George Calderon was a playwright, essayist and translator as well as a journalist. There was nothing unusual in this as journalism before the First World War did not exist as a distinctive career. In 1911 individuals who described themselves as journalists on their census form were subsequently lumped together by the enumerators for the purpose of analysis with authors and editors of all descriptions and people working in advertising. Only newspaper editors were recognised as a separate occupational category.
What was exceptional, however, was that Calderon the journalist had been to Oxford. He was not the only journalist of his generation to have done so, albeit the only one to record his experiences in a novel. The much older C.P. Scott (1846-1932), long-standing editor and owner of the Manchester Guardian, had attended Corpus Christi in the late 1860s, while Calderon’s contemporary, Geoffrey Dawson (1874-1944), who went on to edit The Times, was up at Magdalen. Both though were exceptional, and Dawson, like Calderon, had been to a top public school. Most journalists and the editors and proprietors of journals and newspapers had had no experience of higher education in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Over the last three years, I have been heading an ESRC-funded prosopographical study of members of the professions in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. We have studied the family history of 1,000 members of the professions recorded in the 1851 census across four generations, beginning with their parents and ending with their grandchildren. Our database, now closed, contains information on about 16,000 men and women (www.victorianprofessions.ox.ac.uk). As our sample was drawn from eight distinctive British provincial towns, it has been possible for the first time to construct an account of middle-class professional life which embraces the country at large and not just the capital. The number of journalists, editors and proprietors in our dataset is not large, about 45. But it is a robust enough sample from which to gain a valuable insight into the chief characteristics of the members of this nascent profession. Some of the 45 belonged to a dynasty of journalists; some were solitary representatives of the occupation in a family that embraced a variety of middle-class careers. Some died very rich; most died poor. Some had literary pretensions and were leading lights in local cultural societies; others were simple reporters. But only one or two, whatever their broader profile, had had an extensive education. Their London avatar was George Bernard Shaw not George Calderon.
Two contrasting examples of the successful provincial journalist among our starting sample of professionals were the Leeds newspaper men, Christopher Kemplay (1804-72) and Sir Edward Baines (1800-90).
Sir Edward Baines, 1870s
The first was editor and proprietor of the Tory and Anglican Leeds Intelligencer. The other edited and owned the Liberal and Non-Conformist Leeds Mercury. Neither had had higher education – Kemplay went to Ripon Grammar School while Baines was sent to New College, Manchester, a school for Protestant dissenters where the chemist John Dalton taught mathematics. Both died rich — Kemplay left £35,000 and Baines a staggering £166,000; both wrote books and pamphlets; and in the third quarter of the nineteenth century both met together frequently at the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Mechanic Institute and Conversation Club. However, their family background and career trajectory were very different.
Christopher was the son of Richard Kemplay who ran a successful private academy in Leeds teaching Latin, Greek, mathematics and modern languages.
Richard Kemplay’s Academy, Leeds, 1820s
(click here to go to the “Leeds Blue Plaques” site for more information)
When his father died in 1830, Christopher took over the school, but he did not stay in teaching for long. In the course of the 1830s, he moved into finance, which was easy to do in an unregulated age, and became a director of the Leeds Commercial Banking Company. Banking too cannot have been to his taste, for in April 1842, shortly after he married, he resigned his directorship to become owner of the Intelligencer, founded by Griffith Wright in 1754. This was a big concern and he was a hands-on proprietor. In the 1851 census he called himself a printer and journalist as well as a newspaper editor and owner and claimed to be employing 80 people. He ran the newspaper until 1866, when he sold it to the newly formed Yorkshire Conservative Newspapers Company which started the Yorkshire Post. He then retired to live off his investments for the last years of his life. Baines in contrast was born into a newspaper family. His father, also Edward (1774-1848), had bought the Leeds Mercury in 1801 and Baines Jnr worked under his father as a cub-reporter from 1815. He was editor three years later (at the age of eighteen!) and co-proprietor from 1827. As he lived until 1890, he unsurprisingly tired of the newspaper business in his middle-age and like his father and elder brother before him was elected to Parliament for Leeds in 1859 as a Liberal where he served until 1874. He never let go of the Mercury, however. He retained the controlling interest until he died and left the paper to his children.
