Phantom flies in amber

Posted on January 5, 2015 by Patrick Miles

So George was preparing himself in earnest for his forthcoming medical. He mentions having ‘massages’. I have a clear recollection of reading somewhere that these were ‘electrical’ massages — presumably the latest thing — but I cannot for the life of me find now where I read that.

This is a phenomenon that I think, or hope, most biographers suffer from. In the course of researching something else, you read something at the edge of your vision, in the thinnest penumbra of the current focus of your inquiry, and years later you think it is significant, you desperately want to use it, but you are darned if you can find it.

These ‘facts’ stick there in your brain like flies in amber… They rapidly acquire ‘reality’ in your mind and memory… And that is the terrible shift, the insidious metamorphosis, because all the time you cannot find their source they could be entirely imaginary! 

Certainly, of course, you can’t use them, as they are unattributable.

Some examples in my case would be:

1. George Calderon not only did ‘exercises’ and had ‘massage’ when he was striving to get back into the Army, he had ‘electrical’, possibly even ‘magnetic’ massage, which would be typical of his obsession with the latest expensive gadget or fad. (Entirely unproven.)

2. His brother Henry had a child, because I once saw a very blurred announcement of the fact in the digital Times, noted it, but could never find it again. (See posts of 27 September, 11 October, 12 December.) No such child’s birth is registered in Britain for this period, so this ‘fly in amber’ is a phantom. Possibly I ‘confused’ it with an announcement of the death of George’s sister-in-law Kathleen in 1909.

3. Searching various digital newspapers about three years ago, I noticed that a ‘northern’ newspaper (the Manchester Guardian?) referred ‘in passing’ to George as a ‘playboy’. This ‘made sense’, I thought at the time, because when he was working with repertory theatre productions of his plays in northern Britain he had to throw parties, joked, smoked and doubtless flirted a bit, and he liked playing billiards and cards… When I wanted to make use of this, however, I could no longer find it, although I searched every digital newspaper I had previously looked at. I came to the conclusion that I was entirely deluded about this particular fly. But then last September it suddenly became real: Michael Caines quoted it from the TLS of 12 May 1921!

(To be continued.)

Next entry: The Medical

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(Commentary)

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Staggered by flu, I did not have the energy to add any comments to my post of George’s New Year letter to William Rothenstein; but I will offer a few points now.

William Rothenstein is an extremely interesting figure. He was a prolific portraitist, but in my view uneven. Kittie, who was a trained painter, disliked Rothenstein’s portrait of George so much that, although it was exhibited in Chicago in 1912, it disappeared for over a hundred years after. Quite coincidentally, I was reading Matthew Dennison’s Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West yesterday and noticed Harold Nicolson said of Rothenstein’s portrait of his wife: ‘Vita was a beautiful woman and this is an ugly one.’

Similarly, Rothenstein was incredibly generous with his money to numerous struggling artists, but they repaid him with little gratitude or friendship. In the case of Augustus John and some others they repaid him with disgustingly anti-Semitic insults behind his back. It is, I believe, a tribute to Joseph Conrad’s and George Calderon’s integrity and cosmopolitanism that they never treated Rothenstein other than as a real friend whose sociability, cultural inquisitiveness and philanthrophy they valued.

After George’s letters to his parents (107), to Kittie (95), and to Grant Richards (30), more have survived to Rothenstein (17) than to any others of George’s friends. They cover the years 1903-15 and are exceptionally useful as sources about George’s first play, his anti-suffragism, his activity during the 1912 London Dock Strike, and the last seven months of his life. As Rothenstein recounted in his memoirs, when he lived in Hampstead he and George used to share early-morning walks on the Heath in which they talked about everything under the sun. It was Rothenstein who got George onto the steamer in a state of nervous collapse in 1906, for his recuperative voyage to Tahiti. Having done so, Rothenstein wrote to Kittie: ‘It was very hard for me to leave him […]. I love him very much, and I pray he may come back as strong and robust as he was of old.’

Calderon’s letters to Rothenstein are low on verbal exhibitionism. As with this one, they tend to ‘tell it how it is’ and their mood is one of relaxed, confident divulgence.

At first, the idea that Kittie ‘sets an exaggerated value on my company’ sounds outrageous: he had been away from home for three months and nearly been killed by a German sniper! Could he really not see how much she needed him back, and preferably for good? (As I have said many times, she was completely without family of her own in England now, and even her best friends were far from Hampstead.)

