Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon c.1901
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon, 1912
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Captain of the 11Recent 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)
Monthly Archives: August 2014
30 August 1914
On this day Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the B.E.F., telegraphed Joffre, his French counterpart, that he could not contemplate putting the B.E.F. back in the front line ‘for at least ten days’ and was intending to withdraw beyond the … Continue reading
Interpreter preparation
Calderon was fluent in French, had ‘learnt Flemish while shaving in the mornings’ (according to his composer friend Martin Shaw), and incredibly enough had once made a special study of Walloon dialects. His German was also competent. He had absolutely … Continue reading
Confusion, or subtlety?
From a hundred years on, it is difficult to make sense of Calderon’s new situation. If he was taking Hedley’s advice that the quickest way of getting to the Front was as a military interpreter, why was he continuing his … Continue reading
‘The Godfather in War’
About now 1914, George Calderon went again to see his golfing acquaintance Coote Hedley. He turned up at his house at 9.30 in the evening, wearing his O.T.C. ‘reach-me-down’. However, as Hedley told Mrs Hedley, ‘even in that awful old … Continue reading
25 August 1914
On this day the first accounts of the Battle of Mons started appearing in British newspapers. The Times headed its main report ‘Namur Lost, German Success in Belgium’ and led off: ‘The battle is joined and has so far gone … Continue reading
23 August 1914
At about 7 a.m. today the Germans began to attack British positions around Mons. It was the British Expeditionary Force’s first action of the war. At first the German surges were mown down by rifle-fire. Gradually, however, von Kluck’s troops … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Alexander von Kluck, Belgium, British Expeditionary Force, George Calderon, Mons, The Great War, World War I
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…and impatient!
Calderon had not by now heard whether he had been given a commission, so he went to see his golfing acquaintance Lieutenant-Colonel Coote Hedley, who lived not far away in Belsize Avenue, to ask what he, George, could do to … Continue reading
Determined
Calderon’s approach to issues of the day (Russia, suffragism, unionism) was to study them in depth, analyse them, then decide what was the right course of action for him and stick to it through thick and thin. This was why … Continue reading
Writer’s self-block?
There is no evidence that Calderon wrote anything new in 1914 after signing up. Yet the previous seven months had been packed with literary-theatrical work: he had written or assembled most of his posthumous best-seller Tahiti, finished a pantomime The Brave Little … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary
Tagged Ballets Russes, Clara Calderon, comments, Diaghilev, George Calderon, Il'ia Tolstoi, Inns of Court Officer Training Corps, Inns of Court Regiment, Laurence Binyon, Lev Tolstoy, Martin Shaw, Michel Fokine, Tahiti, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, William Caine, World War I
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14 August 1914
The British Expeditionary Force was still moving up to join the French Fifth Army near the Belgian border, and in London today the weather was ‘grilling hot’ (Mark Bostridge, The Fateful Year). That evening George Calderon wrote to Clara Calderon in … Continue reading
A biographer worries…
A big challenge for the biographer when his subject died in the trenches is, frankly, stylistic: should he/she go with the deepening muffled drums, the lugubrious blanket that descends on your prose as the end draws closer? No, in my … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged 'real time', 4 August 1914, biographies, biography, comments, death, endings, George Calderon, style, The Great War, World War I
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A biographer dreads…
A very successful biographer asked me how George Calderon died. I replied that he disappeared in the smoke of battle. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s lucky for you: you’ve got a clean ending, not long years of decline, dementia etc.’ As … Continue reading
A biographer writes…
The main object of ‘Calderonia’ is to post events and documents in a kind of ‘real time’ ; exactly a hundred years after they happened. And judging by the emails I have received, that’s what people appreciate. This timeline approach … Continue reading
Training and War Games
Then we lived in an atmosphere of drill – I don’t only mean the drills etc and general training that he was going through, but at home: books on drill, books on everything, Morse codes, other codes, German military handbooks … Continue reading
5 August 1914
Note that George Calderon’s ‘Attestation’ simply meant that he had joined the ‘Territorial Force’ and this committed him to ‘Four Years Service in the United Kingdom’. In his excellent The British Soldier of the First World War (Shire Books, 2010) Peter Doyle … Continue reading
Kittie
It should be clear from my posts of 18 and 27 August that Kittie Calderon felt deeply frustrated by her husband’s ‘finality’, as she called it, about going to the Front when no-one was asking him to enlist at the … Continue reading →