a troop assault to succeed.

They, the top generals at the Somme, did not apply their common sense?! There could hardly be a more damning condemnation of them.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Battle of the Somme, Bishop of London, Clare Hopkins, comments, common sense, Damian Grant, Dardanelles, deserters, Gallipoli, General Douglas Haig, General Henry Rawlinson, Harvey Pitcher, Hugh Sebag Montefiore, Mametz, Military Intelligence, Montauban, Richard Chartres, Stephen Tempest, The Great War, World War I, Ypres | 2 Comments

John Hamilton the Good/Great?

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Patrick Miles

At this time one hundred years ago, after the first anniversary of her husband’s disappearance at Gallipoli, Kittie Calderon decided it would be wise to channel her energies into a number of projects. One of these was to erect a memorial tablet to her father John Hamilton at the entrance of the causeway leading to St Ernan’s Island, Donegal Bay, where he had built a house that was to become Kittie’s childhood home.

Kittie was now in correspondence with the Arts and Crafts sculptor-mason Eric Gill, whom she had visited earlier in the summer at Ditchling Common, Sussex. Gill wrote to her on 26 July 1916 suggesting ‘a panel about six feet long by 18 inches high (this would allow of one and a half inch letters)’, recommending Grey Roman Stone, and giving a quote for the whole job. Kittie’s handwritten draft for the inscription reads:

This Causeway stands to commemorate the great mutual love between John Hamilton and the people of Donegal, both his own tenants and others.

After a time of bitter hunger and pestilence, when John Hamilton, not for the first or last time, had stood between them and death — knowing that his great wish was to build a road joining his favourite dwelling place, St Ernans, to the mainland, and that owing to the Atlantic tides he could not achieve this without expenditure far beyond his means — the people, Roman Catholic and Protestant, came in their hundreds with spade, pick, and barrow and built this Causeway, refusing all recompense.

John Hamilton J.P., D.L. of Brownhall and St Ernans was born in 1800, succeeded his father in 1807, and died in 1884.

The final version of the inscription, which is essentially as Kittie drafted it and can be seen at the entrance to the causeway today, is given on page 41 of this fascinating biography of Hamilton by a veteran of the Irish Times:

John Hamilton of Donegal

The incident the memorial refers to is well attested. It is not clear when Hamilton decided to build the causeway, but it must have been after the Irish famines of 1831 and 1845-50, as these have to be the ‘time of bitter hunger and pestilence’ that Kittie refers to. Possibly it was 1860. Hamilton had tired of gaining access to his house at low water or by boat. All the local experts warned him he would not be able to build a causeway because the tidal currents were too strong; they therefore advised him to build a bridge in two sections. He is said not to have been able to afford this solution (the distance was 220 yards), but the truth may be that he was so stubborn that he determined to prove everyone else wrong.

He took on a hundred labourers with wheelbarrows and attempted to complete the causeway foundations during a low spring tide. They managed three-quarters of it when the surge got the upper hand and Hamilton postponed the effort until a midsummer neap tide. That day’s work too was swept away. The next day, however, in Dermot James’s words, ‘a very large group of men turned up, offering their services to Hamilton free of charge’. All they would accept was a drink of whisky and water twice a day. This bank held and next day two large parties turned up, playing fifes and drums, to carry on the work. These were Orangemen (Protestants) on the one side, and Ribbonmen (Catholics) on the other! In friendly rivalry, they helped complete the causeway by late evening and, in Hamilton’s words, ‘striking up each their own tune marched off in the best of humour’.

The debt of the people of Donegal to John Hamilton was indeed great. During the famine of 1831 he organised a subscription fund, which the gentry, Government and others contributed to, in order to assist the poorest people with cheap food in the short term. Then he personally laid out large amounts of money to import meal, rice, beef and seed potatoes of the highest quality, he personally employed the starving, and he took no rents. During the Potato Famine itself, he employed people from his own estate and outside on land improvement projects financed largely by himself, arguing that rather than spending huge sums on soup kitchens and road-building it would be better to enable the starving to grow more food for the next year; for which purpose he again bought the seeds and encouraged his tenants to diversify away from potatoes. Against a background of one million deaths in Ireland as a whole, not one of Hamilton’s tenants during the Potato Famine years died of starvation. ‘It would appear to be almost impossible’, Dermot James concludes, ‘to exaggerate what John Hamilton did for more than two thousand desperately poor and vulnerable people around him.’

But when I said that James’s biography is ‘fascinating’, I meant it. It is fascinating because it shows Kittie’s father to have been complex. He had a luminous sense of Christian duty, a great propensity to act, dynamism and determination, but he was pitifully exploited by the Irish (British) government of the day, was undoubtedly regarded as an easy touch by many of his tenants, and (as he admitted himself) was disastrously undermined by his own inexperience and impetuosity. By 1850 much of his estate was mortgaged. His patrimony was largely spent and he was heavily in debt. ‘In all Ireland there never was, nor is there, a more considerate and humane landlord than the good and kind-hearted proprietor of St Ernan’s’, wrote the Catholic Parish Priest of Donegal Town about Hamilton (an Anglican) in 1880. The army of causeway-builders must have recognised this.

Hamilton’s first wife, whom he had married in 1823 when she was seventeen and with whom he had five children, died in 1854 and her death brought him very low. However, in 1858, at the age of fifty-seven, he married the thirty-three-year-old Mary Simson, who bore him John Pakenham Hamilton in 1861 and Katharine (Kittie) six years later. Kittie, then, was his youngest child. They became extremely close, especially after her brother left for public school but Kittie continued to live at home and be educated by her parents and an inspirational governess. Without question, John Hamilton nurtured Kittie’s own Christian faith, her views on compassion and charity, her own lifelong propensity to act to help those in sickness or need, her own powers of empathy and emotional intelligence.

