Guest Post: John Pym, ‘The Soldier, the Professor and the Portrait Photographer’

(A reminiscence with Calderonian associations)

General Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough, France, May 1917, artist’s signature indecipherable, by courtesy of Peter Stone – Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

Once, when I was a boy in the 1950s, my mother led me to a large mansion block in Kensington, West London, so she could introduce me to her last surviving uncle, Hubert Gough, a general of the First World War. He must then have been nine or ten years older than I am today. Hubert was not in perfect health when I shook his hand. He was lame and his eyesight fading. But, in his day, ‘Goughie’ had been a fearless horseman and a notable if controversial soldier. By birth a member of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, he’d settled in England after Ireland gained her independence in 1922. And he remained in London throughout the Second World War making himself useful, on his own initiative, by organising the Chelsea Home Guard. One night during the Blitz an explosion blew in the windows of the family flat. No one was injured, but Anne, the second of his four daughters (an only son, Valentine, died young), and at that moment his unofficial chief of staff, found herself on the floor wrapped, like an Egyptian mummy, in a thick blackout curtain.

Anne told me this anecdote in 1971. I was an indentured reporter on the local newspaper in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and she was living in the nearby village of Langton Green, in an airy house next to a market garden that she’d worked for a number of years with her late partner, a retired military officer. After tea, on my afternoon visits to Langton Green, we usually moved on to large glasses of gin, poured lukewarm without the benefit of ice, and Anne, who had seen a lot of my orphaned mother in her youth, regaled me with stories of her own life – one incident, I recall, involved casually shooting squirrels from the gutters of her house with Hubert’s shotgun. I liked Anne. She had a quick laugh, a smart, upright bearing as befitted a soldier’s daughter (as a young woman she’d been a competitive ice-skater), and bright, narrow, slightly hooded eyes, unmistakably inherited from her father.

I don’t think that my mother Diana was particularly close to Hubert, the older brother of her father Johnnie, who died from wounds inflicted by a German ricochet bullet at Fauquissart, Pas de Calais, in February 1915 – four months before George Calderon disappeared into the smoke of battle on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Diana’s mother was acquainted with George’s wife Kittie – the bond of war widows – and in the late 1920s Diana came to know Kittie well through her future husband, Jack Pym, whose mother Violet Lubbock was a kinswoman of Kittie and one of her closest friends.

Politically, Hubert and Diana were at opposite ends of the spectrum. He was an uncomplicated Empire Loyalist; she a left-wing ‘political organiser’ who became, at the beginning of the Second World War, a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. But perhaps, she thought, meeting her uncle might give me a sense of the family’s living past and also its continuity. Hubert died in 1963, and my mother thirty years later.

To be frank, my memory, more than sixty-five years on, of my one encounter with my great-uncle Hubert, is opaque. The flat was certainly dark, the furniture heavy, and the atmosphere dominated by an odour of medicine and furniture polish. But I do not have a clear recollection of the man himself – a peppery and impulsive soldier, it’s been said, over whose career loomed the shadow of the battle of Passchendaele, in which he’d played a significant role. As Hubert made plain in his memoirs, a grateful nation had not showered him, as it had his fellow senior military commanders of 1914-18, with honours and wealth when peace finally settled, temporarily, over Europe in the 1920s. Norman Stone has described him as ‘a gallant man with a history of bad luck’.

Hubert’s last battle on the Western Front had been in March 1918 when Ludendorff’s vastly superior force broke the British line. A fighting retreat ensued and the German advance was halted, decisively, before Amiens. The breaking of the British line was, however, a national trauma that required a scapegoat and that scapegoat was Hubert Gough. He was removed from his command – of the Fifth Army, which had been at the centre of the battle – nine days after the start of the German offensive. Hubert’s shattered reputation was eventually restored (in as far as it could be) in 1937 when he received a private audience with the new King, George VI, and an award in the Coronation honours list. This had been preceded a year earlier by a contrite letter from David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister in 1918 who’d demanded Gough’s dismissal in the heat of battle, offering a careful, retrospective apology – but all this is another story.

On my visit to the Kensington flat, I do remember, however, as vividly as if it had happened this morning, Hubert’s hand running down the lapel of my school blazer and over my collection of enamel badges – Diana’s bronze swimming award for life-saving; the Esso oval; the plummeting gold Eagle of my favourite weekly comic. His touch confirming what he could not quite discern. ‘What a lot of medals you have!’ Hubert remarked. I was too young to have detected any irony in the old man’s voice, and, if there had been, I doubt it would’ve been intentional.

The title page of Hubert Gough’s copy

Marius Deshumbert was born in Lyons in 1856 and as a young man taught at the city’s Martinière boys’ school. He established himself as a writer in London at the age of twenty-three, and went on to hold the position of Professor of French at the Staff College, Camberley. In the Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (1920), Deshumbert is described as a ‘French Ethicist’, the founder of the Comité Internationale pour la Pratique de la Morale fondée sur les Lois de la Nature, general secretary of the Société Londonienne de Morale and president of the Croydon branch of the Alliance Française. ‘He has written works on French Grammar and the naturalist theory of morals’, the dictionary added. Deshumbert died in London (perhaps in Croydon) in the middle of the Second World War.

