‘We are not bamboozled’

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Patrick Miles

About now George Calderon was informed by letter, or told to his face, that his ‘real status’ was ‘that of interpreter’, i.e. not ‘second lieutenant’ as he had disingenuously interpolated in Form M.T. 393, APPLICATION FOR A TEMPORARY COMMISSION IN THE REGULAR ARMY FOR THE PERIOD OF THE WAR (see my post of 6 December).

It must have been a bit of a blow to him. However, as we shall see on 17 December, it did not deter him for one moment from pressing his case. Rather, he probably relished the fact that the ‘game’ was ‘afoot’ — his wrestle with the British military machine. He had honed his skills at dealing with bureaucrats when he was in Russia 1895-97.

But in fact the military paper-men had got it wrong. As we saw (post of 20 September), in recognition of George’s military training Colonel Gordon Wilson of the Blues had made him 2nd Lieutenant when they were at Windmill Hill Camp. Similarly, there can be no doubt that the 2nd Battalion Royal Warwickshires had designated him 2nd Lieutenant ‘in the field’ at Ypres on 29 October.

The trouble, I suspect, was with the indeterminacy (flimsiness) of the rank ‘2nd Lieutenant’. When I mentioned it recently to a Falklands veteran who was interested, he simply guffawed. In 1914 it possibly conveyed the following message where George was concerned: ‘good egg, over age, toff, can’t be called plain private’.

Next entry: Total war comes closer

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A different mystery, then

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Patrick Miles

You may remember that under ‘A lacuna’ (27 September) and ‘Pause and enigma’ (11 October) I described my attempts to solve the ‘mystery’ of Henry Calderon, George’s second-eldest brother. He had never featured in any of George and Kittie’s extant papers, although all the censuses from 1871 to 1911 show him living in London, and George never went to say goodbye to him, as he did with his other London relations, when he left for the Front. Was Henry the black sheep of the black pot family, as it were? If so, why?

The only child surnamed Calderon, born in Britain between 1879 and 1915, having non-Spanish forenames, and unaccounted for amongst George’s brothers’ families, was Edwin Anthony Calderon, whose birth was registered in the third quarter of 1901. Unfortunately, the NA search also showed that his death was registered in the last quarter of 1902.

I ordered his birth and death certificates. The first told me he was born on 13 June 1901, his father was also called Edwin Anthony Calderon, a ‘waterside laborer’, and his mother was Saba Calderon ‘formerly Vecerro’. Being the informant, the mother had to give her address, which was 15 Island Row, Limehouse, near the London Docks. This would make sense, of course, if her husband was basically a docker. The fact that the father is stated to be Edwin Anthony completely rules out Henry Calderon, but it seemed a little strange that the child was named exactly the same as his father. Why might this be?

The child died on 26 November 1902 from pneumonia. His mother was present and is described this time as ‘Seba Calderon, a nurse (domestic) late of 15 Island Row Limehouse’ and her new address is given as 25 Bickerton Road.

Now simultaneously, my researcher had searched the census of 1901 in vain for a Saba Calderon or Edwin Anthony Calderon, the named parents. However, the death certificate of their son gave the mother’s name as ‘Seba’, which is an abbreviation of the name Sebastiana or Sebastiane. We therefore looked again in the 1901 Census at the entry for ‘Sebastian Calderon’, who was visiting 2 Condor Street in Limehouse when the census was taken, and lo and behold ‘Sebastian’ has been changed to ‘Sebastiana’ (or ‘Sebastiane’) and the age (30) erased in the male column and written in the female column. The chances are, surely, that this is Seba Calderon, who at that point was six months pregnant with her son. The only thing is, she is clearly marked down as unmarried…

Why had she left domestic service at 15 Island Row and was now living at 25 Bickerton Row? Well, the latter was St Pelagia’s Home for Destitute Girls, a Roman Catholic establishment in Upper Holloway providing accommodation for unmarried mothers and their first-born babies.  The census entry says she was born in South America. What became of her after her son’s death? She does not feature in the 1911 census, any more than her so-called husband does. Was he really Edwin Anthony, and was his surname really Calderon? There was a custom of women naming their baby after its true father when the latter refused to acknowledge it — in order to shame or at least commemorate him. Is that what happened here, and Edwin Anthony senior was actually an Englishman with a surname quite different from Calderon?  It’s a sad mystery.

Meanwhile, a 1907 pocket diary of George Calderon’s has suddenly come to light that mentions his brother Henry three times, and in sociable contexts, so it seems unlikely Henry had ever blotted his copy book; it seems more likely that in 1914 he was just an elderly bachelor insurance man living in New Barnet, as the 1911 census implies!

