Tag Archives: Dardanelles

A soft landing and season’s greetings!

After five and a half years living full time with writing this book, I am somewhat dazed by the soft landing of Bibliography, Acknowledgements and the odd tidying up. I am a bit light-headed. It feels unreal, especially compared with … Continue reading

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‘…but Mr Jones does look a nice dog’

After enduring a long bout of illness and the first anniversary of George’s disappearance at Gallipoli, in the summer of 1916 Kittie decided she must channel her energies into a number of useful and therapeutic activities. One of these was … Continue reading

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Guest post: Clare Hopkins, ‘One Man and his College’

Anyone who has ever watched an episode of Morse or Lewis will know that Oxford Colleges are well supplied with portraits. Founders, archbishops, prime ministers, and Nobel Prize winners gaze grandly down from the panelled walls of Dining Halls. Smaller … Continue reading

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‘bubbling with wit and good humour’

In a letter to the TLS  (9 July 2010) I appealed for unpublished letters or works of George Calderon, but also asked readers to contact me if they had ‘come across references to him in obscure publications’. My thinking was that … Continue reading

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A letter to the ‘Manchester Guardian’, 12 May 1919

Sir, — The recent notice in the “Times” of George Calderon’s death in battle on Gallipoli tells his friends that they may hope no longer. To us the loss is inexpressible. That which the theatre has suffered cannot, of course, … Continue reading

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‘A paradox, a paradox…’

As part of my preparation for writing ‘Who George Calderon Was’, I have just re-read all the personal memoirs that Kittie asked George’s friends to write for Percy Lubbock’s book about George (the memoirs themselves have never been published). Undoubtedly … Continue reading

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Kittie Hamilton

I have returned from holiday fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November and get copies to the interested publishers immediately afterwards. This means writing the Afterword (‘Who George Calderon Was’), radically improving the … Continue reading

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‘Edwardian bastards’ — a personal note

Periodically I have to remind myself that in the 1950s I met plenty of Edwardians, in the sense of people whose character and values were formed in the longer Edwardian period of 1897-1916 and who were thought of as being … Continue reading

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Intemperance and ‘Heroism’

On 30 August 1920, Kittie received through the post the first draft of Laurence Binyon’s ode to George’s memory, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57345 . She was at Constance Sutton’s Tudor home in Herefordshire, Brinsop Court, and wrote to Binyon next day that she had … Continue reading

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Future biographers of George Calderon…

Even at this late stage, ‘things keep coming up’. It took me, as predicted, two pretty full days to input to the text of my biography (167,000 words) the 1000+ corrections and revisions that emerged from my two complete readings … Continue reading

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From the diary of a countrywoman

In December 1922 Kittie moved from Hampstead with her housekeeper Elizabeth Ellis to ‘Kay’s Crib’, a Victorian three-bedroomed house with a fair amount of ground to it at Sheet, near Petersfield, in Hampshire. She told a friend of Percy Lubbock’s: … Continue reading

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Somme: the ‘walking’ controversy

When I read Harvey Pitcher’s Comment of 1 July about the Bishop of London’s address in Westminster Abbey commemorating the eve of the Battle of the Somme, I took it that the Bishop was quoting the order to WALK across … Continue reading

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John Hamilton the Good/Great?

At this time one hundred years ago, after the first anniversary of her husband’s disappearance at Gallipoli, Kittie Calderon decided it would be wise to channel her energies into a number of projects. One of these was to erect a memorial … Continue reading

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The Somme: over to you

It won’t, I think, surprise followers to hear that I know next to nothing about the Battle of the Somme compared with Ypres 1 and Gallipoli, which George Calderon fought at and which we covered from day to day in … Continue reading

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Three women follow the Somme

After Kittie Calderon had done all she could to establish George’s fate at Gallipoli on 4 June 1915, and accepted that she would live by the faith that he was in a Turkish prisoner of war camp, she suffered a … Continue reading

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The Somme: Ends and Beginnings

When did the Edwardian Age begin and end? Obviously, in the literal sense it spanned Edward VII’s reign, 1901-10. Cultural historians, however, have long extended it beyond those dates, because the nexus of attitudes and values that we call ‘Edwardianism’ began to … Continue reading

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