Although he once enjoyed a reputation as an established, if minor literary figure, acknowledged on both sides of the English Channel, Marius Deshumbert is today, it’s fair to say, a wholly overlooked name in the intellectual firmament of the late Victorian era through to the 1920s. He wrote an account of the Doctrines of Confucius (1897) and a Life of Jesus (1911); and his best-known work, An Ethical System Based on the Laws of Nature, was translated from the French by Lionel Giles in 1917 and went on to be published in eight other languages, including Russian, Dutch, Japanese and Bengali.

In January 1900, Deshumbert returned to France to lecture at the Sorbonne on ‘How to Teach and How to Learn Modern Languages’. This, one imagines, came about in part as an extension of his salaried post as a teacher of French to officers of the British Army. He’d compiled two dictionaries, comprehensively tailored to the needs of these professionals: Deshumbert’s Dictionary of Difficulties met with in Reading, Writing, Translating, and Speaking French (1889) and an Alphabetical French-English List of Technical Military Terms for Military Students (1892).

The flavour of Deshumbert’s style in the lecture hall – Napoleonic, authoritarian, and not without a dash of sarcasm – can perhaps be sampled in the tone of his address ‘To the Student’ in the fifth edition of the Dictionary:

You will probably spare yourself some mortification if – instead of waiting until you have actually made the mistakes pointed out in this book, and been corrected by the half-suppressed smile which you will be quick to detect on the faces of your listeners – you carefully read every page of this Dictionary of Difficulties, and mark with a pen or pencil the paragraphs which contain ‘something you did not know before’.

At first, perhaps, you will not follow my advice, but will use this book as you do any other dictionary; that is to say, open it only after meeting with a difficulty; but would it not be wiser to make yourself familiar beforehand with the danger-signals, and thus avoid the pitfalls?

Signed, ‘The Author’.

By his own admission Hubert Gough was not a natural linguist, though he had picked up some Urdu during his childhood in India, where his father Charles, another in the family’s long line of military men, had served for almost all his professional life, chiefly on the North-West Frontier. But in the late 1890s, when he himself had been posted to India and where he saw his first burst of active service, Hubert made time to brush up and improve what little French he’d learned while billeted as a sixteen-year-old in the house of a Protestant pastor at Versailles. This cramming in India was in preparation for the severe Staff College entrance examination. He passed the test and was admitted to the College in January 1899.

It was then, I assume, that he acquired his copy of Deshumbert’s Dictionary of Difficulties, 132 pages long and bound in sturdy blue oilcloth. Hubert signed his name with an unsharpened lead pencil on the inside front cover, and immediately beneath noted in blue and black ink, and blue pencil, a number of useful military words and phrases: ‘to be terrify [sic]’, ‘to leap’, ‘to fly’, ‘to take advantage’, ‘harmless (stupidly)’ and – thinking of his horse – ‘clover’ (trèfles, m.). These ‘difficulties’ do not appear in the dictionary, so were perhaps jotted down during one of Deshumbert’s Staff College lectures.

Hubert took Deshumbert’s words on ‘danger-signals’ to heart and marked the first 22 pages of the dictionary with a number of telling blue and red pencil ‘crosses’. He highlights three of the eight listed translations of the verb ‘to blow’ – though not ‘to blow out one’s brains’ (se faire sauter la cervelle or se brûler la cervelle). He committed to memory the French for a steep bank, a beast of burden, to give the cold shoulder, life is at stake, to raise to the peerage – and ‘a negro’s hut’ (une case), which merited two crosses.

Hubert Gough’s annotations to Deshumbert’s Dictionary of Difficulties

He wrote out the French for ‘to ask a question’ and noted how to express ‘picking a quarrel with somebody about nothing’, and that ‘un capon’ was ‘a coward (familiar)’ whereas ‘un chapon’ was a capon. A blue cross went beside ‘rester sur le carreau’, to be killed on the spot. ‘Une apologie’ was ‘a vindication, a justification’ (horizontal red line plus two vertical lines). Then in October of 1899, Hubert’s French studies came to an abrupt halt when he was ordered to embark for special services in South Africa. In due course, his useful ‘dictionary of difficulties’ was handed to his brother Johnnie who himself entered the Staff College in 1904, graduating two years later. And then after Johnnie’s death the book passed to his widow, Dorothy, and then his daughter, Diana, and then many years later to me. It is quite possible that George Calderon had his own copy of the Alphabetical French-English List of Technical Military Terms, which he used when preparing to be a military interpreter in Flanders.

Nearly fifteen years after Hubert Gough broke off his French studies with Marius Deshumbert, he found himself in France – where he was to remain for almost the entire course of the war. ‘I had always been particular, during the four years of the War’, Hubert wrote in The Fifth Army (1931), ‘to maintain a friendly attitude towards French officers. We were always obliged to speak French; I never spoke in my own tongue to a French General throughout the War. My French was quite good, though of the polite order more suitable to drawing-rooms than to sharp arguments…’ Hubert then goes on to lament his lack of the ‘stern phrases’ he should have used when General Foch, the French commander, visited his headquarters during the battle of March 1918 and delivered what Hubert considered an unbecoming and wholly irrational dressing-down.

