Probably the biggest remaining mystery of George’s biography is: what happened to all his papers associated with researching Slavonic folklore and primitive religions? The book Demon Feasts (or whatever it would have been entitled) was, after all, to be his magnum opus. He seems to have started researching it in St Petersburg in 1896, he attended international conferences on the history of religions, published a fraction of it in 1914, and was writing it up when he left for Gallipoli. As far as one can tell, this part of his archive comprised manuscript chapters, voluminous notes, and what was referred to as ‘the Index’, which seems to have been a massive systematised database.
After George’s death was confirmed in 1919, Kittie set about finding a Slavonic scholar to whom a publisher (possibly OUP) would give a contract to ‘complete’ the book. We know from letters and a short manuscript memorandum that her choice fell on ‘Professor Rose of Leipzig’. But who he?
I am afraid that my attempt to identify Professor Rose of Leipzig is a prime example of how the biographical researcher should never take appearances for granted, never set off down a tunnel of his/her own making, never seek only to verify his/her hypothesis, but always question its veracity. The name Rose did not strike me as plausibly German, but since Kittie wrote that he was ‘of Leipzig’ and Percy had translated for her a post-war letter in German from one of George’s former colleagues, I assumed Rose was German. I set about looking for appropriate Professor Roses of the period at Leipzig University, but never found one. He remained ‘the mysterious Professor Rose of Leipzig’.
Then, for the third and perhaps not last time, Michael Pursglove brought all the light of his Russianist experience to the problem. In his review of my book he remarked in passing: ‘Could it be Professor William John Rose, director of SSEES, no less, 1945-47?’ The acronym stands for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London, and I must confess that almost the only director whose name I knew was the first one, Bernard Pares, with whom George worked and whose brother Basil had treated him medically at Ypres. Mike’s knowledge of Russian Studies in Britain is mind-boggling!
‘Professor Rose of Leipzig’, c.1955, holding pipe in right hand, photographer unknown
William John Rose was born in 1885 in Minnedosa, Manitoba, so he was Canadian, but after a B.A. at Manitoba and another from Oxford he went to Germany in about 1912 to pursue his studies in classics and history. According to Clio’s Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians (2017), p. 127, Rose was doing a Ph.D. at Leipzig when interned in 1914. He spent the next four years as a civilian prisoner in Silesia, where he ‘came in direct contact with one of the central problems of European history, namely the German-Slavic and specifically the German-Polish problem’ (Zbigniew Folejewski, ‘William John Rose 1885-1968: A Tribute’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), p. 111). He learned Polish, stayed in Poland after 1918, did a Ph.D. at Cracow, returned to the American continent, and launched on an international career.
Rose was in Oxford in 1908, so George could have met him at the Congress for the History of Religions held there, kept in touch with him, and if Rose visited London he would have been invited to Heathland Lodge, where he would have met Kittie. A memoir of ‘Uncle Bill’ that follows the Tribute referenced in my previous paragraph makes it clear that although a staunch Methodist Rose was jovial, enthusiastic, and somewhat unorthodox . The latter features would have appealed to the Calderons. I conclude that Kittie referred to him as ‘Professor Rose of Leipzig’ because that is where she had last heard of him before the War.
My heartfelt thanks again to Michael Pursglove, this time for giving me a lead which was easy to follow up on the Web and which I believe has definitively demystified ‘Professor Rose of Leipzig’. Rose contemplated, so to speak, George’s research for Demon Feasts, but declined Kittie’s invitation and returned the archive to her. This doesn’t entirely surprise me now that I know he had published nothing on folklore to that date; nor is it clear to me how well he knew Russian, or other Slavonic languages than Polish. The material may all have crossed the Atlantic in 1938, to be worked on by the young Slavist Fritz Epstein at Cambridge, Massachusetts; but so far there is no confirmation of that. What happened to it is still a mystery.
P.S. Since I wrote the above, Dr Lorne Larson, a faithful Canadian follower, has sent me this invaluable link which sheds further and amazing light on Rose’s career.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
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?
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon, 1912
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Captain of the 11
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon c.1901
And Professor Rose was not German!
