Calderonia

Kittie Hamilton

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I have returned from holiday fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November and get copies to the interested publishers immediately afterwards. This means writing the Afterword (‘Who George Calderon Was’), radically improving the ill-fated Introduction, producing the Bibliography, and composing voluminous and fulsome Acknowledgements. I think it is possible to do this without ‘O fallacem hominum spem!‘ [27 July 2016] striking, as I am on course to start writing the Afterword next week…

A blog is a very wonderful thing; or at least, it has proved so for me. As I explained last year, I was very sceptical about its value to begin with, but it led to incredibly enriching dialogues with followers by both Comment and email, it even led to the discovery of new Calderoniana, and in a way it produced a new form of biography (‘blography’). Most recently, it has enabled me to moot on the screen some key issues of my Afterword, such as the ‘nastiness factor’ and the ‘hero complex’, and impelled three subscribers to recommend further reading on the Edwardians that I have found useful. Thank you!

I will touch on only one more aspect of George’s character as an Edwardian, and that will be on Saturday, 8 October. Meanwhile, though, I think it would be appropriate to address some issues concerning Kittie.

The principal one must be that to the modern woman she seems not remotely modern. Her failure to ‘get a life of her own’ must indeed seem exasperating and sad. Her support for anti-suffragism would appear to confirm her lamentable ‘backwardness’. In her memoirs she describes utterly convincingly how George needed her when he was based at home; if she had to go away, ‘he at once seemed to feel left and lost’. Yet when he had to go away on a solo adventure, e.g. to Tahiti, it looks as though she simply waited patiently and meekly at home like a doormat to welcome him back. As a trained artist and believer in the Arts and Crafts Movement, why did she not exhibit paintings, make and sell handicrafts, design things? Why does her work as a VAD during the war seem so half-hearted? Why couldn’t she put all that dynamism of hers into nursing or hospital administration? She was only forty-eight when George disappeared at Gallipoli, so why didn’t she do something full-time on the Home Front that might have opened into a career, as it did for many women? Was Kittie’s identity, her life, her ‘fame’, entirely and only derived from her devotion to George, who manifestly did not need her as much as she thought?

Let me briefly address these points. There was nothing unusual about Kittie not wanting the parliamentary vote. The overwhelming majority of upper/middle class women didn’t want it either, because they did not like what they saw of men’s political life, they wanted their own separate sphere, and they wanted to do the maximum good for society through voluntary caring and nurturing, particularly in local communities and politics, where they already had the vote. (Edwardian society would have fallen apart without them.) We know that as soon as George left on one of his ‘adventures’ Kittie went to stay with Nina Corbet, or at least in a Corbet property where Nina could visit her, or with another of her woman friends. Her relationship with Nina always has to be taken into account in her relationship with George; it entirely complements it. Although in her late twenties Kittie worked terrifically hard at her painting, she came to acknowledge that she did not have the originality or technique to pursue it professionally. She did, however, encourage many younger artists, and her contacts in Arts and Crafts were invaluable to her in designing the posthumous edition of George’s works. We know from George’s letter to William Rothenstein of 1 January 1915 that throughout the war Kittie was chronically ill (at first gynaecologically, then with pernicious anaemia). She had bursts of energy, but I don’t think she could have sustained full-time work in the Red Cross. However, dare I say it, nursing is not a job, it’s a lifetime vocation, even a way of life and a spiritual belief. She had nursed her first husband for three years, her mother for about six years, and was all her friends’ counsellor and nurse in sickness, miscarriages and stress. Her personality was not self-advancing or political, it was kenotic.

But underlying modern, perhaps feminist disappointment with Kittie is, I believe, the feeling that she should have earned her own living. This, of course, would have meant having a career, and for reasons I have already given it’s difficult to see how that would have been possible, even if she had wanted it, which I think before she married Archie Ripley she did. Financially, however, she did not need to work because in 1906 she inherited a large house in Hampstead and some capital from her mother (i.e. it was Simson money, not Hamilton money, because her father died penniless), and after 1898 she had an income from Ripley’s trust fund. This, surely, is the aspect of Kittie’s life that we find most difficult to accept today, whether we are feminists or not. So few of us have any experience of a private income that we may automatically protest that it is wrong. Yet the idea that Kittie did not ‘work’ because she did not ‘need’ to, would be simplistic. The fact is, she had so many altruistic commitments which her money enabled her to meet without paid employment, that she used her unearned income to do those things (i.e. work at them) all the time it lasted — which it only just did. She not only ran her own affairs very impressively after George’s death, she travelled all over southern England ministering care and advice to friends, the Pyms, Calderons, Mrs Stewart… By 1937 she was diagnosed as suffering from chronic exhaustion.

Of course, having a private income was a very Edwardian phenomenon. To what extent, then, was Kittie herself an unreconstructed Edwardian? As far as I know, she never used the adjective Edwardian of herself, but a memoir that she wrote at the end of her life contains a very strong attack on the Victorian age. She felt that it was rooted in the love of money. She disapproved of the poverty, squalor and ignorance that it produced, and she was convinced that Victorian imperial hubris would end in disaster. As I have said before, I believe that the Edwardian period witnessed the greatest explosion of democratic discourse — in politics, on the streets, in the theatre, in print — that Britain has ever known (and it nearly blew the country apart). I think that both George and Kittie saw themselves as part of the great democratic experience. Perhaps because of the long post-WW1 Left consensus, it is difficult for us now to see that. In historical party political terms, George and Kittie were almost certainly Liberals, but today their views on suffrage, trade unionism, the Community, or defence, approximate them more to radical Conservatism. Kittie followed national and international politics closely in the 1930s. I think she felt that her and George’s politics were ‘progressive’ because they were ahead of their socialistic times — she several times implies that in her memoirs.

