‘He was away, far away…’

The S.S. Aguila, a cruise ship of the Yeoward Line, dropped anchor off Funchal, the capital of Madeira, on 31 March 1913, probably around lunchtime. There were twenty-nine passengers aboard, including George Calderon. Within a couple of hours he was sitting at a café with other passengers ‘in a plane avenue’, writing Kittie a postcard.

Funchal tourist postcard sent to Kittie 31 March 1913

The 2017 equivalent

March is not the ideal month in which to make a cruise to Lisbon, Madeira and the Canaries. The Aguila had had a rough time in the Bay of Biscay and then, as George described it,

We came out of Lisbon in the teeth of a howling cold wind, and for two days the sea all foaming and mountainous to the horizon, the rigging yelling, the bows bumping, and all the passengers laid by; the funeral feeling that comes over a storm-ridden ship. But this morning heat and smoothness, resurrection and smiles; deck games began, the great competition for 6d prizes bought in Lisbon.

By contrast, he wrote from the café (which was probably in the Old Town or on the seafront where the Lower Cable Car Station is today), the weather in Funchal was ‘calm and semi-tropical’. Judging from our own recent visit, I imagine the temperature as about 75 Fahrenheit, the sky a radiant blue, the air soft and with a perfect humidity.

Because the postcard George sent shows Funchal’s Tropical Gardens, I assumed that he had been there. These gardens and Monte, which was an aristocratic quarter high above the city, are certainly one of its top tourist attractions today and on our second day in Funchal, 11 March 2017, we visited them:

Foreground: the old entrance path to the Monte Palace Hotel, now Tropical Gardens, March 2017

Storage jar dated 1915 beside the entrance path to the Monte Palace Hotel, now Tropical Gardens, March 2017

Note, however, that the caption to George’s postcard is not ‘Tropical Gardens’ but ‘Entrance to the Monte Palace Hotel’. In 1913 it was known predominantly as the poshest hotel in Funchal. Of course, George did not stay there, as he was based on the Aguila. Moreover, the grounds of the once hotel seem to have been transformed into the Tropical Gardens as late as the 1990s by a local entrepreneur. Finally, when we got home I read my transcript of George’s letter from Las Palmas in the Canaries dated 2 April 1913 and discovered that in Funchal ‘we stayed below [in the town] to escape the expense of the funicular and toboggan (which runs to 9 shillings in half an hour)’.

Plus ça change! This is precisely why we ourselves  didn’t take the funicular up and wicker toboggan down. Today it would cost you ten euros up to Monte by the cable car, and thirty down by toboggan (unless you shared with one other), totalling £34.69, whilst in 1913 it cost the equivalent of £39.93… The ten-minute downward journey by the wicker toboggan (carro de cesta) is almost unanimously described as exhilarating, and from the church at the top of Monte where the last Austrian Emperor is buried we could see how skilfully the boatered drivers steered them; but I think a lot of people baulk at thirty euros for travelling in a basket, especially as the carros leave you with still quite a way to walk into Funchal. Personal recommendation: take the cable car or a taxi up there for about ten euros, see the sights, then buy a ticket for the funicular down to the Botanical Gardens, which including entry to them costs fourteen. Both gardens are stupendous and you may be lucky enough, as we were, to be buzzed by a Monarch butterfly:

Monarch butterfly on bougainvillea in the Botanical Gardens, Funchal. Photo credit: Trip Advisor.

So George and his friends did not ascend to Monte. The sledge ride down had been devised in 1850, apparently, but in 1913 the accepted way for tourists and the well-off to get about the city was in a variety of carriages on runners, drawn by oxen.

The start of the wicker toboggan rides from Monte, March 2017

Ox-drawn sledges in Funchal, c. 1914

In the evening, George wrote Kittie from the ship:

We’ve had a lovely afternoon, just sampling Funchal as quickly as could be done alone: wandering round the streets, driving along them in an oxsledge (2 oxen pull a covered sledge over the slippery cobbles at a slow pace up and down the steep hilly streets). In the middle of the town running down from the hill, a stony channel between steep river walls […] arum lilies growing wild on banks below and pink geraniums creeping right down as in Cornwall. [All was] sweetened with the clean touching tropical feeling of the strange big-leaved trees, the translucent dark shadows, the flat floors — the luxury of Tahiti penetrating the busy port atmosphere.

The wild arums, geraniums, bougainvillea, carpets of nasturtiums, phalanxes of Agapanthus, the sweet-smelling white acacias in the streets, the dramatic proboscis-waving agaves, African tulip trees and bananas, are indeed fantastic. Altogether, on our five-day visit I should think we saw fifty species of exotic tree and flower in bloom, many of them on a six-mile levada (irrigation channel) walk that we did high above the vine terraces of Campanário, with magnificent views out to sea.

