Commemoration (concluded)

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Since this blog started in July last year, I have taken part in many conversations, both viva voce and online, about followers’ responses to George Calderon’s war experience, to the War as it has been unfolding, and to what I can only call the process of commemoration of World War I as we are experiencing it in Britain. With less than a month to the closing of the blog, it is perhaps appropriate to present some of those responses (without attributing them), and some of my thoughts about them. The subject is, of course, complex, perhaps unsurveyable in depth and breadth. I would like to be able to give a reasoned, joined up argument about it, but I have attempted to do this over several hours and failed, so I must ask you to be indulgent to these fragments.

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I was moved by John Pym’s poem ‘To the Memory of George Calderon’, which I posted yesterday, and I imagine followers were too. In a sense, Mr Pym has known George Calderon longer than I have. He heard about him and Kittie from his own grandfather, Evey Pym, who features from day one of this blog, and the Calderons’ spirits, so to speak, still hung in the air when Mr Pym’s father Jack, his uncle Roly, and aunt Elizabeth (George’s god-daughter), lived at or visited Foxwold as adults. Mr Pym is also, of course, familiar with the literature about George, starting with his great-uncle Percy Lubbock’s 1921 Sketch from Memory. Thus, although John Hussey (Finding Margaret: The Elusive Margaret Bernardine Hall, 2011) can speak of George’s ‘legendary sangfroid’, I know that George’s emotional openness in Mr Pym’s poem is based on both knowledge and understanding of the man, and personally I find it convincing.

John Pym’s poem is a marvellous example of empathy; an empathetic act doubtless facilitated by the spirit of the place in which it was composed.

But it is not all empathy. The quotes around ‘Dear Keety’ indicate that although these two words are George’s in origin, they are being uttered by the author; the author, Mr Pym, is (barely perceptibly) intruding himself here. The refrain is in a double voice. George’s words ‘Kittie, Kittie’ have George’s sangfroid, Mr Pym’s ‘Dear Keety’ have a catch in them. And I venture to suggest that they produce that catch of emotion in the reader too.

It’s this ‘catch of emotion’ that all of us, surely, have experienced again and again since the commemoration of World War I began last year. The ‘re-lived’ emotion of the Declaration of War on 4 August gripped the nation. Millions felt the desire to put burning candles on their windowsills and snuff them out at midnight in commemoration of Sir Edward Grey’s famous words. Thousands upon thousands visited the sea of poppies at the Tower, and as far as I know every single flower was bought afterwards. A large photograph of the installation, with a sober caption, appeared in the German newspaper Die Zeit.

Above all, though, the commemoration of World War I, and this blog, produce catches of emotion that we cannot hold. We know too well those moments of shading the eyes, turning away, spluttering, weeping, sobbing. On 4 August I was overwhelmed by the tragic solemnity of the moment and, frankly, by the challenges of the journey ahead on the blog. In October, when Calderon was at Ypres, I was walking through Cambridge when I just thought of George and Kittie’s situation, penetrated it more empathetically I suppose, and burst into tears muttering their names. Followers have told me of similar moments, for instance 10 November 1914 when George was in hospital, learned of the death of his commanding officer, and himself ‘downright cried’, which Kittie said was ‘so unlike him’; and especially up to, on, and immediately after 4 June 1915. At our own commemoration in Hampstead on 4 June there were moments of ‘catch’ in all the readings, even though by then we had read the texts to ourselves several times.

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I think it will be quickest to present the conversation we have had about these issues by resolving it into the key questions it has raised:

What triggers such intense emotions in us about the War or George and Kittie’s story? What are these actually emotions of? Is it a form of grief or bereavement? Have we as a nation suddenly become emotionally more ‘vulnerable’, indeed tearful, indeed maudlin? How often can one experience these emotions about the war dead before our feeling loses authenticity? Have we come to enjoy being moved in this way? Have we become addicted to it? Is there anything wrong about that? Is there any harm or danger in it? Can we sustain this emotional response to the War another four years? Will we expect ‘closure’ on our re-living and commemoration of this war? Do the British as a nation need ‘closure’ now on World War I? 

I cannot answer all these questions, but I shall attempt to allude to them all.

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As Santanu Das’s book Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2005) examines so admirably, the terrible, Apocalyptic worlds of the Western Front and Gallipoli were themselves almost unbearably ‘touchy and feely’. I suggest that we all ‘know’ this, by which I mean we have already ingested deep into our psyches not only the images of mud, corpses and no man’s land, but this context of human intimacy in extremis.

Perhaps this is why it is so often small, even trivial, personal details that can trigger in us such unwithstandable emotion. Archivists work in archives with papers covered in words, but as Das himself says, the stains of trench mud on a letter and ‘a bunch of blue and white flowers, the dried stalks still green pressed onto the letter’ — the ‘material tokens of memory’ — are almost too ‘intimate and unsettling’. The fact that ten-year-old Lesbia Corbet had already tried on her bridesmaid’s dress for her brother Jim’s wedding when he was killed at Givenchy (see my posts of 15 and 17 April) is of a similar order; or George’s arachnophobia as shells are flying overhead at Gallipoli. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is currently tweeting inscriptions on gravestones: ‘I’m all right mother cheerio’ is a fair example of how overwhelming their brevity and authenticity can be.

These small things instantly transport us to the reality of the person and his/her predicament linked to the War; simultaneously they access all we know and feel about the tragedy of World War I; and it is often far too much to bear. I think initially, as one holds the letter with the pressed flowers, say, or reads the living inscription, one’s feelings are akin to grief and bereavement, because one momentarily feels one knows that person. But one also knows they were killed next day, or their women’s and families’ lives destroyed, and those are the ‘impossible’ facts that can engulf one. In a word, I think that what commemoration in 2015 does, whether in the form of a service, or heart-rending biographies of the fallen, or the reading of war poetry, or the viewing of personal items in glass cases at an exhibition, is make us re-experience to the full the pity of war.

Where the blog is concerned, I think it is also the pity of George and Kittie’s lives that followers, and I, sometimes find too much. There is no space here to define or analyse this ‘pity’, or what Wilfred Owen meant by ‘the pity of war’, but I do not think that is necessary.

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I happen to believe it is our own empathy that enables us to be so moved by these small items or details, or aspects of commemoration, and I believe that there has been an enormous increase in the recognition, understanding and cultivation of empathy in Britain in the last thirty years or so. Europeans and North Americans remark on it. We increasingly believe that ‘feeling into’ a person’s situation is vital to our emotional understanding of them and to our own ’emotional intelligence’ (a phrase, incidentally, that George was one of the first to use in print, in 1911). Surely this is a good thing?

Kierkegaard wrote: ‘The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective at times — but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.’ That is true empathy. But obviously, if our empathy is restricted to ‘putting ourselves in other people’s shoes’ and feeling and thinking what we would experience in those shoes, it risks being about ourselves rather than others. The possibility is always there that our pity is merely a rush of self-pity.