In my opinion, a very important point is that many of Kittie’s activities (her ‘work’) were enabled by her being a Hamilton, i.e. the scion of an English family that could trace its ancestry to Edward I; a member of a top Anglo-Irish family; the daughter of John Hamilton the Good (see my post of 3 August 2016). She moved very confidently in society, networking came naturally to her, and this was the source of her success as George’s agent. She very rarely comes across as bossy, but her manipulative and diplomatic skills were inbred and her social authority recognised everywhere. She usually got her way. This enabled her to play a leading role in charitable ventures at Hampstead, Petersfield and Kennington. Although she always had ‘Mrs George Calderon’ emblazoned on her suitcases, in a sense she was really always Katharine Hamilton.

I have written the above somewhat off the top of my head, thinking onto the screen — as has been so beneficial whilst mulling over my Afterword about George as an Edwardian. I don’t know whether I shall discuss Kittie as an Edwardian or anything else in the Afterword. To some extent, the life and personality of Kittie embrace the whole book; and this is intentional. It starts with her marriage to George’s friend Archie Ripley (whilst George was in Russia), it covers the whole of her fifteen-year marriage to George, and it continues for another thirty-five years without him. I don’t know about attempting to sum her up. The temptation to ‘defend’ her in the Afterword may prove irresistible, but really the whole book should show what she was: a vibrant, long-suffering, lovable, and emotionally intelligent woman. Numerous people, including a great-niece of hers, have told me that ‘really’ I am most interested by Kittie and the book is ‘really’ about her! Well, I don’t know about that. As a theatre person and ex-Russianist, I was naturally first drawn to George, but after their marriage I became more and more conscious of their symbiosis.

However, I do think — no, I know — that when Kittie died in the Hove nursing home on 30 January 1950, having given instructions that her funeral should be private, with no flowers, and her ashes scattered (we don’t know where), she felt that she had done all that she wanted with her life, that she was completely fulfilled.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged anti-suffragism, Archie Ripley, Arts and Crafts, biographies, biography, Calderon family, comments, Conservative Party, Dardanelles, Eliza Stewart, feminism, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Hove, John Hamilton, Kennington, kenosis, Kittie Calderon, Liberal Party, Mary Simson, Mrs Stewart of Torquay, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Petersfield, Pym family, suffragism, Tahiti, The Great War, The Red Cross, Third Battle of Krithia, trade unionism, VAD, William Rothenstein, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest post: Alison Miles, ‘Living with George and Kittie since the mid-1980s’

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Patrick Miles

When I first heard about George Calderon it was the mid-1980s and my time was mainly taken up with small children. However I realised that something big was starting when Patrick went to Scotland to visit an attic full of lumber, in mid winter. There was snow on the ground even in Cambridge and it was so thick in Scotland that his train got stuck in a drift. When he returned I heard about the invigoratingly cold attic where he found letters, papers and other items relating to George and Kittie. This was ‘the archive’ which, 30 years later, has moved temporarily to Cambridge.

There were many other visits to Scotland to catalogue the archive, and marathons of train and taxi travel to places that were of huge importance to Kittie Calderon, including one to Foxwold and her home at Kennington, White Raven. It was after this visit, also in the 1980s, that I heard about the three elderly Pyms whom Patrick met at Foxwold, one of whom, Jack Pym, had designed White Raven. It was then I discovered ‘White Raven’ was also Kittie’s nickname while that of her best friend, Nina Corbet, was ‘Black Raven’.

So by the start of the 1990s I was aware of several key players in Kittie Calderon’s life. But I did not know much about George – he was an enigma and continues to be so even though I know far more about him now.

Kittie is a real person. Is this because much of what she did is familiar territory or is it that the archive of letters and papers is her collection? Her style of living was similar to the views and behaviour of my grandparents, and her photos mirror those of our family from the early 20th century. Kittie’s hand is on literally everything from her suitcase (see Calderonia 15 January 2016) to her ordering and labelling of papers.

Through Kittie I have met both her contemporaries and her (and her friends’) descendants. Communicating with and meeting people ‘keeps the world going round’ so it has been wonderful to be on the fringes of Kittie’s huge network. I feel as though I have met them all, past and present.

What about George and his family and friends? I know about him, his parents and his siblings, but I do not feel I have met them. None of their descendants lives in Britain. My understanding of George (if that is possible of someone I’ve described on several occasions as a maverick) is mainly through Kittie. But his wonderful Christmas card (see Calderonia 27 June 2015) did give me a real insight into his talent for comedy and fun.

It may seem odd to have ‘met’ people from the past, but the work that Patrick has been doing on George and Kittie’s lives has created a sense that we are living 100 years ago. There was a particularly freaky time during the 1914-15 blog, written continuously exactly 100 years later in 2014 -15, when it was all too easy to feel we were living 100 years in the past. In 2015 I often caught myself referring to the present as 1915.

Part of my parallel life in ‘George-and-Kittie-land’ has been to get to grips with family trees. Many of them are complex because there were second marriages following death or divorce, in some cases no male children to inherit and of course family tragedies. The 1914-18 war took its toll as did illness. A lasting memory, from our visit several years ago to Moreton Corbet churchyard, is the ‘missing statue’ (of Mercury) above Vincent Corbet’s grave (see Calderonia 2 September 2016). The statue has since been recovered but seeing the statue-less plinth created such a powerful sense of loss, unhappily familiar to so many people at the time.

Moreton Corbet, November 2009 (the poppy commemorates Jim Corbet, killed in action at Givenchy 15 April 1915)

This leads me on to places. It has been a great privilege and delight in more recent years to visit a range of places that were important to both George and Kittie. The trip to Tahiti following in George’s footsteps has yet to happen but it has been discussed – I am not optimistic!