Next entry: ‘We are not bamboozled’

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Words (Edwardian) again

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Patrick Miles

There was a long news item in The Times last week headed ‘Army gallantry awards under fire’. To clarify, this was not about awards-made-under-fire, but about ‘Britain’s centuries-old military honours system’ being ‘questioned amid allegations that a second Military Cross has been awarded after exaggerated accounts of a soldier’s gallantry’. When I read the piece, it wasn’t the content that surprised me, it was the fact that in a 2014 newspaper the word ‘gallantry’ was used seven times.

As any dictionary will show, ‘gallant’ is a tricky word, especially as it can change its stress. Its meaning ranges from ‘noble’ and ‘brave’ to ‘showy’, ‘grand’ and ‘amorous’. Presumably these ambiguities derive from its ancient French origins in the language of chivalry and courtly love. It is a fine old word — a gallant word, in fact… But when people read it in a military context today do they even understand what it means? Is ‘gallantry’ really appropriate in an age of improvised explosive devices? Can war conceivably be ‘gallant’ any longer? Was it ever? Do modern British soldiers themselves use the word ‘gallantry’? Surely what it comes down to today is courage?

I suppose what amazes me is that a word very commonly used in the language of the First World War is still used of military bravery today. ‘Gallant’ for ‘courageous’ seems euphemistic, trivialising, effete; it even suggests the subject is an amateur soldier, that war is not a deadly serious, professional business. As such, of course, ‘gallant’ sounds quintessentially Edwardian. But in fact plenty of Edwardians questioned the use of ‘gallant’ after experiencing trench warfare, machine gun barrages and poison gas.

Another Edwardian word that I have difficulty with is ‘sporting’. In his memoir of George Calderon, Percy Lubbock wrote that after a production of one of George’s plays the actors would present him with a silver cigarette-case ‘in recognition of the very sporting manner in which he had conducted rehearsals’. I literally do not understand what ‘sporting’ means here. Does it imply that they all approached rehearsals like a game of cricket? Why would you want to do that?

Almost exactly a hundred years ago, the Daily Mail wrote: ‘The inevitable miseries of war can, on the one hand, be restrained and limited, without any loss of military advantage, when it is waged by gentlemen and sportsmen, and on the other hand can be indefinitely extended, when it is waged by Germans.’ Surely this is completely delusional?

Some Edwardians already thought so. One of the most popular poems of the age was Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’, with its final line ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’. It was regularly alluded to in the journalism of the first year of the War and as Newbolt’s biographer Susan Chitty has said, it ‘spawned a mass of games-playing war poems’. Yet the critic E.B. Osborn remarked at the time: ‘I cannot understand why this stout old nation persists in thinking of war as sport. Sportsmanship is our new homely name for the chevalerie of the Middle Ages.’

Similarly, Kittie Calderon refers several times to George’s ‘soldiering’, e.g. ‘the moment G. was fit for anything he meant to get back to soldiering’. There is no indication that she is using the word pejoratively. It seems merely the neutral descriptive word for what George was doing; indeed it feels as though this was the word he used himself. But to us, surely, it makes being a combatant soldier sound like a part-time, dilettante activity, something you ‘have a go at’, like golf or watercolours. It seems to trivialise it.

Yet we should doubtless always remember the Edwardians’ peculiar sense of humour. They would never call a spade a spade if they could call it something funnier that they had seen, perhaps, in Punch. Understatement, euphemism and jolly irony were the norm. Avoid sounding serious and at all costs avoid sounding ‘professional’. Perhaps, then, ‘gallant’, ‘sporting’ and ‘soldiering’ are simply examples of Edwardian irony?

Perhaps we are more professional, more pedestrian and more boring than them?!

Next entry: A different mystery, then

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Chronotopia cured, or ‘a biographer…writes’

Posted on December 8, 2014 by Patrick Miles

In my post on 12 September, I described how writing the blog nearly every day whilst attempting to finish the book had induced a kind of schizophrenia: the blog tells the last year of George Calderon’s life day by day in a species of real time, whereas writing a biography you are engaged with an extended piece of time past. I found it very difficult to hold the two in my head at once. The relevant circuits in my brain kept crossing and shorting. I suggested that the blog narrative and the book narrative are different ‘chronotopes’, i.e. time/space forms. My brain was suffering from ‘chronotopia’.

What I have been a bit coy about, is that this appeared to lead to the only writer’s block I have ever experienced. Try as I might, I found that when I was writing the blog in October I couldn’t write the chapter of the book at the same time. In a sense this wasn’t surprising, as the ‘deep’ research was being done for each day’s blog, and in the past I’ve never started writing a chapter until I was happy that the research had been exhausted. On the other hand, for two months I found it was simply impossible to write ‘continuous’ narrative when I had been writing ‘discrete’ narrative every day on the blog. For two months I didn’t write any of the book at all.

