Calderonia

Guest post by John Pym: ‘Women in Love’ and Glenda Jackson’s Oscar

Posted on February 8, 2021 by Patrick Miles

In London in the 1970s and 80s I used to review movies for the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin. That serious, no-frills journal, founded in 1934, aimed to cover every feature film released in UK cinemas. Some of the films that came my way for review – decades before the Internet opened the gate to explicit pornography – were slapdash crudely censored soft-core sex pictures. Each MFB review, whatever the merit of the film, required a one-paragraph plot synopsis and a one-paragraph critical assessment. Payment was based on the length of the second paragraph. And in the case of the sex films, this rarely exceeded three or four lines. Penelope ‘Pulls It Off’ (UK), Emmanuelle II – L’Anti-Vierge (France), There’s No Sex Like Snow Sex or, in the original, Beim jodeln juckt die Lederhose (West Germany).

I was reminded of the hours I once spent in tiny underground Soho viewing theatres – diligently recording what balding Kurt did to nubile Inge – while seated the other day in the comfort of my own home watching a Blu-ray disc of the BFI’s re-mastered 4K restoration of Women in Love (1969), and by one scene in particular that I’ll come to in a moment. The movie was directed by Ken Russell: the cherubic enfant terrible of the era who was then beginning to shift his so-called ‘appalling talent’ away from TV arts biopics to feature films. The, to my mind, over-literal script, drawn from a famous novel by D.H. Lawrence, once considered ‘pornographic’ but now a set text, was by the American playwright Larry Kramer. Kramer was also the film’s producer and moving spirit. A number of other film-makers, including Stanley Kubrick, declined to direct the script before Russell threw himself into the job with gusto.

Released by United Artists, Women in Love made a big splash on its well-advertised first run in the dying months of the Swinging Sixties. Word spread. Stark naked men were to be seen grappling on a carpet – a polar bear pelt having been dramatically hurled aside! Glenda Jackson, the young actress from the Royal Shakespeare Company who a few years earlier registered a claim to future stardom in the role of Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, in Peter Brook’s sensational stage production of the Marat/Sade, was said to disrobe in a way that would make the eyes pop right out of your head.

The wrestlers – Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed, left) and Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates)

In the movie, Mr Brangwen, a modest grammar school craft-instructor in a Midlands colliery town, has two lively daughters, Gudrun and Ursula, freethinking women in their radiant twenties who are preoccupied with the question of marriage. This was Lawrence’s principal theme: How, precisely, in these modern times, are we to live together, woman and man, man and man, woman and woman? But what, I would suggest, strikes today’s reader of the novel Women in Love most forcefully is Lawrence’s volcanic, convoluted desire to write about sex in a new and more honest way – and his failure, despite every effort, to make the act of sexual intercourse between healthy young people in any way convincing. Violent – essentially, embarrassed – passion seems to sweep everything else aside. Isn’t sex on the page supposed to be, at the very least, sexy? Not here.

Lawrence circles and circles and defers and defers. The flow of stock imagery, the self-acknowledged repetitious language, the reach-me-down adjectives and weak adverbial modifiers render these passages at first enervating, then annoying, and finally downright ludicrous. Not wholly unlike, but in a different register, those soft-core scenes of Bavarian ladies, free at last from their bust-constricting dirndl, gripping their large self-satisfied men in feathered hats and shiny lederhosen as they sledded down the mountainside emitting shrieks of delight.

The film is handsomely shot by Billy Williams, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work, and is a memorable symphony of contrasting tones – an ominous night-time lake, the dark surface pricked by the reflection of Chinese lanterns; the mellow wood-panelled room where the wrestling match takes place before the blazing fire; the eye-dazzling sequence in the snowy landscape around Zermatt where matters come to a fateful climax. The four main players, Jennie Linden and Glenda Jackson as Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and Alan Bates and Oliver Reed as their respective lovers, Rupert Birkin, a preening intellectual school inspector, and Gerald Crich, a depressed colliery magnate, do their best with all the ponderous talk of highfalutin ideals. But in the end, it seems to me, very little of this talk strikes the viewer as authentic. One longs, sometimes, for the simple uncomplicated sound of real human conversation.