Hamilton was complex… By 1880, when he had basically retired to St Andrews, near his wife’s family estate, his children by his first marriage were in their fifties. They probably agreed that their father was Good, but not that he was Great. He had in fact become what he never wanted to be, an absentee landlord; he had got through his fortune and was living on his second wife’s money; there was a suspicion that his generosity was a form of religious self-gratification; he deeply regretted and reproached himself with his own financial mismanagement. When he died in 1884, all he left his eldest son James in the family account at the Ulster Bank, Donegal, was fifty-four pounds, nineteen shillings and a penny. James inherited a heavily mortgaged estate which took him and his descendants three generations and the sale of much property to turn round.

Yet John Hamilton was more than ‘one of the most benevolent of that now rarely remembered class of good landlords’, as Dermot James puts it. Throughout his life he was above all a seeker after truth. Whether to religion, medicine, social welfare, education or politics, he brought genuine critical and creative thinking. He never ceased intellectually to question and move forward — and again I think this is something he imparted to his daughter and which George Calderon deeply appreciated in her. Although at the end of his life Hamilton remained proud of what he had done for his tenants during the Famine years and in greatly reducing illness amongst them by improving drainage and sanitation, he concluded that the whole landlord system had to go. He himself encouraged his tenants to buy their holdings. Whilst he thought there were advantages to the whole of Ireland remaining in the Union, he also approved of a form of Home Rule. My own favourite quotation of John Hamilton’s is from his 1852 Journal:

The people are not yet fit to rule because they are not yet capable of willing obedience to any rule for the general benefit. I am in principle a more utter democrat than any I have ever met with, but before the people can govern, they must be able to govern, the test of which is willingness to be governed for the general good; for the people who govern must govern something, and in this case that something is themselves.

A perennial truth, it seems to me.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged causeway, Dardanelles, democracy, Dermot James, Donegal, Donegal Bay, Eric Gill, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Home Rule, Ireland, James Hamilton, John Hamilton, John Pakenham Hamilton, Kittie Calderon, landlordism, Mary Simson, memorial tablet, Orangemen, Potato Famine, Ribbonmen, St Andrews, St Ernan's, St Ernan's Island, The Great War, World War I | Leave a comment

‘O, fallacem hominum spem!’

Posted on July 27, 2016 by Patrick Miles

This tag from Cicero, meaning ‘Oh how deceptive is men’s hope!’, may be heard on the lips of Chekhov buffs when disappointed about something, followed sotto voce by Kulygin’s line: ‘Accusative with exclamation…’ (Act 2, Three Sisters).

It is certainly appropriate for me to exclaim it now. In my post of 23 June, entitled ‘Progress’, I announced that I was going into printing out the typescript of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius and ‘giving it its final hoover’. I said I did not know how many weeks this would take, and alas it has taken five. But that isn’t the worst of it. I began to check quotations at random — because they had all been checked once before when I was revising the manuscript — and I found to my incredulity that nearly every other quotation had an error in it. There was no alternative, of course, but to go back to the beginning of the typescript and check every quotation, date, figure, fact, very carefully. Even this cannot be the ‘final’ operation. Having completed this five-week deep-pile hoover, I have decided I must immediately go back to the beginning and read the text fluently as originally planned, checking just a few quotes and figures at random.

I must be frank, it is more than disappointing, it’s almost depressing (but these are the ‘Dog Days’). For the first time, I think, in the whole of this project, I have wobbled over whether I am really up to the challenge of it.

There are well over a thousand changes I now have to introduce to the computer version of the whole book. Admittedly, half of them are changes involving tightening up punctuation or syntax, improving expression, or having second thoughts about things (e.g. how far George got towards the Turkish trenches before he was killed), but that leaves far, far, far more mistakes of quotation or digital fact than I remotely expected. What is the explanation? I have spent many an idle minute in the last three weeks staring into space and speculating on that, in a state of some shock.

I have two and a half theories. First, that creating the book in tiny but legible handwriting, in pencil, which then is checked and revised in manuscript before being typed up, is a disaster. When I come to revise the first typescript (in hard copy) I can spot typos, of course, and obvious errors of transcription, and in any case I made changes on screen as I transcribed the manuscript, but the only way to eliminate every error of transcription would be for me to read the manuscript back word for word to someone following the typescript on screen and for them to spot the errors. This would be asking a bit much of them, but it could not be done the other way round, with one of us reading from the screen, as they would not be able to read my writing efficiently enough and even I would find it more difficult than reading the manuscript aloud. When I translate plays (first in pencil), I always ask someone to read the translation back to me from the screen whilst I follow in the original language, but somehow I did not think a similar process would be necessary in the case of one’s own writing. Oh how deceptive is men’s self-confidence! In fact, of course, it is probably more necessary to go through this read-back process when you are both the author and the typist.

Long-term followers may feel that my second explanation is a case of ‘blame the brain again’, but now that I have been made painfully aware of the errors of transcription I committed when writing the manuscript and the errors of transcription I committed when typing it up, I do see a common trend. In about 80% of cases, what I have done is drop words that I would not have considered necessary myself, and I have not been conscious of doing this. It is eery how consistent the pattern is; and the words elided really aren’t missed, there is no appreciable loss to the sentence. I conclude, therefore, that fifty years of striving to use the least number of words in translations and my own writing have programmed my brain to make this reduction automatically, without my conscious mind being aware of it. But, whether these words are redundant or not, they have, of course, to go back in for the quotation of someone else’s writing to be accurate.