Kittie’s first husband, Archie Ripley, was brought up at Earlham Hall in Norwich. Our visits there have spanned a long enough period of time to see it steadily change from a fairly run-down version of the house his family rented (Archie’s mother’s first husband was one of the Gurneys) to a wonderfully restored building in splendid grounds. As well as the house itself, the lawns and paths match the 19th century idyllic garden described by Percy Lubbock, a nephew of Archie’s, who visited regularly as a child. The descriptions bring the place to life and it is lovely to be able to visit what was a childhood paradise.

Eastcote, near Pinner, is where George lived when he was ‘courting’ Kittie. That word does not match George and he was certainly not ‘going out’ with her. His approach was more of a sensitive campaign. He walked or cycled from the house where he lodged and, thanks to local historian Karen Spink, we were able to follow his route on paths that still exist. In 1904 George and Kittie visited Cap Gris Nez, staying at La Sirène which is now a restaurant – we ate there looking westwards in the evening sun across the beach and the rocks (hence the name) that Kittie and George sat on to be photographed. They painted the landscape, so we were able to match the old pictures with the present views.

Cap Gris Nez, 2013 (the large white building on the left is on the site of the original hotel that George and Kittie stayed in, September 1904)

After George’s death Kittie had two ‘new’ homes of her own, near Petersfield and at Kennington, both of which we have seen – and to me they came alive both from her accounts and photos and through today’s local historians. She had strong associations with Foxwold over a relatively long time. It provided her with a stable base where close friends lived (and their descendants still do, near by) and to whom she provided support from time to time. At White Raven she was only forty miles or so from Foxwold.

White Raven, 1986

It is easier to associate George with words and ideas than places. He visited Cambridge when it was very different from now despite the core of old buildings. It was an eventful and unpopular visit because he tried to drum up support from undergraduates to work in the mines during the 1912 strike, one of many examples of taking action in aid of his strong belief in a cause. This is one side of this multi-faceted man. Another is his amazing ability to relate to children from being on holiday with the Pym children in 1914, the very ones 70 years later that Patrick met when he visited Foxwold, to entertaining small children who stayed with them (‘Let’s play Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh and the cloak, and I’ll be the mud’).

Living with George and Kittie is going to carry on for many years – what an opportunity!

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alison Miles, biography, Cambridge, Cap Gris Nez, comments, Eastcote, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Pym, Foxwold, George Calderon, Jack Pym, Jim Corbet, Karen Spink, Kennington, Kittie Calderon, La Sirene, Moreton Corbet, Nina Corbet, Patrick Miles, Petersfield, Robin Britcher, Roland Pym, Scotland, Sheet, Sir Walter Raleigh, Vincent Corbet, White Raven | 2 Comments

‘Things are still coming up’

Posted on September 24, 2016 by Patrick Miles

The rather shaken and stirred papers of George and Kittie Calderon were finally married and chronologically sorted five years ago, and the surviving 247 books of their library were carefully flipped through revealing fascinating photographs, visiting cards, notes and even letters. I was therefore flabbergasted to discover, when I was recently reading Kittie’s copy of the 1924 Chekhov volume, that she was using this as a bookmark:

caption

It was not surprising that it had never revealed itself before, as it is thin, pressed absolutely flat, and was tucked right in the seam between pages. Naturally, it was instantly captured in a polyester sleeve (in which it was scanned above), catalogued and filed.

It is interesting. We don’t actually know where George was on 5 October 1913. On 23 July he and Kittie had left for Foxwold and the beginning of their summer holidays. A month later they were at Acton Reynald for the popular celebration of the coming of age of Sir Roland James Corbet, Nina’s son Jim. In my biography I’ve written that they probably returned to Hampstead as usual in September. This half-a-cheque would seem to corroborate that. For if George made it out on 5 October and it was cleared by Lloyds at Hampstead on 8 October, the chances are that it was signed in Hampstead for some service or commodity obtained in Hampstead. Not long after, George was definitely at home in Well Walk, preparing for a theatre production of his Maharani of Arakan.

Most interesting of all is the fact that George’s bank was based in Norwich. He had a bank account in Oxford when he was a student there, but we don’t know with which bank. The letters ‘AIN’ before ‘NORWICH’ on this 1913 cheque suggest that in 1913 he was banking with Barclays & Company Limited at Bank PLAIN, Norwich.

Why would George do this?

Kittie’s first husband, Archie Ripley, had been related to the famous Gurney bankers of Norwich through his mother. When he died in 1898, a trust fund was set up for Kittie that was administered by her solicitor William Ripley in Norwich and the investments in it were managed by Gurney’s Bank. In 1896 Gurney’s and other banks were merged into Barclays & Company Limited. Norwich, then, was where Kittie’s capital and credit lay, and this cheque is perhaps further proof that George had made a ‘prudent match’.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Acton Reynald, Archie Ripley, Barclays Bank, Foxwold, Gurney's Bank, Hampstead, Jim Corbet, Laura Gurney, Laura Ripley, Lloyds Bank, Nina Corbet, Norwich, Oxford, polyester sleeves, Rabindranath Tagore, The Maharani of Arakan, Well Walk, William Ripley | Leave a comment

‘Edwardian bastards’ — a personal note

Posted on September 23, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Periodically I have to remind myself that in the 1950s I met plenty of Edwardians, in the sense of people whose character and values were formed in the longer Edwardian period of 1897-1916 and who were thought of as being from that era. My grandmother and grandfather, for instance, born in 1892 and 1888 respectively, spoke affectionately of only one monarch, ‘Teddy’, and in retrospect I can see that (perhaps rather unusually) the furnishings of their home were essentially still late Edwardian.

