Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon, 1912
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Captain of the 11
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon c.1901
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of armsRecent Comments
- John Pym on Two anniversaries We are all, followers and occasional contributors, beholden to you, Patrick, for reminding us for ten years that the past is worth remembering and for keeping alive the... (August 17, 2024 at 1:06 pm)
- Patrick Miles on A second Family Bible Very many thanks for fleshing that point out -- and so entertainingly! (I love your reference to creative writing courses, which are a phobia of mine.) Although several... (August 2, 2024 at 11:03 am)
- Laurence Brockliss on A second Family Bible When I say that the British Republic of Letters was dead by 1880, I don't mean to imply that thereafter there were no men and women outside universities, institutes and... (August 2, 2024 at 9:19 am)
- Patrick Miles on A second Family Bible Thank you for devoting valuable time to writing this fascinating Comment. If I may say so, it is awe-inspiring to see the author of a monumental work standing back from that... (July 31, 2024 at 5:32 pm)
- Laurence Brockliss on A second Family Bible Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain was a new departure for me. For most of my adult life I have worked on seventeenth and eighteenth century France. It is also... (July 24, 2024 at 11:31 am)
Tag Archives: The Great War
10 March 1915
Today, Wednesday 10 March, a War Council meeting was held at which Kitchener announced that he would now send his last Regular Army division, the 29th, comprising about 15,000 men, to the Mediterranean to join the forces being despatched from … Continue reading
9 March 1915
Today, the Commander of the East Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sackville Carden, suddenly telegraphed the Admiralty that he could do no more to knock out the Intermediate Defences of the Dardanelles until he had received more planes for aerial reconnaissance inland. … Continue reading
8 March 1915
On this day the East Mediterranean Fleet’s bombardment of the shore batteries at the Dardenelles that had begun on 25 February was suspended. It had not gone well. The shelling of the outer forts, from a very safe distance, appeared … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Dardanelles, Gallipoli, Geehl, George Calderon, Kum Kale, Nusrat, Sedd el Bahr, The Great War, World War I
Leave a comment
Back to Brockhurst
About today, 3 March 1915, George Calderon returned to barracks at Fort Brockhurst near Gosport in Hampshire. He had lost about a month through illness. Now his training probably began in earnest. The aim was to make him, at the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Fort Brockhurst, General Kitchener, George Calderon, Gosport, New Army, The Great War, World War I
2 Comments
The return to Tahiti
Calderon arrived in London from Tahiti on 30 October 1906 and started writing his book about the island in November 1907. However, he soon gave it up to concentrate on his plays The Fountain and Cromwell: Mall o’Monks. Meanwhile, as Kittie put … Continue reading
‘Black Pot’ and black holes
For the first two years that I was writing George Calderon’s biography, its working title was Black Pot: The Mysterious Life of George Calderon. The reason for this was not just that several people before me had failed to find significantly … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, biography, Brothers Grimm, Charles Frohman, comments, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Kum Kale, Mabel Dearmer, Martin Shaw, Percy Lubbock, Peter Pan, Sedd el Bahr, Tahiti, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, The Lamp, William Caine, World War I
Leave a comment
George convalescent
Among the more than a thousand letters in George and Kittie’s archive and eight international archives, there appears to be not one from or to either of them for the fortnight or so in February/March 1915 that George was at … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian marriage
Tagged Beethoven, card games, Debussy, Dr Albert Tebb, Fort Brockhurst, George Calderon, Glazunov, J.S. Bach, Kittie Calderon, Liadov, Percy Lubbock, Rakhmaninov, Schumann, Shadrach, Sibelius, The Great War, Tommy, Trinity College Oxford, Womack, World War I
Leave a comment
19 February 1915: The die is caught…
At a meeting of the War Council on this day, Kitchener withdrew his agreement to send the crack 29th Division to the Dardanelles. Before the die could hit the cloth, he had caught it and pocketed it again. His action … Continue reading
16 February 1915: The die is tossed…
Since the War Council had decided on 28 January (see my post of that date) to mount a purely naval operation to force the Dardanelles a month later, not a great deal had happened. Churchill, as First Lord of the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Dardanelles, Gallipoli, General Kitchener, George Calderon, The Great War, Winston Churchill, World War I
Leave a comment
15 February 1915
About today one hundred years ago, George Calderon finally escaped from the quarantine of Fort Brockhurst near Gosport and made it home to Hampstead for at least a fortnight’s sick-leave. As Kittie wrote in her memoirs, he was ‘still very … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian marriage
Tagged Fort Brockhurst, George Calderon, Gosport, Hampstead, Kittie Calderon, satire, The Great War, World War I
Leave a comment
The dear departed
After writing the last sentence of George’s life in its strict earthly sense (I have two short chapters about his and Kittie’s afterlife still to write), I left the manuscript chapter for a day before coming back to revise it, as … Continue reading
The Scott syndrome
Two days ago, I happened to hear on Radio 3 Sarah Walker’s introduction to her ‘Choice’ on Essential Classics, which was Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica (sic). As I recall it now, she said that the composer was commissioned to write the … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged 'real time', Battle of the Brickstacks, biographies, biography, comments, Constantinople, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Ian Hamilton, Kittie Calderon, Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Robert Falcon Scott, Sinfonia Antartica, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Vaughan Williams, World War I, Ypres
Leave a comment
A biographer sighs
I have now written the last chapter of Calderon’s life (not the last chapter of the book), and revised it in manuscript. I have been living with the whole Gallipoli campaign for the past three months. Although this has not … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Alan Moorehead, biography, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Peter Hart, The Great War, World War I
Leave a comment
They all fall down
Suddenly, in early February 1915, the inmates of Fort Brockhurst were struck by influenza. Kittie says the ‘whole regiment’ went down, but presumably this is figurative. Certainly hundreds were affected, so perhaps the whole 9th (Service) Battalion was garrisoned in … Continue reading
The biographer perspires
For a few days, I am almost entirely taken up with two smallish but extended projects that have nothing to do with my biography of George Calderon. This is highly frustrating. I tied up chapter 14, which ends with George … Continue reading →