Neither Christopher nor Edward sired a prolific progeny. Christopher had two sons and two daughters. Only Caroline (1843-1915), who married Thomas Clarke Tatham (1839-1914), a Cambridge-educated London barrister with South American business interests, had children of her own. Neither of his sons became a journalist: one was an artist and the other studied for the bar. Edward had three sons and four daughters but they were no more fruitful. Only John William (1839-75) and Anne Catherine (1841-1924) left offspring. John William was the only son to follow in his father’s footsteps and run the Leeds Mercury. He had two elder brothers: one became a corn flour and seed merchant, the other a barrister who went to London University. Through Caroline, Christopher had two grandchildren, Christopher Kemplay Tatham (1881-1970), a barrister, and Geoffrey Bulmer Tatham (1882-1918), an ecclesiastical historian, who died on the Somme.
Geoffrey Bulmer Tatham, 1917/18
Copyright: © IWM. Original Source:
http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205389473
Both, like their father, attended Trinity, Cambridge. Through John William, Edward had six grandchildren, two sons and four daughters. One of the two sons, Herbert Stanhope (1868-96), also became a newspaper man: he was the fourth generation of Baines to edit the Mercury. The other, Edward, b. 1866, became a physician. John William, like his father, grandfather and virtually all journalists before 1914, had not had a higher education, but both Herbert and Edward went to Caius, Cambridge, after attending Leeds Grammar School. Herbert had apparently been brought up to be a newspaper man, so perhaps it was simply felt that he should not be denied the opportunities given his elder brother. Herbert, who married Elizabeth Graham, one of the first women to attend Newnham, was the last direct descendant of Edward Baines to be associated with the newspaper trade. His own son, John (b. 1894), grandson and great grandson all went to Winchester College, then served in the army as sappers. In 2015 Andrew Baines, Sir Edward’s great-great-great-grandson, and his sister Joanna Palmer published the letters their grandfather sent home from France and Salonika during the Great War.
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon
It is possible that Calderon would have heard of the Kemplays. Christopher’s daughter Caroline was not the only member of the family to move to London. His younger brother, James, who died in 1882, was a prominent London QC, based in Leinster Gardens Paddington, who had been 4th Wrangler in the Cambridge Tripos of 1833. It is certain Calderon would have heard of Sir Edward Baines. Sir Edward was one of the great journalists of the nineteenth century who had sprung to national fame early in life when he exposed the government provocateur, Oliver the Spy. Baines moreover was a lover of Italian Renaissance art whose collection of engravings, lithographs, copies and some originals was mainly left to the Yorkshire College, in 1890 part of the Victoria University. The majority of the other journalists and their families in our database, Calderon would certainly have never encountered. They were too poor and obscure or too solidly provincial to have crossed his horizon. Nonetheless, he and they belonged to the same parvenu tribe that was slowly evolving into our modern conception of the fourth estate and their lives, like his, deserve to be better known.
Laurence Brockliss is Fellow and Tutor in History at Magdalen College, Oxford, and Professor of Early Modern French History at the University of Oxford. He works on the history of education, science and medicine in Britain and France between 1500 and the present day. His books include French Universities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford, 1986); [with Colin Jones] The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997); Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2002); and The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford, 2016). He is currently involved in an ESRC-funded study of the professions in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
© Laurence Brockliss, 2017
Dear Laurence,
Your extremely interesting post has brought to the surface a question that I had lurking at the back of my mind. When I was researching the relationship between George Calderon and his Oxford college, Trinity, I found myself pondering on a final “What if…”.
What if George had not been killed at Gallipoli? Would he, like his undergraduate friend Laurence Binyon, have ended his days as an Honorary Fellow of his college?