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We certainly have become more ‘tearful’ as a nation, but I think one reason is that society has become theatricalised almost to saturation. Crimes, disasters, public inquiries, very recent political history, are instantly translated to the television screen, the computer screen, film or the stage. Bizarrely — to older generations — an historical event like Waterloo is no longer just commemorated, it has to be ‘enacted’ (not ‘re-enacted’), and the media even talk of ‘Napoleon’ or ‘Wellington’ when they mean the actors impersonating them. We are invited by the media to respond to real events as theatrical performances. Above all, we are an instantly self-imaging society. We are therefore more used than ever to responding to a third term: the imaged, quasi-dramatic representation of people and events, rather than the individuals and the events themselves. Within hours of a disaster anywhere in the world, we can watch ‘footage’ of it and emote about it. In May 1915 Britons had a newspaper with one archive photograph of the Lusitania on its front page.

If the paradigm of our twenty-first-century empathy is theatre, can we learn anything from the experience and tradition of audience empathy in the real theatre?

Possibly. I have said already that I think our powers of genuine empathy access the ‘tragedy’ of the War, and if by that we mean something complexly, unbearably ineluctable, then those feelings are akin to the fear and pity of the greatest tragic plays.

In that context, Aristotle’s concept of ‘catharsis’ might look applicable. Unfortunately, theatrical catharsis is most commonly thought of as ‘purifying’, ‘purging’, getting rid of the strongest emotions we are capable of through empathy in the theatre. It is true, I believe, that the notion of bowel evacuation or surgical bleeding is present in Aristotle’s original concept. But how can this help us in coming to terms with the tragedy of the fallen in World War I? It seems too much as though it is designed to produce anaesthesia; a ‘closure’ and ‘return to equanimity’ indistinguishable, perhaps, from indifference.

In truth I don’t believe theatrical catharsis is about an audience getting rid of visceral emotions, it is about these emotions enabling us to face what we are seeing on the stage and know exists in real life. In this sense, there can be comic as well as tragic catharsis. I believe a fragment of Mikhail Bakhtin’s expresses theatrical catharsis more accurately: ‘Tragedy and laughter look being in the eyes equally fearlessly, they do not construct any illusions, they are sober and exacting.’ Nadezhda Mandel’shtam also made a vital distinction, when she said that ‘genuine tragedy is rooted in an understanding of the nature of evil, and only that tragedy can bring us catharsis’.  If our empathetic response to the commemoration and ‘material tokens of memory’ of World War I helps us to look being and evil in the eyes fearlessly, to dispense with all illusion about this human tragedy, then perhaps catharsis is the right word for what we are going through in these four years.

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It is interesting that psychologists use the word ‘catharsis’ in the sense of ‘the purging of the effects [my italics] of pent-up emotion and repressed thoughts, by bringing them to the surface of consciousness’ (Chambers). On ‘the surface of consciousness’, presumably, they are more likely to be cognitively, intellectually, rationally understood — and their sources faced. I therefore think that the identity with theatrical catharsis, if we accept Bakhtin’s and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam’s descriptions of it, may hold.

The point is, empathy is not an end in itself. I have always felt that the limits of empathy must be understanding. You ‘feel in’, you must attempt to be fully ‘subjective’ to others, but this is the beginning of a process. The process should be towards understanding, indeed ‘knowing’ — not knowing in a closed-off sense, but a rational knowing that is momentarily at rest and secure, that ‘looks being in the eyes fearlessly’, perhaps. It is a process that should lead to knowledge and intelligent action.

Are there people who are capable of great empathy but refuse to reach beyond it? I would say that the personal life of the late Princess of Wales, who is often credited with our ‘discovery’ of empathy as a nation, suggests there are. I have also had colleagues with superb powers of emotional understanding, but who felt no need to use them to help students actually solve their problems.

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If the effect of an empathetic response is true cathartic understanding, I see no reason why there is anything wrong, harmful or dangerous about repeating the experience. We do not suggest that seeing one Agamemnon or King Lear is enough. All the time we have an authentic empathetic response to the ‘tokens of memory’ of the War, we are learning. I see no reason why we cannot sustain our emotional response to it for four years if that emotional response is always pure, ‘exacting’, committed to cathartic understanding, and does not degenerate into self-indulgence. I admit that empathy can be exhausting, but our gains in understanding of the tragedy that was the War can be immense.

The Sirens of sentiment, though, lie always in wait. The concept of ‘tragic pleasure’ has always been a dubious one, and we all know how easy it is to fall into enjoying strong feelings. The more they are repeated, the greater the temptation to become addicted to them. Again, I think the blanket theatricalisation of our lives encourages that: we are asked to respond physically to all the media spectacles around us and we end up always crying, or always demonstratively sweeping the (sometimes non-existent) tears from the corners of our eyes like, well, bad tragedians.

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In fine, the conversation is about authentic empathy and its surrogate, sentiment. We associate sentimentality more with the Victorians than the Edwardians, so Laurence Binyon’s words to Kittie about his memorial ode to George (see my post of 25 June) are all the more interesting. Here is the author of the most quoted and, many would say, most emotionally churning poem to come out of the First World War, drawing back from emotionality because of what George was: ‘I wanted to be as exact as I could, and the thought of him cannot be anything but tonic, an astringent to sentiment.’ It is a salutary reminder, a warning against the pleasurable emotional response to the Last Post or ‘For the Fallen’; an astringent from George Calderon himself.

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‘Closure’ has been defined as ‘the evolution of emotions to make them more stable and bearable’ and, less positively, as ‘a feeling of satisfaction or resignation when a particular episode has come to an end’ (Chambers).

It would be interesting indeed to hear the response of ‘professional’ psychologists, psychotherapists and bereavement counsellors to the conversation about this subject that we Calderonians and blog followers have had over the last year and which I have endeavoured to display above. However, I believe that we all have a right as ‘amateur’ psychologists yet full-time human beings, to present our take on it.

I have to say that I meet very few people in the theatre who believe in ‘closure’. This is probably because their life’s work is with empathy, emotions, and the expression of them. They rely on their emotional memory being open and accessible. They cannot just ‘close off’ those sources of their lives as actors or directors. It would be self-destructive. It would be to deny the existence, the goodness, of those sources.

Similarly, I feel that the tragedy of the First World War, for nations and for individuals, is so immense and so important to us that we should never seek ’emotional closure’ on it, just as a German president has said that for his nation there can never be ‘moral closure’. We always need our empathetic response to the fallen, and to the survivors, in order to relate to them fully as human beings. To remember them emotionally is the most human form of memory. We need to do this forever, in order to understand the lessons of this War and, I believe, to keep renewing ourselves as a nation.

I am especially grateful to Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, for her extended contributions over the past year to the conversation about Commemoration. (Click here for a comment by Clare with her thoughts on the subject.)