In a movie dotted with deliberately caricatured secondary players, it is perhaps Vladek Sheybal, the Polish-born character actor, who stands out as the most clear-sighted caricature. He plays Loerke, a gay German artist (with an arch blond boyfriend straight out of Central Casting – though the actor who plays him was in fact straight as a die), who’s inserted into the Zermatt sequence to demonstrate to Gudrun that there really is a life of art that’s separate from (and unquestionably superior to) any self-defeating quest for love. And at one point he laughs with strikingly honest cynicism at the posturing of these half-blind English folk – and also perhaps at the pretension of the film itself. His laughter, however, earns him a flattening Marquess of Queenberry punch from the affronted Gerald.

Gudrun (Glenda Jackson) and Loerke (Vladek Sheybal)

Birkin and Ursula at long last seek sexual relief – and this was the scene that jogged my memory: the frantic struggle to undress; the waving grass, teasing like a burlesque girl’s ostrich-feather fan; bodies floating in air as in a gauzy dream; a soft-focus slow-motion tone of utter unreality. Consider too the scene in which Birkin, having been struck on the head with a glass paper-weight by Hermione Roddice, his former lover, sheds his clothes and wanders through the woods in concussed delirium touching the birch trees, rubbing his body with bracken, and then collapsing prone on the soil. All that’s lacking to bring matters to a climax is one of those ripe figs that Birkin so naughtily described (from a later Lawrence poem), in order to shock the ladies, at one of Hermione’s white-linen lakeside luncheon parties. It’s hard to know, sometimes, whether Ken Russell, the enfant terrible, ever completely removed his tongue from his cheek.

Blissfully floating free – Rupert and Ursula (Jennie Linden) in Ken Russell’s orientation

After his despised father has died, Gerald Crich sets out into the night, his mind in turmoil. At his father’s grave, he plunges his hand into the freshly turned soil and squeezes a handful of mud. He then proceeds to the Brangwens’ terraced house. The front door is not locked. He enters, passes a dozing Mr Brangwen in the parlour, and ascends the stairs. He opens the door to Gudrun’s room. A large study of a female head, redolent, perhaps, of The Rite of Spring, decorates the wall behind the bed. Gudrun awakes and calls her sister’s name. But there stands Gerald, with his muddy boots and his muddy fist. What would an artist such as Picasso have made of him? He’s not exactly a spry mischievous satyr with panpipes. Gudrun sits up, surprised but unshocked. She’d already kissed Gerald in the narrow night-time tunnel where the miners have their trysts and told him she finds his large square face beautiful. This, now, is not unexpected. She’s sexually curious, unafraid and unabashed.

Then comes the moment above all others, I’d say, that clinched Glenda Jackson’s Oscar for Best Actress of 1971. The eyes of the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences must indeed have popped right out of their heads. ‘What do you want from me?’ Gudrun asks. Pause. She then lifts off her nightdress in a single fluid gesture and looks straight at the camera without shame or embarrassment. (An unanswerable riposte, today’s film scholars might say, to the dreaded Male Gaze.) But what follows, alas, is another ludicrous passage of febrile love making, after the interminable unlacing of Gerald’s boots, that ends – none of the sex in this film is touched by any discernible tenderness – with the not inconsiderable bulk of Oliver Reed falling insensible, as men do, on top of poor Glenda Jackson. Gudrun awakes early next morning giving the impression of having had nothing less than a comfortable night’s sleep. Now, however, it’s time for Gerald to put on his muddy boots and go home before the Brangwen household wakes up for breakfast.

