Guest post: Clare Hopkins, ‘One Man and his College’

Anyone who has ever watched an episode of Morse or Lewis will know that Oxford Colleges are well supplied with portraits. Founders, archbishops, prime ministers, and Nobel Prize winners gaze grandly down from the panelled walls of Dining Halls. Smaller paintings of distinguished professors, college heads, tutors and benefactors grace common rooms and fellows’ sets. And then, somewhere about the place, a third tier of pictures of the great and the good is usually to be found. In George Calderon’s alma mater Trinity College a large collection of engravings and photographs hangs on the Senior Common Room back stairs: four somewhat shabby flights that link the bar, the fellows’ garden, the kitchen, the hall steward’s pantry, and a series of rooms where the fellows and others hold meetings, eat meals, host receptions, and read newspapers and journals over coffee. At the first turn, as one ascends, Arnold Pienne’s drawing of George Calderon stands out. Its label is different from the rest; it is one of only three or four original art works on the stairs; and it is the only silverpoint owned by the College. ‘Stands out’ is a little misleading, though. George’s grey mount and delicate creamy tones withdraw into almost invisibility against the deep shade of the wall.

Trinity College’s portrait of George Calderon, drawn in silverpoint by Arnold Pienne, 1930

Anyone who has ever had an Oxbridge graduate as a friend will know too that a College is not just for three years, it is for life. This post, then, is an attempt to deconstruct George’s relationship with Trinity, tracing his footprints in the college archives from his first visit, aged 17, to the arrival of his portrait, some fifteen years after his death.

The name George L. Calderon first appears in the Governing Body minutes of 15 December 1886, recording the award of an exhibition worth £40 p.a. for four years [for today’s retail value multiply by a hundred]. This was the lowliest of the seven scholarships and exhibitions on offer, and had been won in a gruelling examination held over several days in the first week of the Christmas vacation. Some of the papers survive: Latin and Greek translation, verse and prose, in both directions; ‘historical questions’; and an English essay entitled, ‘How far is the actual constitution of society a standing mockery of its projected Christian ideals?’.

George came into residence on 15 October 1887. Since 1664 all new members of Trinity have written their own entries in a leather-bound register. That, and shaking hands with the President (the Rev. Henry Woods), made George a ‘Trinity man’. Immediately below his entry is that of Harold Dowdall, a friend from Rugby; above is Arthur Lowry. Turning the pages reveals the names of others who were to become George’s lifelong friends: Laurence Binyon, Archibald Ripley, Michael Furse…

A member of Trinity College, Oxford: George Calderon’s autograph entry in the Admissions Register

As a freshman George occupied a ‘set’ at the top of Staircase 7 (these days, 14) in the corner of the Garden Quadrangle. The staircase servant lit his fire, brought hot water, and delivered breakfast and lunch from the kitchen. Dinner was a communal meal, eaten in Hall, where the scholars and exhibitioners shared the long table nearest the fireplace. The room rent was £5 a term. In October 1888 George moved across the Quad to a first-floor room on Staircase 10 (today’s 17), for which he paid 10 shillings more. One can learn a lot about the lifestyle of an undergraduate from mundane ledgers and buttery books. In his first term George paid a gate charge to come in after 9 pm only once or twice each week; mostly he had the basic threepenny breakfast. I took down a Stores book at random, and leafed through Michaelmas Term 1890. George did not regularly buy coffee or tea, and a single box of biscuits (2s. 4d.) lasted him the term. Then suddenly, on 27 November, he splashed out 18 shillings on claret, and 11s. 3d. on port. Perhaps he was planning a party for his 22nd birthday on 2 December. The ‘Broad Book’ was used to calculate each man’s end-of-term bill. In the summer of 1889, George’s battels (the sum of weekly buttery bills) were the fourth highest in College at just under £20; and the total cost of his term, including university dues, various compulsory subscriptions, and tuition at 7 guineas, was the sixth highest, at £58 6s. 11d.

