‘Tributes’

Posted on June 25, 2015 by Patrick Miles

A Russianist who has read Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) asks me why I have not posted more tributes to George than my own.

The reason is simply that tributes were not published until his death became officially accepted in 1919 and my commitment in the blog is to ‘real time 1915’ and ‘real time now’. Anyone who would like to make one now is, of course, welcome to do so as a Comment.

In fact there were not many published after his obituary (by Percy) appeared in The Times on 5 May 1919. Kittie had decided months before to ask Percy to write his Sketch, and at that point she also invited George’s friends to write down their memories of him. She received memoirs from George’s friends at Rugby H.C. and G.F. Bradby, his Trinity (Oxford) friends Harold Dowdall, Laurence Binyon and A.B. Lowry, Sir Coote Hedley, John Masefield, Thomas Sturge Moore, Emanuele Ordoño de Rosales, the Liberal Lawrence Le Breton Hammond, Leonora Bagg (see my post of 9 May), and probably others that have not survived. They were used carefully by Percy, who quotes from them without naming the authors and was very wary of being over-influenced by them. The best memoir is undoubtedly Binyon’s, in detail, scope and judgement.

Obviously, after these memoirs, which were of course also tributes, had been sent to Kittie and their authors knew that Percy was working on his book, there was no incentive for the writers to publish tributes in the press. In fact they have never been published in full.

However, on 26 August 1920 Laurence Binyon wrote to Kittie from the British Museum (where he worked) to tell her that he had written ‘some verses’ about George whilst on holiday in Brittany. ‘I fear they may read rather cramped and bald in style,’ he continued, ‘but somehow I could not write of George in the traditional elegiac strain. I wanted to be as exact as I could, and the thought of him cannot be anything but tonic, an astringent to sentiment.’ He continued to improve them for at least another month, until they were published that year as In Memory of George Calderon. They were then reprinted at the front of Percy’s book, with the title ‘George Calderon 2nd Dec. 1868 – 4th June 1915’.

Another Russianist has written to me describing Binyon’s fourteen stanzas as ‘very much in the spirit of “They Shall Grow Not Old”, and very beautiful and memorable’. Others may feel that, like ‘For the Fallen’ itself, Binyon’s poem in George’s memory is wildly uneven in quality. It is more a case, in my view, of Edwardian plenitude. There are stanzas in there for everyone. Thus Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, very movingly quoted stanzas 5 and 6 in her blog Comment of 4 June, and I chose the last two stanzas for my reading at the Commemoration that day.

Next entry: …then three come along at once

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Commemoration (to be continued 2)

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Plan A for a commemoration of George’s death (see yesterday’s post) was really dictated by long accepted British forms of commemorative ritual. These have loosened up in recent years, of course, to a point where you have extended, all-singing-and-dancing customer-devised funerals and memorial services complete with video links to Australia, although an indulgent priest still presides. I actually think that the presence of a priest and a theological framework in which he/she sets death has a healthy restraining effect on the modern British tendency to secularised sentimentality — which is why I was pro plan A.

But we hadn’t asked ourselves what would have been most appropriate in the eyes of George and Kittie. As soon as I began to do this, I was struck by George’s words to Kittie in his letter of 10 May 1910: ‘Rejoice in the colour and vigour of the thing — and drink deep with jolly friends […] and other Rabelaisians. Your wishes for good, will work all the better when two or three of you are gathered together.’ Of course, the last nine words echo those of the Gospel, but it is characteristic that George is talking only of a secular, human impact of the ‘wishes for good’ shared between ‘two or three of you gathered together’.

The idea struck root, then, of a plan B that involved a very few people. After all, we could no longer accommodate scores because we no longer had the venue(s), so it had to be fewer rather than more. Then people started emailing from around Britain, from the EU, and from North America, to say they would ‘raise a glass’ to George on the day. The penny dropped that, in the 21st century, people could ‘commemorate’ anywhere on the globe, and at the same time, without being physically with you. And although we could no longer stage a ‘public’ commemoration, practically a memorial service, we could always stage one ‘in’ public: at Hampstead, near the very house that George and Kittie had lived in.

Reading the words ‘drink deep’ and ‘Rabelaisian’, I also suddenly remembered that George had referred in a letter to the ‘street café life’ of London that he liked so much. So a post-commemoration lunch in a restaurant that fitted that description seemed appropriate. Evidently he would have approved of it, Kittie probably too.

Mr John Pym, the grandson of the Calderons’ friends Violet and Evey Pym of Foxwold, and I, therefore went to Hampstead to reconnoitre and to sample a venue for the lunch. The space opposite the Calderons’ house was in fact ideal, and off the street, and Café Rouge on Hampstead High Street fitted George’s and our bill precisely. Where the invitees were concerned, at most a dozen could be accommodated on the verges of the public footpath, so the obvious candidates — the full available ‘Calderonia’ team plus spouses — were ideal, as they amounted to nine.

On 4 June, then, we nine assembled on the spot at 11.50, we read two pieces from Kittie’s memoirs and an officer’s diary relating to George’s departure for war and to the battle of 4 June 1915, we kept the two minutes’ silence at noon, then we read two verses from Laurence Binyon’s ode to George’s memory (see tomorrow’s post) and Nina Corbet’s letter of comfort to Kittie when George’s death was officially accepted in April 1919. Flowers were left, with a copy of the commemoration readings, for the owners of the former Calderon home, and we repaired to Café Rouge for a suitably Rabelaisian repast.

Over lunch the nine of us signed this commemorative programme (I can’t reproduce a signed copy, because of the problem on the Net of identity theft):

Calderon Commemoration Menu

Click on image to enlarge.

Although the commemoration ‘act’ lasted only twenty minutes, I think it was intense and satisfying because it was so intimate and could not possibly have been held in a place more resonant with the events of 1914/15 for George and Kittie. The closing words of Nina’s letter to Kittie, four years after George’s death, were: ‘I clasp you close, Dina — Your T’Other’, which were almost unbearable. But the event had to be properly ‘closed’ and for that we turned traditional: we adapted the words of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’.

George, Kittie, Nina. We honour George’s sacrifice, and we cherish their memory. We will remember them.

We will remember them.

To be honest, it did occur to me that someone would say after this, ‘We can’t leave it there, can we? We must say something that rounds it off completely.’ If that happened, it seemed to me the swiftest way to ‘close’ would be to jump out of the secular and pronounce: ‘Rest eternal grant them, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.’ For that purpose I had memorised the words in both English and Latin, but mercifully they weren’t needed, or I should have felt I had turned ‘parson’! Perhaps I should say that two Calderonians had made it clear some time before that they would attend a lunch but not a quasi-religious service; but a religious element is already present in Nina Corbet’s letter of consolation to Kittie in 1919.