My grandfather signed up in September 1914 and went through the whole war as a private and an artillery man, from the home front to Gallipoli, then Mesopotamia, finally Ypres. It is clear to us all now that he returned suffering from PTSD and this affected his civilian life ever after. No-one acknowledged the fact, however; it seems certain that they did not understand it and he repressed it. He seemed to me quiet, somehow crushed, and very gentle. But he could still inform me that ‘the only good German is a dead one’ and assure me that the Muslims he had lived amongst as a soldier had the best punishment for thieves — cutting their hand off. At the age of eight, I was stunned and frightened when he said such things. He had been a Scout from the start and gave me Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys to read. I found the book a bit bizarre and simply could not understand what the Chief Scout was referring to when he kept going on about male ‘purity’ that one had to preserve at all costs.

It so happened that there were also quite a few retired army officers in the area where I grew up, who had been in the First World War. They struck me as cheery, but strangely one-dimensional: they never seemed to relax and just chat like normal people. Their style of dress was also very buttoned up. To me as a small boy there always seemed something potentially dangerous about them: they usually had rather cold eyes and bristly moustaches and I felt you could never be sure that they might not turn nasty. I was sure that, for all their bluffness, they believed (like the numerous retired schoolmasters of the same vintage) that a ‘sound beating’ was good for a boy.

And under it all, even in the 1950s, was a residual belief in class. I myself rarely saw that turn nasty, but everywhere there was awareness of people’s social and financial position, and a tacit deference towards it. When it came to studying the Great War in depth at secondary school, one knew instinctively that class had bedevilled officer-men relations and perhaps been a factor in the military bungling that we spent a considerable part of our time analysing and excoriating. I would go so far as to say that in 1966 I would not have been half so shocked to read this account by a private in World War I as I was when I came upon it last year:

The eyes of the man [on the stretcher] next to me were large with pain. I smiled at him, but instead of smiling back at me, his lip curled resentfully, and he turned over on his side so that he could face away from me. As he did, the blanket slipped from his shoulder, and I saw on his shoulder strap the star of a Second Lieutenant. I had committed the unpardonable sin: I had smiled at an officer as if I had been an equal, forgetting that he was not made of common clay. Once after that, when he turned his head, his eyes met mine disdainfully. That time I did not smile. […] I cursed him and the system that produced him.

(Quoted by Peter Hart in his Gallipoli (London, Profile Books, 2013), pp. 392-93.)

I imagine that some followers have been surprised by my choice of the words ‘nasty’ and ‘bastard’ in discussing the Edwardian mindset. Unfortunately, I can think of none more appropriate and I feel it is important to acknowledge that the Edwardians felt empowered to be those things.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Belgium, class, comments, Dardanelles, Edward VII, Edwardians, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Mesopotamia, Peter Hart, Robert Baden-Powell, Scout Association, The Great War, World War I, Ypres | 3 Comments

Intemperance and ‘Heroism’

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Patrick Miles

On 30 August 1920, Kittie received through the post the first draft of Laurence Binyon’s ode to George’s memory, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57345 . She was at Constance Sutton’s Tudor home in Herefordshire, Brinsop Court, and wrote to Binyon next day that she had read his poem ‘in the beautiful courtyard of this wonderful house […] a lovely spot to read it for the first time’.

As he explained in his covering letter, Binyon had just returned from a holiday in Brittany and had written ‘the verses’ there. The fair copy he was enclosing had been transcribed by his wife Cicely. He had many doubts about the poem, which he set out to Kittie at length, and he asked her to be ‘exact in your turn — and exacting’. ‘There may be false notes perhaps. There are certainly things that could be better.’

Given Kittie’s definitely ‘exacting’ critical standards, it is amazing that she took exception to only one word. The poem swept her off her feet. ‘I just can’t find the words, I think it is so beautiful and so him’, she told Binyon. She loved all of it, but particularly the last stanza, where she felt George was ‘there […] standing before one’.

The word she had difficulty with was ‘Temperance’ in Binyon’s original second line:

Wisdom and Valour, Faith,
Justice and Temperance, — names
Of virtue’s quest and prize, —
What is each but a cold wraith
Until it lives in a man
And looks thro’ a man’s eyes?

‘Was George “temperate”?’ Kittie asked Binyon. She found it ‘very difficult’ to say why she did not think ‘Temperance’ was appropriate, and I am sorry that for copyright reasons I cannot quote the hundred and fifty or so halting, dash-marked, underlined and disjointed words in which she struggles to define her meaning, because they convey a vivid image of her thinking onto the paper. She tussled with it, because she felt it was a very important question that she had to resolve. George was not, she stresses, ‘intemperate’, ‘but but [sic] there was a swift white heat about him that with all his gentleness and tenderness burnt things up without hesitation’. It did not ‘always’ burn things up, Kittie continues; sometimes it was a positive ‘driving force’; but whatever George did he did ‘with a sort of passion’. This ‘never blinded his justice or integrity’, yet ‘it did burn up’.

What Kittie is describing is precisely what I feel to be George’s and other Edwardians’ uncontrollable urge to go at things like a bull at a gate. Thinking twice, risk assessment, analysing where beginnings might plausibly lead before acting, was boring to them. They had instantly to ‘get up and go’. They saw this as ‘adventure’, as their ‘propensity to act’, their ‘enterprise’, without realising that often they just wanted the fix. (This explains George’s unfinished or barely started projects.) Further, they saw this rush at things, this ‘burning up’ as Kittie calls it, as heroic. Thomas Carlyle’s writings about the ‘hero’ and the ‘great man’ still affected them (we know from George’s library that he was a fan). Personally, I feel that this is the most likely explanation for Newbolt’s and George’s intensity in the ‘icons’ of them that I discussed in my last post. In a letter to Grant Richards, George describes Chekhov as ‘a great man’. Maybe; but it is impossible to imagine Chekhov, or even Tolstoi, posing as great men in their photographs…

With Binyon’s agreement, the words ‘and Temperance’ were removed from the second line of the ode and the metre filled out with an adjective: ‘the lofty names’. Binyon also made a dozen changes of his own before the poem was published.

