20/4/16. Several people have asked me about late photographs of Kittie. Here is the last one I know of. It was not easy to date. Triangulating from the probable year of Cairn terrier Bunty’s birth (1922), the dog’s known longevity, the garden furniture, the boundary hedge, and Kittie’s stouter appearance, I put it at 1936, possibly 1937. It seems strange that there are none later, considering that Kittie lived another fourteen years.
Kittie Calderon and Bunty in the garden of ‘White Raven’, c. 1936
As followers know, I am stuck with 4% of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius still to revise, namely the last two chapters, covering Kittie’s life 1915-50. However, I am not as frazzled by this as I have been about missing deadlines in the past, since it is caused by ‘events’ — events that, hopefully, can only improve the book.
The Net has truly revolutionised biographical research. I do trawls every so often for new mentions of George and especially for archival material (obviously, much of this would never have been found before computers). The last one I did on 16 March. I was not expecting anything new, but collections in public archives are going online all the time. This trawl produced three astonishing new hits:
- The papers of Sir Ian Hamilton relating to his time in command of the Gallipoli campaign are held in the Liddell Hart Military Archives at King’s College London. A hit came up for an item catalogued as ‘1915 Jun 15-1915 Aug 8 Correspondence with relatives of soldiers relating to their requests for news of Lt George Calderon, 9 Bn Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, attached to King’s Own Scottish Borderers [and three others]’. Given the word ‘relatives’, I assumed this was a letter/letters from Kittie, especially as her maiden name was Hamilton and she could probably claim some relation. Wrong. Sir Ian had received a letter (which has not survived) from Onslow Ford, an officer who trained with George in the Ox and Bucks at Fort Brockhurst. Onslow Ford can be seen on the group photo I posted for 10 April 1915 and his name appears in a letter from Labouchere to Kittie that I quoted in my post for 15 July 1915. Labouchere told Kittie that Onslow Ford ‘knows Ian Hamilton and can write to him on the chances of [Edwardian expression] his being able to make special enquiries out there’. There was absolutely no evidence until now that Kittie took up Onslow Ford’s offer. On 8 August 1915 at GHQ, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Ian Hamilton dictated a substantial reply to Onslow Ford, which I cannot quote at length for copyright reasons but will summarise thus. Hamilton says that he has received nothing but ‘negative information’ about George’s whereabouts, but there have been ‘many cases’ of wounded officers being found with ‘first dressings’ put on them by the Turks, when trenches were retaken from the Turks after forward parties of British soldiers had occupied and lost them in the initial attack. Hamilton concludes, then, that there is ‘quite a glimmer of hope still’ that George Calderon will be found alive. So the idea that George was not killed outright, which Kittie clung to for another four years, originated with Sir Ian Hamilton himself. This is a rather sensational development and necessitates my re-writing part of chapter 15. There are several things I need to do, though, before I can proceed to that, e.g. discover the Christian name of Onslow Ford, which my indefatigable researcher Mike Welch is working on. Onslow Ford was one of the four sons of the Victorian sculptor Edward Onslow Ford, but we don’t know yet which one. Not the least intriguing thing, however, about the documents concerning George in this file is that Ian Hamilton dictated his reply to Onslow Ford on one of the very worst days for him, Hamilton, in the whole of the Gallipoli campaign. Hamilton had been despairingly watching offshore at Suvla the incompetence of his generals following the landings of the day before and had to intervene personally. He concludes his letter to Onslow Ford by apologising for its brevity, ‘but we are in the middle of a great battle’. Really, these Edwardians were extraordinary people…
2. ‘An Introduction to Martin Shaw’ is an article that appeared on the Web following the acquisition by the British Library of Shaw’s Archive from the firm of Quaritch, who wrote the original text. It mentions that Shaw’s papers contain ‘a rare manuscript by the young playwright George Calderon’. If true, it would not be rare, it would be unique! (George’s few extant dramatic relics are typescripts.) It is probably the text of George’s contribution to a pantomime called The Brave Little Tailor which he wrote with William Caine in 1913-14 and for which Shaw was writing the music. The pantomime text was completed, but not the music, because the War broke out and the project was aborted as it was based on a German fairytale. I couldn’t write about George’s text before, because it appeared to have been lost. Now I must see it, but the Shaw Archive at the British Library hasn’t been catalogued yet, so it will take curators a while to find it for me.
3. The papers of Laurence Binyon are on loan to the British Library (where, of course, he had worked when it was called the British Museum). There is a working catalogue of them online, but the BL search facility had not revealed any material relating to the Calderons. However, one of Binyon’s grandsons, Mr Edmund Gray, very kindly pointed out to me that ‘Calderon’ had been misspelt in the catalogue and there were in fact some letters from Kittie in his grandfather’s archive. I am very desirous to see them. They are probably from the period 1920-30 and may contain Kittie’s response to Laurence Binyon’s ode in George’s memory; in which case I will weave it into chapter 15 (Percy Lubbock’s response to it in a letter to Kittie was rather aspersive). The reason the archive has nothing from George is probably that he and Laurence Binyon often saw each other daily at the BM, and when they didn’t all that was needed was a note or a phone call to arrange to meet. Since Binyon’s papers are only on loan to the BL, I needed Mr Gray’s permission to access them, which he has most graciously given.
