Calderonia

15/1/16. One of the most difficult problems of researching Kittie Calderon’s life after George’s death is deciding how much she travelled abroad. After Percy Lubbock married Lady Sybil Cuffe in 1926, the couple lived in the fabulous Villa Medici at Fiesole and invited Kittie to stay with them at least six times between 1928 and 1930; but she seems to have gone only once (in November 1930). Similarly, she twice planned to visit Constantinople and Gallipoli, but the evidence is that she did not.

There is a fine leather suitcase emblazoned ‘Mrs. George Calderon’, which has the remains of a single foreign luggage label on it:

I cast an eye over this label twenty years ago and thought: ‘Hm, “Russie” down right, a minaret top left, must be from travelling to Constantinople by ship, which was also a route to Russia’. But last week, having concluded Kittie did not go to Gallipoli, I took a closer look at the label (with a magnifying glass). First, as the image above clearly shows, top left is not a minaret, but a dome topped with a cross. The only church it reminded me of from my own experience was the basilica of Le Sacré Coeur in Paris. Second, what could the letters RAND be a part of, if not a French place name? I assumed that the letter before the R was an E, then ran through the possibles. None was at all convincing. Then the penny dropped: it is much more likely to be a G before RAND — and grand must be the commonest word ending in -and in the French language. Googling about on ‘le grand‘, Paris and ‘Russie’, I eventually came up with the Grand Hôtel de Russie at the top of the Boulevard Montmartre in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. The Sacré Coeur basilica would tally with that, of course.

As far as is known, Kittie went to Paris only once, with George on their honeymoon in 1900. Both were keenly interested in contemporary French painting, which might explain why they stayed in Montmartre, and they may well have known that the famous series of paintings of Boulevard Montmartre by Impressionist Camille Pissarro was made from his balcony in the Grand Hôtel de Russie. The ‘suitcase’ is actually more like an attaché case of the period, i.e. hand luggage. The prominent words ‘Mrs. George Calderon’ on the front might be there because Kittie was going to Paris and wanted to make it clear she was (newly) married… At least, that is my hypothesis: that this case is her honeymoon case.

Other hypotheses that would explain this label are invited! Note that I am unable to explain the black, column-like shape on the right, or the bit of shield at bottom left that appears to say UNIT[É?].

Stop Press!

16/1/16. Within hours of the above post going up, John Pym emailed me with an image he had found on the Web of a luggage label that fitted Kittie’s exactly and demonstrates that the hotel was in Rome, not Paris. The only difference was that the image did not feature the UNIT[…] shield bottom left. However, it was conclusive proof that the label could not date from George and Kittie’s honeymoon to Paris in 1900. I had actually found the Grand Hôtel de Russie in Rome when I was trying to identify Kittie’s label, but rejected it as the nearest church had no high pinnacles on it, whereas the basilica of the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre has… I hadn’t considered the Vatican!

Well, by the evening Calderonia‘s indefatigable Web-Meisterin Katy George had found and sent me an even better image:

This contains the logo U.N.I.T.I. and even an extra line, again in French. If I had offered a bottle of champagne, Katy would definitely have won it! My sincere and humble thanks to her, to John Pym, and others who emailed me about this yesterday. My thanks are very humble, because I never expected so many people to give their time so generously to solving this one and my own hypothesis was up a gum-tree…

I have been asked when, then, did Kittie visit Rome? Most likely in 1930, when she stayed with Percy and Sybil Lubbock at Fiesole, whence it would be easy to reach Rome by train, but possibly the year before: a scrap of label on the side of her case says LUG, most likely standing for LUGANO, which might refer to a possible visit to Lesbia Corbet (married name Mylius) on Lake Como in 1929. Whereas the Grand Hôtel de Russie in Montmartre seems to have gone long ago, the one in Rome appears to have survived to this day — minus the ‘Grand’.

Thanks again to everyone who responded so splendidly.

1/1/16. A very happy new year to everyone. As you will gather from the above, we are now presenting Calderonia slightly differently. ‘Featured Comments’ will soon replace ‘Comments’, although all past Comments will still be accessible. Links will be introduced between past Comments and it will, of course, be possible to leave new ones. Previous ‘Watch this Space’ posts will be archived and made accessible. A number of over-arching categories that are not tagged, e.g. ‘Edwardian Character’, ‘Conduct of the War’, ‘War Poets’, will also be introduced. I shall leave up ‘Christmas at “White Raven” 1944’ for a little longer, as people have emailed me that they like it. Then it will be archived. I hope to carry on posting weekly until the biography is published, and I may feature some entries from Kittie’s diary for ninety years ago on the days for which she wrote them. Watch this space for completion of the last chapter of the biography very soon.