In the First World War the Edwardians paid a terrible price on the battlefield for their unpondered, essentially self-gratificatory conception of heroism. George, though, was already critical of heroism before 1914, as his and Hankin’s hilarious send-up in their 1913 play Thompson amply demonstrates. And as Susan Chitty writes:

By the end of 1915 Newbolt was struggling to keep up his spirits. The ill-fated invasion of the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli had failed. Calderon had died there. The next patriotic book to encourage boys to the front was due but, not surprisingly, Newbolt’s attitude to war was changing. ‘I write about heroic deeds and hairsbreadth escapes as if they were children’s games, with no real pain or danger in them,’ he admitted to Alice [Hylton].

(Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt (London, Quartet Books, 1997), pp. 227-28.)

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alice Hylton, Anton Chekhov, Battle of the Somme, biographies, biography, Brinsop Court, Cicely Binyon, comments, Constance Sutton, Dardanelles, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Grant Richards, Henry Newbolt, Heroism, iconography, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Lev Tolstoy, St John Hankin, Susan Chitty, temperance, The great man, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Thomas Carlyle, Thompson, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

The Nastiness Factor

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I have ‘worked with’ the Edwardians, so to speak, for a while now. I feel that if I were dropped into London society around 1905 I would know my bearings and could hold my own. There is much that, having come to know them better, I admire: their energy, their enterprise, their versatility, the fact that in their time, as Roy Hattersley has put it, ‘a modern nation was born’. But if there is one thing that mystifies me about them, it’s the streak of nastiness that seems to have run through so many; a nastiness of which they usually seem to have been unaware and for which they did not apologise.

Take George’s close friend Henry Newbolt (1862-1938). Today Newbolt is remembered for his poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’ with its refrain ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’, for the doggerel-wobbles in his immensely popular naval verse, and his propaganda written to encourage boys to join up in World War I. That was his official persona, but both Susan Chitty’s biography Playing the Game (1997) and The Later Life and Letters edited by Newbolt’s wife (1942) show him to have been likeable, civilised, and the author of some almost first-rate private lyrical poetry. Yet this is how Newbolt wanted to look:

Henry Newbolt, c. 1912

Close-shaven, starch-collared, tight-lipped, there is no doubt that this is the perfect image of an Edwardian male. Perhaps I am wrong — perhaps, for instance, there is a hint, just a hint, of humour in those eyes — but to me it says: ‘I am a bastard, don’t trifle with me.’ There is something Hitlerian about it. And, indeed, Newbolt could be a bastard, apparently without noticing it. For instance, at the age of twenty-two his son Francis was so badly shell-shocked at Ypres that he returned to England demented, shaking and unable to speak. When, after three months, he was granted a two-month extension of leave, Newbolt’s comment was: ‘I’m sorry that he isn’t doing more for his country.’

This photo of Newbolt was used as the frontispiece of his Later Life and Letters and dated by his wife Margaret. The photo of George below is dated by me c. 1912 because that was his most public year, both in the theatre and as a political activist. He spent a lot of time in 1912 rushing all over the country addressing meetings, which would account for the overcoat, whilst the white scarf was part of the uniform of an Edwardian theatre man. He probably needed to have an impressive photograph to present to fans. The portrait was taken by celebrity photographer Frederick Hollyer and has become the ‘iconic’ image of George, used by Kittie as the frontispiece of Percy Lubbock’s Sketch from Memory and the most commonly reproduced image of George since.

To me, at least, the right eye (right as we look at it) seems to suggest a certain vulnerability, even angst, whilst the faraway look in the left is not so much romantic as sadly resigned. But I have to say I think the overall impact when one first sees this photograph is ‘in your face’ like Newbolt’s: to us, surely, the pallor and the tight lips project self-assurance, arrogance, even menace. I well remember thinking when I first saw this image as a twenty-year-old: ‘Another Edwardian bastard’…

That is why I now prefer not to use this image of George! I know from researching his life that he was not a bastard, so I particularly favour the previously unpublished photograph of him laughing and smoking that features second from the left in Calderonia’s banner. But the fact remains that when it came to a posed studio photograph, this is how he wanted to look. I discern some of the same intention as Newbolt’s. In a word, neither of them looks likeable, and some people might say they look positively nasty. Yet both of their wives were content for these images to represent their husbands to the world.

George Calderon, c. 1912

In his love letters to Kittie in 1899, George admits he is ‘brutal’, ‘blunt’ and ‘coarse’ at times — ‘It is no use my trying to keep up any illusion that I am a man of admirable character’ — but at least he is honest and says sorry. His ‘nastiness’ was caused by the stresses of their falling in love so soon after the death of Kittie’s first husband, George’s friend Archie Ripley, and there is not a hint that he was ever like this once they were married. But there are numerous examples of him being publicly nasty (of course, some would say that being anti-suffragist and a ‘strikebreaker’ was nasty by definition). In the case of his public nastiness, it seems all too characteristic of the Edwardians; he does not appear to have regretted it; and unfortunately it was difficult to undo.

In his 1902 bestseller The Adventures of Downy V. Green, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, which made George’s reputation as a humorist/satirist, there is a junior fellow of ‘St Ives College’ (instantly recognisable to Trinity College alumni as their own), who is described by the narrator as ‘thin and sickly-smiled’, with ‘a moist and lifeless hand’, and depicted by George in his illustration as diminutive, weedy and nervous. He is characterised aloud by Downy as ‘a slimsy boy, with a kink in his chest’ and a ‘design’ of a moustache, then sotto voce as ‘the rancourest little sarpent topside dirt’! George’s Trinity contemporaries saw in this figure a portrait of H.E.D. Blakiston, who in 1907 was to become President of Trinity. Doubtless they laughed at some aspects, but there could be no doubt that the portrait was ‘nasty’, even vicious. Understandably, it seems to have complicated George’s relations with his old college after 1907, and perhaps even Kittie’s after George’s death.