Next entry: Letter from Alexandria

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Commemoration (to be concluded)

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Patrick Miles
To the Memory of George Calderon

© Poem, John Pym 2015

Mr Pym, who is the grandson of Violet and Evey Pym, of Foxwold, two of the Calderons’ closest friends, sent me this poem a fortnight before the anniversary of George Calderon’s death. He was not able to take part in the Commemoration itself at Hampstead on 4 June. Emmetts, the garden of which is now a National Trust property, was the home of Violet’s parents, Frederic and Catherine Lubbock, and is within walking distance of Foxwold.

The poem is voiced for George, but the refrain may be taken to be in a dual voice: ‘Kittie, Kittie’ is George speaking, but ‘Dear Keety’ is the author quoting George’s ‘Russianised’ version used, for instance, in his letter of 10 May 1915 as he left Devonport for Gallipoli (‘Good night and goodbye, dear Keety; your loving old spouse P.’).

‘that narrow bridge’: see Macaulay’s poem How Horatius Kept the Bridge. George Calderon was a classical scholar.

‘Sneasley’: Anton Chekhov, whose surname is derived from the Russian for sneeze.

‘Archie’s mother, Laura’: Archie Ripley (1866-98) was Kittie Calderon’s first husband; his mother Laura Ripley (Gurney by her first marriage) was a grandmother of Percy Lubbock and is John Pym’s great-great-grandmother. Flowers were laid on the Ripley family grave at Earlham in an act of remembrance on 2 May 2015.

‘Percy, my first remembrancer’ is Percy Lubbock, author of George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921); ‘his beloved sister’ is Violet Pym.

‘Edwaaardians’: an older generation pronounced the ‘ward’ syllable to rhyme with ‘card’.

‘The whistle blows’: to go over the top.

Next entry: Commemoration (concluded)

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Gallipoli: planning a disaster

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Patrick Miles

The Third Battle of Krithia, in which George Calderon was killed on 4 June, may have been the bloodiest single battle fought by the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force at Gallipoli, i.e. in terms of its own losses. Enemy losses, both in the Allied attacks and Turkish counterattacks, were even greater. The British and French troops were exhausted, and ‘by the middle of June […] there was scarcely a man on the peninsula who was not a victim to the prevailing epidemic of dysenteric diarrhoea’ (Official History).

So where was the campaign to go now?

Ian Hamilton had decided this before 4 June: when he received the reinforcements he had requested, he would attempt to break out from Anzac across the narrowest part of the southern peninsula, capture Maidos and Kilid Bahr, and cut off the Turks’ southern communications. In absolute secrecy, General Birdwood had presented a scheme for the attack to Hamilton on 30 May. Four days after the Third Battle of Krithia, Hamilton received a cable from Kitchener saying that he was sending out three new divisions. These, of course, might take up to five weeks to arrive, but they were enough for Hamilton’s staff to start planning in detail what they hoped would be the ‘decisive blow’ of the campaign. In the last week of June, Kitchener even offered Hamilton two more divisions, which he accepted. The new government was hoping for a spectacular success.

Meanwhile, it was decided that the pressure must be maintained on the Turks at all costs. This time the attacks would be concentrated on the two flanks where they had failed on 4 June, and the biggest concentration of howitzers possible would be used before the infantry went in. On 21 June the French attempted to take the deadly Turkish fortifications on the crest of Kereves Spur, but captured only Haricot Redoubt. On 28 June the British tried the same tactics along Gully Spur and Gully Ravine. George’s old regiment, the 1st King’s Own Scottish Borderers, had been reattached to the 87th Brigade after 4 June, moved to the left of the line, and took part in these engagements. The Turks sustained huge losses in their counterattacks and feared the complete collapse of their right flank. But the British VIII Corps simply did not have enough howitzers at its disposal; as a result, in the very sector of Fir Tree Spur where George had fallen on 4 June the 156th Brigade (Royal Scots and Scottish Rifles) were massacred. Today, 30 June 1915, the French were able to take advantage of the Turks’ disarray on the British front to capture the rest of the Kereves Spur fortress (the ‘Quadrilateral’).

The new ‘bite and hold’ tactics looked to have been successful. But, yet again, they had come at a terrible cost to the attackers. The French had given their all but were under constant bombardment from the Asiatic shore. In Peter Hart’s words, ‘They would do little more for the rest of the campaign than hold their line’. The 156th Brigade were part of the 52nd (Lowland) Division that had started arriving two days after George’s death; Hamilton’s first reinforcement division, then, was already depleted. Moreover, knowing that the real thrust was to come at Anzac/Suvla, at least one member of the British higher command regarded all these attacks as ‘cruel and wasteful’.

It seems that Hamilton had resigned himself to a ‘no-win’ situation at Helles. Everything, therefore, now depended on the planning and execution of the ‘decisive blow’ to be launched from the north in August. If that failed, the disaster would be complete.

Next entry: Commemoration (to be concluded)

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Another Calderon signs up

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Patrick Miles

At Edmonton, Alberta, on this day in 1915, George’s eldest brother, the architect Alfred Merigon Calderon (q.v.), applied to join the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force — as their youngest brother, Frederick Elwyn, had on 23 September 1914. It is not clear whether Fred (q.v.) was by now on the Western Front, or whether he was still a reservist in Britain and staying with his mother Clara in London on weekend leave. Had Fred, or Clara, telegrammed Alfred to tell him that George was ‘wounded’? Had this affected in any way his decision to sign up for active service?

A M Calderon's Enlistment Papers

Alfred Merigon Calderon’s application for active service

In fact, before they emigrated to Canada both Frederick and Alfred Calderon appear to have served many years in the Middlesex Rifles as cadets and by 1915 Alfred had been a commissioned officer with the 66th Canadian Battalion for about a decade.

There was a considerable difference in their ages, however: in 1915 Fred was 41 and Alfred Merigon 54… In other words, in the Attestation above Alfred had falsified his age by ten years! This is not the only interesting thing about the above form. It looks as though he completed it using a typewriter. In answer to the question ‘What is your religion?’ he had typed ‘Yes’, but had to correct it longhand to ‘Church of England’. Perhaps he was influenced here by his father’s flippant attitude to religion: in the 1881 census Philip Hermogenes Calderon, who was well known for his theatrical impersonations, had prefixed his name with ‘Bishop’.

Alfred Calderon fought on the Western Front for three years with the 1st Battalion, Edmonton Regiment, and seems to have returned to Canada in 1919 with a distinguished service medal and the rank of Captain.

Fred Calderon, who had visited George in hospital in London in November 1914, and to whom George was particularly close (see my post of 1 November 2014), was killed by a sniper at Ypres on 3 April 1916 and is buried at Zillebeke (q.v.), not more than a couple of miles from where George was wounded on 29 October 1914.

Both Alfred and Fred can be seen on the family photograph illustrating my post of 27 September 2014.

Next entry: Gallipoli: planning a disaster

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…then three come along at once

Posted on June 27, 2015 by Patrick Miles

When I started my deeper research for this biography in 2010, one of the things I did was trawl the Web for manuscripts of George’s that were up for sale. I found only one item, which we bought for the archive. (It was two unpublished letters from George to the editor of the Cambridge Magazine in 1912 following his tumultuous public appearance in Cambridge during the Coal Strike and the tour of his play The Fountain.)