But this is not quite the whole story. Larry Kramer, the American producer/scriptwriter of Women in Love, who went on to become one of his country’s leading gay activists and a controversial but notably successful campaigner for the rights of people with HIV/Aids, saw an opportunity in this film to expand on D.H. Lawrence’s underdeveloped theme of ‘Men in Love’. At the end of the famous wrestling match, Gerald and Rupert lie side by side on the carpet, shoulders almost touching, spent and exhilarated – looking, in fact, as if they’ve just had sex, and actually enjoyed it. Rupert suggests they might, like those German knights of old, swear an oath of undying brotherly love. But since this is the twentieth century, he implies, they need not actually mingle their blood. Gerald is taken aback: he’ll have to think about that, he says. But in the event, as the future unfolds, and his relationship with Gudrun disintegrates, Gerald fails to act on Birkin’s suggestion. Out of ignorance, cowardice or simple lack of self-knowledge – who knows? Yet the offer was clearly made – and there it lies, at the end of the film, waiting as it were for another generation to take it up.

© John Pym, 2021

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged Alan Bates, Ballets Russes, Billy Williams, British Film Institute, D.H. Lawrence, Eleanor Bron, Emmanuelle II, film adaptations, films, Gerald Crich, Glenda Jackson, Hermione Roddice, Jennie Linden, John Pym, Ken Russell, Larry Kramer, Loerke, Oliver Reed, Oscars, Penelope 'Pulls It Off', Peter Brook, pornography, Richard Heffer, Rupert Birkin, soft porn, The Rite of Spring, There's No Sex Like Snow Sex, Ursula Brangwen, Vladek Sheybal, Women in Love | 5 Comments

‘Hurtler’ Brangwen, woman in love

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Let me explain what lies behind the next three instalments of Calderonia, which are distinguished guest posts taking us up to 8 March and beyond.

As part of our lockdown season of old films, Alison and I watched a DVD of Ken Russell’s 1969 Women in Love, which I first saw in 1970. To my pleasant surprise, the acting still seemed superb. But to my utter surprise, I found that my perception of the film had swung through 180 degrees. The experience of watching it fifty years on was a kind of dawning revelation, almost an epiphany.

It is difficult to believe now, but in 1970 D.H. Lawrence was a guru amongst Britain’s younger generations. This was the result of Penguin’s mass re-publication of his works, the popularity of F.R. Leavis’s writing on Lawrence, and the failed 1960 ‘Trial of Lady Chatterley’ on a charge of obscenity. I would go so far as to say that some of the embeardification of university students at the time was inspired by Lawrence.

His values and ideas, particularly regarding sex and marriage, profoundly influenced us. Our focus was on those, not on his amazing art as such. I think my own case was typical. By the age of twenty I had read three of Lawrence’s novels, most of his short stories, almost all of his poetry, selected essays, selected letters, Mornings in Mexico, and Penguin’s volume A propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But it was Lawrence the critic of English life that most grabbed me. Consequently, as I watched the film in 1970 I blithely thought of Birkin as Lawrence (Alan Bates had the beard), I approved of everything Birkin said, and cheered him on. I regarded him as the hero seeker after truth.

Fifty years later, it was quite different. I immediately identified with Ursula Brangwen. She is by far the most empathetic person in the film. Where she listens, asks questions of an other, feels, thinks, reasons, and above all loves, Birkin mansplains, preaches, rants, shows off, gratuitously offends, and is most interested in himself. I particularly enjoyed the scene of their big row: as far as I am concerned, everything Ursula says of Birkin is true, and the passion and emotional intelligence with which she says it are magnificent. Her ability to give love makes her luminous. Her instincts and intuition are right. True, Birkin is on a quest, we see him develop and learn, he even has the last word. But he learns from Ursula. In 2020 I saw the film as about her: her growth, the power of her love, her as the superior seeker after truth. And in the last scene I agreed with her, not Birkin.

I then made a very embarrassing discovery. After watching the film, I wanted to check a few things in the novel. I went to the copy that I had bought in 1970, the Penguin edition with Jennie Linden and Alan Bates on the cover as above, and found, beyond all doubt, that I had never read it… I had only ever seen the film! Well, there and then I began reading the novel Women in Love, and could not put it down.