‘White Raven’ painted by Roland Pym above Kittie’s front door

Faithful followers of this blog/website will recall twelve months ago the Christmas of 1914 at Foxwold, Brasted Chart, in Kent. The Pym, Lubbock and Calderon families all participated, as well as two refugees from German-occupied Belgium who were living with George and Kittie Calderon in Hampstead. None present ever forgot it, and Percy Lubbock wrote poignantly of it in his portrait of George published in 1921.

The only other Christmas in Kittie’s life after 1914 that we have as much information about is that of 1944, thirty years later when she was seventy-seven. That too was dramatic, but in a completely different way. I felt it would be appropriate, before the year in which my biography should be published and this blog ends, to describe from manuscript sources what happened at Christmas 1944.

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My deeper research into Kittie’s life at Sheet, Petersfield, persuades me that she made the mistake in 1922 of coming in at the very top of local society. She was a relation by marriage and good friend to the biggest local landowner, Helen Bonham-Carter (then hyphenated); she was the widow of a war hero and literary man whose public profile was still quite high through the 1920s; she was the scion of a famous family (the Irish Hamiltons); and she had exalted friends (Astleys, Corbets, Ripleys etc) who visited her. Yet she lived in a relatively modest Victorian cottage, ‘Kay’s Crib’, outside the village proper. Much of the rest of Sheet society was composed of upper middle class retired folk, e.g. from the military, who rather fancied themselves. Understandably, when Kittie hove in she put these people’s backs up. She described Sheet in retrospect as ‘my prison’.

By about 1932, Kittie had decided to get out of Hampshire. Her nephew Edward Pakenham Hamilton (1893-1983) had become Estate Manager at Godinton Park, near Ashford in Kent, and his father, Kittie’s only brother John Pakenham Hamilton (1861-1946), had moved to Ashford with his wife to be close to their eldest son. This, and the desire to be nearer to the Pyms at Foxwold, persuaded Kittie to buy a plot of land north of Ashford and have a house built there according to her own specifications. She asked Violet and Evey Pym’s son, the architect John Pym (1908-93), to build it for her, and she moved into it in late 1934. John Pym’s brother, the artist Roland Pym (1910-2006), then painted the above white raven over the door, as that was to be the new house’s name.

‘White Raven’ was the sobriquet she had adopted in her relationship with Caroline (Nina) Corbet (1867-1921), who was ‘Black Raven’ because her first husband was Walter Corbet (1856-1910), descended from a henchman of William the Conqueror’s called ‘Le Corbeau’.

Unlike ‘Kay’s Crib’ in Sheet, Kittie settled into ‘White Raven’ extremely well. She designed a formal garden and took on a gardener called Grant. Although at that time ‘White Raven’ was in relatively open countryside, she was in easy distance of a church and village, and beyond that was Ashford with its fast line to London. The people who lived around her were far more middle class than at Sheet and she became something of a local treasure. She was visited by friends from her earlier life (probably including Sir Coote Hedley, the ‘Godfather in War’ (q.v.), who died in 1937) and often saw her brother John and nephew Edward. By April 1942, however, Edward Hamilton had had to move to a job at Retford.

Sarah and John Pakenham Hamilton at ‘White Raven’, c. 1936

Kittie and her housekeeper Elizabeth Ellis remained at ‘White Raven’ throughout the War. Dog fights and phalanxes of German bombers passed overhead, and as a major railway hub Ashford itself was targeted. The noise was so loud that on 24 October 1943 Kittie wrote to Percy Lubbock that, sitting in the kitchen, she and Elizabeth were ‘bounced into the air by the shocks overhead’. Friends all over the country tried to persuade Kittie to go and live with them, but for various reasons she would not budge. Then in June 1944 the flying bomb attacks began. Up to a hundred a day roared over and Ashford became the worst-hit area after London. Kittie called them ‘Boodlebugs’. In her words, the two women suffered ‘continuous long almost sleepless nights’, which began to grind them down.