I have regularly searched the Web since, but never found anything. Then, as readers of the blog will know, in March the truly amazing Katy George in Kent found a letter of Kittie’s amongst some items in a charity shop (see Katy’s Comment of 15 March and my post of 23 March). As if that were not enough, at the end of May Katy spotted a copy of George’s 1904 Dwala for sale through Abebooks, inscribed by Kittie and with a letter from her preserved inside it! It arrived from Tasmania only six days later. The book itself is very rare, and turned out to be a gift from Kittie to Frederick O’Brien, an American writer on the South Seas who had sent her two copies of his long, laudatory article on George’s Tahiti in the New York Times Book Review of 5 March 1922. She wrote to thank him for this.

Finally, a fortnight ago, my blogmaster came across this item for sale on a website for theatrical memorabilia:

Christmas 1901 Cartoon

Click image to enlarge.

It is inscribed by Kittie on the back in pencil: A Christmas card drawn by G.C. to try and persuade my mother to come down to Christmas dinner — our first Christmas at Heathland Lodge 1901 Hampstead.

The dog greeting Mrs Hamilton on the red carpet is Jones (see the photograph of Kittie in the Calderonia biographies). The three minions on the left are carrying bowls of punch. The man with large raised right arm and left hand holding a giant glass is George, the woman with an exaggerated bun of hair is Kittie, and the short figure between them is perhaps George’s mother Clara. The couplet bottom right reads:

NONE BUT THE BRAVE DESERVE THE FARE:
BE BRAVE TODAY: COME DOWN THE STAIR.

Mary Hamilton and Kittie

Left: Mary Hamilton in 1891; Right: her daughter Kittie, c. 1910

This cartoon strikes me as one of the funniest George ever drew. Lest anyone think, in the aggrieved manner of 2015, that it is meant to be unkind or satirical, let me assure them at once that it is not. It is genuinely intended as an act of caring and humorous persuasion. Mrs Hamilton (1825-1906) got on extremely well with George, once her daughter was married to him and he had a job. He was the favoured person for lifting her in bed and making her laugh. Her health was very bad for the last five years of her life, and unfortunately she died whilst George was on his way back from Tahiti.

My guess is that this cartoon did persuade Mrs Hamilton to come downstairs for Kittie and George’s first Christmas dinner in their new home — and I’ll never complain about the Internet again!

Next entry: Another Calderon signs up

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‘Tributes’

Posted on June 25, 2015 by Patrick Miles

A Russianist who has read Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) asks me why I have not posted more tributes to George than my own.

The reason is simply that tributes were not published until his death became officially accepted in 1919 and my commitment in the blog is to ‘real time 1915’ and ‘real time now’. Anyone who would like to make one now is, of course, welcome to do so as a Comment.

In fact there were not many published after his obituary (by Percy) appeared in The Times on 5 May 1919. Kittie had decided months before to ask Percy to write his Sketch, and at that point she also invited George’s friends to write down their memories of him. She received memoirs from George’s friends at Rugby H.C. and G.F. Bradby, his Trinity (Oxford) friends Harold Dowdall, Laurence Binyon and A.B. Lowry, Sir Coote Hedley, John Masefield, Thomas Sturge Moore, Emanuele Ordoño de Rosales, the Liberal Lawrence Le Breton Hammond, Leonora Bagg (see my post of 9 May), and probably others that have not survived. They were used carefully by Percy, who quotes from them without naming the authors and was very wary of being over-influenced by them. The best memoir is undoubtedly Binyon’s, in detail, scope and judgement.

Obviously, after these memoirs, which were of course also tributes, had been sent to Kittie and their authors knew that Percy was working on his book, there was no incentive for the writers to publish tributes in the press. In fact they have never been published in full.

However, on 26 August 1920 Laurence Binyon wrote to Kittie from the British Museum (where he worked) to tell her that he had written ‘some verses’ about George whilst on holiday in Brittany. ‘I fear they may read rather cramped and bald in style,’ he continued, ‘but somehow I could not write of George in the traditional elegiac strain. I wanted to be as exact as I could, and the thought of him cannot be anything but tonic, an astringent to sentiment.’ He continued to improve them for at least another month, until they were published that year as In Memory of George Calderon. They were then reprinted at the front of Percy’s book, with the title ‘George Calderon 2nd Dec. 1868 – 4th June 1915’.

Another Russianist has written to me describing Binyon’s fourteen stanzas as ‘very much in the spirit of “They Shall Grow Not Old”, and very beautiful and memorable’. Others may feel that, like ‘For the Fallen’ itself, Binyon’s poem in George’s memory is wildly uneven in quality. It is more a case, in my view, of Edwardian plenitude. There are stanzas in there for everyone. Thus Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, very movingly quoted stanzas 5 and 6 in her blog Comment of 4 June, and I chose the last two stanzas for my reading at the Commemoration that day.

Next entry: …then three come along at once

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Commemoration (to be continued 2)

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Plan A for a commemoration of George’s death (see yesterday’s post) was really dictated by long accepted British forms of commemorative ritual. These have loosened up in recent years, of course, to a point where you have extended, all-singing-and-dancing customer-devised funerals and memorial services complete with video links to Australia, although an indulgent priest still presides. I actually think that the presence of a priest and a theological framework in which he/she sets death has a healthy restraining effect on the modern British tendency to secularised sentimentality — which is why I was pro plan A.

But we hadn’t asked ourselves what would have been most appropriate in the eyes of George and Kittie. As soon as I began to do this, I was struck by George’s words to Kittie in his letter of 10 May 1910: ‘Rejoice in the colour and vigour of the thing — and drink deep with jolly friends […] and other Rabelaisians. Your wishes for good, will work all the better when two or three of you are gathered together.’ Of course, the last nine words echo those of the Gospel, but it is characteristic that George is talking only of a secular, human impact of the ‘wishes for good’ shared between ‘two or three of you gathered together’.

The idea struck root, then, of a plan B that involved a very few people. After all, we could no longer accommodate scores because we no longer had the venue(s), so it had to be fewer rather than more. Then people started emailing from around Britain, from the EU, and from North America, to say they would ‘raise a glass’ to George on the day. The penny dropped that, in the 21st century, people could ‘commemorate’ anywhere on the globe, and at the same time, without being physically with you. And although we could no longer stage a ‘public’ commemoration, practically a memorial service, we could always stage one ‘in’ public: at Hampstead, near the very house that George and Kittie had lived in.

Reading the words ‘drink deep’ and ‘Rabelaisian’, I also suddenly remembered that George had referred in a letter to the ‘street café life’ of London that he liked so much. So a post-commemoration lunch in a restaurant that fitted that description seemed appropriate. Evidently he would have approved of it, Kittie probably too.