In the late 1880s Trinity had some 140 undergraduates in residence (in college or digs), of whom up to sixty would participate in Sunday night debates in the Junior Library. Debating Society minutes can suggest a man’s character, even presage his future career. George found his voice in his third term (Archie Ripley spoke much sooner), moving an amendment (defeated). Do I sense a man who enjoyed arguing for the sake of it? Almost always, it seems, he was on the losing side. On 1 December 1889 he moved ‘That in the opinion of this House the measures adopted by Temperance Reformers are incompatible with the dictates of reason and expediency’ – to which ‘the opposition was overwhelming’ and he lost by 20 votes. He was defeated again in January 1890, when he opposed the motion that ‘Realism in Literature and Art is to be deplored’.

George was quickly elected to the debating and paper-reading Gryphon Club. Members met weekly in each other’s rooms; they dined termly; and gathered for an annual photograph. George was funny, and he liked performing. In November 1890, the Oxford Magazine reported that he entertained the Gryphon with a ‘particularly amusing paper on “women”’. The following month he starred in a Smoking Concert (think in-house music hall), giving a ‘specially notable […] lecture on the art of recitation, illustrated by the poem of Burglar Bill’, and closing the first half in an unaccompanied quartet with Mike Furse and two others, singing the comical ‘catch’ ‘My Celia’s Charms’.

The Gryphon Club, 1890.

George (front left) often sits cross-legged in college photographs; and this is not the only one that shows him with a “no. 2” haircut, unusual for men of his class at this date. What with the cane and the waxed moustache, he has the air of an amateur magician — no wonder Herbert Blakiston (middle far left), is giving him such a dirty look. Other friends in this photograph are Archie Ripley (front far right), Laurence Binyon (back far right), Arthur Lowry (seated next to George), and Harold Dowdall (glued into the centre of the back row).

Sport was big in late Victorian Oxford. The Trinity Archive has a charming photograph of George leaning against a wall in a photograph of the 1890-1 Rugby XV. But how fast a runner was he really? A programme survives for the Trinity College Athletics Sports held at the end of his first term. George was one of 20 men competing in the heats of the 150 yards handicap, and was given a penalty of 7 yards. He was not placed, but came second in the mile. In the two years following, he again entered the mile, and again did not win. A keen but not outstanding middle-distance runner, then, at least as a young man.

George sat his Finals in the summer of 1891, and his Second in Literae Humaniores (Latin and Greek literature, philosophy, and history) was published in the University Calendar. And so he went down, as the Oxford jargon has it. But Trinity College remained in his blood. In Trinity Term 1895 George took his MA, that curious Oxford degree by means of which graduates acquire the status of life-long membership of their college and university. Trinity invited its MAs back regularly to college feasts – known as gaudies – while a committee of alumni organised an annual dinner in London. I don’t know if George ever attended, but I see in the battered ledger that equates to today’s alumni database that he updated his address when he returned from Russia: South Hill Farm, Eastcote, near Pinner. And when his close Trinity friend Archie Ripley lay dying, Percy Lubbock’s Sketch attests that George visited him assiduously. I think we can guess one thing at least that they talked about.

In 1902, George published his satirical novel Downy V. Green. Its unkind depiction of Herbert Blakiston has been discussed elsewhere on Calderonia, but let us consider here the setting of the book, the landscape and texture of the story. The moment when Downy is told off for walking on the grass of the Front Quad… His rooms on ‘the ground floor of a third quadrangle, surrounded on three sides by grey crumbling stone buildings, and open on the fourth, but for an iron railing, on to a long and stately garden’… Every detail, every custom of the fictional St Ives College shouts ‘Trinity!’. George was deficient in neither energy nor imagination: this vivid realisation is surely a testament to his deep and lasting affection for the place. A contemporary identified the character Bill Sykes as an ‘unmistakable reproduction’ of the Trinity rowing Blue Hugh Legge, and Sykes’s room as an ‘exact’ double of Legge’s. George drew his own illustration of undergraduates eating breakfast together – and is that the author himself sitting with his back to the window?

