‘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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
Watch this Space
Calderonia is an experiment in biography through a blog. It tells the story of George and Kittie Calderon’s lives from 30 July 1914 to 30 July 1915 from day to day as it happened, but exactly 100 years afterwards. It therefore feels like a biography in real time. When no facts were known for a particular day, the author posted on subjects ranging from the Edwardians, recently published biographies and his own problems as a biographer, to translating Chekhov and the Commemoration of World War I.
The blog-biography can be accessed in various ways. To read it from the beginning, go to the top of the column on the right and click the appropriate link. You can then read forward in time by clicking the link at the end of each post. If you wish to start at a particular month, scroll down the column on the right to Archive at the bottom. Posts can also be selected through Search Calderonia and the Tags on the right. An update on the complete biography of George Calderon always follows this introduction.
3/2/16. Today I tackle the revision of chapter one, first written, revised and wordprocessed in June 2011. I have always known it was going to be a challenge, as it starts the biography at one remove (George hardly appears in it) and the first page and a half is too philosophical, airy-fairy and drawn out… It’s a terrible beginning if you want to grab the reader and never let them go again. At the time of writing I tried to get round this by keeping it very short (3500 words), but that was fudgery… There are things in it that are important (to me) to say, e.g. about Edwardian semantics and body language, not to mention Kittie’s first husband and George’s university friend Archie Ripley, but no publisher, I fear, will want it; or the last chapter. Chekhov’s advice is ringing in my ears: ‘when you have written a story, tear off the beginning and end of it, because that’s where we writers lie most’!
A number of followers have asked me what condition Kittie was suffering from in her years at ‘White Raven’ (1934-47) and whether it was this that carried her off (30 January 1950).
The latter is the easy question. On her death certificate the causes of death are given as: 1a Hypostatic Pneumonia, b Cardiac failure, c Arteriosclerosis. However, her hypostatic pneumonia (‘Old People’s Friend’) was just the result of prolonged confinement to bed (constant fluid collection at back of lungs), ‘cardiac failure’ refers presumably to her heart winding down, and ‘arteriosclerosis’ was a long-term condition, so it seems to me these amount to saying no more than that the cause of death was ‘old age’ and they tell us nothing about her chronic health problems 1934-47.
The most obvious reason for all her correspondence suddenly breaking off in 1946 is that she had a stroke and never recovered the ability to write. But there is no independent evidence for this and she does not seem to have entirely lost her powers of speech. I don’t favour this explanation, therefore. The ‘most obvious reason’ for no letters from or to Kittie having survived after 2 January 1946 is actually that they were lost or burned after her death! Given the large number of her correspondents, it is hardly likely that they all stopped writing to her at once. (On the other hand, if she did have an incapacitating stroke all her correspondence would have been taken over by her attorney, Louise Rosales, and Mrs Rosales was definitely a ‘burner’.)
Kittie’s known symptoms after moving into White Raven were problems with (close?) vision, suddenly falling asleep, and having to keep running to the ‘bathroom’. Not a single photograph of her wearing glasses is known, but we know she had them as she refers in a diary to her ‘spex’. But the problem was not just optometric. She visited a consultant in London, who it seems told her he could do nothing for her beyond a new lense prescription. This implies that the real problem was cataracts or something like macular degeneration. Her suddenly ‘falling asleep’ could have been just a hypothermic reaction to inactivity in the grossly underheated houses she lived in. Although Kittie says in a private letter that it is her ‘middle’ that plays her up, implying the problem is gastric, her spidery failing writing and blackouts could imply chronic urinary tract infection. She thought very highly of her G.P. in Ashford, a Dr Body (!), and he tried the latest medication for her gastric/urinary condition, but it didn’t work.
We shall probably never know what Kittie clinically had wrong with her. But the really interesting thing, in my view, is that nowhere does Kittie ever say what, clinically, she has been diagnosed as having. This, I think, is very characteristic of the Edwardians and, indeed, our recent forebears. You did not name your disease/complaint, because (a) medical terminology was for doctors, (b) you weren’t supposed to discuss illness openly, (c) your job was to keep a stiff upper lip through it all.
There is a graphic illustration of Kittie’s attitude to illness in her pocket diary for 1939 — and incidentally it shows that we must add the term ‘grip’ to ‘staunch’, ‘stalwart’ and ‘stout’ in our Edwardian vocabulary. She had had a fall in September or November 1938 (she is confused about which) and been badly concussed. This had aggravated her already existing proneness to falling asleep. But she was determined to battle on, and to write about it in her diary for 10 January 1939 even though this cost her great effort and her writing and self-expression were affected:
She had recovered by the beginning of March and was following political developments in Europe closely. Two months before war broke out she was able to revisit her birthplace, St Ernan’s Island Donegal, on a motoring holiday with Louise Rosales.
This is the most recent ‘Watch this Space’ post. For the archive of ‘Watch this Space’, please click here.