Mr John Pym, the grandson of the Calderons’ friends Violet and Evey Pym of Foxwold, and I, therefore went to Hampstead to reconnoitre and to sample a venue for the lunch. The space opposite the Calderons’ house was in fact ideal, and off the street, and Café Rouge on Hampstead High Street fitted George’s and our bill precisely. Where the invitees were concerned, at most a dozen could be accommodated on the verges of the public footpath, so the obvious candidates — the full available ‘Calderonia’ team plus spouses — were ideal, as they amounted to nine.

On 4 June, then, we nine assembled on the spot at 11.50, we read two pieces from Kittie’s memoirs and an officer’s diary relating to George’s departure for war and to the battle of 4 June 1915, we kept the two minutes’ silence at noon, then we read two verses from Laurence Binyon’s ode to George’s memory (see tomorrow’s post) and Nina Corbet’s letter of comfort to Kittie when George’s death was officially accepted in April 1919. Flowers were left, with a copy of the commemoration readings, for the owners of the former Calderon home, and we repaired to Café Rouge for a suitably Rabelaisian repast.

Over lunch the nine of us signed this commemorative programme (I can’t reproduce a signed copy, because of the problem on the Net of identity theft):

Calderon Commemoration Menu

Click on image to enlarge.

Although the commemoration ‘act’ lasted only twenty minutes, I think it was intense and satisfying because it was so intimate and could not possibly have been held in a place more resonant with the events of 1914/15 for George and Kittie. The closing words of Nina’s letter to Kittie, four years after George’s death, were: ‘I clasp you close, Dina — Your T’Other’, which were almost unbearable. But the event had to be properly ‘closed’ and for that we turned traditional: we adapted the words of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’.

George, Kittie, Nina. We honour George’s sacrifice, and we cherish their memory. We will remember them.

We will remember them.

To be honest, it did occur to me that someone would say after this, ‘We can’t leave it there, can we? We must say something that rounds it off completely.’ If that happened, it seemed to me the swiftest way to ‘close’ would be to jump out of the secular and pronounce: ‘Rest eternal grant them, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.’ For that purpose I had memorised the words in both English and Latin, but mercifully they weren’t needed, or I should have felt I had turned ‘parson’! Perhaps I should say that two Calderonians had made it clear some time before that they would attend a lunch but not a quasi-religious service; but a religious element is already present in Nina Corbet’s letter of consolation to Kittie in 1919.

The other, complementary and vital part of the day was the messages I received from people commemorating George even as we were. Mr Pym, at that time in the United States, emailed at 11.51 BST: ‘You will be in position as I write and I am with you in spirit’. It was 6.45 a.m. in Maine and he would be raising a glass to George’s memory over lobster that evening. From Croatia a follower who was much taken by George’s work with Rabindranath Tagore emailed to say she would be observing the day. Mr Derwent May of The Times, a keen appreciator of Calderon, emailed to say that he would be raising a glass over lunch where he was co-judging this year’s Hawthornden Prize. Harvey Pitcher, the Chekhov scholar and translator, did likewise with a friend in Cromer. Most arresting of all was to receive an email on 3 June from the military historian Peter Hart, whom I do not know personally but have frequently quoted on this blog, to say that he would be featuring George’s last letter in his tour next day ‘on the battlefield’, i.e. at Gallipoli itself.

In the evening, we were able to Tweet some photographs of the commemoration and thank everyone involved. I might add that it was also an occasion for me to thank the whole ‘Calderonia’ team, researchers, consultants, supporters and blogmaster, without whom it would have been impossible to write the biography in less than ten years, if ever!

By sheer stumbling, then, or serendipity, call it what you will, and thanks massively to modern computer technology, I think we arrived at a form of commemoration that was appropriate to these particular people, Kittie and George, and above all was twenty-first century. It made them seem modern, people of today like us, whereas in retrospect I can see that the church service would not have; it would have held them at a greater distance, a more solemn and unreal distance. I will admit to having woken up in a cold sweat a few nights before, wondering whether it would work, or someone might suddenly say ‘I can’t read this, it’s all over the top!’, but it seemed to work…

It was a huge relief when it was over and we could move to a more ‘Rabelaisian’ commemoration, but I think we will all remember it — and, of course, the subjects of it. I say ‘subjects’, because another thing that several of us felt strongly about was that the commemoration should be inclusive, i.e. not just celebrate George’s humbling act of sacrifice, but those others who were involved, entangled, engulfed by it.

Much discussion was had both before and afterwards about the issues of commemorating the fallen in this and the coming years of the centenary of the War. I hope to address some of these issues through two final posts on commemoration next week.

Next entry: ‘Tributes’

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Commemoration (to be continued 1)

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Patrick Miles

The organisation of a public commemoration of George Calderon’s sacrifice on 4 June 1915, and the experience of the form it eventually took, have raised a huge number of questions in my and other Calderonians’ minds. Very long emails were exchanged in April and May, I and others made many trips to London to sort it out, and I would like to share with you over the next ten days some of the facts and some of our meditations.

It was decided long ago, of course, that there should be a public commemoration. There are no relations of the Calderon family alive in Britain today. Kittie’s family, the renowned Hamiltons, are very scattered across Britain and Ireland. At the beginning of this year the feeling arose (the ‘spontaneous’ nature of that is interesting in itself) that the commemoration should be held in a consecrated space. George and Kittie were based in London for nearly fifty years of their lives, and George was definitely a well-known figure in literary London, so London was chosen as the venue.

If one thinks about it, it is not at all a foregone conclusion that the commemoration should be held in a consecrated space. George was Christian in his acts, as Kittie always said (‘a better Christian than me’), but there is no doubt he was agnostic where the divinity of Christ was concerned, in some other aspects he veered to atheist, and he had a phobia of ‘parsons’. Kittie, however, was a deep believer and attended Anglican services. Moreover, the vast majority of our annual commemorations of the fallen in both world wars, and in this centenary year of the First World War, take place in churches or if outside are still conducted by priests. So that is probably why we opted straight away for an Anglican church and priest. But we should have thought about it!

Within London, a church off Piccadilly had first claim, as the church in which Kittie and George had been married with Corbets, Calderons, Hamiltons and alumni of Trinity College, Oxford, present. The memorial service for Dick Sutton in December 1918 had also been held there, and Kittie attended it. Another church, off the Strand, had a claim, as it has a strong association with the London theatre world and Kittie clearly had links with it in the 1920s. We do not know which, if any, church she attended in Hampstead, so that was out. It would, of course, have been splendid to hold the service in the chapel of Trinity College, Oxford, and the College was already wholly committed to commemorating George among its fallen.

I knew the space at the church of first choice, so in the fourth week of March I sent the clergy a carefully crafted email through their website, outlining what we had in mind and the contribution to church funds that we could make. No response came in a week, so I sent a letter on 30 March. Obviously, this left over two months to the centenary date. I never received a reply. On 11 April, with less than eight weeks to organise the event, I emailed the church again to say that I would have to go elsewhere, confirmed it in writing on 13th, and went to the second choice. It replied to my email immediately and was most accommodating. However, I did not know this space, so I went to London to view it. It would have been perfect, but the amplified ‘performance art’ going on outside was so loud and so dire that a two-minute silence in the ‘service’ would have been impossible. Moreover, at that point I was told that the excellent, kindly priest, who insisted on charging us nothing, was going to be away for three weeks. So nothing could even be discussed before the end of April. The chapel of Trinity College, Oxford, it transpired, was due to close before 4 June for two years’ restoration.