The other, complementary and vital part of the day was the messages I received from people commemorating George even as we were. Mr Pym, at that time in the United States, emailed at 11.51 BST: ‘You will be in position as I write and I am with you in spirit’. It was 6.45 a.m. in Maine and he would be raising a glass to George’s memory over lobster that evening. From Croatia a follower who was much taken by George’s work with Rabindranath Tagore emailed to say she would be observing the day. Mr Derwent May of The Times, a keen appreciator of Calderon, emailed to say that he would be raising a glass over lunch where he was co-judging this year’s Hawthornden Prize. Harvey Pitcher, the Chekhov scholar and translator, did likewise with a friend in Cromer. Most arresting of all was to receive an email on 3 June from the military historian Peter Hart, whom I do not know personally but have frequently quoted on this blog, to say that he would be featuring George’s last letter in his tour next day ‘on the battlefield’, i.e. at Gallipoli itself.

In the evening, we were able to Tweet some photographs of the commemoration and thank everyone involved. I might add that it was also an occasion for me to thank the whole ‘Calderonia’ team, researchers, consultants, supporters and blogmaster, without whom it would have been impossible to write the biography in less than ten years, if ever!

By sheer stumbling, then, or serendipity, call it what you will, and thanks massively to modern computer technology, I think we arrived at a form of commemoration that was appropriate to these particular people, Kittie and George, and above all was twenty-first century. It made them seem modern, people of today like us, whereas in retrospect I can see that the church service would not have; it would have held them at a greater distance, a more solemn and unreal distance. I will admit to having woken up in a cold sweat a few nights before, wondering whether it would work, or someone might suddenly say ‘I can’t read this, it’s all over the top!’, but it seemed to work…

It was a huge relief when it was over and we could move to a more ‘Rabelaisian’ commemoration, but I think we will all remember it — and, of course, the subjects of it. I say ‘subjects’, because another thing that several of us felt strongly about was that the commemoration should be inclusive, i.e. not just celebrate George’s humbling act of sacrifice, but those others who were involved, entangled, engulfed by it.

Much discussion was had both before and afterwards about the issues of commemorating the fallen in this and the coming years of the centenary of the War. I hope to address some of these issues through two final posts on commemoration next week.

Next entry: ‘Tributes’

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Commemoration (to be continued 1)

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Patrick Miles

The organisation of a public commemoration of George Calderon’s sacrifice on 4 June 1915, and the experience of the form it eventually took, have raised a huge number of questions in my and other Calderonians’ minds. Very long emails were exchanged in April and May, I and others made many trips to London to sort it out, and I would like to share with you over the next ten days some of the facts and some of our meditations.

It was decided long ago, of course, that there should be a public commemoration. There are no relations of the Calderon family alive in Britain today. Kittie’s family, the renowned Hamiltons, are very scattered across Britain and Ireland. At the beginning of this year the feeling arose (the ‘spontaneous’ nature of that is interesting in itself) that the commemoration should be held in a consecrated space. George and Kittie were based in London for nearly fifty years of their lives, and George was definitely a well-known figure in literary London, so London was chosen as the venue.

If one thinks about it, it is not at all a foregone conclusion that the commemoration should be held in a consecrated space. George was Christian in his acts, as Kittie always said (‘a better Christian than me’), but there is no doubt he was agnostic where the divinity of Christ was concerned, in some other aspects he veered to atheist, and he had a phobia of ‘parsons’. Kittie, however, was a deep believer and attended Anglican services. Moreover, the vast majority of our annual commemorations of the fallen in both world wars, and in this centenary year of the First World War, take place in churches or if outside are still conducted by priests. So that is probably why we opted straight away for an Anglican church and priest. But we should have thought about it!

Within London, a church off Piccadilly had first claim, as the church in which Kittie and George had been married with Corbets, Calderons, Hamiltons and alumni of Trinity College, Oxford, present. The memorial service for Dick Sutton in December 1918 had also been held there, and Kittie attended it. Another church, off the Strand, had a claim, as it has a strong association with the London theatre world and Kittie clearly had links with it in the 1920s. We do not know which, if any, church she attended in Hampstead, so that was out. It would, of course, have been splendid to hold the service in the chapel of Trinity College, Oxford, and the College was already wholly committed to commemorating George among its fallen.

I knew the space at the church of first choice, so in the fourth week of March I sent the clergy a carefully crafted email through their website, outlining what we had in mind and the contribution to church funds that we could make. No response came in a week, so I sent a letter on 30 March. Obviously, this left over two months to the centenary date. I never received a reply. On 11 April, with less than eight weeks to organise the event, I emailed the church again to say that I would have to go elsewhere, confirmed it in writing on 13th, and went to the second choice. It replied to my email immediately and was most accommodating. However, I did not know this space, so I went to London to view it. It would have been perfect, but the amplified ‘performance art’ going on outside was so loud and so dire that a two-minute silence in the ‘service’ would have been impossible. Moreover, at that point I was told that the excellent, kindly priest, who insisted on charging us nothing, was going to be away for three weeks. So nothing could even be discussed before the end of April. The chapel of Trinity College, Oxford, it transpired, was due to close before 4 June for two years’ restoration.

My own feeling about the form the service should take was that it should be short, introduced and concluded by the priest, who could put George’s life achievement and sacrifice in a double context, secular and religious, as she/he would no doubt want to, that there should be relevant readings by ‘Calderonians’, a two-minute silence at the time of George’s death, and the sociable part of the occasion would be a lunch afterwards (I had already chosen a venue for that in the Strand and visited it).

But even before a weekend’s agonised SWOT analysis had led us on 19 April to cancel the booking for the second venue, the event itself was mushrooming. Clearly, members of the numerous families associated with George in his life should be invited, perhaps the French descendants of his brother Frank, and alumni of Trinity College, Oxford. Suggestions were made about a much wider range of ‘performance’ that might be included in the commemorative event. I suddenly realised it was beginning to look more like a memorial service, that it could involve well over a hundred people, even the parading of regimental flags, and there would be no chance of feeding everyone afterwards…

Organising it in six weeks was obviously going to be a challenge. I took a deeper breath and decided to get on with it. At that moment, however, it became clear we had no venue. There was no longer a consecrated space in London or anywhere else that was appropriate. About a month had been ‘wasted’.