A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77

We don’t actually know how deeply Blakiston was offended by Downy. George was not the first person to make fun of him, and certainly not the last. Soon after his election to the Presidency in 1907, ‘Blinks’ began listing alumni publications in his annual reports, and George’s books appeared regularly: The Fountain, for example, in 1911. I have searched in vain for any evidence of Blakiston’s reaction to the famous incident in March 1912, when George was called on stage at the end of The Fountain’s first performance in the city and felt inspired to invite undergraduates to join him in a meeting in the Hall to discuss the Miners’ Strike. It is surely significant that it was to Trinity’s large gates on Broad Street that he led them. Trinity was his home in Oxford, and he acted instinctively.

And then, the War. Blakiston followed events closely in The Times. On 15 July 1915 he snipped out the announcement that George was missing – a man whom he had got to know in his first term as a tutor. For four years the President recorded the names of Trinity’s fallen on a scroll in the Chapel – a grim total of 155, each of whom he had known personally. Trinity’s War Memorial is the largest of any college memorial in Oxford, and it was very much Blakiston’s brainchild. Although not the most beautiful, it is undoubtedly the most useful, and arguably the most moving. Gifts of money and books poured in to build and stock the War Memorial Library – a place where the young men never did grow old. Laurence Binyon donated two guineas. Kittie sent a copy of Percy Lubbock’s Sketch of George. The Library was formally opened in November 1928, with the name G. L. Calderon emblazoned in gold letters almost at the top of the board above the entrance. George was the second most senior member of Trinity lost in the War, and the oldest to fall in action. The College does indeed remember them: the names are read in the Chapel every Remembrance Sunday, while for the duration of the First World War’s centenary, a new roll of honour is on display outside the Hall, alongside the earliest surviving manuscript of Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’.

Trinity’s fallen on the Roll of Honour in the War Memorial Library. The names are arranged by year of admission to the College. (Click image to enlarge)

It was almost two years after the Library was opened that Kittie Calderon wrote to Herbert Blakiston, out of the blue, to offer Arnold Pienne’s silverpoint drawing. Her letter of 14 July 1930 runs to three pages.

Kittie’s letter to President Blakiston, offering the silverpoint portrait, 14 July 1930

Kittie’s tone seems oddly nervous; perhaps she was daunted by the President’s crusty reputation. She seems to have taken a break half way through writing, then picked up her pen to add a rush of detail; almost as if she is trying to offload responsibility for the idea onto Laurence Binyon. Or perhaps the gift was indeed Binyon’s suggestion in the first place, and Kittie is feeling awkward about the whole business. Binyon was a regular visitor to Trinity; he would have been familiar with the picture collection. The label glued on the back of the picture is in his writing.

George’s label, written by his undergraduate friend Laurence Binyon

Kittie calls the drawing ‘very delightful’ – but did she really think that? Patrick tells us she liked very few pictures of George. I very much look forward to reading his expert interpretation of this letter. Personally, I think she was spot-on when she described the drawing as beautiful. It seems so much nicer than the Frederick Hollyer photograph on which it was based (see extreme right in Calderonia’s portrait masthead). The silverpoint is softer, and warmer; George has lost that disdainful, almost audible, sniff. Yet he seems so pale, so mysterious; he looks desperately, achingly, sad. One can almost make eye contact – but then he slips away. He has come home to his College like a ghost. Or like a man who ‘just vanished in the smoke of battle…’

© Clare Hopkins, 2016

Clare Hopkins is the Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford. Throughout the project of researching and writing the first full-length biography of George Calderon, Clare has given me the full benefit of her knowledge as the college’s historian. Moreover, her suggestions, comments and ideas have shaken up my thinking in innumerable productive ways. Patrick Miles