5 April 2024
I have received from a cousin the above image of our grandfather’s regimental sword. This plate on its scabbard seems to supply some context to what I knew about his military career. He joined up in 1894 when he was nineteen, and would normally have retired after twenty-one years. His military record, however, tells us that on 2 June 1914 he was ‘permitted to continue in the Service’ beyond that and was promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major on 25 August 1914. He was discharged on 15 December 1919. It rather looks, then, as though the Northamptonshire Regiment decided they would need him in the war that was widely anticipated (and only two months away), so they held out to him the prospect of becoming their RSM if he stayed on with them; which he did, and by July 1918 they appreciated his contribution warmly enough to present him with this sword. We know from his record that he did not go to the Front, he stayed at regimental HQ Northampton on the parade ground. So he must have been mainly employed in training the intake of (very) young officers. This would perhaps explain the family anecdote about him saying to an officer as the company which the latter was drilling marched into the distance: ‘Well say something to them, sir, if it’s only goodbye!’
I told my wife that he must have been engaged to train such men, and we both fell silent. How many of those young Northamptonshire Regiment officers did my grandfather ever see again? Alison immediately said, ‘It was like in Andrew’s book — the gaps in the photograph as they went down one by one.’ Exactly; their usually brief lives after leaving the parade ground for the Front, whether Loos or the Somme. As vital sources to the chapter about George Calderon’s military career in my biography of him, between 2014 and 2018 I read an awful lot of books about the First World War. But six years after the centenary I am more convinced than ever that the two most meaningful and permanent books to have come out of it are Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph and I Shall Not Be Away Long. I thought a military historian of my acquaintance was exaggerating when he said ‘every British home should have a copy of these two books’, but he was not.
17 April
So my version of Hölderlin‘s poem ‘Wenn aus der Ferne’ was posted on this blog two days ago. To say it was much worked on would be daft — the poem was long lived with before I even started writing it down in English. Unfortunately, today I spotted a typo in it: stanza 5 begins ‘Aspect’, when it is just the completion of enjambement from the previous stanza so the word should not have a capital letter. Dear me, dear me, how on earth had I missed that? It can’t be corrected now, because the text in the post is not wordprocessed — you can’t easily do that Alcaic stanza layout in WordPress — it’s a scan of my typescript that only Blogmaster Jim Miles could set up for me in Calderonia. Possible explanations for the typo: (1) I forgot that my own convention in this translation was not to use capital letters for the beginning of each line as Hölderlin does, because I wanted a more flowing, natural look to Susette’s speech, (2) the sheer force of the capital A in ‘Aussehn’ (look, aspect, mien, appearance) as the first word of the new stanza (qua abstract noun it always has a capital letter in German) bewitched me into doing the same in English, (3) the sheer force of this extraordinary enjambement (‘Aussehn. Wie flossen Stunden dahin, wie still’…) knocked me over, suspended my typographical judgement. BUT: ‘[man] of sombre/Aspect’ grows on me more and more and I may leave it like that. The portentous use of the capital A in English suggests Susette is gently — so gently — mocking Hölderlin, in order to shake him out of his seriousness and self-absorption; and I like it, because only someone who loved him as deeply and knew him as completely as she did could do that.
2 May
The above clay brooch, 4 cm across, was given to me by Jim for Christmas. Caitlin Pirie creates modern jewellery from clay with different glazes and other materials, often with a Japanese motif as her workshop is named after the affectionate Japanese Akita dog. It looks to me from the Web that my brooch is a one-off — unique! Well, Jim couldn’t possibly have given me a more appropriate subject, as I love watching koi carp. Caitlin has captured beautifully the effect of clouds in the water which I once alluded to in a haiku. She has even enhanced that sense of the sky by placing a kind of sun in the middle. It would be interesting to know what were her own intentions.
The English anorak badges
The brooch has two pins at the back and was just asking to join the menagerie on my anorak (yes, I am an anorak and proud of it). So for a while that’s where it was. But I thought it was so fascinating and dynamic that I moved it to my desk where I can see it all the time. By the way, the solid old fish with barbels, beneath the vivid Small Tortoiseshell on my collar above, is a Tench.