Then in 1909 at the Queen’s Gate Hall George took on the suffragette Helen Ogston (who had brandished a dog-whip at a recent gathering) in a public debate of the motion ‘That in the Opinion of this Meeting the Parliamentary Franchise should be extended to duly-qualified Women’. Continuing in Percy Lubbock’s words, for Percy was there:

The lady began it; her fluent, attractive appeal was listened to in a charmed silence, broken occasionally by a few happy sighings and purrings; she was a beautiful figure of a Diana, earnest and free. The audience rose to her eloquence; the thorny quarrel was raised to the level of a large, splendid, wind-swept passion; it was the contest of Milanion and Atalanta […] And then […] George began his reply, and it was as though Mephistopheles had landed upon the shore of a Greek island. With his arguments and his sarcasms, his crude interrogations, his facts and his dates, the atmosphere was chilled and the shining spaces contracted. From fervent souls the listeners were changed to mere pouting and hissing human beings; they turned upon the intruder who so degraded them […] the lofty passion had become a squall of exasperated dissent.

Nasty! That is how George had come across, and one has to assume that is how he wanted to come across. Yet it was all totally unnecessary: if, instead of being determined to project himself as some kind of Juvenalian satirist, he had identified the (glaring) Achilles heel of the motion and employed his irresistible charm and courtesy to attacking it, he might even have swung it by a few votes. But for some people he always remained essentially a ‘nasty’.

I could quote many cases of eminent Edwardians who made no secret of this streak and displayed no shame about it, for instance the imperial consuls Cromer and Curzon (both active in the anti-suffrage movement), Baden-Powell, G.B. Shaw, or Emmeline Pankhurst, and I have given it a lot of thought. What produced it in so many otherwise admirable people? If I say that I feel it was the result of Edwardian chauvinism and imperialism, I risk appearing to suggest that these people personally were all chauvinists who believed that, in Curzon’s words, the British Empire was ‘under Providence, the greatest instrument for good the world has seen’. Manifestly some, for instance George, G.B. Shaw and Pankhurst, were not chauvinists.

However, what I have come to believe is that the unstoppable growth and apparent stability of the Empire under the Edwardians produced an all-pervading national confidence, self-assurance, belief that, in Cecil Rhodes’s words, Englishmen had ‘won the first prize in the lottery of life’, and this rubbed off on everyone (except, perhaps, the King) without their being aware of it. It rubbed off on them as an unselfconscious arrogance. They were ‘right’ and this gave them the right even to be nasty. In fact in their eyes it wasn’t nastiness, it was just…being right.

(In my next post I shall consider a slightly different perspective.)

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, Cecil Rhodes, comments, Downy V. Green, Edward VII, Emmeline Pankhurst, Frederick Hollyer, George Bernard Shaw, George Calderon, H.E.D. Blakiston, Helen Ogston, Henry Newbolt, iconography, Juvenal, Kittie Calderon, Lord Cromer, Lord Curzon, Margaret Newbolt, nastiness, Percy Lubbock, righteousness, Robert Baden-Powell, Roy Hattersley, Susan Chitty, Trinity College Oxford, Vitai Lampada | 3 Comments

Afterword ‘spoilers’?

Posted on September 16, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Veteran followers of this blog will know that my estimates of how long it is going to take to complete any given piece of writing connected with my biography of George and Kittie Calderon are usually out by a factor of at least three (O fallacem hominum spem! — see post for 27 July). Nevertheless, I cannot resist the temptation to say that I think I am now half way through my preparation for writing the Afterword and might write it swiftly in the first ten days of October.

Since I completed the body of the biography (i.e. 1867-1950) months ago, and basically know what I think about George (the subtitle of the Afterword is: ‘Who George Calderon Was’), you could be forgiven for wondering why the 4000-word Afterword is taking me so long. The answer is: I am reading the entire typescript yet again, noting relevant quotations and highlighting forty facts for re-verification, I have to go over meticulously and internalise what George’s friends said of him in their memoirs (commissioned by Kittie), I need to reconstruct meticulously the narrative of his revaluation in the media through the 1920s, I need to complete the theatrical and radio history of his plays from 1950 to the present, and above all I must understand/evaluate him in the context of Edwardianism (1897-1916) as a whole

The latter has involved identifying all the possibly relevant books about the Edwardians that I had not read already. I found fourteen. There were only three or four that I felt I needed to read extensively, although in nearly all of them I noted something potentially quotable. If anyone would like to recommend a book about the Edwardians that they have found particularly enjoyable or profound, please do!

Generalising terribly, I have found that the drawbacks with most British books about the Edwardians from my point of view are that they are either concerned with the ‘thick’ political and cultural history of the period, or they focus on key personalities like Baden Powell or Marie Lloyd, or they are polarised towards the uppermost class and the working class, when I want to know more about the mores of the upper middle class. Thus Anita Leslie’s Edwardians in Love (1972 etc) or Juliet Nicolson’s The Perfect Summer [1911]: Dancing into Shadow (2006), or George Cornwallis-West’s Edwardians Go Fishing (1932) are highly readable and revealing, but almost restricted to the highest echelons of Edwardian society, which is not surprising given the aristocratic pedigrees of their authors.

What really interests me is attempts to identify the constituents of the Edwardian psyche or character and suggest what conditioned them. For example, I know about George’s obsessiveness, ‘amateurism’, adventurism, or love of paradox, but how typical were these of the Edwardians generally, and what were their causes? Nearly fifty years after it was first published, the best ‘diagnostic’ study of this kind, in my view, remains Samuel Hynes’s The Edwardian Turn of Mind. My own favourites to set beside it would be Paul Thompson’s The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (1975 etc), Roy Hattersley’s The Edwardians (2004 etc), and Yvonne Bell’s The Edwardian Home (2005 etc). Obviously, I have read many biographies of individual Edwardians and even more studies of special subjects (theatre, suffragism, Gallipoli etc). These are very instructive. But what I am really after is psychology. How do the Edwardian mind, and the minds of George, Kittie and their set in particular, compare with our own?