Fortunately, as soon as George was off the battlefield I found I could write the part of chapter 14 dealing with Belgium very ‘continuously’ at about 1000 words a day. One way of looking at that would be to say that around 30 October 1914 I could at last get my head round everything that had happened to him since being taken on by the Blues as an interpreter, and tell that story rather than the day-to-day (blog) story. In a funny way, it’s as though once he was immobilised in bed at the Sussex Lodge Hospital I was free to get moving again myself (partly because we didn’t actually know what he was doing each day).

After that, I pretty soon got ahead of the blog timeline in the book timeline. In fact I have now written this chapter up to March 1915 and am researching Gallipoli like mad (his own biographical documentation is dense enough after the beginning of May; what I need is thicker contextualisation of what he was doing). I think this was the breakthrough — getting ahead, at last, of the blog’s ‘real’ time. It’s been strangely liberating; the end of ‘chronotopia’ or even, if you like, of writer’s block…

To be frank and not coy, it would have been a disaster for the book if I’d remained locked in blog time: I wouldn’t have been able to finish it until after the closure of this blog next July! It would have meant that although 90% of the book was written before I started the blog, it would have taken me a year to write the remaining 10%! As it is, the book has already taken me eighteen months longer to write than the two years I’d envisaged, because (a) the Net has enabled me to track down far more about George than I ever thought possible, and (b) he led such a ‘fascinatingly diverse life’, as a publisher’s letter recently put it, that special chapters had to be researched on his involvement in anti-suffragism, strike-breaking and ballet, to name but three areas.

I only hope that the galvanisation of my writing of the biography doesn’t have a dumbing and dulling effect on the blog. Two followers have already intimated that it has! Alas, perhaps they were expecting a post literally every day.  The biography must be finished early in the new year and I have to find a publisher whose production flexibility might enable them to bring the book out around the centenary of Calderon’s death. I see that Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas are well provided with new biographies coming out for the anniversaries of their death. Perhaps, when you are writing the first biography, you are allowed a little latitude in strict commemorative time?

Next entry: Words (Edwardian) again

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The military situation (2)

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The military situation in the Calderon household had worsened, from Kittie’s point of view.

She could see that George’s wound was not fully closed, but he had managed to get down with her to Brasted and back on 29 November, exactly a month after he had been shot, and now he made it clear that he intended to ‘get back to soldiering’, as she put it, the moment he was ‘fit for anything’. ‘He felt sure his former Commission in the Field, his wound and Sir Coote Hedley [see posts of  20 and 26 August 2014] between them would this time get him over all difficulties.’

About now he completed Form M.T. 393, intended ‘for a candidate who is neither a cadet or ex-cadet of the Senior Division, Officers Training Corps, nor a member of a University’. This constituted an APPLICATION FOR APPOINTMENT TO A TEMPORARY COMMISSION IN THE REGULAR ARMY FOR THE PERIOD OF THE WAR.

A number of things must have jumped out at whoever read George Calderon’s completed form. First, there was his year of birth (see my post for 2 December). Second, box number 10, ‘Whether now serving, or previously served, in any branch of His Majesty’s Naval or Military Forces, or in the Officers Training Corps’, contained an impressive amount of information, starting with ‘3 years in Artists’ Volunteers, 2 years in Inns of Court Volunteers (1900-01)’. These years were significant, as they implied he had been patriotically responding to the shortfall of troops for the Second Boer War. Third, ‘Appointed Interpreter with Royal Horse Guards, Sept. 1914’ had a caret after the word ‘Interpreter’ and ‘(2nd Lieut.)’ was written above it.

In my experience, no detail of a Calderon text is ever fortuitous. The casual-looking parenthesis (‘afterthought’) is sure to be intentional. As Percy Lubbock wrote of George, ‘there was nothing he loved like outwitting a difficulty’ — the ‘appeal to his ingenuity’ was a ‘most characteristic enjoyment’ for him. We can be pretty sure, then, that ‘(2nd lieut.)’ is pushing out a boat. So would the recruiting officer give it a following wind?

Next entry: Chronotopia cured, or ‘a biographer…writes’

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The military situation (1)

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Patrick Miles

In the course of the First Battle of Ypres (19 October – 22 November 1914), the French, Belgian and British armies had fought Falkenhayn’s army to a standstill; but at a terrible cost. Beckett (2013) estimates German losses at a minimum of 134,300, of whom approximately 19,600 were killed. French losses are difficult to quantify for this period, but appear to have been between 50,000 and 85,000. The Belgians lost 18,522 — a third of their army that had escaped Antwerp. BEF casualties were 58,155 including 7960 dead.

One of the reasons for the Germans’ defeat at Ypres was that Falkenhayn had thrown thousands of under-trained reservists and student volunteers against what were veteran regular soldiers. Almost all commentators agree with Sir James Edmonds, the official historian of the Great War, that the BEF was ‘incomparably the best trained, best organised and best equipped British Army that ever went forth to war’. But Ypres was its graveyard. The ‘old’, professional, patrician Army was no more. Followers of this blog may recall that on 27 October the commander of IV Corps, Henry Rawlinson, found himself with no corps to command, since his infantry (7th Division) had lost so many men that it had to be amalgamated with Haig’s I Corps and his cavalry (3rd Division) was transferred to Allenby’s Cavalry Corps. On 1 November 7th Division’s commander, Thompson Capper, actually said there was ‘no division left, so that I’m a curiosity — a divisional commander without a division’. This was the division that contained the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, in which George Calderon had briefly served as a second lieutenant on 29 October.