The most egregious example of my rewriting quotations is so extraordinary that I still can hardly believe it. Possibly the most famous quote from George’s 1912 Introduction to Two Plays by Anton Tchekhof is: ‘His plays are tragedies with the texture of comedy.’ I have known this aphorism since at least 1968. In manuscript, I managed to render it as ‘His plays are comedies with the texture of tragedies’. I managed to type it up without noticing anything; it was only the word-by-word checking of the redesigned hoover that brought it to light. But as I see it, this is an extreme example of the brain seeing what it wants to see rather than actually reading. The error I made is, I suppose, ‘Freudian’: without being aware of it, I wrote down what I subconsciously believe (‘comedies with the texture of tragedies’) rather than what George wrote. And this has had an interesting and not unproductive repercussion: I am no longer sure of what George meant, or whether this whole ‘texture’ business means anything at all!

Obviously, it is also tempting to conclude that such fallibility is the result of anno domini (or as people charmingly put it these days, ‘dementia’). That is my ‘half theory’. The basic problem, I feel, lies in the cunningly trained reflex of the brain to project its own preferences on things irrespective of the reality fed it by the senses. I think we all suffer from this, but I am prepared to admit it has been exacerbated (honed) by age.

To cap it all, I said in my ‘Progress’ post that the sixth draft of my Introduction had gone off to a very experienced writer-biographer friend to have the surplus moisture mangled out of it and then I hoped to ‘iron it to a state of crispness’, but O, fallacem… It has come back not mangled, but cut into pieces. I’m reminded of a friend who, when he asked Matron at his boarding school what had happened to one of his vests, was told: ‘I cut up your vest to mend your pants!’ It is not at all clear to me how, after this treatment, the pieces of my Introduction could be sewn together again to make a credible garment.

Of course, after the initial shock one should be wary of taking such things too seriously. There must always be the suspicion that your critic hasn’t really understood where you were going with what you have written; why you have composed it the way you have. However, in this case my reader is definitely 28.53% right. I won’t go into the details; they concern the opening sentence, paragraphs, page and ‘selling the book’ to publishers’ readers. But then we are not all as lucky as Ruth Scurr and can start with a sentence that contains the name of a famous writer plus two of the most powerful words in the English language: ‘John Aubrey loved England’!

All I can say is, ‘watch this space’…

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, Cicero, comedy, comments, Dog Days, George Calderon, John Aubrey, Kittie Calderon, Kulygin, Ruth Scurr, Sigmund Freud, The Great War, Three Sisters, tragedy, World War I | 2 Comments

‘Old P.H.’

Posted on July 23, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Although I was sceptical about this blog when first persuaded to start it nearly two years ago, I cannot chirp loudly enough about the benefits it has brought the project. There is our amazing follower Katy George, who came upon an important letter of Kittie’s inside a book bought at a charity shop and contacted me through the blog, then discovered ANOTHER one online, in Tasmania, concerning George and Tahiti. (Letters from Kittie are very rare and both were acquired for the Calderon archive.) There are the expanses of fresh contextual information followers have contributed, the new angles they have brought to events, and the enriching dialogues I have had through the Comments channel, particularly about George’s character and our national commemoration of World War 1. Not to mention the unexpected but satisfying challenges of writing a ‘blography’ of George and Kittie almost every day for a year, followed by the current blog in a different genre.

Most recently, I received an email from our subscriber Distinguished Professor of Linguistics Greville Corbett, at the University of Surrey, with a photograph he had taken that morning at the Watts Gallery at Compton, near Guildford, of the top half of this painting, which he said ‘jumped off the wall’ at him:

P.H. Calderon by G.F. Watts (by kind permission of Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village)

Well, it sprang off the screen at me, too. I gasped! Because it solved in one blow a question that had intrigued me and others for about thirty years (almost a ‘phantom fly in amber’). Facing page 30 of Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) is what we had always taken to be the photo of an engraving captioned ‘Philip Hermogenes Calderon, R.A., father of George Calderon’. Three-quarters of it, I would say, is almost black. Beneath it, in extremely small print, are the words ‘G.F. Watts, R.A., O.M., pinxit’. The word ‘pinxit’ (‘painted’) was taken to be figurative for ‘engraved’ and it was thought Watts might have produced it from a photograph now lost. Above all, though, because the figure looks like an old man, and far more Spanish than P.H. Calderon’s own photographs, it was seriously doubted that the ‘engraving’ was of P.H. at all — perhaps Kittie had miscaptioned it and really it was of P.H.’s father, Revd Juan Calderón, who had emigrated to Britain in 1845 and become Professor of Spanish at King’s College, London?

I cannot do better than quote Watts Gallery’s own description of the painting in their care, which they have kindly emailed me:

G. F. Watts, P. H. Calderon, 1871, Oil on canvas, 63.5 cm x 51 cm, Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. Full-length male portrait in three-quarter profile; portrait most likely intended for Watts’s series of portraits of eminent Victorians presently known as the ‘Hall of Fame’. Philip H. Calderon (1833-1898) was born in France but became a naturalised British subject in 1873. He first studied to become a civil engineer but in 1850 he enrolled at the James Matthews Leigh Art School in London, where he studied painting and drawing. As an artist, Calderon shared Watts’s circle of friends. The two painters often discussed artistic techniques. Watts was extremely pleased with the results of his portrait and commented on it to Calderon: ‘I am immensely pleased with it. It is so luminous and bright, so dead in surface, that I feel for the first time in my life I am on my way to a good thing. No more oily surface but a bright fresco-like appearance.’ It was around this time that Watts began building a new house and studio and was financially committed to accepting portrait commissions. The portrait of P.H. Calderon accompanied other portraits sent to represent his best work in Paris 1878.

This leaves no doubt, since Juan Calderón died in 1854, that the original of the portrait in Percy Lubbock’s book about George Calderon is of George’s father P.H., and that this original is a painting. The other tiny words beneath it, ‘Emery Walker ph. sc.’, therefore presumably mean ‘Emery Walker [Arts and Crafts engraver, photographer and printer] made this photograph’ of Watts’s original.