It might, just conceivably, be an objective assessment and Kittie was genuinely becoming over-dependent on him. On the other hand, in the third paragraph from the end he seems fully to appreciate his responsibility towards her. It was not just her un-wellness (pernicious anaemia, menopause?): she had been ‘through an anxious and wearing time, exerting her beyond her powers’. That, surely, was the truth. Kittie was a very bubbly, vibrant little Anglo-Irish person (her ‘titter’ was said to be infectious to her dying day), but she was religious, she was feminine to the tips of her fingers, and she had devoted the best part of her life to her relationship with George, both as his partner and his literary agent. She could not really accept this ‘man’s world’ of ‘soldiering’, or George’s determination to get himself killed in action at the age of 46.

Yet here he is, telling Rothenstein about ‘laying plans’ for the ‘continuation’ of his ‘campaign’ to get a commission in the Army. This certainly seems to confirm Percy Lubbock’s statement that Calderon loved nothing so much as the challenge of finding a way through ‘impossible’ obstacles. It was a game for him, but deadly earnest for Kittie.

When Calderon tells Rothenstein in the last paragraph of this letter that by the end of the war he won’t have any money to pay for the ticket to visit him in Gloucestershire, he is referring to the fact that his love-affair with the Army is depriving him of the ability to earn anything from new writing, translating, or journalism. Apart from his army pay, his only source of income now was royalties from his translations of Il’ia Tolstoi’s memoirs and two of Chekhov’s plays, and cheap editions of his own plays The Fountain and The Little Stone House.

Next entry: Phantom Flies in Amber

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1 January 1915

Posted on January 1, 2015 by Patrick Miles

                                                                                                         42 WELL WALK,

                                                                                                                  HAMPSTEAD.

Jan.1st.1915.

My dear William,

Forgive my abominable behaviour in not answering your pleasant letters before. I have fallen into a routine of slight occupations, which means never to leave me free for the decencies of life. Massage, exercises, military reading, repose, visitors, what not. But I treasure your invitation to come and stay with you: a thing I should like to do of all things — but I do not see it as practicable just now. K. sets an exaggerated value on my company, and I am laying my plans for a continuation of the campaign. The fact that I was acting as a combatant when wounded makes it likely that I may get a commission as a combatant officer, and I am awaiting a reply to my application to the War Office. In any case I am still in the Corps of Interpreters and must soon go before a Medical Board for examination. So I shall go back in one quality or the other.

[…]

I can still less leave Kittie, because she has been far from well for a long time, and has been through an anxious and wearing time, exerting her beyond her powers. We have had Belgian refugees in the house since the middle of October — three at first, two now — hearty young men, who ought to be in the army, but I can’t tell them so. My love to Alice, who also wrote and asked me to come — and to the children, if they remember me.

My brother Frank drills with the United Arts Corps, and my young brother Fred (a child of 40) is on Salisbury Plain as a private in the Canadians. He’s on leave in London for a day or two, restored to his sorrowing family after 15 years absence in Ottawa — a strange thing, this war, to bring families together.

I look forward to a more peaceful time to enjoy my visit to you; though by then I doubt if I shall have any money to pay for the ticket. Never mind, I’ll walk.

Yours ever

George Calderon.

This letter is quoted by kind permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University, where it is conserved as MS Eng 1148 (218).

Next entry: (Commentary)

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23-31 December 1914: Christmas at Foxwold

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Patrick Miles
Foxwold, by James W. Herald, c.1894

Foxwold, by James W. Herald, c.1894

Christmas Day 1914 was a Friday. Two days before, George and Kittie Calderon, together with their Belgian refugees Jean Ryckaert and Raymond Dereume, made their way by train to Sevenoaks, where they changed for Brasted. At Brasted station they were collected by pony and trap, most probably, and taken to the rather grand, but architecturally eccentric country house Foxwold (see parts of the 1985 Merchant Ivory film A Room with a View). They returned to Hampstead on New Year’s Eve and on 1 January 1915 George wrote a cracking letter to William Rothenstein which will form my next posting.