The Kaiser, who had planned to make a triumphal entry into Ypres on a white horse, was profoundly depressed by the outcome of the battle. Falkenhayn himself concluded that Germany might not have another opportunity to win the war, and recommended a diplomatic solution. But this was politically unacceptable.

Both sides dug in as fast and impregnably as they could. Trenches now stretched 500 miles from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border and the war was evidently entering a different phase. How could trench warfare be won? Practical answers were already exercising generals’ minds on both sides. More lateral thinkers, however, were meditating on other ways of breaking the military stalemate.

Falkenhayn had had to redeploy troops from Ypres to the Eastern Front — that was another reason he had lost the battle. He now proposed closing down the Eastern Front entirely, by coming to a ‘Bismarckian’ accommodation with Russia. The influx to the Western Front of the forces thus freed would, he was convinced, crack the Allied defence. But the Chancellor in 1914, Bethmann Hollweg, would have none of it. Worse, Ludendorff and Hindenburg fervently believed that Germany should, and could, win the war in the East quickly, and only then turn to win it in the West. Against his better judgement, Falkenhayn allowed himself to be drawn into this fantasy.

By contrast, in London on 5 December 1914 the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, was writing to the Platonic love of his life, Venetia Stanley, that the ‘volatile mind’ of his First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was ‘at present set on Turkey and Bulgaria, and he wants to organise a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles’. This was the most lateral proposal made for breaking the stalemate in which the war was locked. Asquith told Miss Stanley that he was ‘altogether opposed’ to it…

Next entry: The military situation (2)

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Birthday

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Today, 2 December 1914, was George Calderon’s forty-sixth birthday. He most likely celebrated it over tea with Kittie and his mother; possibly a sister or brother also looked in. His mother, Clara Calderon (1836-1921), was the sister of painter George Adolphus Storey, and a Victorian superwoman.

George was born in the morning at 9 Marlborough Place, St John’s Wood, where his father, Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833-98),  was a prominent member of the ‘St John’s Wood Clique’ of painters that included Storey. Immediately after the event, P.H. Calderon wrote to his mother-in-law to announce it. The letter evidently passed into Kittie’s papers at some point, but the bottom half was torn off and this is all that remains:

Fragment of a letter from George's father to his maternal grandmother, 2 December 1868

Fragment of a letter from George’s father to his maternal grandmother, 2 December 1868

‘I need not expatiate further on his beauty’, wrote Calderon père, ‘ — he is very dark, and has long hair — and promises to be like his father.’ What this does not explain is the thick black line he has drawn down the top and back of George’s infant head. This is clearly different from the actual hair, so it seems most likely it was part of the caul, i.e. foetal membrane. In Russian superstition, to be born ‘in the caul’ (v rubashke) was very lucky!

However, on War Office Form M.T. 393, which George completed at about this time ‘For Appointment to a Temporary Commission in the Regular Army for the Period of the War’, it was precisely the year of his birth that was underlined half a dozen times in pencil by the recruitment officer.

Next entry: The military situation (1)

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29 November 1914

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Today, a Sunday, George Calderon presented in person the white and pale blue blanket that he had knitted for his god-daughter Elizabeth Pym. Her christening took place at Brasted in Kent and the other godparents were Cecil Dawnay and Hannah Bartlett.

Mary Elizabeth Pym

Mary Elizabeth Pym
c. 1921
(Reproduced by kind permission of Carol Taylor)

Elizabeth Pym’s father, Captain ‘Evey’ Pym, was unable to attend owing to military duties. Her maternal grandparents, Frederic and Catherine Lubbock, who lived not far away at Emmetts, were presumably there; she had no grandparents alive on her father’s side.

One imagines that Calderon wore his army uniform. He almost certainly walked with a stick. There must have been great interest amongst the party in his experiences at Ypres, which he probably satisfied quite humorously. Although mild, it rained much of the time. George and Kittie returned to London the same day.

George was an agnostic and could be acerbic about what he called ‘the parsonic mind’. However, he evidently had no philosophical problems about standing godfather to his friends’ children. As one of Kittie’s god-daughters told me, George and Kittie were ‘wonderful with young people’ and could give them independent advice.

It is a great pity that the signature on the portrait above is illegible. Elizabeth Pym would have been about seven when it was drawn, and although I met her myself a full sixty-five years later, I can confirm that it does capture her. To me she was a very sweet lady, who made me lunch, had a sparkle in her eye, and seemed tickled by the idea that I was interested in her godfather. Her eyebrows really were that long.