At the risk of ‘spoiling’, over the next few weeks I will look at a few psychological facets of George and Kittie that I touch on in my Afterword, and how they might relate to the Edwardians as a species of people-in-time, our own forefathers, our semblables. Meanwhile, in this month’s guest post my wife will spill the beans about living with George and Kittie for thirty years…

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Afterword, Alison Miles, Anita Leslie, Baden Powell, biographies, biography, comments, Edwardians, George Calderon, George Cornwallis-West, Juliet Nicolson, Kittie Calderon, Marie Lloyd, Paul Thompson, psychology, Roy Hattersley, Samuel Hynes, spoilers, Yvonne Bell | Leave a comment

Kittie absolved, Lydia looks in

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I received my copy of the second edition of George’s Two Plays by Tchekhof from a distinguished bookseller in Cumbria, and promptly set about comparing its Introduction with that of both the first edition and the Chekhov volume edited by Kittie and published in 1924. George made six changes to the Introduction for his second edition, including the philosophical-religious one my last two posts have been about, and the last paragraph in the second edition is identical to that in the 1924 edition. Kittie could not, therefore, have made the change in the last paragraph that I have been discussing.

Nevertheless, I think she must have been pleased to see that in his revision of the last paragraph George replaced his pantheistic (Taoist?) suggestion that the meaning of life is immanent in ‘this husk of a planet’, with the insistence that we ourselves ‘put meaning into it’. The synonyms he gives for this meaning are unchanged since the first edition: ‘hope itself, God, man’s ideal’. George’s mention of God may well have surprised Kittie, as he hardly ever used the word and was, as we know, an agnostic. Note, however, that he is merely listing forms of meaning that other people put into the world. He is keeping the concept of God at arm’s length. Moreover, he completes the sentence by saying that all these forms of meaning, including God, ‘continually progress and develop’, so there cannot be anything absolute and finished about them; they too are grounded in the human spirit, they are products of unending human endeavour.

All this is very reminiscent of Chekhov himself, who has been paradoxically described by Harvey Pitcher as a ‘devout humanist’. One of my favourite letters of Chekhov was written to Diaghilev on 30 December 1902 and contains this:

Modern culture is the beginning of work in the name of a great future, work that will continue for tens of thousands of years perhaps, in order that, if only in the distant future, humanity will know the truth of the real God — i.e. not hazard guesses about this truth, not look for it in Dostoyevsky, but know it clearly, just as humanity discovered that two times two is four.

George refers indirectly to this letter in one of his footnotes, and it may well have influenced him in writing his last paragraph.

* * *

Interestingly, the cover of the second edition of Two Plays by Tchekhof, published like the first by Grant Richards, is green, not red. So if you ever come across a copy of the book without its title page, the colour of the cover should be diagnostic. A quick clincher, however, would be whether page 24 looks like this:

Cast lists as they appeared from the second edition onwards

As long as the cast lists are on page 24 and consist of three sets, as above, you may be sure it is the second edition, because when the first edition appeared on 29 January 1912 the London production featuring Lydia Yavorskaya as Nina had not taken place. The verso of the second edition’s title page says ‘Second Edition . . October 1912‘, and by then the London production had come and gone.

Lydia Yavorskaya, c. 1910

The launch of Two Plays by Tchekhof was cleverly crafted by Grant Richards, and George himself contributed to its marketing. In December 1911 Yavorskaya had staged the first London production of Gorky’s On the Bottom of Life. She had probably met George through the Stage Society. She invited him to give a lecture on Gorky in the theatre and it drew a large audience. In return, George persuaded her to act in a performance of The Seagull at the Little Theatre with that theatre’s actress-manager, Gertrude Kingston. The performance was timed as close to the publication of George’s translations as Yavorskaya’s theatre engagements would permit — Sunday 25 February 1912.

A biography of the bisexual and magnificently outrageous Lydia Yavorskaya (1871-1921) would be sensational. Having abandoned her first husband in Kiev, she rapidly slept her way to the top of the Moscow theatre. Chekhov was both attracted and repelled by her. He had a brief affair with her in 1894 and it was rumoured he was going to marry her. Instead, she created priceless publicity by marrying Prince Vladimir Baryatinsky in scandalous circumstances. She was mendacious, manipulative, determined and very hard-working. The Prince’s opinion was: ‘You either adore her or you can’t stand her.’

But as Chekhov himself said, she was intelligent. She had been professionally coached with her stage English, but was not going to perform in The Seagull until she was sure that George’s translation was bona fide. She seems therefore to have taken herself off to Brighton, where her great friend Kropotkin lived (Yavorskaya was very left-wing), and asked him to vet it, as his English was excellent and he knew Chekhov’s work well. Quite possibly it was as a result of this process that the performance was postponed a month, to 31 March 1912. However, without Kropotkin having pointed out a few errors of translation in the first edition, and supplied a new footnote, George might not have revised Two Plays by Tchekhof for the October edition at all.

There is an intriguing sentence tucked away in one of George’s footnotes that suggests he had sussed Yavorskaya. She discreetly put it about London’s theatrical world that Chekhov had written The Seagull for her and that she was Chekhov’s original Nina. In fact she had turned down the play and the part in Russia and Chekhov’s friends recognised her as, in Aleksei Bartoshevich’s words, ‘the prototype of the cabotine [ham actress] Arkadina’. Now, in London at the age of forty-one, she was insisting on playing the teenage part. George concludes his footnote on the kind of ‘star’ actress Arkadina was: ‘In The Seagull Arcadina [sic] would have insisted on playing Nina.’