Foxwold, which was owned by the thirty-five-year-old Captain C.E. Pym (‘Evey’), provided the perfect family Christmas for the Calderons. They adored his thirty-two-year-old wife Violet (‘Wiley’), her soldierly husband, and their three small children, who have featured in ‘Calderonia’ ever since my first posting on 30 July. Other Pym family members were there for Christmas, too. Just up the road was Violet’s parents’ home, Emmetts (see www.nationaltrust.org.uk/emmetts), which also had a full house this Christmas, and festivities were shared between the two houses.

The family connection between the Pyms and the Calderons was that Violet’s mother, Catherine Lubbock, née Gurney, was the half-sister of Kittie’s first husband, Archie Ripley (1866-98), who had been a close friend of George’s from their Oxford days. The Lubbocks were a large and famous family, a national treasure indeed. Violet was Catherine and Frederic’s only daughter. Her brothers were Guy, Cecil, Samuel, Percy, Roy and Alan, at least four of whom were present at this Foxwold-Emmetts Christmas.

One feels that Christmas at Foxwold must have been English and Dickensian par excellence. Evey Pym was frugal, but his father Horace, for whom Foxwold was built in 1885 , had famously entertained there, was a very successful Victorian ‘confidential solicitor’, a bibliophile, raconteur, and great admirer of Charles Dickens (whose sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth stayed at Foxwold for ten days in 1896). Surely something of Horace’s expansive conviviality rubbed off on the way his son kept Christmas in 1914?

The presence of children was vital to the festivities and to George and Kittie’s enjoyment. George was a master at organising games and charades, and according to Percy Lubbock he taught Ryckaert and Dereume to ‘build a toy theatre’ — presumably in order to stage a performance on it for the children. The construction probably took place in the largest room at Foxwold, Horace Pym’s L-shaped library. George painted the proscenium and Evey the Royal Arms at the top:

Toy theatre proscenium by George Calderon and C.E. Pym, Christmas 1914

Toy theatre proscenium by George Calderon and C.E. Pym, Christmas 1914

Calderon was ‘at his kindest and sunniest’, Percy Lubbock recalled: ‘What I see is his whimsical, interested face as he describes the delight of searching a ruinous farm-house in the dark, where a German sniper is concealed.’ He coached the Belgians in billiards and even ‘acted polyglot charades with them’. At Ypres on Christmas Day some of George’s former regiment, the Warwickshires, met their enemies in no man’s land.

On 27th there was a heavy fall of snow across Britain.

It was presumably at this point that, in Kittie’s words, ‘one of those glorified charades that George was so splendid at evolving was got up for the soldiers quartered in the village’. It was performed in the village hall. Unfortunately, we have no evidence that George acted in it himself as he had in his uproarious ‘Ibsen Pantomime’ at Emmetts in the festive season of 1911/12. ‘It was extraordinarily funny and clever’, Kittie wrote, and George ‘thoroughly, as usual, enjoyed his time at Foxwold’.

But, of course, the war was at the back of everyone’s minds. Percy Lubbock wrote in 1921:

That Christmas party had travelled far in a few months […] I seem to remember a frame of mind in which two firm convictions dwelt side by side — that the war must certainly end within a few months more, and that it would somehow not end after all; it was impossible to suppose that it would last, it was unimaginable that it should cease. But George himself was little concerned with this dilemma; he looked neither backward nor forward, he had work on hand that made the moment all-sufficient. He was a soldier in the war, slightly damaged for the time being, but well enough to be planning his return to activity […] I think of him as the one member of the party who seemed to live serenely in the midst of the upheaval, on sure foundations that he could trust. All around him were trying, more or less successfully, to adjust their balance to the new conditions; he, from the first moment of the war, was firmly on his feet, and never had to think of the matter again. […] He was one of the few whom the war found ready, morally and intellectually; he had no further preparations to make.

Kittie Calderon saw only the rehearsals for George’s show at Brasted village hall; she was not well enough to attend the performance. She had, in fact, not been well for some time. One would give a lot to know what her mystery illness was, but one can imagine some factors that influenced it.

All the images illustrating posts connected with Foxwold, and a huge amount of the information these posts contain, have been supplied with unstinting kindness and generosity by the descendants of Violet and Evey today. I am sure that followers of ‘Calderonia’ will want to join me in wishing the Pym family the most Dickensian of cheer this Christmas, one hundred years later and in happier times.