Our stalwart follower, guest-poster and poetic commenter Damian Grant is a lifelong Lawrentian. He really knows his Lawrence. His fundamental work, A Thematic Index to Phoenix and Phoenix II, is published in A D.H. Lawrence Handbook, edited by Keith Sugar, Manchester University Press, 1982, pp. 329-447, and is described as

an index of an original kind, in which 37 terms, pairs of terms, or opposing terms are indexed, with a brief quotation to provide the context. The words chosen relate to Lawrence’s underlying ideas, his ‘philosophy’; his vision of reality itself and the place of the elemental human being within that reality.

I mentioned to Damian that I was ‘in love with Ursula Brangwen’, having never read the novel before. His response was: ‘I am glad you are in love with Ursula Brangwen. She is the right kind of girl.’ He then explained that Ursula literally is the protagonist of Women in Love, because Lawrence had originally conceived of a single ‘Bildungsroman’ exploring her physical and spiritual growth over three decades. This had split in two, and The Rainbow dealt with the earlier part of her life. I plunged into reading it. Straight after, I read Women in Love for a second time, and watched the film for a third.

This experience solved a few problems — for example, the chapter ‘Gudrun in the Pompadour’, omitted from the film, hilariously distances Lawrence from Birkin — but it left many more questions hanging in the air. Has Russell’s film as a film stood the test of time? How faithful is it to the book? Does it flirt with pornography? What are we to make of Lawrence’s descriptions of sex in the novel? What do things like this mean: ‘this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God who are in the beginning’? Why are there absolutely no medical details of Birkin’s numerous illnesses, or indications of the source of his ‘about four hundred a year’ (£35,000 at today’s prices) which enable him and Ursula to become people of leisure? Why are emotions monotonously referred to in terms of electricity and magnetism? Why are there two references to the 1914-18 War in the novel, yet it ends before the War begins? Is there any substance to Birkin’s critique of contemporary marriage, or is it guff? Were there no happy Edwardian marriages?

Suddenly it occurred to me that Calderonia has three long-term followers who could tackle such questions much better than me! John Pym is a film critic, Damian Grant a Lawrence critic, and Laurence Brockliss has made a prosopographical study of Victorian and Edwardian England. They all immediately accepted my challenge, for which I am hugely beholden to them, and their guest posts will appear on these dates:

8 February: ‘Glenda Jackson’s Oscar’, by John Pym

22 February: ‘Women in Love — the novel as prophetic book’, by Damian Grant

8 March: ‘Love and respect in the Victorian and Edwardian marriage’, by Laurence Brockliss

Women in Love is still a contentious novel. Most of our subscribers, I imagine, have read it or seen the film. Please, then, communicate your views, your reactions to the several expert posts, by leaving a Comment, however short, long or vituperative (rather than emailing me personally). I am hoping that we can really get a dialogue going over this major work of twentieth century English literature. Is it, even, its greatest novel?

If anyone would like to do a further guest post on an aspect of Lawrence’s novel, after 22 March, please contact me. I shall eventually blog about connections between Lawrence and Calderon in life and literature.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged Alan Bates, Bildungsroman, biography, comments, D.H. Lawrence, Damian Grant, F.R. Leavis, George Calderon, Glenda Jackson, Gudrun Brangwen, Jennie Linden, John Pym, Ken Russell, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Laurence Brockliss, love, marriage, Penguin Books, Rupert Birkin, The Great War, The Rainbow, Ursula Brangwen, Women in Love, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest Post: James Miles, ‘TLS Adverts A and B’

Posted on January 18, 2021 by Jim D G Miles

Last December we put an advert for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius in the Times Literary Supplement and, naturally, as the resident typesetter and “designer-ey” type on the Sam&Sam team, I was the one who made it. It was a lot of fun and in this article I want to talk a little about the process.

The starting point was pretty much this:

It is a handwritten design template by Sam1 with the key points he wanted to include in the ad.

The first thing I did was to get these details into a basic design shell on the computer so we could visualise how they would look. We quickly realised that space on such an advert is deceptive, and it becomes cluttered very rapidly. Here’s a printout of that first mock up with red pen notes by Sam1.

But this was still great progress! We were in fact almost there at this point — it just needed colour, tuning, and a lot of polish.