Except that it hadn’t. It had made us realise we hadn’t really thought about the nature or scale of the commemoration in the first place. We had, really, just gone with the tide. Some of us began to realise that and feel that it was actually a blessing in disguise that none of the consecrated spaces, and hence a presiding religious figure, was available. We had, er, been saved from ourselves. At least, that is how I saw it myself on 20 April. A sense grew on me that the church service ‘wasn’t meant to be’ when two indispensable Calderonians had to excuse themselves from attending it for absolutely uncancellable reasons.

We had no Plan B, but now we had to devise one.

Next entry: Commemoration (to be continued 2)

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‘Things fall apart’

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Since George Calderon’s death at noon in the Third Battle of Krithia on 4 June 1915 the timeline of this blog has frayed almost to nothingness. I understand the disorientation and even irritation of some followers who have emailed me. They want ‘finality’, or at least some certainty, about Kittie’s attempts to discover the truth, but I’m afraid that is precisely what you are not going to get for the remainder of this blog.

Followers may remember that a distinguished biographer told me how lucky I was that George ‘disappeared in the smoke of battle’ because that gave me a good ending to my biography, as opposed to slow decline, years of dementia, etc. But that’s not a ‘good ending’, it’s a lie! For Kittie there was never ‘closure’. That was the ending.

For the next thirteen days we have no positive evidence whatsoever about what Kittie did, indeed where she was, or what feedback she got from Hedley and Bell. Percy Lubbock’s first letter to her from Alexandria was dated 27 June 1915, but it will not appear in this blog until eight days later as the blog is tied to Kittie’s timeline, not Percy’s. (Eight days is probably the average time it took mail to get from Egypt to an address in Britain.) There are no more letters from Gertrude Bell in Kittie’s file until 14 July, although that does not mean to say Bell never wrote. How long did Kittie stay at Hoe Benham? We don’t know.

But there is one negative that is tantamount to a positive fact. There are no more copies of telegrams from the War Office in George’s War Office file until 12 July, so we can be pretty sure Kittie did not receive any more from that quarter until then.

Of course, it is ghastly. We know George died eighteen days ago, Kittie didn’t. It prompts us to ask, how on earth could this blatant error about him being ‘wounded’ come about?

On the one hand, it might seem easy enough. George was ‘seen to fall’, says a witness statement signed 13 July 1915, and finding him ‘missing’ a day or two after the attack George’s KOSB comrades put the best construction on it — that he ‘fell wounded’ (in Percy Lubbock’s Sketch from Memory this became ‘severely wounded’). As all accounts agree, the wounded were tirelessly stretchered away from the battle front all day. The Official History even mentions it specially: ‘The task of getting the large number of wounded down to the beach was particularly arduous, and high praise is due to the stretcher-bearers and regimental doctors, who were working all through the afternoon and the following night and day.’ One can understand, therefore, that once comrades in the 1st KOSB had convinced themselves George was wounded, they could assume he was on a hospital ship at Imbros, Lemnos, or on his way to Alexandria.

On the other hand, they must have known that with the Turks counterattacking in the late afternoon of 4 June the corpses of those killed on the open ground before the first Turkish trench was taken had been ‘piled up on each side of the new communication trench to the captured position’ (Official History). The overwhelming chance, if the KOSB officers had thought about it, was that the ‘missing’ George was amongst the dead. Two officers were convinced he had been killed ‘outright’. Although the corpses had been in the baking sun for three days, it is still a mystery why no attempt to identify them, for instance through identity discs, seems to have been made when they were removed on 6th or 7th June by the newly arrived 1/5th KOSB. The reason the corpse of George’s company commander, Captain Grogan, was identified is probably that it lay actually in the Turkish trench taken.

Frankly, it is inexcusable that Kittie was told George was ‘wounded’. He was ‘missing’. Everyone on the spot agreed about that, and they should never have jumped to the conclusion that he had been stretchered away. But such is war.

Next entry: Commemoration (to be continued 1)

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20 June 1915

Posted on June 20, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today at Hoe Benham Kittie received George’s last two letters (1 and 3 June 1915 — see my posts of those dates 2015), redirected from Hampstead at 5.45 p.m. yesterday.

The Field Post marks are clearly 1 and 3 June respectively, so she may have opened them in that order. If so, she must have been delighted, amused, even reassured (‘Dearest Mrs P., Nothing in your letters need make you anxious’), by the first.

But the message of the first line of George’s second letter would have been crystal clear to her. Other, younger men’s letters from the 1st KOSB written on this date are quite unequivocally written in the knowledge that they might not survive the next day. George had deliberately written his ‘last’ letter as though it was not his last. He never intimated that he was afraid or that Kittie should be; on the contrary, the phrase ‘I’m always a fortnight behind the newspapers’ probably meant ‘don’t believe anything you read about us, you won’t hear the true situation from me until a fortnight later’.

This last remark may have given Kittie hope. But the contrast between reading his words of over a fortnight ago, being told by the War Office nine days ago that he was ‘wounded’, and knowing nothing more since, must have been too much for her.

Some of Nina’s affectionate names for Kittie were ‘Dina’ (possibly from its rhyme or from the popular music hall song ‘Villikins and his Dinah’), ‘Quinckee’, ‘Swan’ (from her very white skin), and ‘White Raven’ (contrasting with the Corbets’ heraldic black raven).

Next entry: ‘Things fall apart’

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Life at Hoe Benham

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Patrick Miles

We may assume, then, that two days ago Kittie arrived at The Cottage at the Crossways, Hoe Benham, to stay for an indefinite period with the closest woman friend in her life, Nina Astley (Corbet). She would have travelled to Newbury by train, where she was met either by Nina with her husband Reginald Astley, who drove a car, or by a pony and trap that brought her the five miles to Hoe Benham. Alternatively, she may have changed trains at Newbury and got out at Boxford, which was only a couple of miles from the Crossways.

Nina’s first husband, Sir Walter Orlando Corbet, had died at Ludlow aged fifty-four from a perforated duodinal ulcer on 20 December 1910, leaving as his descendants Sir Roland James Corbet (q.v., b. 1892) and Lesbia Rachel Corbet (q.v., b. 1905). On 27 January 1913 Nina, then aged 45, married Reginald Astley, aged 51, who had been Sir Walter’s estate manager and was the brother of Constance Sutton’s second husband, Hubert Astley.

To begin with, Nina and Reginald Astley lived in London and at the Corbets’ historical home of Acton Reynald, Shropshire. ‘Reggie’ Astley continued to be a trustee of the Corbet estate until the coming of age of Sir Roland James Corbet (Jim) on 19 August 1913. He and Nina then carried on living in London, but were also resident at Benham Valence, Berkshire, the ancestral home of the Suttons. Sir Richard Vincent Sutton (Dick, q.v.) inherited Benham Valence in 1912, by which time his mother and Hubert Astley had moved to Brinsop Court, Herefordshire, but as a professional soldier in the Life Guards he was not often in residence and the house had many rooms.