But if P.H. Calderon was 1871 minus 1833 equals thirty-eight years of age when Watts painted this portrait, why does he look at least sixty, why are his moustache and beard far more luxuriant than in photographs, and his nose and eyebrows greatly accentuated in size and shape? The answer, I speculate, is in the combination of P.H. Calderon’s character with Watts’s approach to painting. ‘Old P.H.’ loved dressing up as a Spanish grandee straight out of a picture by Velazquez (there is a photograph by David Wilkie Wynfield of him in this guise), and Watts declared that he painted ‘ideas, not things’. I feel, then, that Watts understood the ‘idea’ that P.H. wanted to project of himself, and created it in paint, rather than producing a naturalistic portrait of the lively, successful, thoroughly anglicised Hispano-Frenchman sitting before him.

P.H. Calderon was the acknowledged leader of a group of painters known as the ‘St John’s Wood Clique’ (they included G.A. Storey, whose sister Calderon married, W.F. Yeames, G.D. Leslie, H.S. Marks, Wynfield and others). In my ignorance, I had assumed Watts was also a member of the group, but he wasn’t; he was much older than them and ploughed his own furrow. Nevertheless, paintings by the St John’s Wood Clique share Watts’s slide into allegory and symbolism. This painting by P.H. Calderon is a fair example:

‘Captain of the Eleven’ by P.H. Calderon, 1882

When in 2012 this painting came on the market for the first time since 1925, Bonhams Director of 19th Century Paintings, Peter Rees, described it as ‘the perfect image to represent the Victorian view of children as models of truth and honesty’. I would say that it is also an iconic image of the ‘straight bat’ (it now hangs in the Long Room at Lord’s). It became familiar to everybody after Pears Soaps published it in their Christmas Annual for 1898 and mass-reproduced it on posters, prints and presentation cricket bats throughout the twentieth century. The boy is completely unlike George, but there is a certain facial resemblance to his brother Fred, born in 1873. Even so, what Rees called the ‘clear complexion and cherubic face’ make it less of a real boy than a romantic trope. ‘Captain of the Eleven’ sold in 2012 for £289,250, a new world record for a Calderon painting.

There can be no possible doubt that P.H. Calderon was an accomplished painter. He has a unique Victorian palette. However, when George wrote to Kittie on 10 February 1899 ‘I am undermined in all my actions by the desire to please an audience; it is the worst of vices, of the gentler sort’, he may well have had his father in mind too. In order to support a family of ten, P.H. needed to earn good money. He therefore developed subtle ways of pleasing his Victorian, especially male audience. To quote the Art Renewal Center Museum website: ‘Calderon was a skilled painter of attractive young women, and had the ability to show their emotions in a way which appealed to Victorian sentiment and was regarded as chivalrous.’ His obituary in The Times of 2 May 1898 described it as ‘a happy art in painting the charms in womanhood’.

In 1891 P.H.Calderon almost went too far with the following painting depicting a saint:

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calderon-st-elizabeth-of-hungarys-great-act-of-renunciation-n01573

It offended Catholics, opponents of ‘Parisian’ nudity in Victorian art, and public opinion that objected to the Royal Academy buying up paintings for the nation from its own summer exhibition through the Chantrey Trust which the Academy administered (P.H. was paid £1260 for it). Controversy about the painting raged for weeks in the press and even Parliament, but P.H. Calderon seems to have kept his counsel. To the modern spectator the painting may seem voyeuristic and tacky, but root as I might I have never found the least suggestion that P.H. was ‘Bohemian’ or led a double life. He was simply what Watts portrayed: an eminent Victorian. He counted Dickens and Trollope among his friends, had a reputation for humour, histrionic singing and practical jokes, and was beloved by the students he taught as Keeper of the Royal Academy from 1887.

I am extremely grateful to Dr Beatrice Bertram, Curatorial Fellow of Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, for providing the full-length image of P.H. Calderon’s portrait and informing me about it. I have immensely enjoyed browsing through Watts Gallery’s excellent website. Watts proves there to be a fascinating, even controversial Victorian/Edwardian. As a theatre person, I was particularly interested in his brief 1864 marriage to the seventeen-year-old Ellen Terry, who in 1911 George Calderon was hoping would play the lead in a London production of his translation of The Cherry Orchard. Watts Gallery was established by G.F. Watts and his second wife in 1904 and I believe it was the first gallery in Britain to be dedicated to a single artist. I can’t wait to visit it in the flesh.

Heartfelt thanks to Professor Corbett for inspiring this post!

Posted in Edwardian character, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biography, Bonhams, Captain of the Eleven, Chantrey Bequest, Chantrey Trust, Charles Dickens, Clara Calderon, comments, Compton, David Wynfield, Emery Walker, G.A. Storey, G.D. Leslie, G.F. Watts, George Calderon, Greville Corbett, H.S. Marks, Juan Calderón, Katy George, Kittie Calderon, Percy Lubbock, Peter Rees, Philip Hermogenes Calderon, Royal Academy, St Elizabeth of Hungary's Great Act of Renunciation, St John's Wood Clique, W.F. Yeames, Watts Gallery, Watts Gallery-Artists' Village | Leave a comment

The Somme: over to you

Posted on July 21, 2016 by Patrick Miles

It won’t, I think, surprise followers to hear that I know next to nothing about the Battle of the Somme compared with Ypres 1 and Gallipoli, which George Calderon fought at and which we covered from day to day in autumn 2014 and summer 2015.

