Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Captain of the 11
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon c.1901
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
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?
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George Calderon, 1912
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George CalderonRecent Comments
- John Pym on Two anniversaries We are all, followers and occasional contributors, beholden to you, Patrick, for reminding us for ten years that the past is worth remembering and for keeping alive the... (August 17, 2024 at 1:06 pm)
- Patrick Miles on A second Family Bible Very many thanks for fleshing that point out -- and so entertainingly! (I love your reference to creative writing courses, which are a phobia of mine.) Although several... (August 2, 2024 at 11:03 am)
- Laurence Brockliss on A second Family Bible When I say that the British Republic of Letters was dead by 1880, I don't mean to imply that thereafter there were no men and women outside universities, institutes and... (August 2, 2024 at 9:19 am)
- Patrick Miles on A second Family Bible Thank you for devoting valuable time to writing this fascinating Comment. If I may say so, it is awe-inspiring to see the author of a monumental work standing back from that... (July 31, 2024 at 5:32 pm)
- Laurence Brockliss on A second Family Bible Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain was a new departure for me. For most of my adult life I have worked on seventeenth and eighteenth century France. It is also... (July 24, 2024 at 11:31 am)
Category Archives: Personal commentary
The Scott syndrome
Two days ago, I happened to hear on Radio 3 Sarah Walker’s introduction to her ‘Choice’ on Essential Classics, which was Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica (sic). As I recall it now, she said that the composer was commissioned to write the … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged 'real time', Battle of the Brickstacks, biographies, biography, comments, Constantinople, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Ian Hamilton, Kittie Calderon, Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Robert Falcon Scott, Sinfonia Antartica, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Vaughan Williams, World War I, Ypres
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A biographer sighs
I have now written the last chapter of Calderon’s life (not the last chapter of the book), and revised it in manuscript. I have been living with the whole Gallipoli campaign for the past three months. Although this has not … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Alan Moorehead, biography, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Peter Hart, The Great War, World War I
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Lacunae: the ‘benefits’
So (see my post of 21 January) we do not know a great deal about George Calderon’s training at Fort Brockhurst between now and the middle of April 1915, nor about his relationship with Kittie in that period, because of … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, biography, comments, Dardanelles, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, lacunae, The Great War, World War I
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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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An Appeal
If you have not read Clare Hopkins’s ‘Recent Comment’ of 9 January, please do. Clare is Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, and the author of what has been described to me by the Senior Tutor of a different Oxford foundation … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Archie Ripley, Arthur Farquharson, biography, Cecil Sharp, Clare Hopkins, comments, Coote Hedley, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, Martin Shaw, Reginald Tiddy, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, Trinity College Oxford, William Caine, World War I
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Phantom flies in amber
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 … Continue reading
(Commentary)
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, Augustus John, comments, George Calderon, Grant Richards, Harold Nicolson, Il'ia Tolstoi, Kittie Calderon, military interpreters, Percy Lubbock, Tahiti, The Great War, Vita Sackville-West, William Rothenstein, World War I, Ypres
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A biographer’s long breath
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 … Continue reading
17 December 1914
42 WELL WALK, … Continue reading
Total war comes closer
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, … Continue reading
‘We are not bamboozled’
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 … Continue reading
Words (Edwardian) again
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 … Continue reading
Chronotopia cured, or ‘a biographer…writes’
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged 'real time', biographies, biography, chronotopes, chronotopia, comments, George Calderon, The Great War, World War I
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The military situation (2)
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, … Continue reading
The dear departed
After writing the last sentence of George’s life in its strict earthly sense (I have two short chapters about his and Kittie’s afterlife still to write), I left the manuscript chapter for a day before coming back to revise it, as … Continue reading →