On 15 April 1915 Nina’s son Jim Corbet was killed at Givenchy. His death caused a dynastic crisis, as the inheritance had always been male. The Corbet family, of course, had to sort this out. Meanwhile Nina, completely devastated by Jim’s death, withdrew to the Cottage at the Crossways, Hoe Benham, on Dick Sutton’s estate. She was not exactly in purdah, but naturally she was still mourning her son. Her husband, who was a special constable, was possibly in London some of the time, ‘Zeppelin watching’.

It seems to me that the ‘Cottage at the Crossways, Hoe Benham’ could be what features on Googlemaps today as ‘Blandys Farm, Crossways, Newbury’. If anyone out there knows more, please let me know! Whether it is Blandys Farm or not, one can be sure that Kittie had arrived in a beautiful, quiet rural setting with a few servants, where she could unwind completely with her best friend. It was quite likely that Constance Sutton (see my post of 12 June) came over from Brinsop Court to stay in her son’s mansion and visit Kittie.

As Lesbia Corbet said to me in 1986, ‘Those three were very close.’

Next entry: 20 June 1915

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The biographer blurts

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Ah dear, it’s time to come clean. The ‘disaster’ has happened: this blog is now a fortnight ahead of the writing of my biography itself. I finished Chapter 14 of the biography with George going over the top on 4 June 1915 and it is now 18 June 1915. To be precise, I finished Chapter 14 on 5 February 2015 and haven’t written a word of the biography since! To be even more pointed, I completed the research for Chapters 15 and 16, which will be very short and take the story to Kittie’s death in 1950, on 18 May 2015, and still haven’t started Chapter 15 itself!

But, I reassure myself, this is not writer’s block. I have never suffered from writer’s block, because I have never had the time to suffer from writer’s block… Yet it’s time in a different sense that has scuppered me now: the problem that I have discussed throughout this blog, of ‘chronotopia’, of having to ‘two-time’ with the ‘real time’ of the blog (day-by-day) and the extended time, joined-up time, narrated time of a biography. I have always found it difficult to keep these two chronotopes in play, yet apart, in my brain whilst writing the blog, and I suppose I have lost the struggle: the blog-time, ‘real time’, ‘synchronicity’, has taken over, to the ‘detriment’ of biography-time. I am resigned to not restarting the biography until the blog closes on 30 July 2015.

As you can imagine, on one level I find this highly irritating. So near to finishing the biography, and yet so far! Yet there are definite, unexpected up-sides.

Through May and early June, when I was writing almost daily posts, I realised the (blindingly obvious) fact that this blog of the last year of George Calderon’s life is a biography in its own right. I never remotely expected to regard it as such — the blog was essentially a way of raising George’s profile and hopefully attracting publishers — but now, I think, I can claim it’s an exercise in the new genre of internet biography, even if it covers only a year. As followers have pointed out to me, it is also autobiographical as it traces my own problems; and many other contemporary themes come into it, above all the War. In any case, as my post yesterday demonstrates, the ‘discipline’ of writing a day-to-day biography in ‘real time’ leads to discoveries that I missed when I was researching and writing Chapters 14 and 15 in ‘longer time’. This is a very good thing. It has already led to my revising parts of Chapter 14 and undoubtedly means I will write Chapter 15 differently (hopefully, more sensitively and accurately) than I would have without the blog.

I shall concentrate on the blog, then, until 30 July 1915/2015. After that, I won’t have to wrestle with chronotopia, with time-bifurcation in the brain, and can just concentrate on biography-time. It will mean the book has taken me nearly five years to research and physically write, which is frustrating since I thought it would take me three, but colleagues keep assuring me ten years is par for the course for a full-length biography. In any case, it’s not as though I am writing nothing. I write thousands of words a week on the blog!

It all convinces me more than ever that George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is about ‘tourbillions in Time’ (Robert Graves, ‘On Portents’); time past and time present…

*                    *                    *

When I say that I shall have spent five years researching and writing this biography, I should admit that that’s not true sensu stricto: I first tracked down George and Kittie’s papers thirty years ago, tinkered with Calderoniana over the years, but was able to get down to detailed research, and writing, only when I ‘semi-retired’. This accounts for why some kind friends tell me I have been ‘working on Calderon’ for thirty years; but that is not true in any focussed, professional, biographical sense, blokes and blokesses.

Next entry: Life at Hoe Benham

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Fast developments

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Yesterday and the day before I did some entirely new research on correlating what documents we have about these few days of Kittie’s life. The result is, of course, still only an hypothesis, but I think it is a plausible one. For me it is a revelation. It suggests that Kittie was far more proactive than I had thought, was working much faster than I thought, and that things in the mess and muddle of this war could move far more quickly (on the home front, at least) than I had assumed.

In the Calderon archive there is a rather scrumpled letter from Percy Lubbock without a date, without its envelope, and on writing paper headed ‘4th Field Ambulance, 2nd Division, Expeditionary Force’ — which has, however, been crossed out and ‘Emmetts’ written underneath. The printed address perhaps suggests that Percy has just got back from a Red Cross trip to the Western Front. He begins:

Dear Kitty

One must go to Egypt when one is told to go, it seems — but I could wish they hadn’t arranged it so that I should exactly miss you. But there it is — and I dare say it is easier to skip off to Alexandria at two minutes’ notice than to sit and work in England.

I had assumed this was written to Kittie at the end of this week, around 20th, when we know she was staying with Nina Astley (Corbet) at Hoe Benham in Berkshire, but I had missed the fact that Percy’s next extant letter to her is from Alexandria and dated 27 June. I had also overlooked the fact that his letter from Emmetts is dated by him ‘Tuesday’. Given that it took at least a week to get to Alexandria, and Percy’s boss, Gertrude Bell, had been in touch with Kittie only on 14th, the only ‘Tuesday’ Percy could have been writing on was next day, Tuesday 15 June.

Perhaps Bell had already decided to send Percy to Alexandria on Red Cross business before she received Kittie’s letter of 13 June. It seems more likely, though, that she had decided by 15th that he was to go and look for George in the military hospitals of the city. Perhaps she did this independently, but perhaps she agreed to do it after Kittie rang her on 14th and offered to subsidise Percy to go. (It would not have been the last time she subsidised his activities.)