I am grateful, therefore, to Harvey Pitcher for pointing out in his Comment that at the Somme the orders were to walk towards the enemy. I did not know that. It has been referred to several times in the media since. I gather that the rationale was that each man was carrying 70 lbs of equipment (why so much?) and would have been exhausted if he had had to run the whole distance. But, of course, it gave the enemy plenty of time to surface from their dugouts, man their machine-guns, and mow the British soldiers down ‘like corn’, as eye witnesses put it. I don’t know, however, whether the sound of the whistles would have carried three hundred yards and was therefore as stupid as it appears. I asked a military man about this with regard to the Third Battle of Krithia, where the lines were about 200 yards apart, and he confessed it had never occurred to him. I agree, though, that it is tempting to regard the use of whistles as typical Edwardian military gung-hoism or ‘casual arrogance’ as Peter Hart called it (see my post of 1 July).

Where the walking pace is concerned, it could be objected that the commander of the Fourth Army, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, did not know that the German front line had not been destroyed, and in particular that its twenty-foot-deep dugouts were intact; that for us to criticise him and Haig, therefore, is simply wisdom of hindsight.

But that was my point in my post on 1 July: Rawlinson assumed the German barbed wire and trenches had been destroyed, he did not know, and he went ahead with the Battle. What kind of risk assessment is that? In fact, as I understand it, Rawlinson ignored the doubts expressed to him by infantry officers about the damage caused by the barrage (Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, 1971), and the opinion of his intelligence officers, formed from interrogating deserters, that the German machine-gun placements were still in one piece (Hugh Sebag Montefiore, Somme: Into the Breach, 2016). It is the fact that he went ahead and there was no plan B when it became clear he was disastrously wrong, that I regard as so Edwardian.

I am not, however, by any stretch of the imagination a military historian. I have asked experts at the Imperial War Museum to comment, but (understandably) they are too busy. (See http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-happened-during-the-battle-of-the-somme .) If there are any military historians out there who can throw their expert light on our perceptions of the Battle of the Somme, please do Comment, or you would be very welcome to present a guest post.

The most difficult, and awful, thing to get one’s head round, I find, is that although the Battle of the Somme was perceived at the time as a defeat, or at least deadlock, as attrition it does seem to have marked the beginning of the end for the German war effort.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged attrition, Battle of the Somme, British Expeditionary Force, comments, Dardanelles, Gallipoli, General Douglas Haig, General Henry Rawlinson, George Calderon, Harvey Pitcher, Hugh Sebag Montefiore, Imperial War Museum, Martin Middlebrook, Peter Hart, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, World War I, Ypres | 1 Comment

Mrs Stewart of Torquay recalibrated

Posted on July 19, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I refer new followers to my post of 1 June 2016. The reason it was important to find out more about the life of Mrs Eliza Stewart, even so late in the project, is that after the sudden death in 1921 of her daughter, Kittie Calderon’s lifelong friend Nina, Kittie became a ‘second daughter’ to Mrs Stewart and often visited her in Torquay. Kittie was a trained nurse and attended Mrs Stewart in her long last illness. She was almost certainly present when Eliza Stewart died at home on 24 November 1925. Since my biography of George Calderon is ‘also’ a biography of Kittie, right up to her death in 1950 thirty-five years after George, it was important to clarify aspects of Mrs Stewart’s life, particularly as that could throw light on the vexed question of when Nina and Kittie became firm friends.

Extremely diligent researchers under the direction of Local & Family History Librarian John Tucker at Torquay Library, teamed with my indefatigable genealogist and Web-searcher Mike Welch, and myself, have been beavering away at the subject since the beginning of June and come up with what we think are well-substantiated answers to a ganglion of questions about Mrs Stewart. Unfortunately, these answers differ somewhat from many of the versions presented in my post of 1 June!

First, when and where did Mrs Stewart live in Torquay? She was known in the Stewart family of Fife as ‘Mrs Stewart of Torquay’ because, family lore had it, she was relegated to Torquay after returning to Britain with her infant daughter following the sudden death of her husband, James Affleck Stewart, in Canada in 1867. Their return to Britain was placed in 1870. But neither she nor Nina appears in the U.K. census for 1871. The first hard fact we could find about her residence in this country at all was in the 1878 edition of White’s Directory for Devonshire, which has her living at a house called ‘The Nest’, Kent’s Road, Torquay. She was presumably out of the country for the 1881 census, but the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses show her in London and elsewhere with her Stewart/Corbet family. She must have left Torquay long before.

According to John Tucker’s team, and Mike Welch’s researches in Kelly’s Directory, Mrs Stewart moved back to Torquay in 1912, when she bought a house called Congham Lodge, which she renamed The Croft and lived at until her death. Although the history of this property is complicated, I can now confirm, from period maps supplied by John Tucker and from satellite images, that it is the one illustrated in my post of 1 June. Mrs Stewart lived there for the rest of her life, and here is a grand photograph of her taken there:

Kittie Calderon’s caption: ‘Mrs Stewart in her Drawing-room at The Croft Torquay’ (c. 1914)

There is some doubt still about when Mrs Stewart was born. According to family tradition she was ‘Canadian’, but the extant censuses give London as her birthplace and one says ‘London, Westminster’; public records would therefore suggest she is the Eliza Sarah Vale born there in 1844, but her census returns and death registration imply anything from 1840 to 1844. An 1888 newspaper report discovered by Mike Welch does, however, appear to explode the version that she had never met her in-laws before she came over from Canada with Nina following her husband’s death: she visited the Stewart estate in Fife in 1862 ‘with her late husband and they were a very handsome couple’. So was she married at the age of eighteen?

Another obscure newspaper report nailed by Mike Welch narrows down the time when Nina and Kittie became close (they had possibly first met when they were young children visiting their respective grandparents in Fife).