Probably the biggest remaining mystery of George’s biography is: what happened to all his papers associated with researching Slavonic folklore and primitive religions? The book Demon Feasts (or whatever it would have been entitled) was, after all, to be his magnum opus. He seems to have started researching it in St Petersburg in 1896, he attended international conferences on the history of religions, published a fraction of it in 1914, and was writing it up when he left for Gallipoli. As far as one can tell, this part of his archive comprised manuscript chapters, voluminous notes, and what was referred to as ‘the Index’, which seems to have been a massive systematised database.
After George’s death was confirmed in 1919, Kittie set about finding a Slavonic scholar to whom a publisher (possibly OUP) would give a contract to ‘complete’ the book. We know from letters and a short manuscript memorandum that her choice fell on ‘Professor Rose of Leipzig’. But who he?
I am afraid that my attempt to identify Professor Rose of Leipzig is a prime example of how the biographical researcher should never take appearances for granted, never set off down a tunnel of his/her own making, never seek only to verify his/her hypothesis, but always question its veracity. The name Rose did not strike me as plausibly German, but since Kittie wrote that he was ‘of Leipzig’ and Percy had translated for her a post-war letter in German from one of George’s former colleagues, I assumed Rose was German. I set about looking for appropriate Professor Roses of the period at Leipzig University, but never found one. He remained ‘the mysterious Professor Rose of Leipzig’.
Then, for the third and perhaps not last time, Michael Pursglove brought all the light of his Russianist experience to the problem. In his review of my book he remarked in passing: ‘Could it be Professor William John Rose, director of SSEES, no less, 1945-47?’ The acronym stands for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London, and I must confess that almost the only director whose name I knew was the first one, Bernard Pares, with whom George worked and whose brother Basil had treated him medically at Ypres. Mike’s knowledge of Russian Studies in Britain is mind-boggling!
‘Professor Rose of Leipzig’, c.1955, holding pipe in right hand, photographer unknown
William John Rose was born in 1885 in Minnedosa, Manitoba, so he was Canadian, but after a B.A. at Manitoba and another from Oxford he went to Germany in about 1912 to pursue his studies in classics and history. According to Clio’s Lives: Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians (2017), p. 127, Rose was doing a Ph.D. at Leipzig when interned in 1914. He spent the next four years as a civilian prisoner in Silesia, where he ‘came in direct contact with one of the central problems of European history, namely the German-Slavic and specifically the German-Polish problem’ (Zbigniew Folejewski, ‘William John Rose 1885-1968: A Tribute’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), p. 111). He learned Polish, stayed in Poland after 1918, did a Ph.D. at Cracow, returned to the American continent, and launched on an international career.
Rose was in Oxford in 1908, so George could have met him at the Congress for the History of Religions held there, kept in touch with him, and if Rose visited London he would have been invited to Heathland Lodge, where he would have met Kittie. A memoir of ‘Uncle Bill’ that follows the Tribute referenced in my previous paragraph makes it clear that although a staunch Methodist Rose was jovial, enthusiastic, and somewhat unorthodox . The latter features would have appealed to the Calderons. I conclude that Kittie referred to him as ‘Professor Rose of Leipzig’ because that is where she had last heard of him before the War.
My heartfelt thanks again to Michael Pursglove, this time for giving me a lead which was easy to follow up on the Web and which I believe has definitively demystified ‘Professor Rose of Leipzig’. Rose contemplated, so to speak, George’s research for Demon Feasts, but declined Kittie’s invitation and returned the archive to her. This doesn’t entirely surprise me now that I know he had published nothing on folklore to that date; nor is it clear to me how well he knew Russian, or other Slavonic languages than Polish. The material may all have crossed the Atlantic in 1938, to be worked on by the young Slavist Fritz Epstein at Cambridge, Massachusetts; but so far there is no confirmation of that. What happened to it is still a mystery.
P.S. Since I wrote the above, Dr Lorne Larson, a faithful Canadian follower, has sent me this invaluable link which sheds further and amazing light on Rose’s career.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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