So the hypothesis is that the two women very quickly agreed that Percy Lubbock should sail for Alexandria and that by the time Percy was writing to Kittie on 15 June he knew she was going off to be with Nina. We know from his next letter that Kittie wrote to him on 16th (we don’t have the letter). This implies that she was momentarily in London still but that by today, 17 June 1915, she was at Hoe Benham (otherwise Percy would still have been able to see her in London). Percy himself could have embarked for Alexandria today.

Very swiftly indeed, then, Kittie had achieved her three highest priorities, given the lack of further information from the War Office about George’s fate: she had got Coote Hedley to give the War Office Casualties Section a following wind, a close family friend had been despatched to look for George, and she was with her lifetime confidante, Nina, who was uniquely able to comfort her. Nina’s house in Berkshire did not have a telephone, but it could receive telegrams, for instance from Gertrude Bell, or from Elizabeth Ellis if the latter took receipt of a new telegram from the War Office.

But neither Bell nor Kittie appears to have told Percy the specific (i.e. true?) reason he was being sent posthaste to Egypt, for his letter of 15th to Kittie ends:

If George should be there, wouldn’t that be a lark. Do write to me c/o Messrs T. Cook, Rue de la Porte de Rosette 2, Alexandria. If ever you want to telegraph to me, apply to Miss Bell, 20 Arlington St. She will be able to do so free of charge.

Rather dizzy work, life.

Yours affect.,

Percy

Next entry: The biographer blurts

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16 June 1915

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Unless you are from a military background, you might not realise that soldiers on active service strive to report back to Battalion HQ at home, or how much other regiments exchange information from the battlefield with each other at home, or to what extent those at Battalion HQ feed information to their comrades’ families left in Britain, and vice versa.

Kittie had obviously been in touch with the 9th Battalion Ox and Bucks still stationed in England, because today she received a letter from Captain Arthur Maxwell Labouchere, the adjutant with whom George had been particularly friendly at Fort Brockhurst (for a photograph of him see my post of 10 April 2015). However, twelve days after the 3rd Battle of Krithia the 9th Battalion Ox and Bucks had evidently heard very little about its four/five officers including George who had left Devonport for the Dardanelles on 13 May:

Bovington Camp
WOOL
Wareham

Dear Mrs Calderon

I am so sorry to hear George is wounded and sincerely hope it is slight. I think it is a most favourable sign that he is classed among the list of ‘wounded’. We heard today that Capt. Hogan also was ‘wounded’ but no details are yet to hand. It is bad luck for George to get caught so soon again with all his splendid enthusiasm; and I am sorry for you to have to go through this anxious time again. No-one here, who knew George, is not deeply touched by the news, for he took everyone’s heart by storm. I will let you know immediately, if any news should reach us about him.

Yours very sincerely

Maxwell Labouchere

Bovington Camp in Dorset had been an infantry training area since 1899. Wool is a village between Dorchester and Wareham.

It will be remembered that Captain Hogan had commanded D Company of the 1st KOSB, which on 4 June was in the delayed second wave of attack. This did not get mown down but went on to capture its objectives. In the first wave, the twenty-five-year old Captain James Grogan, who commanded B Company containing George’s platoon, is said to have reached the first Turkish trench, been seen firing his revolver from its parapet, but then been killed by a Turkish ‘bomb’, i.e. hand grenade of German manufacture.

Was Kittie cheered, or depressed by this letter? Evidently Battalion HQ had been informed that Hogan was ‘wounded’, or received the news from him personally, but it had not known that George was ‘wounded’. Why not? What was the difference?

Next entry: Fast developments

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14 June 1915

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Bell received Kittie’s letter this Monday morning and replied immediately in her rapid administrator writing:

Dear Mrs Calderon,
We telegraphed yesterday about Mr Calderon, at the request of the War Office. I do so very deeply sympathise with your anxiety and I hope we shall [soon be able to] give you good news.
Yours sincerely
Gertrude Bell

There was a special reason why Bell could ‘so very deeply’ sympathise with Kittie: the love of her own life, Colonel Dick Doughty Wylie, had been killed at Helles on 26 April 1915 (see my post for that day).

The square brackets above supply what has been gnawed by a mouse.

Next entry: 16 June 1915

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Action

Posted on June 13, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Both Constance Sutton (Astley) and Nina Corbet (Astley) knew only too well the nervous and physical effects that anxiety tended to have on Kittie.

But Kittie had her own well-developed pattern of techniques for coping with it. She clung to her faith in benign outcomes (was ‘stalwart’ and ‘stout’), believed in taking positive action, and sought the company of friends for comfort.

Today, Sunday 13 June 1915, she went to church and prayed for George’s safety. Telegrams were delivered on a Sunday, but none came. She decided she must do something, but what? The War Office was basically saying ‘wait for our next telegram’, so on what pretext could she get back to them and try to hurry them up?

She noticed that in the telegram George had been described as ‘2nd Lieutenant Calderon’, when he was certainly Lieutenant. Although Calderon was hardly a common English name, the error could be made out to be significant in tracing him through the military hospital system. She therefore probably went this evening to see the ‘Godfather in War’, Coote Hedley (q.v.), not far away in Belsize Avenue, and persuaded him to write an internal note at the War Office to the Casualties section pointing out George’s true rank. This he did next day.

She also wrote to Gertrude Bell, who was running the ‘Enquiry Department for Wounded and Missing’ at the British Red Cross and Order of St John in Arlington Street. Bell was a brilliant administrator, linguist and archaeologist, who had been George’s counterpart in the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League when he was Honorary Secretary of the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. They got on well and she thought highly of him. But for him, she wrote to George on 18 July 1910, the anti-suffrage demonstration in Trafalgar Square on 16 July, which was meant to be a joint WNASL and MLOWS event, would have been a ‘disaster’ scuppered by MLOWS misogynists.

It is possible that Kittie had not known of Bell’s war work until told by Percy Lubbock, Violet’s brother. He was working for the British Red Cross at Arlington Street himself, as his extremely poor eyesight meant he could not sign up. Percy (1879-1965) was gay, had greatly admired his uncle Archie Ripley, Kittie’s first husband and George’s Oxford friend, and he became very supportive of Kittie from now on.

Whether Kittie had yet told George’s mother Clara that he was ‘wounded’, we can only speculate. Perhaps she was waiting first for confirmation.

Next entry: 14 June 1915

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Letter from a concerned friend

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today, Saturday 12 June, at Brinsop Court (q.v.), Constance Astley wrote Kittie a four-side letter. We do not know when Kittie received it, as Constance herself says she knows Kittie is ‘in the country now’, but not where, and therefore is sending the letter to her sister-in-law, Nina Astley (Corbet by her first marriage), Kittie’s closest friend.