Elizabeth Ellis at ‘White Raven’, c. 1936

On 25 October 1944 John Hamilton’s wife Sarah died. His sons were extremely worried about his ability to care for himself — not to mention the dangers of continuing to live in Ashford — so after the funeral they tried to persuade him to go to live with one of them at a time. But John would not budge either. Continuing in Kittie’s words to her god-daughter Lesbia Lambe (Nina Corbet’s sole surviving child):

the sons hated him being alone in this house, so it seemed obvious I should ask them if he would let me and Elizabeth come for a few days and he said he would agree to that… So here we both came on the Wednesday [1 November 1944] and for the first day in our mutual habitation of that little house [‘White Raven’] we were both out of it when the Boodler came along and left cards but he knocked in vain for admittance, and after a rather bad attack of temper departed — after laying all the tiles upon the lawn on the south side and knocking down nearly all the ceilings, especially choosing my bedroom and in it my bed..!

A flying bomb had landed in the back garden of ‘White Raven’ and there is little doubt that Kittie and Elizabeth would have been killed if they had been there. The explosion also caused severe damage to the houses around it. Now they had to stay with John Hamilton much longer, whilst ‘White Raven’ was made habitable. As Kittie wrote to Lesbia on 8 November: ‘John is bored stiff with us in our different ways — he does not even try to camouflage the fact — indeed goes so far as to be, I think, genuinely glad that he probably saved my life by acceding to those “tiresome” sons!’ Kittie herself believed that it was God who had used her brother to save her and Elizabeth’s lives. It seems that they finally departed for ‘White Raven’ on 18 December.

Kittie and Elizabeth Ellis now prepared to celebrate Christmas at ‘White Raven’. A major problem was finding something to eat on Christmas Day. Louise Rosales, Kittie’s friend in London, had tried to get a chicken from her own butcher, but ‘he can’t let me have any more till the war is over!!!! He offered me some ROOKS (!) for you […] to replace the non-existent chickens’. However, as Kittie wrote to Lesbia on 18 December, Elizabeth managed to ‘collect a clever little teeny weeney chicken for her and me without telling me’. At this point, Kittie learned that she was going to have three unexpected guests — ‘Brother John and his nice engineer son George and his nice wife Lily’. What were Kittie and Elizabeth to do, as the midget chicken would ‘never have fed four’?

The day was saved by Lesbia and her husband Charles Lambe, who sent a ‘beautiful St Fort chicken’ by post from Fife, which arrived on Christmas Eve. St Fort is the Stewart estate near St Andrews that had been inherited by Nina and where her daughter was now living. As Kittie reported to Lesbia, ‘Brother John had been quite moved on the Christmas Day occasion when I told him he was eating a St Fort Chicken! Your Great-Grandmother had given him many a good day’s shooting when a big Eton boy and later at Cambridge in his vacations when we were sometimes in Fife’.

After Christmas 1944, John Hamilton sold his house in Ashford. His eldest son, Edward, helped him to pack up. The two men then stayed a night at ‘White Raven’ and left for Nottinghamshire, where Edward was living with his family.

So Kittie’s plan of living out her life near relations in Ashford had been frustrated. Her closest relation (by marriage) in Kent was now Evey Pym, forty miles away.

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The high point of researching Kittie’s life 1923-50 over the last few months has been discovering that Elizabeth Ellis did not die before Kittie left Kent for Brighton in January 1948 (or possibly late 1947). This is entirely thanks to my superb London researcher Mike Welch, who specialises in large institutional and genealogical databases. The truth that Mike uncovered about Elizabeth Ellis is both fascinating and revealing.

When I was doing the initial research on this period of Kittie’s life about a year ago, I asked Mike to look for Elizabeth Ellises who had died between 1945 and 1947. This was because there was no mention of Elizabeth in Kittie’s papers after 1945 and I knew that she had died before Kittie. But if she had retired because of illness before Kittie moved to Brighton, she could have lived and died anywhere. The name Elizabeth Ellis was so common that without a date of birth it was impossible to narrow down which one in the registers of deaths she might be.

However, last month the National Archive made available a new source of information, the 1939 residential register, and Mike saw the opportunity to discover Elizabeth Ellis’s date of birth (5 June 1869) from the entry for ‘White Raven’. Comparing this with a wider swathe in the register of deaths, Mike spotted an Elizabeth Ellis who died in BRIGHTON in 1948. Tracing this Elizabeth Ellis back through the 1911, 1901, 1891 and 1881 censuses, it became clear that she was indeed Kittie’s long-serving housekeeper.

She was born in Lincolnshire and in 1881 was living in a workhouse with her mother, a domestic servant. Elizabeth went into service herself and by 1911 was working for the family of one Wright Provost in Hampstead. The next year, when the Calderons moved to Well Walk in Hampstead, she became their housekeeper (a promotion). We now know that she moved with Kittie to Brighton in 1947/48. Staggeringly, Elizabeth Ellis was probably still living and working with Kittie at the age of seventy-eight.