In the 1881 U.K. census Kittie was living in St Andrews with her parents and brother, and Nina in Kent with her nurse/governess. The following year, however, ‘Miss Katharine Hamilton and Miss Nina Stewart’, both aged fifteen, were teamed together in the ‘autumn competition of the St Andrews Ladies’ Golf Club’. It seems possible, then, that by 1882 Nina had moved to Fife since inheriting the estate following her grandmother’s death in 1880, and both she and Kittie were receiving their education in St Andrews.

Given popular beliefs about the Victorian era, it may seem amazing that in 1882 St Andrews had a ladies’ golf club at all, but by the beginning of the Edwardian era there were even! women’s London clubs (Kittie and George’s sister Marge belonged to one).

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, Canada, comments, Eliza Stewart, Fife, George Calderon, golf, James Affleck Stewart, John Tucker, Kittie Calderon, Marge Calderon, Marguerite Calderon, Margy Calderon, Michael Welch, Mrs Stewart of Torquay, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Nina Stewart, St Andrews, The Croft, The Nest, Torquay | Leave a comment

The Somme: a memory

Posted on July 12, 2016 by Patrick Miles

In July 1970, whilst waiting to hear whether I had been awarded a grant to do a Ph.D. on Chekhov, I worked for six weeks in the male wing of a ‘mental hospital’ near my home. I place the words in inverted commas, because I am sure that is not what it would be called today. The large, Napoleonic buildings had been the local workhouse until after the Second World War. In 1970 the patients included teenagers and adults with Down Syndrome, ‘stable’ schizophrenics, many severe epileptics, and others still described then as ‘mentally subnormal’. It was a remarkably well-run, caring and happy place.

On my early shifts I had to shave some of the patients. Amongst them, incredible to relate, were a few men who had joined the institution when it was a workhouse, had nothing medically wrong with them, and had simply stayed on when it became a ‘mental hospital’. One of these was Ben Hattersley, who was about eighty, lean and fairly limber, with white hair and blue eyes, but going blind. He was, I think, the oldest patient, and I was told early on by one of the nurses that Ben had had been ‘at the Somme’. The nurse said to me, ‘Ask him about the Somme, he’ll tell you about it.’

So one morning when I was giving Ben a shave, I did ask him if he had been at the Somme, and he had no hesitation in telling me his experiences, from the mud, the terror, the comrades killed around him, to the deafening artillery barrages, the exhaustion, the reality of bayonet combat, and his own amazement at surviving. He wanted to tell people of the most terrible experience of his life; he wanted us to know. As I finished shaving him, however, I very clearly remember him saying, in a state of agitation: ‘But the worst thing was the screaming of the horses…I couldn’t stand that.’

I have often thought about it since. I am inclined to think that it wasn’t primarily the thought of the pain the horses were in that Ben found unbearable (after all, there were men out there screaming, groaning, calling), it was that the horses’ screaming was the nec plus ultra; something of a different order; something Apocalyptic.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Battle of the Somme, Ben Hattersley, biographies, biography, British Expeditionary Force, comments, horses, mental hospital, The Great War, war horses, workhouse, World War I | 5 Comments

Three women follow the Somme

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Patrick Miles

After Kittie Calderon had done all she could to establish George’s fate at Gallipoli on 4 June 1915, and accepted that she would live by the faith that he was in a Turkish prisoner of war camp, she suffered a long breakdown. She wept incessantly and succumbed to one illness after another. There is exceptionally little evidence of what she did between October 1915 and July 1916. After leaving Foxwold on 10 June 1915, the day before she received her first telegram about George from the War Office, she could not be persuaded back, however much Violet and Evey Pym tried, until July 1917.

One may be sure, however, that she closely followed developments in the War and, at this time in 1916, the course of the Battle of the Somme. She had many friends and relations in the army, and above all her closest friend Nina Corbet fed her news that her sister-in-law Constance received from her son Dick Sutton, who as ADC to General Sir Henry Rawlinson was on the spot. Nina was Dick Sutton’s favourite aunt, he was in her own words ‘like a very dear son to me’ after her own son Jim Corbet was killed at Givenchy in 1915, and all three women had been extremely close since the 188os.

Three weeks after Sir Henry Rawlinson launched the Battle of the Somme (see my post of 1 July), Dick Sutton wrote to his mother:

Here the battle drags on, progress much slower than we would like, but I suppose as fast as one can expect. The Bosches seem to fight as well out of the trenches as they do in them, and their machine-guns, hidden in woods and standing corn, are very deadly, especially as our gunners can’t see where they are. The decision of the battle has still to come.

The peoples of the Allied countries were hoping for the definitive collapse of the German line as a result of this battle, especially as the Germans had just lost at Verdun. However, although after 1918 German generals said that the Battle of the Somme was the real turning-point of the War, because they lost so many men that they could never again raise a fully trained fighting force, as the months wore on Allied hopes were dashed. On 7 November 1916 Dick Sutton wrote in his diary:

Sir Henry has written a strong letter to GHQ, deprecating the continuation of the offensive here under present conditions, which are not likely to improve before it freezes. The efficiency of the Army next spring will be endangered if the present losses in officers and NCOs continue. I am certain from this that the great battle of the Somme is over. We have, I am afraid, gained only a local success, which cannot be called a victory.

Dick Sutton survived the War, to his mother’s great rejoicing, but died of influenza at a military hospital in Wimereux on 29 November 1918. All three women were devastated. Both the Corbet and Sutton families, who had come to Britain with the Norman Conquest, were left without male heirs.

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Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Battle of the Somme, biographies, Captain Charles Evelyn Pym, comments, Constance Astley, Constance Sutton, Dardanelles, Dick Sutton, Evey Pym, Foxwold, Gallipoli, General Henry Rawlinson, George Calderon, Givenchy, Jim Corbet, Kittie Calderon, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Sir Richard Sutton, Sir Roland James Corbet, Verdun, Violet Pym, Wimereux | Leave a comment

Zamyatin: Ross: Calderon

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Everyone should read Zamyatin’s anti-Utopian novel We, which had such an impact on George Orwell and is so different from his own 1984. But I don’t believe newcomers to Zamyatin should start with the masterpiece…

Yevgeny Zamyatin. Portrait by Boris Kustodiev, 1923.