Constance, neé Corbet, was equally close to Kittie and Nina when they were all young women. In particular, after the sudden death of Constance’s first husband, Sir Richard Sutton, in 1891, it was Kittie whose unpretentious religious faith saved Lady Constance Sutton from near-suicidal depression. Constance never forgot this.

Whether, as I suggested yesterday, Kittie had telephoned or written to Nina with the news that George was wounded, we do not know, but Constance was writing today without knowing that George had been wounded. She was replying to a letter from Kittie that she had left ‘so long unanswered’, but since Constance knows that George is at Gallipoli, Kittie’s letter to her could hardly have been written before 8 June 1915 (unless Kittie had heard previously on the Ox & Bucks grapevine, or from Coote Hedley, where George was).

The reason she had not replied earlier, Constance writes, is that she had spent ‘every minute of my 3 weeks at Benham [Valence]’ with her son Dick Sutton (see my post of 25 October 2014 ), who was recovering from a wound received at Ypres on 13 May 1915. His wound had ‘healed nicely’ and he seemed ‘not at all upset, but he still suffers from headaches at times’. Then she continues:

I am thinking of you so often, Kitty darling, and with such real sympathy for I know the awful state of anxiety in which you must be living — and the Dardanelles being so far away makes it worse — but how proud you must feel of George taking part in such a wonderful piece of work — I think it is perfectly splendid of him at his age, and with no previous military training, to give up everything to go and fight for his country — and splendid of you too, because I know you will have sent him without a word — except of encouragement and approval — and God knows it is harder for the rest left at home, than for those who go.

Dick Sutton had been a professional soldier with the Life Guards since 1910. His mother visited him at Windmill Camp, Salisbury Plain, for the King’s review of the 3rd Cavalry Division, and saw George there (see my post of 28 September 2014). The reason she spells Kittie with a ‘y’ is that that was the intimate ‘cat’ form (see my post of 2 November 2014).

Next entry: Action

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11 June 1915

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Sometime today, which was a Friday, Kittie received the following telegram:

O.H.M.S. I certify that this telegram is sent on the service of the WAR OFFICE [Signature]

2nd Lieut. Calderon Oxford Light Infantry attached K.O.S. Borderers was wounded June 4th. Further news will be telegraphed when received.

FROM: Secretary, War Office

We simply do not know her immediate reaction, but it seems unlikely that she panicked. At least the telegram said George had been wounded; and he had been wounded once before. She doubtless rang her closest friends in London. She may have dropped lines to Violet Pym, Catherine Lubbock, and her closest friend Nina Astley (Corbet), or even rung them, but she seems to have taken no action yet.

It was presumably now just a case of waiting for the ‘further news’ to be telegraphed as promised. On the other hand, when George had been wounded in Flanders on 29 October 1914, he telegraphed her himself (see my post of 1 November 2014).

Next entry: Letter from a concerned friend

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10 June 1915

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today Kittie returned to Well Walk, Hampstead, from staying with the Pyms and Lubbocks in Kent.

The Belgian refugee Jean Ryckaert, who had been living at the Calderons’ since October 1914, had recently left, whether for a job in central London or for unoccupied Belgium is not clear. The last of the three refugees, Raymond Dereume, may still have been living in the house whilst he applied to emigrate to the United States, where he had a very successful future ahead of him. The one person who was certainly there to greet Kittie was her housemaid Elizabeth Ellis, who lived in.

Ellis had probably gone to work for the Calderons when they moved to Well Walk in the last quarter of 1912. She was an Anglican and did charitable work for the Girls’ Friendly Society. She stayed with Kittie for the next thirty-five years.

Elizabeth Ellis, 1923+

Elizabeth Ellis, c. 1923, holding Kittie’s tabby cat Abednego and with Kittie’s dog Bunty, successor to Tommy, at her feet

It seems likely that on this day at Well Walk Kittie received George’s letters of 22 and 27 May, from Alexandria and Gallipoli respectively (see my posts for those dates 2015). If so, the first one, with its Tolstoyan description, its R.M.S. Orsova gossip and its relaxed banter, will have entertained her, and she probably laughed her infectious titter as she read George on one of his pet subjects:

The parsons are good fellows and sportsmen; they preached all over the ship on Sunday; hold a communion service of nurses every morning before breakfast; and the senior of them refereed the officers’ boxing. There is a tall fat one who thinks and talks chiefly of food; relates adventures in which he ‘missed a meal’; rang up the steward all night in the Bay of Biscay to ask if the ship was sinking, and troubled Hogan every hour, when a guard, to enquire as to the dangers of being torpedoed.

On the back of this letter, it may be remembered, he had confirmed that they were bound for Lemnos. Because she had already received his letter of 30 May, she knew that he was at Gallipoli; but now his letter of 27 May described their arrival at Helles the day before. This was a brilliant letter, written with great verve and immediacy, that also started with a long Tolstoyan sentence, touched on everything from the ‘young moonlight’ to corncrakes and lizards, included the black humour with the unexploded bomb, and was utterly reasssuring — much more so than the one of 30th, when several men near him had been wounded and ‘about 80’ Turkish shells had landed in and around their camp.

The sequence of George’s letters had now been restored and only those of 1 and 3 June were left for her to receive.

Next entry: 11 June 1915

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Kittie

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Patrick Miles

George Calderon had now been dead four days, but no-one in Britain knew that.

At Brasted Chart, near Sevenoaks in Kent, Kittie continued to support the Calderons’ friend Violet Pym, amusing Violet’s three children Jack (aged seven), Roly (aged five), and Elizabeth (aged seven months), reading to them, and accompanying them on their excursions. Violet was thirty-three. She had lost another son at almost full-term in 1913. Her husband, Captain ‘Evey’ Pym, was a professional soldier and at the moment absent most of the time. The two women were very close. Despite their age difference of fifteen years, they were a great comfort to each other. This was as George had intended.

June 1915 was dry, and today in Kent temperatures reached almost 80 Fahrenheit.

Although the Visitors Book for the Pyms’ home, Foxwold (q.v.), records Kittie as having stayed there from 1st to 10th June, she evidently was spending some of her time at Violet’s parents’ home, Emmetts, about a mile away. Apart from being the widow of Violet’s mother’s half-brother Archie Ripley (d. 1898), Kittie had helped Violet’s father Frederic Lubbock lay out the Rose Garden at Emmetts in about 1908. Whilst staying at Emmetts now she probably helped with the gardening and weeding. She doubtless read a lot, and she may have painted some water colours. Sometime before 1910, she had also designed the garden at Foxwold.