Finally, down at Kennington in Kent some very kind people contacted by local historian Robin Britcher (see ‘Watch this Space’ 24 February 2016) examined the records of St Mary’s Church for mentions of Kittie. (Understandably, there seems to be no-one alive there who remembers her.) They discovered that she was a founder member of the Friends of that church, who look after its fabric and pay for repairs/improvements. She was enrolled in 1941, paid her subscription for three years, and against her name was a full address in Hythe, twelve miles away. What was the significance of this? In 1941 Hythe was on the front line! Mike Welch established that the address had been a guest house in the 1920s, but it was impossible to discover from public records what it was during the war. Exercising his lateral thinking on the newly available information of the 1939 Register, however, Mike concluded that an unnamed child had been present in the house and might still be alive. He traced this child and I spoke to him, now aged eighty, on the phone. He confirmed that the house had been a popular guest house during the war, with many military families visiting, but in 1941 his grandparents decided to move inland as the shelling from across the Channel was hotting up. The guest house’s Visitors Book still exists, but stops in 1928. What was Kittie Calderon doing there in 1941 and how long did she stay? Could her visit be connected with the death of a young neighbour of hers, who was killed by a landmine on Hythe beach on 13 May 1941? The investigation continues, as does our search for a house in Torquay that Mrs Stewart, Nina Corbet’s mother, lived in for thirty years, and which Kittie visited for long periods after Nina’s death.
Altogether, an unexpected basinful…
Related
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Captain of the 11
George Calderon, 1912
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon c.1901
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
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.
Watch this Space
20/4/16. Several people have asked me about late photographs of Kittie. Here is the last one I know of. It was not easy to date. Triangulating from the probable year of Cairn terrier Bunty’s birth (1922), the dog’s known longevity, the garden furniture, the boundary hedge, and Kittie’s stouter appearance, I put it at 1936, possibly 1937. It seems strange that there are none later, considering that Kittie lived another fourteen years.
Kittie Calderon and Bunty in the garden of ‘White Raven’, c. 1936
As followers know, I am stuck with 4% of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius still to revise, namely the last two chapters, covering Kittie’s life 1915-50. However, I am not as frazzled by this as I have been about missing deadlines in the past, since it is caused by ‘events’ — events that, hopefully, can only improve the book.
The Net has truly revolutionised biographical research. I do trawls every so often for new mentions of George and especially for archival material (obviously, much of this would never have been found before computers). The last one I did on 16 March. I was not expecting anything new, but collections in public archives are going online all the time. This trawl produced three astonishing new hits:
2. ‘An Introduction to Martin Shaw’ is an article that appeared on the Web following the acquisition by the British Library of Shaw’s Archive from the firm of Quaritch, who wrote the original text. It mentions that Shaw’s papers contain ‘a rare manuscript by the young playwright George Calderon’. If true, it would not be rare, it would be unique! (George’s few extant dramatic relics are typescripts.) It is probably the text of George’s contribution to a pantomime called The Brave Little Tailor which he wrote with William Caine in 1913-14 and for which Shaw was writing the music. The pantomime text was completed, but not the music, because the War broke out and the project was aborted as it was based on a German fairytale. I couldn’t write about George’s text before, because it appeared to have been lost. Now I must see it, but the Shaw Archive at the British Library hasn’t been catalogued yet, so it will take curators a while to find it for me.
3. The papers of Laurence Binyon are on loan to the British Library (where, of course, he had worked when it was called the British Museum). There is a working catalogue of them online, but the BL search facility had not revealed any material relating to the Calderons. However, one of Binyon’s grandsons, Mr Edmund Gray, very kindly pointed out to me that ‘Calderon’ had been misspelt in the catalogue and there were in fact some letters from Kittie in his grandfather’s archive. I am very desirous to see them. They are probably from the period 1920-30 and may contain Kittie’s response to Laurence Binyon’s ode in George’s memory; in which case I will weave it into chapter 15 (Percy Lubbock’s response to it in a letter to Kittie was rather aspersive). The reason the archive has nothing from George is probably that he and Laurence Binyon often saw each other daily at the BM, and when they didn’t all that was needed was a note or a phone call to arrange to meet. Since Binyon’s papers are only on loan to the BL, I needed Mr Gray’s permission to access them, which he has most graciously given.
Finally, down at Kennington in Kent some very kind people contacted by local historian Robin Britcher (see ‘Watch this Space’ 24 February 2016) examined the records of St Mary’s Church for mentions of Kittie. (Understandably, there seems to be no-one alive there who remembers her.) They discovered that she was a founder member of the Friends of that church, who look after its fabric and pay for repairs/improvements. She was enrolled in 1941, paid her subscription for three years, and against her name was a full address in Hythe, twelve miles away. What was the significance of this? In 1941 Hythe was on the front line! Mike Welch established that the address had been a guest house in the 1920s, but it was impossible to discover from public records what it was during the war. Exercising his lateral thinking on the newly available information of the 1939 Register, however, Mike concluded that an unnamed child had been present in the house and might still be alive. He traced this child and I spoke to him, now aged eighty, on the phone. He confirmed that the house had been a popular guest house during the war, with many military families visiting, but in 1941 his grandparents decided to move inland as the shelling from across the Channel was hotting up. The guest house’s Visitors Book still exists, but stops in 1928. What was Kittie Calderon doing there in 1941 and how long did she stay? Could her visit be connected with the death of a young neighbour of hers, who was killed by a landmine on Hythe beach on 13 May 1941? The investigation continues, as does our search for a house in Torquay that Mrs Stewart, Nina Corbet’s mother, lived in for thirty years, and which Kittie visited for long periods after Nina’s death.
Altogether, an unexpected basinful…
Share this:
Related