African Tulip on Funchal’s seafront

An author overpowered by acacia blossom on Levada do Norte

George concluded his two-page letter:

The ship is near going and the steward is asking for letters, the winches still rattling. Funchal looking wonderful and Tahitian with its lights in patterns up the hill and the grey mountain against a clear sky. Goodbye for a fortnight: I’ll hardly send a letter now that can reach you much before I do. P.P.P. [Pore Peeky Peety]

His card left Funchal on 31 March and arrived at 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, on 5 April. His letter, which presumably was taken ashore on a tender, left Funchal on 1 April but also reached Hampstead on 5 April. Both were redirected by the housekeeper, Elizabeth Ellis, to Kittie at Acton Reynald in Shropshire. In fact, George wrote Kittie from the Canary Islands a long letter on 2 April and a postcard on 6 April and both arrived before him.

Judging from his surviving letters, George’s time in Funchal was the most enjoyable of his twenty-seven-day cruise. The fact that the word ‘Tahiti’ suddenly pops up twice in his letter to Kittie speaks volumes. His visit to Tahiti in 1906 was one of the happiest times of his life, as one can tell from his posthumous (1921) bestseller about it. To compare Madeira to Tahiti was the highest praise.

By contrast, George had had a ‘terrible hard day on expeditions’ on 26 March at Lisbon, when a group of twenty passengers decided to visit all the palaces within twenty miles of the city. As he explained in a ten-page letter to Kittie written on 28 March, they went

like sheep, tram, train, shay […] with a guide who told us all we ought to know, where the King sat, where the Bishop knelt, and the places of the people in waiting; and stood tuttutting and slapping his old hands anxiously together under the palm trees to get his silly tourists together, who would go wandering off down the green slopes, among the waterfalls and scented bushes instead of hurrying on to the next palace. When we got into Cintra for the second time and were led off to another palace, Joyce [a brewer from Dublin] and I escaped to a little wine shop on the market place and played Portuguese billiards.

The following day there was a ‘general rebellion against official expeditions’ and the ‘shiny old guide wandered with a group of [only] six’. George and three other men formed a group that he called ‘the Gang’ and ‘marauded the town’ shopping. ‘I am interpreter to the party, regarded as a regular dab at Portuguese by the rest’ — which must have been a bit tiring — and in the evening they attended a satirical review in Portuguese, at which one member expected George to perform simultaneous interpreting!

At the Aguila’s next stop after Funchal, Las Palmas in the Canaries, the Gang’s policy of breaking away from organised tourism had a most interesting consequence, which George explained in his letter to Kittie of 2 April:

It is the chief principle of the Gang not to go on the official expeditions prepared for our advantage by the Company; that is our only plan for the day, not to go on the official journey. The only remaining feature of our plan is to take Miss Strachey in our care. This is a very highly educated intelligent Suffragette; about 32, but sadly tinged with old maid, limp, appealing, grateful. Prostrated with work for the Cause, she was prostrated with the voyage next but perked up by Madeira, and did the right thing by the mountains, while we stayed below. […]

Miss Strachey, who is Secretary of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage (Mrs Fawcett’s brand) has suddenly realised that I am the Antisuffrage monster and discovered that we have held official correspondence about debates and things.

The idea of these four men being overcome with protectiveness for feminist activist and organiser Philippa Strachey is hilarious. Since George had first mentioned her (‘an intellectual bright plain woman’) in his letter to Kittie of 28 March from Lisbon, he had presumably turned all his famous Iberian charm and courtesy on her and she now found herself trapped in the metaphorical embrace of an anti-suffrage Beast! He even took it upon himself to defend her against ‘some damned Scotchman’ on the ship who had ‘complained’ about her at dinner…

Philippa Strachey, 1921. Photo credit: National Portrait Gallery.

George was very wrong about three things concerning Miss Strachey. First, she was not thirty-two, but forty; second, she could not be a suffragette if she was a member of the National Union of Suffrage Societies, which rejected militancy, she had to be a suffragist; thirdly, in the sad way men do, George had mistaken her willowiness for lack of grit. Philippa Strachey, who was a sister of Lytton and a cousin of the anti-suffragist St Loe Strachey, organised the Women’s Service in two world wars, lived to be ninety-six, and was ‘always in such good spirits’ that friends visited her at her nursing home ‘in order to be cheered up’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

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Why did George embark on this winter cruise?

Actually, the reason was the same as with Philippa Strachey: he was ‘prostrated by work for the Cause’, but it was a different Cause. He commonly signed himself ‘Pore Peeky Peety’ when he was on a trip designed to restore his health. 1912 had been the busiest year of his life: in January his epoch-making Two Plays by Tchekhof had been published, he rushed around promoting it and a London production of The Seagull with Lydia Yavorskaya, he was involved in two productions of The Fountain, one of which toured, he completed his classic article ‘The Russian Stage’, he spent a month touring the country addressing meetings about the Coal Strike, followed by two months working at the London docks during the strike there, then there was the premiere of The Maharani of Arakan at the Albert Hall, the premiere of Revolt at Manchester, and finally the move in December 1912 to Well Walk after eleven years at Heathland Lodge in the Vale of Health.