Yevgeniy Zamyatin by Boris Kustodiev, 1923.

The best way into the delightful, geometrical, farcical, Carrollian, delicate, synaesthetic, quasi-Aspergerian, intense and disturbing world of Zamyatin is through his short stories. A browse on Amazon will offer you two collections published over thirty years ago, but I warmly recommend the selection recently translated by John Dewey — see http://www.brimstonepress.co.uk/books/detail/YZ-TheSignAndOtherStories.htm .

I was amazed to discover that of the ten stories in Dewey’s volume only one had been translated before: A Fisher of Men. But I can well understand that Dewey could not resist making his own translation of this hilarious story of sexual represssion in Edwardian London! In style and theme it is a sequel to The Islanders, Zamyatin’s much longer satire on life in Jesmond, an impeccably upper middle class area of Newcastle upon Tyne. If Orwell is supposed to have based the totalitarian state of 1984 on his schoolboy experience of Eton, We could be seen as the ultimate extrapolation of Zamyatin’s experience of living at 19 Sanderson Road, Jesmond.

As I discover from J.A.E. Curtis’s magnificently lucid The Englishman from Lebedian — A Life of Evgeny Zamiatin (1884-1937) (Boston, 2013), Zamyatin was sent to Newcastle by the Tsarist government in 1916 as a civilian marine engineer to supervise the construction of Russian icebreakers. He lived there for eighteen months and, at least in the six months before his wife arrived from Russia, was very unhappy. He found Newcastle ‘utterly dull’, its theatres ‘completely stupid’, the English ‘terribly virtuous’, Jesmond inspissately bourgeois, and the Russian community ‘not my sort of people’.

Whether he knew it or not, about a mile away, at ‘Sherwood’, Graham Park Road, Gosforth, was living a thirty-nine-year old Russian woman who would have agreed with him. She objected to Newcastle’s architectural gloom, its perpetual rain, the dedicated conformism of English life, its lack of vitality and culture. It was ‘absolutely wrong for her’, her second son told me in a phone conversation on 19 March 1986. Whenever she could she would get away, either with or without her husband.

She was Mariia (‘Manya’) Iakovlevna Guseva, married to Archibald Campbell Ross, a naval engineer who worked for R. & W. Hawthorn of Newcastle and had fallen deeply in love with her when he was working on Tsarist battleship projects in St Petersburg. This was in 1895, when Manya was only eighteen, and he married her the year after. Both Archie and Manya Ross were close friends of George Calderon’s from his years in Russia, 1895-97. In 1900 Manya gave birth to George Campbell Ross, George Calderon attended his christening as a godfather, and Rear Admiral G.C. Ross was the son who rang me in 1986.

From left to right: Archibald Campbell Ross, George Campbell Ross, George Calderon, c. 1902, at 4 Collingwood Terrace, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne

So could Zamyatin have known the Rosses whilst he was living in Newcastle? The icebreaker that Zamyatin was working on there was being built by Armstrong Whitworth and, of course, there were an awful lot of other marine engineers in Newcastle. On the other hand, Archie Ross spoke fluent Russian, wrote the language well, and knew Russian naval ways, so he might have been brought in as a consultant. More likely, the Rosses met Zamyatin at a Russian social or cultural event, as Manya gravitated to the Russian community and Zamyatin was friends with the Russian consul. Manya Ross would certainly have been interested in him as a writer, but otherwise she was not one of his ‘sort of people’: she was a Tsarist patriot and he was a Bolshevik!

When Manya Ross made her cultural forays to London, she may well have occasionally stayed with the Calderons at Heathland Lodge in the Vale of Health. The only specific information we have about a visit is from George’s 1907 pocket diary. At 10.00 p.m. on Saturday 4 May 1907 George took Kittie’s niece May Hamilton ‘to Easter service at the Russian Church with Manya’. An entry for 8 May reads: ‘8.15 Red Lamp [the comedy by Hilliard Booth?] with Manya and supper at the Criterion’. On 10 May George and Manya went to ‘Balkan Exhibition’, three days later Manya came for ‘lunch and tea‘ (underlined in the original), then presumably returned to Newcastle. In November 1909 Manya travelled to Glasgow to be with George and Kittie at the premiere of George’s translation and epoch-making production of The Seagull.

With her unassailable sense of realism, Kittie took a nuanced view of Manya’s visits to London. On 25 September 1941 she wrote from White Raven to her niece Nancy Knox in Australia:

Melbourne [is] within such easy reach for the Little Knoxes to go for a night or two at intervals to see ‘the Life’ [i.e. zhizn’], as a Russian friend of ours used to say when she used suddenly to appear on our doorstep from Newcastle where fate had planted her and her delightful engineer husband. Manya never could see any of ‘the Life’ in Newcastle — though it was there sure enough but not easy for Russian eyes to discern.

In 1926 or 1927 the Rosses moved nine miles out of Newcastle to Heddon-on-the-Wall, where Manya must have been even lonelier. After Sir Archibald’s death in 1931, she appears to have moved permanently to London.

In St Petersburg 1895-97 Manya and her family gave George Calderon an enormous amount in terms of Russian language practice, sight-seeing, initiation into Russian culture, manners and understanding of Russian women, which he used in his articles published in the Pall Mall Gazette. When George and Kittie announced in October 1900 that they were getting married, Manya wrote George the only letter of congratulation that has survived in his archive. It is in Russian and I translate:

Don’t tell me you are getting married, too?! How unlike you that is, — that you are in love, I can believe, — but that you are getting married and so soon — it’s simply incredible. I approve of your choice, but am sorry to lose you as a dear, good friend and interesting person to talk to. I know that both of you will be happy, because you are both suited to each other, I felt that immediately I saw your darling Kittie. She really is wonderful, and her old mother too. I send you my parental blessing. I am sorry that we shan’t be at your wedding, much as we would like to be, it’s your own fault, you should have told us earlier. Your devoted and ever-loving MANYA.

