Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Captain of the 11
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon c.1901Recent Comments
- Patrick Miles on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Many, many thanks for reprising, Johnnie, for I know how busy you are. How serendipitous that you had just seen a 'live' performance of Murnau's b&w Sunrise! I gather from... (March 14, 2025 at 10:21 am)
- John Pym on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ March 8, 2025: Last evening, I watched a digital transfer of a black-and-white movie, made by an expatriate German in California nearly a hundred years ago, in a packed town... (March 10, 2025 at 4:36 pm)
- Patrick Miles on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Your response here is (obviously) deeply informed... Thank you very much indeed. In comparing the coach ride to Simferopol in Heifitz's film with the chariot race in Ben-Hur... (March 5, 2025 at 10:01 am)
- John Pym on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Black-and-white camerawork was, I suspect, as natural to the director of The Lady with the Little Dog as breathing in and out or eating his breakfast. I doubt that he was... (February 28, 2025 at 11:01 pm)
- Patrick Miles on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ We are deeply favoured and honoured to publish on Calderonia the eminent film critic John Pym's magnificent tribute to Heifitz's film The Lady with the Little Dog, perfectly... (February 24, 2025 at 10:56 am)
Category Archives: Modern parallels
Commemoration (to be concluded)
Mr Pym, who is the grandson of Violet and Evey Pym, of Foxwold, two of the Calderons’ closest friends, sent me this poem a fortnight before the anniversary of George Calderon’s death. He was not able to take part in … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, Archie Ripley, Captain Charles Evelyn Pym, Catherine Lubbock, comments, Dardanelles, Devonport, Earlham, Emmetts, Foxwold, Frederic Lubbock, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Hampstead, Horatius, John Pym, King's Own Scottish Borderers, Kittie Calderon, Laura Ripley, Percy Lubbock, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Violet Pym, Well Walk, World War I
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‘Tributes’
A Russianist who has read Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) asks me why I have not posted more tributes to George than my own. The reason is simply that tributes were not published until his death became … Continue reading
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged A.B. Lowry, Clare Hopkins, commemoration, comments, Dardanelles, For the Fallen, G.F. Bradby, Gallipoli, George Calderon, H.C. Bradby, Harold Dowdall, John Masefield, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Lawrence Le Breton Hammond, Leonora Bagg, Manolo Ordoño de Rosales, Percy Lubbock, Sir Coote Hedley, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Thomas Sturge Moore, tributes, Trinity College Oxford, World War I
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Commemoration (to be continued 2)
Plan A for a commemoration of George’s death (see yesterday’s post) was really dictated by long accepted British forms of commemorative ritual. These have loosened up in recent years, of course, to a point where you have extended, all-singing-and-dancing customer-devised … Continue reading
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged commemoration, comments, Dardanelles, Evey Pym, Foxwold, Francois Rabelais, Gallipoli, George Calderon, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Peter Hart, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Violet Pym, World War I
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Commemoration (to be continued 1)
The organisation of a public commemoration of George Calderon’s sacrifice on 4 June 1915, and the experience of the form it eventually took, have raised a huge number of questions in my and other Calderonians’ minds. Very long emails were … Continue reading
‘An obscure mixture of feelings’
I try reading the London Review of Books about twice a year, but each time end by flinging it in the bin: it’s not a literary publication, it’s a political one written by amateur politicians. And what I can’t take about … Continue reading
Ruth Scurr’s exhilarating experiment
In my post of 6 March I discussed an essay by Ruth Scurr about biography that had just appeared in the Guardian Review. Her essay stirred up a whole hive of issues that the modern biographer should be aware of and needs … Continue reading
Writers’ illnesses
Presumably George Calderon had recovered from the influenza that confined him to Fort Brockhurst for a fortnight; but if so, why did he come home on sick leave ‘still very ill and with a high temperature’, as Kittie described it? … Continue reading
The Edwardian turn of language
If George’s translations are ‘quirky’ and Constance’s ‘bland’, what is it they have in common that qualifies them both as ‘Edwardian’? A certain kind of logorrhoea combined with loose sentence structure and genteelism. Garnett, it has to be said, is … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, comments, Constance Garnett, George Calderon, Harold Pinter, Kittie Calderon, Michael Frayn, Michel St-Denis, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Theodore Komisarjevsky
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Mews, hues, and wonkers
So (see ‘Two anniversaries’, 29 January), save perhaps for a few lost manuscript versions of Chekhov’s one-act plays made throughout the British Empire for amateur performance, Constance Garnett was the first person to translate a Chekhov play into English (The … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, comments, Constance Garentt, Elizaveta Fen, George Calderon, Glasgow Repertory Theatre, John Galsworthy, John Russell Brown, Larus ridibundus, Laurence Senelick, Lydia Yavorskaya, Ronald Hingley, Royal National Theatre, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, The Stage Society
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They have wonderful editors
Hilary Mantel is an excellent writer. But when it was announced in January 2013 that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were going to be adapted for the RSC and a media maelstrom broke out, I felt uneasy. It wasn’t as though Thomas … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell: Mall o'Monks, David Cameron, editors, George Calderon, George Osborne, Hilary Mantel, Lloyd George, Nick Clegg, Rachel Sylvester, RSC, The Times, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Victor Hugo, Wolf Hall
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5 October 1914
Windmill Hill … Continue reading
Language issues again
The version of Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ published in The Times (see my post of 21 September) seems to contain a misprint in line 11: ‘stanch’ instead of ‘staunch’ (‘to the end against odds uncounted’). Last week I was in the … Continue reading
Commemoration (concluded)
Since this blog started in July last year, I have taken part in many conversations, both viva voce and online, about followers’ responses to George Calderon’s war experience, to the War as it has been unfolding, and to what I … Continue reading →