Next entry: Birthday

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Reactions

Posted on November 28, 2014 by Patrick Miles

It has been suggested to me that the lack of Comments on the blog, after four months, is an indication of the ‘maturity’ (i.e. 60-plus) of its visitors and followers. You prefer to email me than bruit your reactions to the whole world. Well, being ‘mature’ myself, I understand — and I have certainly received some interesting emails.

A professor wrote in August: ‘I fear I may become addicted. It’s a fascinating experiment in creative history.’ That was very gratifying, as my object always was to create the effect of George’s and others’ lives ‘happening now’, rather than bottled as ‘history’. An historian wrote at the same time: ‘I think it makes it very accessible when presented like this’. She meant, I think, the War, and that was much more the focus then, of course. I had hoped that the day-to-day approach to the War would be useful to students, educational websites and providers, but of course one cannot get away from the fact that the blog is principally about the life of this writer George Calderon of whom ‘nobody has heard’!

A Times writer emailed me: ‘There is the drama of the war, the drama of Calderon’s life, and the drama of your feeling your way into your biography.’ Yes, hopefully, but I am aware that I can’t always achieve a balance between those three. This is the first time I have written a blog and it is harder and much more time-consuming than I thought… It has also had this very weird dissolvent effect on my writing the biography itself, which was 92% done when the War broke out (see post on 12 September, ‘A biographer bifurcates’). I hope to return to that problem in a post next week.

So, sincere thanks to everyone who has contacted me about the blog. Your comments have been without exception interesting and useful. Apologies to Michael Caines and Juliet Nicolson, whose names were crassly misspelt for a few hours after the particular posts first appeared. Thank you, too, to those who have pointed out typos or infelicities, which I have attempted promptly to correct. This is very important, as the blog will eventually become a permanent site. And a special thank you to the grandson of Violet and Evey Pym for converting me to the 21st century practice of putting a single space after a full stop, rather than a double one.

Next entry: 29 November 1914

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The sexiest couple in Europe

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Many passenger lists from a hundred years ago are available online, but it seems that those for ‘normal’ voyages within Europe were not preserved except in special circumstances. Thus I haven’t been able to establish exactly when the Fokine family left Britain for Norway in November 1914. Conceivably they left at the very beginning of December 1914; but Vitalii Fokine’s commentary to Fokine, Memoirs of a Ballet Master (London, Constable, c. 1961) suggests it was in the second half of November.

Michel and Vera Fokine in "Scheherazade", 1914

Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914
(The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0)

Michel and Vera Fokine were fabulous dancers; artists of absolute world significance. Calderon had acted as interpreter/fixer for Michel during Ballets Russes’s sensational visit to London in 1911 (see Juliet Nicolson, The Perfect Summer (London, John Murray, 2006)), but he had also written an unsigned piece about Ballets Russes in The Times of 24 June 1911 which has been widely reprinted ever since. He and Michel Fokine saw eye to eye. They were both polymaths, supremely gifted, had similar senses of humour, George had extensive useful contacts in English cultural circles, and was himself eager to write libretti for modern ballet. George and Kittie’s sculptor friend Emanuele Ordoño de Rosales also hit it off with Fokine, and made several figurines of him, viewable on the Web.

Fokine had broken with Diaghilev after the latter, for reasons connected with his relationship with Nijinsky, had attempted to ruin the first night of Fokine’s masterpiece Daphnis et Chloé in June 1912. However, Nijinsky was sacked by Diaghilev in late 1913 following Nijinsky’s wedding in Buenos Aires on 10 September. After complex negotiations, Fokine agreed in the winter of 1913/14 to become Diaghilev’s choreographer again and to create seven new works for him. The Ballets Russes season at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 8 June-25 July 1914, was one of the high points of Michel and Vera Fokine’s career, and the only occasion on which Fokine himself danced in London. It is possible that George Calderon translated for Fokine his long letter to The Times of 6 July 1914 in which Fokine set out his famous ‘Five Principles’ of modern ballet, although for stylistic reasons I am doubtful that it was Calderon’s work. Nevertheless, it seems highly likely that before the Fokines left for Paris at the end of July 1914 George and Michel discussed the four or five ballet libretti that George had written so far.

The day that the Fokine family were due to leave Paris by rail for Russia through Germany, 3 August 1914, Germany declared war on France and they aborted their journey. (If they had not, they would have been held in Germany as Stanislavsky and some Moscow Arts actors were.) Instead, the Fokines moved to Biarritz close to the Spanish border. On 29 September George wrote to Kittie mentioning that he had had a letter from Michel. Unfortunately this letter has not survived, but George paraphrased: ‘Mme Fokin [the correct English transliteration] has got a bad chest again and they are thinking of leaving Biarritz for Spain (Switzerland is too full of Germans, they say).’ Judging from Vitalii Fokine’s commentary to his father’s memoirs, they crossed into Spain about then.