Elizabeth Ellis had been, as Kittie expressed it, ‘my valued old servant’ for thirty-six years, but we know from the records that Kittie provided generously for her too. Elizabeth died on 3 September 1948 in the same Brighton nursing home that Kittie was to die in on 30 January 1950.

16/12/15. It seems to me in retrospect that every one of the fifteen chapters I have written of George Calderon’s biography is perilously different in length, form and style; but none is so different as the one I am writing at the moment — the last one of the book. It is the story of Kittie’s last twenty-eight years and George’s posthumous literary life, yet it will be the shortest (about 3000 words). The ‘deep chronology’ that I spent two months constructing proved only the beginning. I realise now that I have to evoke not only the key events in Kittie’s life 1922-50, but the ‘feel’ of her life through those years. I have, in fact, to evoke how it felt to be Kittie. Quite, quite different from the other chapters. And, I have to admit, a tall order. But that’s enough of a ‘spoiler’…

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Cambridge Professor of International History David Reynolds’s lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’, was a virtuoso performance — restrained, relaxed, magisterial, deeply challenging. The audience of about a hundred and fifty gave him a long ovation.

Many of Reynolds’s points are made in his recent book (and TV series) The Long Shadow, which I was familiar with, but I was surprised to find myself taking three pages of notes. If I were to summarise and quote from the whole lecture it would take thousands of words. Personally, I hope the lecture is published in some form, as it is surely something of an historic turning-point itself in how we think of the First World War.

Reynolds is ‘not sure that the way we remember the War is conducive to making our peace with the War’. Poets like Owen and Sassoon are our ‘supreme interpreters of the War’, and he implied that they won’t lie down… There has been a revival in Remembrance Sunday and the two-minute silence. Our difficulty in making our peace with WW1 can be traced to disillusion after 1918 with the idea that it had been ‘the war to end all wars’ and therefore justified. We are troubled by the fact that it did not solve the ‘German Problem’, and the biggest loss of life in British military history was therefore wasted. Reynolds quoted Hannah Arendt to the effect that the great problem after WW1 was ‘coming to terms with sudden, random death’. He gave a harrowing example of this from Vera Brittain and could only compare it today with the devastating emotional impact of road deaths. He described his experience of the charity Road Peace, whose own act of remembrance is held the week after Armistice Day, and drew parallels between national attitudes to WW1 and grieving. By contrast, we have made our peace with the Second World War because it ‘ended by revealing the morality of the War…it was our Finest Hour’.

A particularly interesting section of Reynolds’s lecture was where he compared attitudes to both wars in the rest of Europe. The French have no difficulty with WW1 because it was a ‘war of national liberation that they won’, whereas WW2 was a disaster for them (‘capitulation and collaboration’) that traumatised French society. But, like the Germans themselves, they have been able to view both wars as a single agony that was laid to rest in 1945 — and even more so by the Treaty of Rome (founding the EU), which Reynolds described as ‘the Peace Treaty that didn’t happen after 1918’. The French and Germans have, Reynolds claimed, ‘moved on’ because they accept a common European destiny, whereas we have difficulty believing we ‘belong’ to Europe and our ancillary role in WW1 itself questions the fact.

Reynolds’s peroration was that ‘we need to remember but also understand’. We are now as far away from the Great War as its participants were from Waterloo (it amused me slightly that he seemed to be suggesting that Waterloo no longer meant anything to WW1 soldiers, when we know from George Calderon’s letters that even as the Orsova was taking him and fellow-officers to Gallipoli they were planning a celebration of it!). ‘We need to remember the men who marched away’, Reynolds concluded, but also:

1. ‘Clamber out of the Trenches’
2. ‘Escape from Poets Corner’
3. ‘Understand the Great War as history’

The latter, of course, is what you would expect an historian to say, but Reynolds meant specifically to understand it as a global war, as one that ‘reshapes the Middle East, and involved China and Japan’.

There was a fascinating range of questions afterwards, both from the audience and from Reynolds to the audience, but the very first participant asked forcefully ‘when?’ would we make our peace with WW1; he felt it would take ‘a long time’ because at the moment we plainly did not want to. At this point, I felt, Reynolds’s own attitude revealed itself as more nuanced. ‘I want to continue remembering these people’, he said, meaning the names all over our war memorials and Thiepval’s arches, and implied that he approved of the public acts of remembrance. But he also added, in a phrase that deeply struck home with me at least, that ‘we have to start letting go of the dead’.