Ouch.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, comments, Diaghilev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Calderon, Gertrude Kingston, Grant Richards, Harvey Pitcher, Kittie Calderon, Little Theatre, Lydia Yavorskaya, Maksim Gorky, Prince Baryatinsky, Taoism, The Seagull, Two Plays by Tchekhof | Leave a comment

‘Yes, but — ‘

Posted on September 2, 2016 by Patrick Miles

The reason I suspected it was Kittie who changed George’s words about the meaning of life at the end of his Chekhov Introduction when she edited his selected works, was that she could rarely resist expressing her own views on religious belief when George committed himself in writing on the subject. A prime example is her comment literally on a letter that George wrote to her on 21 October 1903 following the death of Vincent Corbet.

Vincent Stewart Corbet, c. 1895

Vincent Corbet was the extremely lovable elder son of Sir Walter and Lady Caroline Corbet, and the latter (‘Nina’) was Kittie’s soul-mate. Vincent had been a page boy at Kittie’s wedding to Archie Ripley in 1895. He died of appendicitis at Eton College on 17 October 1903, aged thirteen. Quite apart from the fact that Vincent was the heir to the baronetcy, he had always been loving and protective to his younger brother Jim, he was a popular boy at school, and adored by his parents. The effect of his death on the Corbets and their wide circle of friends can therefore be imagined.

A first service for Vincent was held at Eton on 19 October. Three days later, a full funeral and interment took place at the Corbets’ ancestral home of Moreton Corbet in Shropshire. Nina sent Kittie a red leather wallet containing the order of both services and embossed in gold ‘K.C. 1903’. There is no doubt that Kittie attended the funeral.

The reason George did not, is probably that he was nervously exhausted after completing Dwala and was anxiously waiting to hear from Smith, Elder & Co. that it had been accepted. His health at this time was unstable. On the other hand, although he knew Vincent well, he may have wanted not to intrude on Kittie’s special relationship with Nina.

But on 21 October he wrote Kittie a long letter from Heathland Lodge:

My dear Kee, You will get this just about the time of poor little Vincent’s funeral. That over they will all be able to settle down to a dull progression of getting used to it; a feeling of finality. The great thing to go on is certainties. One thing certain is that a sweet and definite little personality has existed, and is so much to the good; whatever is lost in the future, the past is not lost and is all pure gain — the loss of the future is a miscalculation of the unknowable; the past remains, unspoilt by any of the chances of maturer life.

This letter is a model of George’s technique when responding in writing to births, engagements, bereavements, strong feelings, sudden revelations, unforeseen developments etc. He usually begins with something so ‘in your face’ as to be almost offensive — as here — but it shakes the addressee out of any ingrained mood or conventional feelings that they may have adopted, which means that he has got their full attention and can then express himself more reasonably:

Any comfort that can be found more than that verges into uncertainties. Clerical comforts will not stand abrupt strains: it must be with survivors as it is with people dying; they suddenly doubt the clerical comfort — so a parson has told me, so far as concerns dying people — though certainly he put it in the form of a sudden onslaught of the Devil. Every man and woman must have onslaughts of Agnosticism when brought closely face to face with the hard fact.

This was the end of George’s paragraph and ‘all’ he had to say on the subject. But it was too much for Kittie. At some point (probably after she returned to Heathland Lodge, as she seems to have used George’s own pen!) she wrote in the space that followed, in an unwontedly neat and precise hand:

(Yes, but the Love of God asserts itself to the inner consciousness at such times — not our faith, but the power of God and his love. K.)

They had had long discussions about religious belief, established religion and Christianity before they became engaged in 1899, and they agreed to differ on the subject. Kittie even said in later life that George’s practical christianity (sic) sometimes made her feel like a pagan. Clearly, though, here she felt she must record her view in opposition to George’s, possibly for George himself to read, possibly just for posterity.

But in fact George had not said his last word. He had said all he wanted to in an ‘objective’, ratiocinative, dry and infuriating manner, but he continued:

Give Nina my very best love and sympathy. Vincent presents himself to me most vividly in his bedroom, just in bed, me visiting him — I think by invitation; perhaps not. Eagerly playing the host, entertaining me, keenly watching me, hoping he could please: showing me his Waverley Novels — pointing the way to them rather, from his bed — asking me how I liked the wallpaper, which he had chosen; sorry when I went; blinking in a quick way when the words were trying to get out.

My own feeling is that when Kittie, and perhaps Nina, read this, it slayed them. After the outrageously knowing male lecture on death, George had turned his deeper, artistic side on. He so often finished letters of this kind with a supreme act of empathy. Through its combination of tentativeness and eidetic recall, his description of Vincent enacted what he had written at the beginning of the letter, namely that ‘the past is not lost’: George’s own words had brought Vincent ‘alive’ again for his reader(s).

In 1905 George numbered off three hundred pages of a thick exercise book that was intended to be the first in a series examining chapter by chapter the ‘canonical books of the Christians, in chronological order; so far as one can easily arrive at it’. The project seems to have been his personal fundamental attempt to consider the evidence for Christianity, and especially the divinity of Christ. He abandoned it after fifteen pages. Kittie then turned the book upside down and used it from the new front for the homilies and lessons she gave her Sunday School children!

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged agnosticism, Anton Chekhov, Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, Christianity, comments, Dwala, dying, Eton College, funerals, George Calderon, Heathland Lodge, Jim Corbet, Kittie Calderon, Lady Caroline Corbet, letters, Moreton Corbet, Nina Corbet, parsons, religion, Sir Walter Corbet, Smith Elder & Co., Sunday School, The Bible, Vincent Corbet | Leave a comment

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.