Michel Fokine used his time in Spain to study Spanish dance in depth — this later bore fruit in four of his ballet productions between 1916 and 1935. The Fokines’ intention was to return to Russia for the winter season at the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg, as they had before. This they would do by steaming through the Mediterranean and Black Sea. However, on 29 October 1914 the Ottoman Empire came into the war on the Germans’ side and this shut off Russia’s Black Sea ports to European traffic. The Fokines decided the only way home to Russia was across the North Sea, despite the danger of attack from U-boats. They therefore returned to Paris and gathered themselves to move on to Britain and buy tickets to Norway (from Newcastle to Bergen?).

It was probably in the last week of November 1914 that the Fokine family visited Calderon at 42 Well Walk. Here is Kittie’s account:

The Fokins were terribly concerned to find him wounded. These two friends were always to us like birds of the air.

None of the ordinary things of life seemed to touch them. They adored each other and their little boy Vitalie, this and their wonderful art were literally all that counted to them. Besides [Michel Fokine] finding an understanding artistic sympathy in George, […] they became truly attached to him and we to them. She was an exquisite dancer. As anyone who has seen Fokin’s productions must know, he was full of a subtle and delicate humour, and George and he were planning many delicious ballets for the future.

On this occasion poor Madame was very distracted. She knew what would happen. The Germans would capture their steamer — Michel would be seized being of military age — and she and Vitalie would eventually be sent on to Russia — never to see Michel again. Mercifully this dire disaster did not fall upon them. […]

But these creatures of the Sun — for that is what they had made us feel they were — how could they ever exist in the world as the world had become — that is what we wondered.

In fact the Fokines were made of perdurable stuff. They had to be, to remain as focussed on their art as they were. In this respect they possibly present an instructive contrast to the quintessential Edwardian George Calderon. They worked tirelessly at their art, which they knew was at the cutting edge. Michel Fokine was always politically informed and never going to be manipulated by anyone. Early in 1918 he used the confidence of People’s Commissar of Enlightenment Anatolii Lunacharskii to get out of Russia and never return. Performing in Germany on one occasion in the 1930s, he refused to meet Hermann Goering in his box after the show, causing great consternation. He, Vera and Vitalii settled in the U.S.A., where inevitably they did not have an easy time, but they carved out a life for themselves through their own wonderful energy and dedication to their art.

The Fokine family made it safely to Norway in 1914, Michel and Vera performed in Scandinavia, and two months later they all reached St Petersburg. They never saw George Calderon again.

Next entry: Reactions

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Home

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Patrick Miles

If my dating of George’s letter to Riette and Dan Sturge Moore is correct, he returned home on or around Tuesday 24 November 1914.

There he met the three Belgian refugees whom Kittie had taken in after the fall of Antwerp. One was living in George’s study, another in his dressing room. ‘But that all was accepted and fell into line’, Kittie writes. The young men were lively and he greatly enjoyed talking with them, especially about the Belgian Revival, which he had become interested in whilst on a walk through the Ardennes with the Coptic scholar Walter Crum in 1910. He presumably kept his suspicions about Flemish francs tireurs and Belgian peasants’ resentment of the British presence to himself.

One of the Belgian refugees, whose name is unknown, soon got a job in England and left the Calderons’. The other two were called Raymond Dereume and Jean Ryckaert. It seems that they were bank clerks from Antwerp or Charleroi. They became extremely fond of George, Kittie, and the Pym family, and probably continued to live at 42 Well Walk until May 1915. Dereume then emigrated to America, became a successful businessman and Belgian Consul, and in 1940 invited the Pym family and Kittie to take refuge with him in Pittsburgh until the Second World War was over (they graciously declined). He also sent Kittie food parcels throughout that war.

Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.

Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.

Ryckaert appears to have returned to Belgium during or after the First World War. In addition to the above portrait, there is in the Calderon Papers a photograph of his wife bending over a cradle.

Needless to say, it was a huge relief to Kittie to have George back at home:

There followed a short blessed time. He began working hard on his military books, but the remaining picture of him at that time is sitting on a long low chair in the corner of the drawing room with his legs up — knitting, this time a wonderful white and pale blue quilt of elaborate patterns for his God-daughter Elizabeth Pym, aged a few months — talking to his friends who flocked up to see him — or at the piano.

However, the fact that George was ‘working hard on his military books’ sounds ominous and worrying for her…

Next entry: The sexiest couple in Europe

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22 November 1914

Posted on November 22, 2014 by Patrick Miles

It is Sunday, and presumably a quiet time at Sussex Lodge Hospital, so George Calderon writes to the Sturge Moore children:

Dear Riettte and Dan,

Thanks for your interesting letters — and to Mrs Moore too. I hope to be home in a day or two; my foot is nearly well and no longer hurts.