In March 1940, shortly before the German invasion of France, Hubert was sent back across the Channel ‘to see something of the French Army’. It was a trip he clearly enjoyed, despite the dire wartime circumstances, and no doubt he had a chance once again to converse in French. One happy rendezvous was with General Anthoine, ‘my old friend and comrade of Passchendaele days’, who was living in a flat in the Boulevard Raspail in Paris. Alas, within a few months Anthoine was to be arrested and imprisoned by the Germans, only to die soon after his release without completing his memoirs of the First War.

Self-portrait by Gerty Simon, c. 1934. Courtesy of The Bernard Simon Collection, Wiener Holocaust Library Collections

In the 1920s, during the first years of the Weimar Republic, Gerty Simon, born Gertrud Cohn in Bremen in 1888, established herself in Berlin, and then in Paris, as an innovative, probably self-taught portrait photographer. She was in demand. Her work, from montage compositions, through records of working people, to popular glamour shots, was sold to newspapers, magazine and the avant-garde journals. The actress Lotte Lenya and her husband the composer Kurt Weill posed for a theatrical double portrait, staring at each other purposefully with arms defiantly folded – it was 1929 and The Threepenny Opera had just premiered in Berlin.

Albert Einstein; the great French actor Michel Simon, with his long lugubrious face; Käthe Kollwitz, white-haired in a sculptor’s smock, the pre-eminent German pacifist artist of the First World War; the two young stars of the movie Mädchen in Uniform; three French prime ministers; the theatre critic Alfred Kerr – and his six-year-old daughter Judith who would grew up to write The Tiger Who Came to Tea – all sat for Gerty Simon, together with many others from the arts, sciences and politics. Look at these photographs today and you know without a doubt that the dead were once alive.

While Gerty Simon built her career, her husband Wilhelm, a one-time assistant judge in Strasbourg and a decorated veteran of the war, worked for the reparations committee dealing with the contentious issue of the debt imposed on the Central Powers by the victorious Allies. Then came January 1933 and the Simons, established upper-middle-class German citizens, saw what lay ahead for the Jews of their country and the rest of Europe. By the end of the year, Gerty and her son Bernd (Bernard) emigrated to England, to be followed a few years later by Wilhelm.

Soon after her arrival in London, Gerty Simon established a home and studio in what is now Old Church Street, Chelsea. She resumed her career, seemed never short of clients, and in November 1934 mounted an exhibition titled ‘London Personalities’ at the Storran Gallery on the Brompton Road. A second, equally well-received exhibition of fifty-nine ‘Camera Portraits’, followed a year later at the Camera Club near The Strand. This was Gerty Simon’s last exhibition and after it closed she apparently stopped working as a professional photographer. For the rest of her life, and indeed for the next eighty years, she remained out of the public eye. Wilhelm died in 1966, and Gerty in 1970. Bernard Simon died in 2015, aged ninety-four, and left his mother’s archive to The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide in Russell Square, Central London.

In 2019, the Wiener Library marked an exhibition of Gerty Simon’s photographs with a book, Berlin–London: The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon, including biographical and contextual essays by Barbara Warnock and John March, on which I have drawn for the preceding remarks. I visited the exhibition and noticed a flyer for the Camera Club exhibition. Running my eye down the alphabetical list of Gerty Simon’s sitters I was astonished to see, at No. 26, ‘Sir Hubert Gough’.

How was it, that in 1934 or 1935, Hubert – who a few years earlier had published an exhaustive self-vindicating history of the Fifth Army in the First World War – had come to commission a photograph of himself from a German-Jewish refugee whose husband had served in the German Army in that same war and been awarded the Iron Cross? Perhaps there’s a clue in the name of No. 52 on the Camera Club flyer: Sir William Rothenstein – the close friend of George and Kittie Calderon – who in 1932 executed a chalk sketch of Hubert Gough that was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1970.

Rothenstein could have made the introduction, or Hubert may have liked what he saw at the Storran Gallery show. He may have known Gerty and Wilhelm personally as near neighbours. He would certainly have been invited to the opening-night party for the Camera Club exhibition along with Peggy Ashcroft and Constance Cummings. And there he may have talked to the stage designer Jocelyn Herbert or the painter Sir John Lavery, RA, and perhaps, too, to some of the other subjects of Gerty’s camera portraits – the art historian Kenneth Clark, the Austrian diplomat Baron Georg Franckenstein, or, maybe, ‘Lotte Lenja Weill’ (No. 36 on the programme). In any event, Hubert liked Gerty Simon’s portrait of himself well enough – above all others he’d sat for – to include it, twenty years later, as the uncredited frontispiece to his memoirs Soldiering On.

General Sir Hubert Gough (1870-1963).
Photographed in London by Gerty Simon, 1934 or 1935.
Courtesy of the Wiener Holocaust Library Collections

© John Pym, 2020

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘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

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.