My own feeling about the form the service should take was that it should be short, introduced and concluded by the priest, who could put George’s life achievement and sacrifice in a double context, secular and religious, as she/he would no doubt want to, that there should be relevant readings by ‘Calderonians’, a two-minute silence at the time of George’s death, and the sociable part of the occasion would be a lunch afterwards (I had already chosen a venue for that in the Strand and visited it).

But even before a weekend’s agonised SWOT analysis had led us on 19 April to cancel the booking for the second venue, the event itself was mushrooming. Clearly, members of the numerous families associated with George in his life should be invited, perhaps the French descendants of his brother Frank, and alumni of Trinity College, Oxford. Suggestions were made about a much wider range of ‘performance’ that might be included in the commemorative event. I suddenly realised it was beginning to look more like a memorial service, that it could involve well over a hundred people, even the parading of regimental flags, and there would be no chance of feeding everyone afterwards…

Organising it in six weeks was obviously going to be a challenge. I took a deeper breath and decided to get on with it. At that moment, however, it became clear we had no venue. There was no longer a consecrated space in London or anywhere else that was appropriate. About a month had been ‘wasted’.

Except that it hadn’t. It had made us realise we hadn’t really thought about the nature or scale of the commemoration in the first place. We had, really, just gone with the tide. Some of us began to realise that and feel that it was actually a blessing in disguise that none of the consecrated spaces, and hence a presiding religious figure, was available. We had, er, been saved from ourselves. At least, that is how I saw it myself on 20 April. A sense grew on me that the church service ‘wasn’t meant to be’ when two indispensable Calderonians had to excuse themselves from attending it for absolutely uncancellable reasons.

We had no Plan B, but now we had to devise one.

Next entry: Commemoration (to be continued 2)

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‘Things fall apart’

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Since George Calderon’s death at noon in the Third Battle of Krithia on 4 June 1915 the timeline of this blog has frayed almost to nothingness. I understand the disorientation and even irritation of some followers who have emailed me. They want ‘finality’, or at least some certainty, about Kittie’s attempts to discover the truth, but I’m afraid that is precisely what you are not going to get for the remainder of this blog.

Followers may remember that a distinguished biographer told me how lucky I was that George ‘disappeared in the smoke of battle’ because that gave me a good ending to my biography, as opposed to slow decline, years of dementia, etc. But that’s not a ‘good ending’, it’s a lie! For Kittie there was never ‘closure’. That was the ending.

For the next thirteen days we have no positive evidence whatsoever about what Kittie did, indeed where she was, or what feedback she got from Hedley and Bell. Percy Lubbock’s first letter to her from Alexandria was dated 27 June 1915, but it will not appear in this blog until eight days later as the blog is tied to Kittie’s timeline, not Percy’s. (Eight days is probably the average time it took mail to get from Egypt to an address in Britain.) There are no more letters from Gertrude Bell in Kittie’s file until 14 July, although that does not mean to say Bell never wrote. How long did Kittie stay at Hoe Benham? We don’t know.

But there is one negative that is tantamount to a positive fact. There are no more copies of telegrams from the War Office in George’s War Office file until 12 July, so we can be pretty sure Kittie did not receive any more from that quarter until then.

Of course, it is ghastly. We know George died eighteen days ago, Kittie didn’t. It prompts us to ask, how on earth could this blatant error about him being ‘wounded’ come about?

On the one hand, it might seem easy enough. George was ‘seen to fall’, says a witness statement signed 13 July 1915, and finding him ‘missing’ a day or two after the attack George’s KOSB comrades put the best construction on it — that he ‘fell wounded’ (in Percy Lubbock’s Sketch from Memory this became ‘severely wounded’). As all accounts agree, the wounded were tirelessly stretchered away from the battle front all day. The Official History even mentions it specially: ‘The task of getting the large number of wounded down to the beach was particularly arduous, and high praise is due to the stretcher-bearers and regimental doctors, who were working all through the afternoon and the following night and day.’ One can understand, therefore, that once comrades in the 1st KOSB had convinced themselves George was wounded, they could assume he was on a hospital ship at Imbros, Lemnos, or on his way to Alexandria.

On the other hand, they must have known that with the Turks counterattacking in the late afternoon of 4 June the corpses of those killed on the open ground before the first Turkish trench was taken had been ‘piled up on each side of the new communication trench to the captured position’ (Official History). The overwhelming chance, if the KOSB officers had thought about it, was that the ‘missing’ George was amongst the dead. Two officers were convinced he had been killed ‘outright’. Although the corpses had been in the baking sun for three days, it is still a mystery why no attempt to identify them, for instance through identity discs, seems to have been made when they were removed on 6th or 7th June by the newly arrived 1/5th KOSB. The reason the corpse of George’s company commander, Captain Grogan, was identified is probably that it lay actually in the Turkish trench taken.

Frankly, it is inexcusable that Kittie was told George was ‘wounded’. He was ‘missing’. Everyone on the spot agreed about that, and they should never have jumped to the conclusion that he had been stretchered away. But such is war.

Next entry: Commemoration (to be continued 1)

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20 June 1915

Posted on June 20, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today at Hoe Benham Kittie received George’s last two letters (1 and 3 June 1915 — see my posts of those dates 2015), redirected from Hampstead at 5.45 p.m. yesterday.

The Field Post marks are clearly 1 and 3 June respectively, so she may have opened them in that order. If so, she must have been delighted, amused, even reassured (‘Dearest Mrs P., Nothing in your letters need make you anxious’), by the first.

But the message of the first line of George’s second letter would have been crystal clear to her. Other, younger men’s letters from the 1st KOSB written on this date are quite unequivocally written in the knowledge that they might not survive the next day. George had deliberately written his ‘last’ letter as though it was not his last. He never intimated that he was afraid or that Kittie should be; on the contrary, the phrase ‘I’m always a fortnight behind the newspapers’ probably meant ‘don’t believe anything you read about us, you won’t hear the true situation from me until a fortnight later’.

This last remark may have given Kittie hope. But the contrast between reading his words of over a fortnight ago, being told by the War Office nine days ago that he was ‘wounded’, and knowing nothing more since, must have been too much for her.

Some of Nina’s affectionate names for Kittie were ‘Dina’ (possibly from its rhyme or from the popular music hall song ‘Villikins and his Dinah’), ‘Quinckee’, ‘Swan’ (from her very white skin), and ‘White Raven’ (contrasting with the Corbets’ heraldic black raven).

