Several people have asked me why ‘Kittie’ is not spelt with a ‘-y’. The answer is that the spelling ‘Kitty’ is reserved for private, more intimate use, for example between Kittie and George, Kittie and Nina (‘Dinah’) Corbet, Kittie and Constance (‘Connie’) Sutton. ‘Kitty’ long predates Louis Wain’s anthropomorphised cat drawings and cat stories, but I don’t think there is much doubt that it was closely associated in Edwardians’ ears with the diminutive/affectionate form of ‘kitten’. This would explain why George signed himself ‘Peter’, drawing on one occasion a tom-cat underneath: ‘Peter’ was the cat-hero of many of Louis Wain’s early published works. But for polite, upper-class use as a name it had to be changed to ‘Kittie’. Although George used ‘Kitty’ in his love letters, therefore, his 1904 novel Dwala was dedicated to ‘Kittie’.
But even ‘Kittie’ would have been far too familiar for soldier patients addressing a VAD nurse of her social position. She would have been at most ‘Katharine’, and more likely ‘Mrs Calderon’ (this was how some wrote to her after they were discharged), or ‘sister’.
It was an absolute boon for George Calderon that for a ‘few days’ after he was admitted to hospital in London he was allowed to see only his wife as a visitor — and he probabaly knew it. Kittie’s powers as a listener and a therapist were famous. Moreover, by now she was presumably used to caring for wounded soldiers. On her first visit, she had seen George become ‘over-excited’ talking to his brother Fred. We know from later statements that the medical staff at Sussex Lodge Hospital counselled George against talking about ‘the battle’ (i.e. the first day of the Battle of Gheluvelt that he had experienced). But George had already said in his letters that he couldn’t wait to tell her about everything and everyone he had seen in Belgium, so he undoubtedly did, volubly and humorously. Whereas his Edwardian doctors thought it best to suppress the memories, acute stress disorder therapists today might think the opposite.
In any case, Kittie was George Calderon’s ultimate ‘other’. He had to communicate to her everything that was in his heart and on his mind. As she wrote later, of their pre-War life:
He seemed acutely conscious all the time that one was there — and to need one to be there — with the result that I hardly ever went away even for a day when he was at home. He at once seemed to feel left and lost. Of course I did not want to go away. I only say this to show how closely natural life held him though seemingly up to the eyes in ideas, work, and play.
So we will leave them to themselves for a ‘few days’…
Next entry: ‘Mrs Alice’s eye-refreshing flowers’
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Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon, 1912
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon c.1901
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)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Captain of the 11
Nurse Katharine
Several people have asked me why ‘Kittie’ is not spelt with a ‘-y’. The answer is that the spelling ‘Kitty’ is reserved for private, more intimate use, for example between Kittie and George, Kittie and Nina (‘Dinah’) Corbet, Kittie and Constance (‘Connie’) Sutton. ‘Kitty’ long predates Louis Wain’s anthropomorphised cat drawings and cat stories, but I don’t think there is much doubt that it was closely associated in Edwardians’ ears with the diminutive/affectionate form of ‘kitten’. This would explain why George signed himself ‘Peter’, drawing on one occasion a tom-cat underneath: ‘Peter’ was the cat-hero of many of Louis Wain’s early published works. But for polite, upper-class use as a name it had to be changed to ‘Kittie’. Although George used ‘Kitty’ in his love letters, therefore, his 1904 novel Dwala was dedicated to ‘Kittie’.
But even ‘Kittie’ would have been far too familiar for soldier patients addressing a VAD nurse of her social position. She would have been at most ‘Katharine’, and more likely ‘Mrs Calderon’ (this was how some wrote to her after they were discharged), or ‘sister’.
It was an absolute boon for George Calderon that for a ‘few days’ after he was admitted to hospital in London he was allowed to see only his wife as a visitor — and he probabaly knew it. Kittie’s powers as a listener and a therapist were famous. Moreover, by now she was presumably used to caring for wounded soldiers. On her first visit, she had seen George become ‘over-excited’ talking to his brother Fred. We know from later statements that the medical staff at Sussex Lodge Hospital counselled George against talking about ‘the battle’ (i.e. the first day of the Battle of Gheluvelt that he had experienced). But George had already said in his letters that he couldn’t wait to tell her about everything and everyone he had seen in Belgium, so he undoubtedly did, volubly and humorously. Whereas his Edwardian doctors thought it best to suppress the memories, acute stress disorder therapists today might think the opposite.
In any case, Kittie was George Calderon’s ultimate ‘other’. He had to communicate to her everything that was in his heart and on his mind. As she wrote later, of their pre-War life:
So we will leave them to themselves for a ‘few days’…
Next entry: ‘Mrs Alice’s eye-refreshing flowers’
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