I have a Scotchman and a Belgian in the beds next to me. The Belgian can talk Flemish, Walloon and French. He had a friend in the army; another major. They lived next door to each other in Brussels. They lost sight of each other; they were wounded the same day in different parts of the field of battle; and by mere chance, were brought over by the same boat and train, and put in the same room in the same hospital. One has gone now, and one remains, spelling out the Daily Mail with the help of a dictionary.

We have a splendid pianola in the next room, which plays pieces exactly as Paderewski and other great pianists have played them. It works by electricity. We only press a button and listen.

Field Marshal Calderon

Riette (Henriette Hélène Rebecca) Sturge Moore was born on 17 June 1907 and died on 26 September 1995. She became a theatre designer, teacher, and interior decorator.

Daniel Sturge Moore was born in 1905, had a daughter Charmian, and that is unfortunately all I know of him.

‘Mrs Moore’ was née Marie Appia and related to the theatrical innovator Adolphe Appia. She was a cousin of Thomas Sturge Moore, whom she married in 1903.

‘Paderewski’ is Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), pianist, composer, and subsequently prime minister of Poland.

This letter is published by kind permission of Historic Collections, Senate House Library, University of London. It is item MS978/1/2/11 in the Thomas Sturge Moore Papers.

Next entry: Home

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Polymaths, or dilettantes?

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Patrick Miles

It is intriguing that in his memoir Sturge Moore should refer to George only as a ‘scholar’ (see yesterday’s post). They had both written plays, George rather more successfully than Moore, and they had both been active in 1910 in trying to reform the Stage Society, which in George’s opinion was ‘deceived by bad stuff and faded progressiveness’. Moore was very appreciative of Calderon’s translations of Chekhov’s plays.

After my phrase ‘Edwardian in his polymathy’ yesterday, I had intended to write ‘or as some would say dilettantism’, but forgot. I am sure this was a ‘Freudian slip’ caused by the fact that the subject is so tricky! The polymathy/amateurism/dilettantism of the Edwardians is a major theme of my biography of George Calderon, but it is a quagmire of a subject. It seems profoundly unfashionable today, of course. Why did the Edwardians believe in it? Why do they appear to have spread themselves so thinly?

Briefly, as I see it there has never been a period in the life of Britain when democracy, pluralism, polyphony, were so vibrant, individualistic and out on the street as 1901-14. They nearly blew the country apart. The Edwardians’ belief in versatility was a correlative to this. It often took the form of polymathy, but their real belief was that one should pursue interests not for money (‘professionally’) but for the sheer love of them (‘amateurly’). Unfortunately, given the level of affluence among the upper classes, this often appeared to mean merely for pleasure/leisure.

But central to their amateurism was the notion of ‘play’, rather in the sense expressed by Friedrich Schiller: ‘The only time people are entirely free is when they are playing.’ The polymathic, ‘amateurly’ credo of a George Calderon, C.B. Fry or Robert Falcon Scott was a belief in their freedom as individuals, in self-fulfilment. As Moore so rightly put it, Calderon had ‘a zest for play’.

Until quite recently, one-occupation ‘professionalism’ has ruled the roost. You were a ‘serious professional’ at one thing and the rest of your interests were ‘hobbies’. Perhaps, though, with our multi-tasking and ‘portfolio careers’, we can appreciate better today why the Edwardians thought as they did; why being an ‘all-rounder’ was their ideal.

Next entry: 22 November 1914

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Visitors and ‘victory’

Posted on November 20, 2014 by Patrick Miles

The fact that Calderon wrote to Daniel and Henriette Sturge Moore on Sunday 22 November 1914, but not, as far as we know, to their parents, implies that their parents actually visited George in hospital. This is in any case very likely, as the Sturge Moores had been George and Kittie’s neighbours at 40 Well Walk ever since the latter moved into number 42 in December 1912, and were extremely fond of them. In a memoir of Calderon, Tom Sturge Moore wrote:

No-one ever had more perfect neighbours than the Calderons. Yet even at the time of his death I had not realized what a profound and hard-working scholar he was, for he always seemed at leisure and I accepted this trait very much as our children did without looking behind it. His zest for play and his abundant invention for ways and plans to delight them never went to sleep.

Moore — poet, wood-engraver, translator, playwright, critic, aesthete — is as Edwardian in his polymathy as George and every bit as unfashionable. His work was always good, but hardly (as they say) sets the world on fire. Doubtless its time will come again.

Other visitors George had now could have included his seventy-eight-year-old mother Clara; Nina and Reginald Astley, since Jim Corbet had recovered from his wound and was temporarily stationed at Windsor; William Caine the humorist, with whom George had collaborated earlier in the year on the pantomime The Brave Little Tailor; George’s GP and fellow trio-player Dr Albert Tebb; Kittie’s lifelong friend Louise Rosales, who was married to George’s and Fokine’s friend the sculptor Manolo Ordoño de Rosales; and various military acquaintances from the Blues and Inns of Court Regiment.