5 May Another emailed expression of regret that I said I was closing this blog down on its tenth anniversary, 30 July 2024. I was beginning to hope that someone would email or Comment to the effect that they were pleased it was finishing, high time, enough is enough, get off the stage etc etc. O fallacem hominum spem! Now that my book of short stories won’t come out until Christmas, I obviously must continue beyond then, to publicise the book… I have drawn a serious lesson from all this: if you have a blog, you do not need to become tethered to it. I no longer have to post every day, as I did in 2014-15, or even every month. So relax. Keep it there, available for ‘whenever’.
13 May
I’ve received a long letter from team Foreign Office about Ukraine. It begins: ‘Russia’s assault on Ukraine is an unprovoked, premeditated and barbaric attack against a sovereign democratic state […] an egregious violation of international law and the UN Charter.’ Correct. It describes ‘a significant uplift in UK military aid — providing £2.5 billion the next financial year, an increase of £200 million on the previous two years’, as well as ‘£245 million throughout the next year to procure and invigorate supply chains to produce urgently needed artillery ammunition for Ukraine’. The UK was ‘the first European country to provide lethal aid to Ukraine and this played a crucial role in stalling the Russian advance’. Correct. The letter then details, with statistics, our deliveries of materiel and training for Ukrainian forces. For such a small country, the UK’s support is quite impressive. The last paragraph begins: ‘As the Prime Minister told President Zelensky again at the NATO Summit in Vilnius in July 2023, Ukraine’s rightful place is in the NATO Alliance.’ Ah, not so good. I do not for one moment believe NATO was courting Ukraine to join NATO in the decade before the Russian invasion, as the paranoid murderer Putin supposedly convinced himself, but this kind of prime ministerial statement plays straight into his hands. For Putin it is post facto proof and reinforces his paranoia. It is also irresponsible of NATO members like Britain to raise Ukraine’s hopes: it’s not permissible (I always thought) for a country to become a member of NATO whilst that country is in territorial dispute with a neighbour, which Ukraine is likely to be for a long time.
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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.
Related
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
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?
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon c.1901
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Captain of the 11
George Calderon, 1912
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
From the diary of a writer-publisher: 29
5 April 2024
I have received from a cousin the above image of our grandfather’s regimental sword. This plate on its scabbard seems to supply some context to what I knew about his military career. He joined up in 1894 when he was nineteen, and would normally have retired after twenty-one years. His military record, however, tells us that on 2 June 1914 he was ‘permitted to continue in the Service’ beyond that and was promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major on 25 August 1914. He was discharged on 15 December 1919. It rather looks, then, as though the Northamptonshire Regiment decided they would need him in the war that was widely anticipated (and only two months away), so they held out to him the prospect of becoming their RSM if he stayed on with them; which he did, and by July 1918 they appreciated his contribution warmly enough to present him with this sword. We know from his record that he did not go to the Front, he stayed at regimental HQ Northampton on the parade ground. So he must have been mainly employed in training the intake of (very) young officers. This would perhaps explain the family anecdote about him saying to an officer as the company which the latter was drilling marched into the distance: ‘Well say something to them, sir, if it’s only goodbye!’
I told my wife that he must have been engaged to train such men, and we both fell silent. How many of those young Northamptonshire Regiment officers did my grandfather ever see again? Alison immediately said, ‘It was like in Andrew’s book — the gaps in the photograph as they went down one by one.’ Exactly; their usually brief lives after leaving the parade ground for the Front, whether Loos or the Somme. As vital sources to the chapter about George Calderon’s military career in my biography of him, between 2014 and 2018 I read an awful lot of books about the First World War. But six years after the centenary I am more convinced than ever that the two most meaningful and permanent books to have come out of it are Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph and I Shall Not Be Away Long. I thought a military historian of my acquaintance was exaggerating when he said ‘every British home should have a copy of these two books’, but he was not.
