Category Archives: Edwardian character

Guest post: Alison Miles, ‘Living with George and Kittie since the mid-1980s’

When I first heard about George Calderon it was the mid-1980s and my time was mainly taken up with small children. However I realised that something big was starting when Patrick went to Scotland to visit an attic full of … Continue reading

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‘Things are still coming up’

The rather shaken and stirred papers of George and Kittie Calderon were finally married and chronologically sorted five years ago, and the surviving 247 books of their library were carefully flipped through revealing fascinating photographs, visiting cards, notes and even … Continue reading

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‘Edwardian bastards’ — a personal note

Periodically I have to remind myself that in the 1950s I met plenty of Edwardians, in the sense of people whose character and values were formed in the longer Edwardian period of 1897-1916 and who were thought of as being … Continue reading

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Intemperance and ‘Heroism’

On 30 August 1920, Kittie received through the post the first draft of Laurence Binyon’s ode to George’s memory, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57345 . She was at Constance Sutton’s Tudor home in Herefordshire, Brinsop Court, and wrote to Binyon next day that she had … Continue reading

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The Nastiness Factor

I have ‘worked with’ the Edwardians, so to speak, for a while now. I feel that if I were dropped into London society around 1905 I would know my bearings and could hold my own. There is much that, having … Continue reading

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Afterword ‘spoilers’?

Veteran followers of this blog will know that my estimates of how long it is going to take to complete any given piece of writing connected with my biography of George and Kittie Calderon are usually out by a factor … Continue reading

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Kittie absolved, Lydia looks in

I received my copy of the second edition of George’s Two Plays by Tchekhof from a distinguished bookseller in Cumbria, and promptly set about comparing its Introduction with that of both the first edition and the Chekhov volume edited by Kittie … Continue reading

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‘Yes, but — ‘

The reason I suspected it was Kittie who changed George’s words about the meaning of life at the end of his Chekhov Introduction when she edited his selected works, was that she could rarely resist expressing her own views on … Continue reading

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Future biographers of George Calderon…

Even at this late stage, ‘things keep coming up’. It took me, as predicted, two pretty full days to input to the text of my biography (167,000 words) the 1000+ corrections and revisions that emerged from my two complete readings … Continue reading

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From the diary of a countrywoman

In December 1922 Kittie moved from Hampstead with her housekeeper Elizabeth Ellis to ‘Kay’s Crib’, a Victorian three-bedroomed house with a fair amount of ground to it at Sheet, near Petersfield, in Hampshire. She told a friend of Percy Lubbock’s: … Continue reading

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Guest post: John Pym, ‘A bit of fun with Calderon’

On 7 May 2016 Patrick Miles wrote a post on George Calderon and William Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor in which he reproduced the cover of the published version (1923) and also Caine’s Preface – the first paragraph of … Continue reading

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Guest posts on ‘Calderonia’

The next post, which will appear on Monday 15 August, will be by Mr John Pym, son of Jack Pym (1908-93) who featured as a child in my very first post of 30 July 1914 (30 July 2014) and was … Continue reading

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‘Solved!’

I am so relieved to have completed the re-hoover of my 165,000-word typescript in six working days — approximately a fifth of the time my disastrous ‘final’ hoover took (see ‘O, fallacem hominum spem!’ of 27 July). I must say, … Continue reading

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Somme: the ‘walking’ controversy

When I read Harvey Pitcher’s Comment of 1 July about the Bishop of London’s address in Westminster Abbey commemorating the eve of the Battle of the Somme, I took it that the Bishop was quoting the order to WALK across … Continue reading

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John Hamilton the Good/Great?

At this time one hundred years ago, after the first anniversary of her husband’s disappearance at Gallipoli, Kittie Calderon decided it would be wise to channel her energies into a number of projects. One of these was to erect a memorial … Continue reading

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Archive

In my last post I should have explained that some of my fury at having to check again every quotation and fact in the typescript came from the necessity it entailed of taking scores of manuscripts out of George and … Continue reading

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