Next entry: ‘Things fall apart’

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Life at Hoe Benham

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Patrick Miles

We may assume, then, that two days ago Kittie arrived at The Cottage at the Crossways, Hoe Benham, to stay for an indefinite period with the closest woman friend in her life, Nina Astley (Corbet). She would have travelled to Newbury by train, where she was met either by Nina with her husband Reginald Astley, who drove a car, or by a pony and trap that brought her the five miles to Hoe Benham. Alternatively, she may have changed trains at Newbury and got out at Boxford, which was only a couple of miles from the Crossways.

Nina’s first husband, Sir Walter Orlando Corbet, had died at Ludlow aged fifty-four from a perforated duodinal ulcer on 20 December 1910, leaving as his descendants Sir Roland James Corbet (q.v., b. 1892) and Lesbia Rachel Corbet (q.v., b. 1905). On 27 January 1913 Nina, then aged 45, married Reginald Astley, aged 51, who had been Sir Walter’s estate manager and was the brother of Constance Sutton’s second husband, Hubert Astley.

To begin with, Nina and Reginald Astley lived in London and at the Corbets’ historical home of Acton Reynald, Shropshire. ‘Reggie’ Astley continued to be a trustee of the Corbet estate until the coming of age of Sir Roland James Corbet (Jim) on 19 August 1913. He and Nina then carried on living in London, but were also resident at Benham Valence, Berkshire, the ancestral home of the Suttons. Sir Richard Vincent Sutton (Dick, q.v.) inherited Benham Valence in 1912, by which time his mother and Hubert Astley had moved to Brinsop Court, Herefordshire, but as a professional soldier in the Life Guards he was not often in residence and the house had many rooms.

On 15 April 1915 Nina’s son Jim Corbet was killed at Givenchy. His death caused a dynastic crisis, as the inheritance had always been male. The Corbet family, of course, had to sort this out. Meanwhile Nina, completely devastated by Jim’s death, withdrew to the Cottage at the Crossways, Hoe Benham, on Dick Sutton’s estate. She was not exactly in purdah, but naturally she was still mourning her son. Her husband, who was a special constable, was possibly in London some of the time, ‘Zeppelin watching’.

It seems to me that the ‘Cottage at the Crossways, Hoe Benham’ could be what features on Googlemaps today as ‘Blandys Farm, Crossways, Newbury’. If anyone out there knows more, please let me know! Whether it is Blandys Farm or not, one can be sure that Kittie had arrived in a beautiful, quiet rural setting with a few servants, where she could unwind completely with her best friend. It was quite likely that Constance Sutton (see my post of 12 June) came over from Brinsop Court to stay in her son’s mansion and visit Kittie.

As Lesbia Corbet said to me in 1986, ‘Those three were very close.’

Next entry: 20 June 1915

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The biographer blurts

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Ah dear, it’s time to come clean. The ‘disaster’ has happened: this blog is now a fortnight ahead of the writing of my biography itself. I finished Chapter 14 of the biography with George going over the top on 4 June 1915 and it is now 18 June 1915. To be precise, I finished Chapter 14 on 5 February 2015 and haven’t written a word of the biography since! To be even more pointed, I completed the research for Chapters 15 and 16, which will be very short and take the story to Kittie’s death in 1950, on 18 May 2015, and still haven’t started Chapter 15 itself!

But, I reassure myself, this is not writer’s block. I have never suffered from writer’s block, because I have never had the time to suffer from writer’s block… Yet it’s time in a different sense that has scuppered me now: the problem that I have discussed throughout this blog, of ‘chronotopia’, of having to ‘two-time’ with the ‘real time’ of the blog (day-by-day) and the extended time, joined-up time, narrated time of a biography. I have always found it difficult to keep these two chronotopes in play, yet apart, in my brain whilst writing the blog, and I suppose I have lost the struggle: the blog-time, ‘real time’, ‘synchronicity’, has taken over, to the ‘detriment’ of biography-time. I am resigned to not restarting the biography until the blog closes on 30 July 2015.

As you can imagine, on one level I find this highly irritating. So near to finishing the biography, and yet so far! Yet there are definite, unexpected up-sides.

Through May and early June, when I was writing almost daily posts, I realised the (blindingly obvious) fact that this blog of the last year of George Calderon’s life is a biography in its own right. I never remotely expected to regard it as such — the blog was essentially a way of raising George’s profile and hopefully attracting publishers — but now, I think, I can claim it’s an exercise in the new genre of internet biography, even if it covers only a year. As followers have pointed out to me, it is also autobiographical as it traces my own problems; and many other contemporary themes come into it, above all the War. In any case, as my post yesterday demonstrates, the ‘discipline’ of writing a day-to-day biography in ‘real time’ leads to discoveries that I missed when I was researching and writing Chapters 14 and 15 in ‘longer time’. This is a very good thing. It has already led to my revising parts of Chapter 14 and undoubtedly means I will write Chapter 15 differently (hopefully, more sensitively and accurately) than I would have without the blog.

I shall concentrate on the blog, then, until 30 July 1915/2015. After that, I won’t have to wrestle with chronotopia, with time-bifurcation in the brain, and can just concentrate on biography-time. It will mean the book has taken me nearly five years to research and physically write, which is frustrating since I thought it would take me three, but colleagues keep assuring me ten years is par for the course for a full-length biography. In any case, it’s not as though I am writing nothing. I write thousands of words a week on the blog!

It all convinces me more than ever that George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is about ‘tourbillions in Time’ (Robert Graves, ‘On Portents’); time past and time present…

*                    *                    *

When I say that I shall have spent five years researching and writing this biography, I should admit that that’s not true sensu stricto: I first tracked down George and Kittie’s papers thirty years ago, tinkered with Calderoniana over the years, but was able to get down to detailed research, and writing, only when I ‘semi-retired’. This accounts for why some kind friends tell me I have been ‘working on Calderon’ for thirty years; but that is not true in any focussed, professional, biographical sense, blokes and blokesses.

Next entry: Life at Hoe Benham

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Fast developments

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Yesterday and the day before I did some entirely new research on correlating what documents we have about these few days of Kittie’s life. The result is, of course, still only an hypothesis, but I think it is a plausible one. For me it is a revelation. It suggests that Kittie was far more proactive than I had thought, was working much faster than I thought, and that things in the mess and muddle of this war could move far more quickly (on the home front, at least) than I had assumed.

In the Calderon archive there is a rather scrumpled letter from Percy Lubbock without a date, without its envelope, and on writing paper headed ‘4th Field Ambulance, 2nd Division, Expeditionary Force’ — which has, however, been crossed out and ‘Emmetts’ written underneath. The printed address perhaps suggests that Percy has just got back from a Red Cross trip to the Western Front. He begins:

Dear Kitty

One must go to Egypt when one is told to go, it seems — but I could wish they hadn’t arranged it so that I should exactly miss you. But there it is — and I dare say it is easier to skip off to Alexandria at two minutes’ notice than to sit and work in England.

I had assumed this was written to Kittie at the end of this week, around 20th, when we know she was staying with Nina Astley (Corbet) at Hoe Benham in Berkshire, but I had missed the fact that Percy’s next extant letter to her is from Alexandria and dated 27 June. I had also overlooked the fact that his letter from Emmetts is dated by him ‘Tuesday’. Given that it took at least a week to get to Alexandria, and Percy’s boss, Gertrude Bell, had been in touch with Kittie only on 14th, the only ‘Tuesday’ Percy could have been writing on was next day, Tuesday 15 June.