Next entry: 1 January 1915

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A biographer’s long breath

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Back in September, on 27th to be precise, a former professor of American and English literature at Leeds University, Park Honan, died at the age of eighty-six. Since another former professor of English literature recently expressed to me the view that ‘biography isn’t serious writing’, I might be inclined to paraphrase Chebutykin in Three Sisters and comment: ‘one professor more, one less, does it matter?’…

In Honan’s case it does. He was one of the greatest literary biographers of our time. His 1974 biography of Robert Browning is arguably unsurpassed, and he recovered Matthew Arnold for us as a human and humane Victorian thinker. Honan’s excursions into the biographies of Jane Austen (1988) and Christopher Marlowe (2005) genuinely fleshed out lives that it had become usual to regard as obscure and unknowable. He even unearthed new aspects of Shakespeare’s biography, leading the doyen of British Shakespeare studies, Stanley Wells, to call the 1998 Shakespeare: A Life ‘the best available life of Shakespeare’. Honan’s posthumously to be completed biography of T.S. Eliot is likely similarly to shatter assumptions.

The obituaries offer glimpses into many fundamental questions about biography. For instance, although he was an ‘academic’, Honan wrote for the general reader; yet in Paul Vitello’s words (International New York Times, 21 October) his books were ‘praised by scholars for giving historical context to the lives of his subjects and for uncovering previously unknown information’. The perfect balance, then, and a pretty rare achievement. I shall probably return to a few of the ‘fundamental questions’ in this blog before I have finished, but let me touch on just two now.

In Vitello’s words, Honan believed that it is the biographer’s job to ‘inhabit his or her subject’s time, place and personal history’. Honan’s collection of essays Authors’ Lives: On Literary Biography and the Arts of Language should be an adequate answer to professorial disparagers of biography. There he makes it clear that biography is not just the construction of a narrative, it is understanding the life of a person from the past. This, Honan wrote, meant ‘changing oneself, one’s outlook, one’s orientation, until it is possible at least approximately to think and feel in the distant and lost world of the subject’.

I fervently believe this. Biography is an act of objective empathy: you study scrupulously the material/factual evidence you have about the ‘personal history’ and the ‘subject’s time and place’, but your actual job is to think and feel yourself into those worlds. ‘Inhabiting’, though, raises the usual problems of this kind of process. To put it bluntly, you have to inhabit, but you have to come out again in order to have a view of your own. You have to let go of your self to ‘become’ the self of the biography’s subject, but not quite: you have to recover your own identity in the process of writing the biography. These are rather philosophical matters, which I won’t delve into here. They relate directly, though, to another question that tributes to Honan have raised.

Each of his biographies took about a decade to research and write. This to me seems too long. Partly it is explained by the fact that he was holding down a university teaching job at the same time. Probably, though, he positively believed ten years was necessary as a guarantee of conscientiousness. I have to admit he was more realistic than me there, because thinking I could write George Calderon’s biography in two and a bit years was naive! But the reason I think ten years too long is that personally I couldn’t be engaged in that day-in-day-out empathetic process for that length of time. It is nervously exhausting and I want my own ‘self’ back. Park Honan had longer breath than me.

Next entry: 23-31 December 1914: Christmas at Foxwold

 

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Another big ‘Cauldron’

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Rather late in the day, I asked my research assistant to look into the eldest of George Calderon’s brothers, Alfred Merigon Calderon, who was born on 7 June 1861, seven years before George, and was known to have emigrated to Canada (although he was in Hastings for the family photograph taken there on 1 January 1894, see my post of 27 September). Investigating Canadian records online is, of course, a different game from British.

I was not expecting much, but it turns out that A.M. Calderon became one of Canada’s most eminent architects, signed up in 1915 at the age of 55 (on his Officers’ Declaration Paper he gave it as 45!), and retired from the army in 1919 with the rank of Captain. He married a lady thirteen years younger than him, but they appear to have had no children.

See: Alfred Merigon Calderon: Designs of Style and Grace

Next entry: A biographer’s long breath

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The next week

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Patrick Miles

There is no documentary evidence for what George did between 17 and 23 December 1914, when he and Kittie left for what she described as ‘a delightful Christmas at Foxwold [Brasted, Kent] with the Pyms’. But we can be pretty sure that he used the time to plot his return to combatant service. Sir Coote Hedley, who was high up at the War Office (see ‘The Godfather in War’, 26 August) doubtless advised him on how to break through the red tape, although Hedley believed that George would be best employed in Intelligence.