Meanwhile, at Ypres there were hard frosts and even blizzards. About 700 men a day in I Corps were falling sick. There was very little military activity, although the Germans continued to shell Ypres and the Cloth Hall was destroyed. Today, 20 November 1914, Allied intelligence finally detected the movement of German troops to the Eastern Front. The BEF officially declared the battle for Ypres over on 22 November.

‘The First Battle of Ypres was an undoubted allied victory: the Germans had poured forth blood in the winter’s final attempt to achieve a strategic breakthrough on the Western Front, and they had failed.’

This is the view of Max Hastings in Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914, and it was the view at the time. A music hall song, ‘Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser’, became very popular — but not for long.

Next entry: Polymaths, or Dilettantes?

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‘Alle Strassen münden in schwarze Verwesung’

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Apparently it was in November 1914 that Edward Thomas, with the encouragement of Robert Frost, began to write modern poems. I have known the ‘anthology poems’ of Thomas since I was a teenager, but now I am reading all his poems chronologically in the Collected Poems and War Diary, 1917 (Faber, 2004). I’ve been struck by the last poem in ‘Poems 1914’, entitled ‘The Hollow Wood’. It begins:

Out in the sun  the goldfinch flits
Along the thistle-tops, flits and twits
Above the hollow wood
Where birds swim like fish —

The wood appears to be ‘hollow’ in the sense that from above, where the goldfinch is, it is leafless, or ‘pale’ from a few leaves left, and hence a kind of wicker cage in which the other birds can be seen, but for Thomas like an aquarium where these birds ‘swim like fish’.

It is strange, but not surprising, that one immediately relates this image to Thomas’s (yet to come) experience of war. The bare wood is like the fairly small woods all around Ypres in November 1914, such as Nonnebosschen, Sanctuary Wood, or indeed Bulgar Wood where the sniper hid who wounded George Calderon on 29 October. The stripped, dead, brittle, and then devastated wood is a potent image in much war poetry. Moreover, ‘the hollow wood’ in Thomas’s poem already has disturbed and disturbing features: the fish that the birds are compared to ‘laugh and shriek’, the base of these trees is covered in baleful ‘lichen, ivy, and moss’, some trees are ‘half-flayed and dying’, others already ‘dead […] on their knees’. It seems a foretaste of Arras.

Woods — small woods, classically ‘groves’ — feature often in the poems of Georg Trakl, who for me is possibly the most disturbing and beautiful of the war poets. His ‘Grodek’ (October 1914) begins:

At evening the autumn woods resound
With deadly weapons, the golden plains
And blue lakes, which the sun
Darker rolls over; the night embraces
Dying warriors, the wild keening
Of their broken mouths.

The quintessence of the landscape and of the War is rendered in Trakl’s line:

Alle Strassen münden in schwarze Verwesung.

(‘All roads flow into black putrescence.’)

Next entry: Visitors and ‘visitors’

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Nuts and bolts

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Patrick Miles

By and large, I believe readers don’t want to hear about the nuts and bolts of writing biography (the ‘difficulties’), they want to read the biography. However, readers of this blog may be interested in a typical example…

I know from Kittie Calderon’s memoirs that George arrived at Sussex Lodge Hospital with his shattered fibula on 1 November 1914. But when did he leave?

We have searched the regimental records and the hospital records (the latter have just come into the public domain), but there is no mention of a discharge date there.

Kittie does not give a date, although she implies it was longer rather than shorter. That actually is significant.

There is a letter from George to his neighbour Thomas Sturge Moore’s children dated ‘Sunday’, in which he says he will be home ‘in a day or two’. So that could have been written on Sunday 15 November 1914. However, we have a letter written to George by Will Rothenstein on 18 November (I can’t quote it as it’s still in copyright). That looks as though it’s in reply to George’s undated letter about Alice Rothenstein’s visit to the hospital, which was much earlier (see my post of 4 November) . It’s a fair assumption, especially given its content, that Rothenstein’s letter was addressed to George in hospital. So Rothenstein knew George would still be in hospital when he received it on 19/20th?

This hypothesis has to be triangulated with the two other dates we have for November: 1) Michel and Vera Fokine visited him at home in the second half of the month on their way to Norway and Russia, 2) George attended the baptism of Mary Elizabeth Pym at Brasted on Sunday 29 November because he was her godfather (although it seems close to his coming out of hospital, she herself told me in 1986 that George was there).

It looks, therefore, on balance, that the ‘Sunday’ on which George wrote to the Sturge Moore children was later rather than earlier, i.e. must have been 22 November 1914. Adding on the ‘one or two days’ before he came out, that suggests he came out on Tuesday 24th and the Fokines visited him shortly after.

Tedious, but necessary!

Next entry: ‘Alle Strassen münden in schwarze Verwesung’

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