Perhaps Bell had already decided to send Percy to Alexandria on Red Cross business before she received Kittie’s letter of 13 June. It seems more likely, though, that she had decided by 15th that he was to go and look for George in the military hospitals of the city. Perhaps she did this independently, but perhaps she agreed to do it after Kittie rang her on 14th and offered to subsidise Percy to go. (It would not have been the last time she subsidised his activities.)

So the hypothesis is that the two women very quickly agreed that Percy Lubbock should sail for Alexandria and that by the time Percy was writing to Kittie on 15 June he knew she was going off to be with Nina. We know from his next letter that Kittie wrote to him on 16th (we don’t have the letter). This implies that she was momentarily in London still but that by today, 17 June 1915, she was at Hoe Benham (otherwise Percy would still have been able to see her in London). Percy himself could have embarked for Alexandria today.

Very swiftly indeed, then, Kittie had achieved her three highest priorities, given the lack of further information from the War Office about George’s fate: she had got Coote Hedley to give the War Office Casualties Section a following wind, a close family friend had been despatched to look for George, and she was with her lifetime confidante, Nina, who was uniquely able to comfort her. Nina’s house in Berkshire did not have a telephone, but it could receive telegrams, for instance from Gertrude Bell, or from Elizabeth Ellis if the latter took receipt of a new telegram from the War Office.

But neither Bell nor Kittie appears to have told Percy the specific (i.e. true?) reason he was being sent posthaste to Egypt, for his letter of 15th to Kittie ends:

If George should be there, wouldn’t that be a lark. Do write to me c/o Messrs T. Cook, Rue de la Porte de Rosette 2, Alexandria. If ever you want to telegraph to me, apply to Miss Bell, 20 Arlington St. She will be able to do so free of charge.

Rather dizzy work, life.

Yours affect.,

Percy

Next entry: The biographer blurts

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16 June 1915

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Unless you are from a military background, you might not realise that soldiers on active service strive to report back to Battalion HQ at home, or how much other regiments exchange information from the battlefield with each other at home, or to what extent those at Battalion HQ feed information to their comrades’ families left in Britain, and vice versa.

Kittie had obviously been in touch with the 9th Battalion Ox and Bucks still stationed in England, because today she received a letter from Captain Arthur Maxwell Labouchere, the adjutant with whom George had been particularly friendly at Fort Brockhurst (for a photograph of him see my post of 10 April 2015). However, twelve days after the 3rd Battle of Krithia the 9th Battalion Ox and Bucks had evidently heard very little about its four/five officers including George who had left Devonport for the Dardanelles on 13 May:

Bovington Camp
WOOL
Wareham

Dear Mrs Calderon

I am so sorry to hear George is wounded and sincerely hope it is slight. I think it is a most favourable sign that he is classed among the list of ‘wounded’. We heard today that Capt. Hogan also was ‘wounded’ but no details are yet to hand. It is bad luck for George to get caught so soon again with all his splendid enthusiasm; and I am sorry for you to have to go through this anxious time again. No-one here, who knew George, is not deeply touched by the news, for he took everyone’s heart by storm. I will let you know immediately, if any news should reach us about him.

Yours very sincerely

Maxwell Labouchere

Bovington Camp in Dorset had been an infantry training area since 1899. Wool is a village between Dorchester and Wareham.

It will be remembered that Captain Hogan had commanded D Company of the 1st KOSB, which on 4 June was in the delayed second wave of attack. This did not get mown down but went on to capture its objectives. In the first wave, the twenty-five-year old Captain James Grogan, who commanded B Company containing George’s platoon, is said to have reached the first Turkish trench, been seen firing his revolver from its parapet, but then been killed by a Turkish ‘bomb’, i.e. hand grenade of German manufacture.

Was Kittie cheered, or depressed by this letter? Evidently Battalion HQ had been informed that Hogan was ‘wounded’, or received the news from him personally, but it had not known that George was ‘wounded’. Why not? What was the difference?

Next entry: Fast developments

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14 June 1915

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Bell received Kittie’s letter this Monday morning and replied immediately in her rapid administrator writing:

Dear Mrs Calderon,
We telegraphed yesterday about Mr Calderon, at the request of the War Office. I do so very deeply sympathise with your anxiety and I hope we shall [soon be able to] give you good news.
Yours sincerely
Gertrude Bell

There was a special reason why Bell could ‘so very deeply’ sympathise with Kittie: the love of her own life, Colonel Dick Doughty Wylie, had been killed at Helles on 26 April 1915 (see my post for that day).

The square brackets above supply what has been gnawed by a mouse.

Next entry: 16 June 1915

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Action

Posted on June 13, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Both Constance Sutton (Astley) and Nina Corbet (Astley) knew only too well the nervous and physical effects that anxiety tended to have on Kittie.

But Kittie had her own well-developed pattern of techniques for coping with it. She clung to her faith in benign outcomes (was ‘stalwart’ and ‘stout’), believed in taking positive action, and sought the company of friends for comfort.

Today, Sunday 13 June 1915, she went to church and prayed for George’s safety. Telegrams were delivered on a Sunday, but none came. She decided she must do something, but what? The War Office was basically saying ‘wait for our next telegram’, so on what pretext could she get back to them and try to hurry them up?

She noticed that in the telegram George had been described as ‘2nd Lieutenant Calderon’, when he was certainly Lieutenant. Although Calderon was hardly a common English name, the error could be made out to be significant in tracing him through the military hospital system. She therefore probably went this evening to see the ‘Godfather in War’, Coote Hedley (q.v.), not far away in Belsize Avenue, and persuaded him to write an internal note at the War Office to the Casualties section pointing out George’s true rank. This he did next day.

She also wrote to Gertrude Bell, who was running the ‘Enquiry Department for Wounded and Missing’ at the British Red Cross and Order of St John in Arlington Street. Bell was a brilliant administrator, linguist and archaeologist, who had been George’s counterpart in the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League when he was Honorary Secretary of the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. They got on well and she thought highly of him. But for him, she wrote to George on 18 July 1910, the anti-suffrage demonstration in Trafalgar Square on 16 July, which was meant to be a joint WNASL and MLOWS event, would have been a ‘disaster’ scuppered by MLOWS misogynists.

It is possible that Kittie had not known of Bell’s war work until told by Percy Lubbock, Violet’s brother. He was working for the British Red Cross at Arlington Street himself, as his extremely poor eyesight meant he could not sign up. Percy (1879-1965) was gay, had greatly admired his uncle Archie Ripley, Kittie’s first husband and George’s Oxford friend, and he became very supportive of Kittie from now on.

Whether Kittie had yet told George’s mother Clara that he was ‘wounded’, we can only speculate. Perhaps she was waiting first for confirmation.

Next entry: 14 June 1915

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