17 April
So my version of Hölderlin‘s poem ‘Wenn aus der Ferne’ was posted on this blog two days ago. To say it was much worked on would be daft — the poem was long lived with before I even started writing it down in English. Unfortunately, today I spotted a typo in it: stanza 5 begins ‘Aspect’, when it is just the completion of enjambement from the previous stanza so the word should not have a capital letter. Dear me, dear me, how on earth had I missed that? It can’t be corrected now, because the text in the post is not wordprocessed — you can’t easily do that Alcaic stanza layout in WordPress — it’s a scan of my typescript that only Blogmaster Jim Miles could set up for me in Calderonia. Possible explanations for the typo: (1) I forgot that my own convention in this translation was not to use capital letters for the beginning of each line as Hölderlin does, because I wanted a more flowing, natural look to Susette’s speech, (2) the sheer force of the capital A in ‘Aussehn’ (look, aspect, mien, appearance) as the first word of the new stanza (qua abstract noun it always has a capital letter in German) bewitched me into doing the same in English, (3) the sheer force of this extraordinary enjambement (‘Aussehn. Wie flossen Stunden dahin, wie still’…) knocked me over, suspended my typographical judgement. BUT: ‘[man] of sombre/Aspect’ grows on me more and more and I may leave it like that. The portentous use of the capital A in English suggests Susette is gently — so gently — mocking Hölderlin, in order to shake him out of his seriousness and self-absorption; and I like it, because only someone who loved him as deeply and knew him as completely as she did could do that.
2 May
Swirling koi clouds by Caitlin Pirie, The Clay Akita
The above clay brooch, 4 cm across, was given to me by Jim for Christmas. Caitlin Pirie creates modern jewellery from clay with different glazes and other materials, often with a Japanese motif as her workshop is named after the affectionate Japanese Akita dog. It looks to me from the Web that my brooch is a one-off — unique! Well, Jim couldn’t possibly have given me a more appropriate subject, as I love watching koi carp. Caitlin has captured beautifully the effect of clouds in the water which I once alluded to in a haiku. She has even enhanced that sense of the sky by placing a kind of sun in the middle. It would be interesting to know what were her own intentions.
The English anorak badges
The brooch has two pins at the back and was just asking to join the menagerie on my anorak (yes, I am an anorak and proud of it). So for a while that’s where it was. But I thought it was so fascinating and dynamic that I moved it to my desk where I can see it all the time. By the way, the solid old fish with barbels, beneath the vivid Small Tortoiseshell on my collar above, is a Tench.
5 May Another emailed expression of regret that I said I was closing this blog down on its tenth anniversary, 30 July 2024. I was beginning to hope that someone would email or Comment to the effect that they were pleased it was finishing, high time, enough is enough, get off the stage etc etc. O fallacem hominum spem! Now that my book of short stories won’t come out until Christmas, I obviously must continue beyond then, to publicise the book… I have drawn a serious lesson from all this: if you have a blog, you do not need to become tethered to it. I no longer have to post every day, as I did in 2014-15, or even every month. So relax. Keep it there, available for ‘whenever’.
13 May
I’ve received a long letter from team Foreign Office about Ukraine. It begins: ‘Russia’s assault on Ukraine is an unprovoked, premeditated and barbaric attack against a sovereign democratic state […] an egregious violation of international law and the UN Charter.’ Correct. It describes ‘a significant uplift in UK military aid — providing £2.5 billion the next financial year, an increase of £200 million on the previous two years’, as well as ‘£245 million throughout the next year to procure and invigorate supply chains to produce urgently needed artillery ammunition for Ukraine’. The UK was ‘the first European country to provide lethal aid to Ukraine and this played a crucial role in stalling the Russian advance’. Correct. The letter then details, with statistics, our deliveries of materiel and training for Ukrainian forces. For such a small country, the UK’s support is quite impressive. The last paragraph begins: ‘As the Prime Minister told President Zelensky again at the NATO Summit in Vilnius in July 2023, Ukraine’s rightful place is in the NATO Alliance.’ Ah, not so good. I do not for one moment believe NATO was courting Ukraine to join NATO in the decade before the Russian invasion, as the paranoid murderer Putin supposedly convinced himself, but this kind of prime ministerial statement plays straight into his hands. For Putin it is post facto proof and reinforces his paranoia. It is also irresponsible of NATO members like Britain to raise Ukraine’s hopes: it’s not permissible (I always thought) for a country to become a member of NATO whilst that country is in territorial dispute with a neighbour, which Ukraine is likely to be for a long time.
ADVERTISEMENT
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.
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