The professions were and are very well represented in the ranks of Trinity’s honorary fellows. But the 20th-century electorate (the actual fellows) were characteristically snooty in their selection of eminent churchmen, judges, professors, and ambassadors. Cecil Lubbock (who took up a scholarship at Trinity in the year that George graduated) served as Governor of the Bank of England, and was awarded a knighthood. But the Oxford accolade that he most coveted was always denied him, on the grounds that, to the dons, banking smacked of ‘trade’. I assumed that journalism – given its close association with the ‘dirty’ work of printing and its popularity with non-graduates – would have been similarly tainted, however great George’s writing about the First World War might have been. I am pleased, however, to discover (from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) that the two Oxford-graduate journalists whom you mention, C. P. Scott and Geoffrey Dawson, both became honorary fellows of their colleges (Corpus Christi and Magdalen) in 1923 and 1926. But not on account of their skills as hacks; they were honoured for their influential positions in society as long-serving editors of their newspapers.
The multifarious (and perhaps unstable) George Calderon, surely, could never have stuck to one job like that. But what if he had written the play or plays about the aftermath or the commemoration of the War? I dare to think that then he might have got the call. And I hope that he would have been pleased.
I have to confess that until a few months ago I did not know what prosopography is. But following Laurence Brockliss’s guest post I am a total convert!
Prosopographical studies like the one carried out by Professor Brockliss and his team should be invaluable to biographers. A study of a good sample of a profession can contextualise a biographical exponent of that profession, put his/her activity in proper perspective, and should be consulted by the biographer asap. I daresay many biographers do not ask themselves what the reality and status of their subject’s profession was at all, and others only grope towards discovering that. Prosopographical studies like Professor Brockliss’s will prevent biographers from having to ‘discover America’.
I greatly regret having fallen into the latter category myself. When I started research on the chapter about George in Russia (1895-97) I was mildly surprised that, with no experience of student journalism at Oxford (as far as we know), and no publications but plenty of rejections between graduation and 1895, he was able to slip into being a special correspondent in Russia for the Pall Mall Gazette and Standard, and even cover the coronation of Nicholas II for them. I put it down to his eminent Victorian father’s networking with editors — for which there is enough documentary evidence. But Laurence Brockliss’s post indicates that the decisive features were just as likely George’s having attended Oxford and Rugby. These gave him the cachet and the entrée (he had edited a magazine at Rugby, incidentally).
Equally, Brockliss’s marvellously informative post has belatedly led me to distinguish an elephant in the room. I remember reading an American Slavist’s description of George as ‘the English journalist’ and guffawing… For ‘us’, English Calderonians, George is, of course, the man who put Chekhov on the British stage, the witty and deeply satirical author of Downy V. Green, Dwala and The Fountain, the prescient dramatist of Revolt, the so light-penned author of Tahiti, the political activist, the self-sacrificing war hero… But between 1895 and 1903 he contributed on average three articles a year to the newspaper and periodical press, between 1907 and 1910 he published 51 reviews in the TLS, and there wasn’t a year between 1911 and 1914 when he did not write something for the press, usually The Times. He was a journalist, a journalist!
Since the 1930s, at least, the problem with George’s reputation has been that he is viewed as ‘too versatile’, too ‘polymathic’, not ‘focussed’ enough, too ‘maverick’, possibly ‘amateur’, possibly (horreurs!) ‘dilettante’… I assume that is what Clare Hopkins means by ‘multifarious (and perhaps unstable)’ in her very fine Comment on Professor Brockliss’s post. As followers over the past nearly three years will have gathered, my own thesis is that he was not a dilettante, but an ‘Edwardian genius’, which is someone who passionately believed in excellence, freedom of development, versatility, and fulfilling the whole person. I can no longer deny, however, that the ONE ‘stability’ of George’s creative career was his journalism. Well, I might rephrase that as ‘writing’ — whatever else he was, he was always a born writer — but if you look at his writing career biographically, the single most continuous thread is his writing for the press, which Professor Brockliss’s post demonstrates he had exceptional access to amongst Edwardian ‘journalists’ because of his education. Whether George actually ever met W.T. Stead, the ‘greatest journalist of the age’, there is no doubt that their paths crossed; in particular, they were both the object of attentions from the extremely influential London Tsarist agent Olga Novikoff. George’s supreme contribution in The Times to appreciation of Ballets Russes’ values when Diaghilev’s company came to London in 1911 is testimony to his relatively high status in Edwardian ‘journalism’.
I am slightly tweaking my final chapter, ‘Who George Calderon Was’, in the light of this superb guest post.