For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged A Fisher of Men, Archibald Campbell Ross, Armstrong Whitworth, George Campbell Ross, George Orwell, Glasgow, Heathland Lodge, Heddon-on-the Wall, Hilliard Booth, J.A.E. Curtis, Jesmond, John Dewey, Lewis Carroll, Manya Ross, Mariia Iakovlevna Guseva, Mary Hamilton, May Hamilton, Nancy Knox, Nancy Lang, Newcastle upon Tyne, Pall Mall Gazette, R.& W. Hawthorn, The Islanders, The Red Lamp, The Seagull, We, White Raven, Yevgeniy Zamyatin | Leave a comment

The Somme: Ends and Beginnings

Posted on July 1, 2016 by Patrick Miles

When did the Edwardian Age begin and end?

Obviously, in the literal sense it spanned Edward VII’s reign, 1901-10. Cultural historians, however, have long extended it beyond those dates, because the nexus of attitudes and values that we call ‘Edwardianism’ began to form before 1901 and died years after 1910. Thus Samuel Hynes, author of one of the most influential books about the period, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968), placed the beginning at ‘roughly the turn of the century’; some would even date it to the ‘naughty nineties’; Roy Hattersley (The Edwardians, 2004) dated it from Queen Victoria’s death; I perceive it setting in after the Queen’s jubilee of 1897. Hynes wrote that ‘the end of the Edwardian age is as certain as it was sudden — 4 August 1914’ and Hattersely agrees.

But 4 August 1914 is merely symbolical. We all know that Britain went into World War 1 with its Edwardian attitudes intact; that was part of the problem. Last year I followed the Gallipoli campaign on Calderonia from day to day and we could see that it was compounded of ponderousness and mental rigidity, wasteful false heroism, woefully arrogant misplaced self-confidence, dedicated amateurism, and lack of realism, to name but a few attitudes. The failings of the Edwardian officer-class were all too obvious to the ANZAC troops. A tougher new breed of soldier like General Charles Munro, who replaced Ian Hamilton and recommended evacuation, could also see them. I felt then that the Gallipoli disaster not only epitomised the worst of Edwardianism, it marked a turning point in it; the beginning of its end. My own working time-frame for the Edwardian Age became 1897-1915 (one has to spell these things out in one’s Introduction).

However, I don’t now believe that Gallipoli fundamentally changed attitudes. Its failures led to the fall of the Liberal government in May 1915, of Fisher and Churchill, and criticism of the campaign from the Australian journalist Keith Murdoch shook some people’s confidence, but the actual evacuation of January 1916 was seen as a triumph, the nation was still focussed on ‘gallantry’, defeat was not accepted as defeat. It was, I believe, the Battle of the Somme, which was launched at 7.30 a.m. today one hundred years ago, that triggered the break up of the Edwardian mindset.

The Battle of the Somme shared several features with Gallipoli, for example meticulous planning and preparation combined with complete inflexibility, a lack of intelligence analysis combined with a lack of risk analysis, and a belief in ‘heroism’ that made men totally expendable. Meticulous planning and preparation — complete military professionalism — were a good thing, of course. But if there was no plan B, no way of changing from plan A if it went awry, no use of intelligence and risk assessment, then as at Gallipoli meticulous orders could simply make self-destruction more efficient.

George and Kittie Calderon’s twenty-five-year-old friend Dick Sutton, who had been wounded twice by June 1916 and was now ADC to General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of the Fourth Army at the Somme, wrote in his diary on 30 June 1916:

In my opinion everything depends on the infantry following upon the heels of the artillery barrage, which will go up in front of them in each task. The weather appears to be favourable, which is an enormously important factor in modern battles. There are, however, two things which may defeat us; or rather, I should say, not two, but a combination of both. These are the magnificent fighting qualities of the enemy and his ever-present machine-guns. No matter how long or how heavy the bombardment it is impossible to knock out every machine-gun, or kill all the detachments. One machine-gun may hold up a whole Brigade if it is properly handled, and a quantity of machine-guns may hold up our whole attack, and slaughter us in thousands.

As we know, that is what happened. Rawlinson ignored intelligence about the depth and strength of the Germans’ dugouts, believed that the long preliminary artillery barrage had destroyed the German front line, and insisted on his own rigid plan. By the afternoon of today the scale of the disaster was clear, but neither Rawlinson nor Haig could change their plan… By the end of today, the British Army had sustained more casualties than on any other day in its history — 57,470, of which 19,240 dead. When the Battle ended in November, the casualty figure was over a million from both sides.

Yet the effects of the Battle of the Somme were quite different from those of Gallipoli. The army did enter a learning curve. They had invented the ‘creeping barrage’, as Sutton’s diary indicates, but it and the artillery plainly needed improving. Tanks were first used at the Somme in September, but the army had to learn how to combine them with the creeping barrage and infantry assault. This would eventually be a war-winner. The Somme also demonstrated the almost complete irrelevance, if not counter-productivity, of the cavalry. I have the clear impression that defeat on the Somme at last shook military and popular attitudes to the core. As Peter Hart has written in his Gallipoli (2011), the ‘casual arrogance’ that lay behind the Dardanelles disaster was ‘finally exorcised by the Germans on the gently rolling ridges and valleys of the Somme in 1916’.

Edwardianism died at the Somme. This was a very positive development.

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