All this would have strained the nervous health of any man, and George’s was not robust. A busy family Christmas at Foxwold and Emmetts was evidently not relaxing enough, as immediately afterwards he went downhill. We know this because he was unable to accompany Kittie to her lifelong friend Nina Corbet’s wedding to Reginald Astley at Moreton Corbet in Shropshire on 27 January 1913, and Nina refers to the fact of his illness in a letter that she wrote Kittie four days later from Gibraltar on her honeymoon.

I would really appreciate it if someone who knows could enlighten us about when ‘restorative’ cruises to the Canaries, the Mediterranean, the Far East, and even round the world, first came in. I have the impression that it was in the 1880s, but at that time, surely, such voyages were within the means of the upper classes only? Even when Kittie’s first husband, Archie Ripley, went on a reviving cruise around the world in 1894, judging by his letters the other passengers were well off. On George’s 1913 cruise, however, there were Lancashire cottonspinners, clerks, a farmer, a brewer, and bank cashiers. (George entertained them all night after night with his piano playing.)

There really was nothing out of the ordinary, then, about George taking a month’s package holiday to restore his health. It was unusual, though, for a man to go without his wife. He was seen onto the S.S. Aguila in Liverpool on 20 March 1913 by the auburn, svelte Mary Dowdall, whom he liked very much (she was the wife of his close Oxford friend and Mayor of Liverpool, Harold) and who had brought her fourteen-year-old daughter Ursula with her. In a letter written on board before the Aguila cast off, George apologised to Kittie for having to take the holiday and leave her ‘all alone in our big rambling house’.

But Kittie entirely approved of him going, and on his own. In her memoirs she wrote that a cruise was the only thing that could set him up again after overworking to the point of breakdown: ‘Adventure was essential for George – and a man can’t have completeness of adventure if he has got a woman with him.’ Furthermore, their lives were normally so symbiotic that being with George was pretty demanding and she probably welcomed a break from it.

Kittie did have a life of her own; it revolved around her relations and Nina Corbet. With George away, then, first she went to visit an uncle and cousin in Taunton, and probably Mrs Stewart at Torquay. We can tell this from the redirected addresses of George’s missives from the cruise. Then at the beginning of April she was at Acton Reynald, the Corbet family home. The reason for this is unclear, but it may have been to reunite Nina’s eight-year-old daughter Lesbia with her mother after Nina returned from her honeymoon.

Lesbia Corbet (1905-90) and her brother Jim (1892-1915), c. 1914, reproduced by kind permission of the Lambe family

Lesbia was one of at least four god-daughters that Kittie had, and she told me herself in 1986 that she had lived with Kittie whilst George was ‘away, far away, for a long time’. She thought he might even have been in Russia, but this can be ruled out for several reasons. He was on this restorative cruise and Lesbia probably did not see him from one end of her stay with Kittie to the other, which may have made her think he was away for longer than he was. I have often thought about the strange wistful intonation with which Lesbia said ‘He was away, far away, for a long time’, and have come to the conclusion that it was a reminiscence of the sadness that she perceived in Kittie then, as a mere eight-year-old, and perhaps the sadness that they both felt without George at 42 Well Walk.

In Lesbia’s words, she ‘hardly ever saw’ her mother Nina, who was something of a socialite, and she was ‘brought up by nannies and governesses’. However, probably in 1912 Nina rented Compton Lodge from the singer Clara Butt, ‘so as to be near Aunt Kittie’, as Lesbia put it. The Lodge was at 7 Harley Road, Hampstead, about a mile and a half from 42 Well Walk, and it is quite possible that this meant it was easy for Lesbia to go and stay with the Calderons whenever her mother was otherwise engaged. For Lesbia certainly stayed at Well Walk when George was there, and we know from a letter of John Masefield’s that George was master of ceremonies at her ninth birthday party held in the Calderon home.

Whilst Auntie Kittie was ‘like a mother’ to Lesbia Corbet, and ‘much closer than any of my real aunts’, it is probably true to say that Lesbia was the daughter Kittie Calderon wanted and never had. She stayed in the closest touch with Lesbia all her life, particularly after Nina’s death in 1921. In 1940, Lesbia married a hugely talented naval man, future Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Lambe, whom Kittie adored.

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George and Kittie were reunited either late on 15 April 1913 or next day. He immediately joined rehearsals for the London premiere of his and St John Hankin’s play Thompson. He had been gratified to hear from Kittie (in a letter to him at Lisbon now lost) that not many changes had been made to the script in his absence, and the production, starring the popular comedienne Lottie Venne, was a success.

The next voyage George Calderon was to make was in 1915 in the R.M.S. Orsova bound for the Dardanelles.

Lesbia scrupulously preserved all Kittie and George’s surviving papers after Kittie’s death in 1950 and gave me the inestimable benefit of her knowledge of the Calderons and their circle of friends. My biography George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is dedicated to Lesbia’s memory.