Today Kittie received two letters from George redirected by her housemaid at Well Walk, Hampstead. They were out of sequence, since they were George’s letters of 25 and 30 May 1915 from the Orsova at Lemnos and from the KOSB at Helles respectively (see my posts of those dates 2015). George’s letters from Alexandria (22 May) and on arriving at Gallipoli (27 May) had not yet reached Britain.

So she now knew George was at Gallipoli. She was probably not anxious, but she still had to juggle with the fact that his reassurances in those letters were over a week old.

Next entry: 10 June 1915

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George Calderon: a tribute

Posted on June 7, 2015 by Patrick Miles

As I have written before, the question everyone asks me is: ‘Who is George Calderon?’ Perhaps unconsciously, some people seem to intonate this as a rhetorical question implying: ‘Why are you spending years of your life writing about a person nobody has ever heard of?’ No-one has ever asked me why I think he should be remembered, in other words why I believe he deserves a full-length biography. Perhaps, then, this limbo between his death and the blog returning to ‘real’ 1915 time is an appropriate moment to address those unasked questions — in effect, to pay him my own tribute.

In my opinion George Calderon was the best-informed and most critically-thinking Slavist that Britain produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The other big names were grammarians (Morfill, Goudy), ‘old Russia hands’ (Wallace Mackenzie, Baring), historians (Pares, Seton-Watson), or hopelessly acculturated literati (Maude, Graham). Where Russia was concerned, George did not specialise like these figures, he engaged with it as a complete cultural presence in real and historical time. He experienced it, he ‘entered into’ it, he ’empathised’ with it, he deeply researched aspects of it, but he did not ‘catch the Russian virus’, he ‘came out of’ Russia again and turned his own critical but sympathetic mind on it. His approach was holistic, yet at times almost semiotic in its rigour. As a Russianist and Slav folklorist/anthropologist he was far ahead of his time.

The fact that George, at the age of 27, witnessed the Khodynka tragedy during the 1896 celebrations of Nicholas II’s coronation, when 1300 people were trampled to death in Moscow, meant that he had no illusions about Russia; the experience undoubtedly marked him for life. Yet his sense of the comic and the absurd (one of his favourite authors was Lewis Carroll) not only equipped him to survive three years in Russia, it enabled him to apprehend Russia at a deeper level. Chekhov too called Russia ‘absurd’, ‘disjunctive’, and had a love of verbal nonsense. At the same time, George’s driving sense of beauty enabled him to appreciate the best in Russian art from icons and the Old Russian byliny (lays) to Fokine, with whom he worked, and Rakhmaninov, whose music he played.

The articles, reviews and essays on Russian literature, folklore and drama that George produced between 1900 and 1913 can claim to be the most interesting, original and critical corpus of English writing about Russian culture published in the first third of the twentieth century. His literary judgements of Korolenko, say, Gorky, or Leonid Andreyev’s plays, are difficult to fault today. His 1901 analysis of the pernicious cognitive dissonance of Tolstoy’s ‘philosophy’ was not equalled until George Orwell’s 1947 essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’. As I discussed in my post on 13 February, I believe that Calderon’s introduction to his 1912 volume Two Plays by Tchekhof is still the most outstanding piece of writing in English about Chekhov’s plays and their significance for the British stage.

If we look at George’s translations of Chekhov, and his own 1909 production of The Seagull, in the longue durée of British theatrical history, we can see that they had a more telling impact on the early process of acceptance of Chekhov’s plays in English than anyone else’s. Oxford networks played a crucial role in the successful productions of their alumnus’s versions of The Seagull (1909) and The Cherry Orchard (1925). It is quite conceivable that but for George’s efforts Chekhov would not be the most popular classical playwright after Shakespeare that he is in Britain today, or have had the penetrating influence on British theatre, film and television that he has. As I discussed in my posts of 11-12 February, Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov’s plays may have had a longer life than George’s as ‘literals’, but his are the only ones crafted in a contemporary, avantgarde English theatre-language by a Russianist who was also a playwright. In this respect, the only person who can compare with him is Michael Frayn.

As a creative writer himself, the most admirable thing about George Calderon is that he never stood still. Having mastered what one might call the ‘Late Victorian comic short story’, he produced a best-selling Early Edwardian burlesque, The Adventures of Downy V. Green, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford — which seems to have had an afterlife stretching from the 1938 film A Yank at Oxford down to its 1984 remake Oxford Blues. In his political satire Dwala, the very ‘anarchy’ and cinematic jerkiness that reviewers held against it show that George Calderon was moving towards modernism. Dwala almost certainly influenced Aldous Huxley’s novels.

In his plays, George was constantly experimenting. The Fountain was certainly his take on the new Theatre of Ideas, but audiences vastly enjoyed its conservative displacement of Shaw. George’s Cromwell is different again: a verse morality play in the early Tudor style about (heretical) ambition. His last full-length play, Revolt, displays the influence of Chekhov’s ensemble writing, but also of Expressionist film techniques. I think all of these plays are capable of a stage life today in the hands of a good dramaturg. Meanwhile, George’s unpublished libretti for Fokine and his published one-act plays show him working with Islamic subjects, French farce, theatre of mood, ‘mimo-drama’, Symbolist drama… There is no doubt that these works were at the cutting edge of Edwardian modernism. When Harold Hannyngton Child wrote in The Times of 27 July 1922 that ‘one is inclined to say that Calderon’s loss was the heaviest blow which struck the English drama during the war’, he was echoing the view of many.

Ever since Virginia Woolf suggested that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, a touchstone of contemporaries’ attitudes to modernism has been their response to the first exhibition of Post-Impressionist paintings that opened at the Grafton Gallery, Mayfair, on 8 November 1910. George Calderon defended most of these paintings vigorously in an article in the New Age. He concentrated on Gauguin, comparing the ‘great patch of red hair’ of his Christ in the Garden to Sharlotta Ivanovna producing a cucumber and eating it in Act 2 of The Cherry Orchard; for ‘the reality of their inconsequences raises the value of their adjacent pathos’.

During successive periods of liberal and socialist consensus in Britain, it was possible to dismiss George Calderon as a ‘reactionary’ opposed to women’s rights and the unions. Closer acquaintance with what he actually said about suffragism and unionism shows his beliefs to have been far more complex. Like the overwhelming majority of women in Britain during his lifetime, George believed that women were best at philanthropic activity in the local community, where they already had the franchise; the State might have been created by males, but without the dedicated work of hundreds of thousands of real women in the real Community the State in the wider sense would have collapsed long ago. As George moved further and further from the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage (which women could not join) and worked with the far larger Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League (which men could join), he came to appreciate more and more women’s ‘sphere of activity’ in Edwardian society, which they believed precluded a need for the parliamentary vote. ‘Antis’ like Mary Ward, Lady Jersey, Violet Markham, or Gertrude Bell, were feminists in their own right. As Julia Bush has written in Women against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, ‘from a longer-term perspective these women’s sturdy defence of gender difference was also far from irrelevant to later generations’. In any ‘broader project to restore neglected conservative dimensions to women’s history’, as Bush puts it, George’s stance and activism deserve to be considered.