Another contact George may have used was Henry Newbolt, whom he had known since about 1898 and was politically close to. On 6 December 1914 Newbolt’s twenty-one-year-old son Francis wrote to George describing the regiment he, Francis, was now a member of, as the ‘magnificent’ Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Francis had not yet been on active service with them, but they had been fighting on the Western Front since Mons and had particularly distinguished themselves at the Battle of Nonnebosschen Wood, Ypres, on 11 November. His father had probably been instrumental in getting him a place in this regiment. This may be significant for George’s own military destiny.

As well as working on military matters, between 17 and 23 December 1914 Calderon may have been putting some of his literary manuscripts in order, particularly those of his ballets for Fokine, his study of early Slav religions, and Tahiti.

Next entry: Another big ‘Cauldron’

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17 December 1914

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Patrick Miles

                                                                 42 WELL WALK,

                                                                                               HAMPSTEAD.

Dec. 17. 1914.

To the Adjutant General.

Sir,

Not having yet seen my name in the Casualty lists, I have the honour to inform you that I was wounded near Ypres on October 29th, and sent back into hospital at Sussex Lodge, Regent’s Park.

Having been wounded while in action as a combatant officer, by appointment of the Battalion Commander, with the 2nd Batt. of the Royal Warwickshire Regt., I reported myself in hospital as a 2nd Lieut. in that Battalion. But I am informed that my real status is that of Interpreter. I went out on October 6th as Interpreter with the Royal Horse Guards, and was transferred as Interpreter to the 2nd Batt. of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment on Oct. 29.

I have the honour to remain,

Sir,

Your obedient servant

George Calderon

2nd Lieut. (Interpreter)

This is a masterpiece of bureaucratic massage. George had clearly decided to sidestep the recruitment authorities he had been dealing with hitherto, and go to the top. He had probably consulted with his ‘Godfather in War’, Sir Coote Hedley. There is nothing in this letter that is factually untrue, but the last line sends a clear message: he is a military man, a ‘2nd Lieutenant’, rather than an ‘Interpreter’…

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Total war comes closer

Posted on December 16, 2014 by Patrick Miles

Today, 16 December 1914, at eight in the morning, three German battleships emerged from the fog off Scarborough and from a distance of less than half a mile shelled the town. Further up the coast at about the same time, three more German warships saw off four British destroyers that were outclassed, and opened fire on Hartlepool. An hour later, the first German formation arrived off Whitby and attacked that. By half past nine, all of the German ships had disappeared back into the fog.

These attacks on civilian centres were a reprisal for the destruction of a marauding German squadron of battleships at the Battle of the Falklands on 8 December 1914. However, they were far from being merely symbolic. At Scarborough eighteen people were killed, including children, and over eighty injured. At Hartlepool the German ships poured an incredible 1500 shells into the town in fifty minutes, killing 118 and wounding 200. At the tiny port of Whitby three people were killed, heavy damage was inflicted on property, and a large hole was blown in the west wall of the historic Abbey.

Obviously, the attacks caused panic and outrage. Where was the Royal Navy? Extreme frustration was expressed about its being stationed at Scapa Flow (300 miles from Scarborough). Actually the Admiralty had had intelligence that a German naval force was coming out, and half of the Grand Fleet had been sent to wait for it at Dogger Bank, but in thick fog and without radar they could not find it. The killing of babies at Scarborough and the shelling of Whitby Abbey were reminders, people felt, of what the country could expect if the Germans invaded — and fears of that were now rife, despite the fact that the German Army had been stopped at Ypres from seizing France’s Channel ports.

But in one sense the Germans’ attacks on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby were completely counterproductive. They did not so much demoralise people as make them realise that the war was being waged not only on armies and navies, but on them. It was a quantum jump. One can be sure that it was not lost on George Calderon, meditating at 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, on ‘soldiering’ and the historical significance of this war. Only five months later a vital contribution would be made to appreciating the implications for Britain of what we would now call ‘total war’, by an old Oxford undergraduate friend of George’s — Michael Furse, Bishop of Pretoria.

Next entry: 17 December 1914

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‘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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