Just as music gives people ‘ear-worms’, so biography brings us ‘phantom flies in amber’. As I explained in my posts of 5 January and 1 April 2015, over time the biographer becomes convinced s/he has seen things in print that s/he can no longer find, glimpsed documents s/he can no longer trace, heard things (‘facts’) that s/he cannot verify, however long s/he spends looking for them… These obsessions become flies, or even large black beetles, preserved in the amber of the biographer’s brain.
Published by kind permission of the Imperial War Museum.
For me, the figure in the foreground above, who features in the extreme left of the famous photograph of the K.O.S.B. going over the top on 4 June 1915 (see my post for that day last year), is one such beetle.
The very first time I saw the photograph, I was struck by the figure’s resemblance to George Calderon. The soldier is the right height, the nose is as prominent, perhaps the stoop comes from George’s age, weariness, or documented determination always to keep his head down at Gallipoli, perhaps the curious thing on his chest is one of the shell-caps that in his last letter to Kittie he described the ‘armourer sergeant’ fitting on his broken field glasses, perhaps this figure’s impedimenta are what George was referring to when he said he was ‘getting to look like the tramp cyclist at the music halls’? Perhaps the slightly disoriented, absent-minded stance of the figure is what caused him as an interpreter in the Blues to be called ‘The Professor’?
We know that by now George was wearing a pith helmet, and the officers had all, probably, removed their insignia to avoid being picked off by snipers. The fact that this figure is not yet going over the top himself is not unusual: on the Western Front, at least, not all officers surged forward at the head of their men, some remained to encourage and help the rest over, before joining them. In the 1st K.O.S.B. on 4 June there was almost an excess of lieutenants and captains, as so many had been attached from other regiments.
But…but…this is not at all how one had imagined George in the battle, nor does it conform with what we are told by the sources about B Company going over the top. These sources describe B ‘jumping’ as A Company had before them, i.e. attacking in a single surge, not in platoon rushes. Moreover, you would have thought that the photographer would be unable to keep any traces of the dead and wounded from A Company out of the picture and there seems to be no sense of urgency amongst those going over the top here. This is why I concluded last year that the photograph was most likely of C or D Company, who went forward in platoon rushes twenty minutes or more after the time fixed in orders and encountered little resistance.
The photo as a whole calls for interpretation and comment from military historians who have specialised in Gallipoli, and I shall invite one to make a guest appearance on ‘Calderonia’ to explain what he thinks is going on here.
The vital thing about ‘phantom flies in amber’ is never to get so used to them that you end up thinking of them as facts…
For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here.
Related
George Calderon c.1901
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
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)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon, 1912
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Captain of the 11
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Is this George Calderon?
Just as music gives people ‘ear-worms’, so biography brings us ‘phantom flies in amber’. As I explained in my posts of 5 January and 1 April 2015, over time the biographer becomes convinced s/he has seen things in print that s/he can no longer find, glimpsed documents s/he can no longer trace, heard things (‘facts’) that s/he cannot verify, however long s/he spends looking for them… These obsessions become flies, or even large black beetles, preserved in the amber of the biographer’s brain.
Published by kind permission of the Imperial War Museum.
For me, the figure in the foreground above, who features in the extreme left of the famous photograph of the K.O.S.B. going over the top on 4 June 1915 (see my post for that day last year), is one such beetle.
The very first time I saw the photograph, I was struck by the figure’s resemblance to George Calderon. The soldier is the right height, the nose is as prominent, perhaps the stoop comes from George’s age, weariness, or documented determination always to keep his head down at Gallipoli, perhaps the curious thing on his chest is one of the shell-caps that in his last letter to Kittie he described the ‘armourer sergeant’ fitting on his broken field glasses, perhaps this figure’s impedimenta are what George was referring to when he said he was ‘getting to look like the tramp cyclist at the music halls’? Perhaps the slightly disoriented, absent-minded stance of the figure is what caused him as an interpreter in the Blues to be called ‘The Professor’?
We know that by now George was wearing a pith helmet, and the officers had all, probably, removed their insignia to avoid being picked off by snipers. The fact that this figure is not yet going over the top himself is not unusual: on the Western Front, at least, not all officers surged forward at the head of their men, some remained to encourage and help the rest over, before joining them. In the 1st K.O.S.B. on 4 June there was almost an excess of lieutenants and captains, as so many had been attached from other regiments.
But…but…this is not at all how one had imagined George in the battle, nor does it conform with what we are told by the sources about B Company going over the top. These sources describe B ‘jumping’ as A Company had before them, i.e. attacking in a single surge, not in platoon rushes. Moreover, you would have thought that the photographer would be unable to keep any traces of the dead and wounded from A Company out of the picture and there seems to be no sense of urgency amongst those going over the top here. This is why I concluded last year that the photograph was most likely of C or D Company, who went forward in platoon rushes twenty minutes or more after the time fixed in orders and encountered little resistance.
The photo as a whole calls for interpretation and comment from military historians who have specialised in Gallipoli, and I shall invite one to make a guest appearance on ‘Calderonia’ to explain what he thinks is going on here.
The vital thing about ‘phantom flies in amber’ is never to get so used to them that you end up thinking of them as facts…
For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here.
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