On the question of the power of the unions, Calderon’s loyalty was to the community and one nation. He made it quite clear in print that he supported miners’ and dockers’ demands for living wages and good working conditions. He supported the right of workers to strike against employers. But in 1912 he was profoundly disturbed by the spectacle of miners coercing the whole nation and ‘enjoying this wild dream of limitless power’. He foresaw the unions sidelining the legitimacy of elected government and their leaders becoming powerful shoguns. In the longue durée of twentieth century British politics George was prescient. He believed that the answer was for the ‘Community’ to defend itself — which happened in the 1919 Railway Strike and the General Strike of 1926. George’s political philosophy, therefore, was holistic, communitarian, inclusive, individualistic, centrist. Possibly, even, it was influenced by his contact with the women’s movement. Again one can see resemblances to the philosophy of modern conservatism; again one can see that as a conservative thinker he was ‘far from irrelevant to later generations’.

Both George and Kittie gave huge amounts of their personal time and energy to the causes of conservative women and the community in the first decade of the twentieth century, not to mention sums of money from their personal funds. They both believed that the individual had a responsibility to get involved in politics and that personal activism could make a difference. It was this that led Martin Shaw to call George ‘the honestest man I have ever met’: ‘Once he felt a thing to be right, he pursued his path — alone if need be, but disregarding entirely the world’s valuation.’ Many of George’s friends, unfortunately, had no political beliefs of their own, only the reflexes of contemporary political correctness.

George’s resourceful determination to become a combatant in World War I at the age of forty-five can be seen as a natural extension of this ‘propensity to act’; although there was undoubtedly an element of adventurism to it as well. He had long believed that if war with Germany came he must join up and fight, and as Laurence Binyon expressed it, ‘what he believed, he did’. At Gallipoli on 4 June he made the supreme sacrifice. Being supreme, it was neither more nor less than that of millions of other men who were not professional soldiers and were not conscripted. Yet as his biographer I am particularly aware of the richness, talent and achievement of his pre-1914 life that he ‘threw away’, and aware of whom he sacrificed in his wife. In its completeness and absurdity, there is something ‘yearningly tender’, to use Kittie’s phrase, about George’s ‘Greater Love’.

Finally, I feel a boundless admiration for his posthumous masterpiece, Tahiti. Unlike Gauguin, Brooke and others, George did not go to the island for sex. What he brings breathtakingly alive about the many women he met on Tahiti is their beauty, yes, but also their aesthetic sophistication, their taste, their true gentility and caring for other people. It may not even have been wholly true, but it is inspiring. The book itself seems to me the most complete embodiment of George’s personality: ‘a perfectly delightful one’, as the educationist and social reformer Isabel Fry put it in a letter of 1932 to Kittie, ‘delicate and stalwart, sympathetic but no sentimentalist’. No facet of life on the island is overlooked, from its people to its plants, its folklore to its food, its nutters to its bureaucrats, its music to its barbed wire. All are looked at steadily by an eye inclined now to humour, now to wonder, now to acerbity. If Chekhov’s Sakhalin is the complete study of an island that was ‘hell’, George’s is quite comparable as a study of an island that was ‘paradise’. It has remained in print all over the world.

But, it may reasonably be objected, don’t all these areas of interest and activity simply prove that Calderon was the epitome of Edwardian dilettantism?

Thirty years ago, when I first made his acquaintance through Russian Studies, I believed that myself. It seemed self-evident. What other explanation, or view, could there be of so many ‘disparate’ pursuits, of a man so ‘various’? Furthermore, he seemed to pick one interest up, become possessed by it for a while, then throw it away and move on — the hallmark, surely, of the dilettante? Thus, one might claim, he never achieved a stable identity, has never been taken very seriously, nobody knows who he is…

It is understandable that with our 2015 views on ‘professionalism’ and ‘specialisation’ we should jump to these conclusions about George Calderon, but the years of researching his biography convince me that they would be wrong. First, as I have tried to show above, George did not ‘dabble’ in things, he achieved real distinction in whatever he touched. As a Russianist he was first-rate, as modernist satire Dwala is first-rate, as a dramatist he was genuinely innovative, as a political thinker he was ahead of his time, as an anthropologist he was brilliantly holistic and speculative, as a man with the propensity to act he was consistent. Although Percy Lubbock, ten years younger and of an utterly different cast of mind, presented George in his Sketch from Memory as someone who ‘knew precisely the moment he had made his peculiar contribution to a cause’ and would then ‘be gone, like the Red Queen at the end of her marked course’, a more interior knowledge of him through his archives shows that this was not generally true. For instance, he may seem to have dropped the anti-suffrage movement in 1910, but it was merely the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage that he dropped. In 1914 he was still working on Slavonic folklore and paganism, he was pushing Tahiti forward, completing ballet libretti, creating a one-act play to equal The Little Stone House, and writing a modern pantomime with William Caine and the composer Martin Shaw. He did not ‘drop’ these pursuits for the War; he would have returned to them and taken them to their conclusion.

I believe, then, that in George Calderon we are not dealing with an Edwardian dilettante, but with a ‘quantum’ personality — a phenomenon of multi-giftedness and multi-tasking that I call ‘Edwardian genius’. His was a superbly fulfilled life in all its facets, despite so many artistic projects remaining unfinished. The nature and energy of his achievement, the integrity of his life in every sense, are, I am convinced, worth trying to understand in a biography and drawing to a modern readership’s attention. He was an admirable, self-fulfilled individualist, from whose ‘portfolio life’ we might learn much.

As a man, he was sociable, sportive, very funny, theatrical, uxorious, flirtatious, a chain-smoker, desperately hard-working, stalwart, staunch, and…did not suffer fools gladly. I fear he would have instantly classified me as a bull-shitter. But perhaps, just as I was at first repelled by his ‘Edwardianness’ — his slightly menacing look of clean-shaven stiff-upper-lippedness à la Henry Newbolt — so too, perhaps, he might eventually have come round to liking me a twentieth as much as I have come to like him. That makes me smile.

PATRICK MILES

Next entry: Kittie

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