The first idea was to incorporate this image of the Kremlin somehow.

The reflection on the glass in the frame meant I had to take it at a somewhat awkward angle, where you miss the very bottom of the image, but we weren’t interested in that part anyway and I was able to neaten it up a bit and extract this:

Which led to the following design, with the image as a sort of “faded watermark”:

I actually really like this one, and having a chance to share it is the main reason I asked Sam1 if I could write this article. I thought Calderonia readers would find it interesting!

However, the more we looked at it, and compared it with the adverts in an actual copy of the TLS, the more we felt we needed to try something else, at least so we could then choose between “A” and “B”, as it were.

Looking through the TLS, the advert that really stood out to me as being the cleanest, clearest, most no-nonsense and — crucially — the most fitting with the style of the paper itself was the following:

So naturally I mocked up a George version employing a similar design, but with the red that Sam1 advised as being most associated with Calderon.

We really tried to streamline it!

Much as I like the Kremlin variant, this is what we ended up choosing and I think we made the right decision.

This article isn’t a technical “how to” guide, like my typesetting series on here, but I will mention that the software I used for all of this is “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, essentially a free-to-use Photoshop that I find increasingly excellent for all manner of graphics work. When designing these adverts, we have each element as a “layer” which can be moved and tweaked to match whatever our feeling is. I say “feeling” because there was a lot of instinctive decision-making, with both Sam1 and me sitting at the computer adjusting elements here and there. Something I was particularly pleased with was the program’s “Drop Shadow” filter, which gives the book that…well that “drop shadow”! It’s something you almost don’t even notice, but if that shadow isn’t there then the entire advert looks completely amateur. Now I come to think of it, perhaps if I had put the drop shadow on the Kremlin one we would have felt it was a better contender? Anyway, learning little details like this is one of the things I find most satisfying about my Sam&Sam work.

Thank you for reading. If you have any questions about designing an advert like this, feel free to post a comment and I will reply!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged advertising, design, drop shadow, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, GNU Image Manipulation Program, Photoshop, Sam&Sam, Sam2, Times Literary Supplement, TLS | 3 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 13

Posted on January 7, 2021 by Patrick Miles

18 December

‘Bewildered of Cambridge’

It feels like a new record: a week has passed since our, in their own words, ‘very striking’ advertisement of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius appeared in the TLS, and it hasn’t brought us a single sale!

The line between self-justification and rational analysis is very thin in such cases… But I did say when we decided on the ad. that the only way to find out whether they work was to do it, so what lessons can one draw?

It appeared in an issue supposedly devoted to Russia (there was a ghastly portrait of Stalin on the cover). My rationale, therefore, was that it would be read by every professor of Russian Studies in the country, and perhaps further down the subject’s Table of Ranks too, as well as picking up some ‘normal’ readers. Every Russianist in the country should read the book, as it will reveal to them where they have come from and perhaps where they are at. But I know from a lifetime’s experience that these people are extremely slow off the mark. Perhaps some sales will dribble in when they have pierced the plastic on their mailed copies in a couple of months time.

Meanwhile, there were five or six ads from other smallish publishers in the same issue. What could their motive be? Well — obviously — even if their ad. doesn’t sell many copies, it must raise awareness of their very existence. At least 32,000 people will have seen it (and in our case it was very prominently positioned on a recto with the issue’s main article). In terms of raising profile, then, it has to be worth it. This is in fact the first time an ad. for Sam&Sam has appeared in a national newspaper in the U.K. or Russia.

Decision: we will advertise in the Russian issue of the TLS next May, but this time it will showcase Sam&Sam the publisher and push four or five separate English/Russian titles.

The background to this whole experience is that independent publishing has gone viral since 2018 and especially during lockdown. The market is flooded. I would advise anyone publishing a book of theirs that is in any way ‘specialist’ to print no more than 200 copies. (Clays printed 459 copies of George and we have shifted 58%).

If a small but apparently reputable publisher takes on your book with a subvention from yourself, be very wary about being drawn into a second edition. I know people who have paid their subvention to the second edition, the publisher has then pretty soon announced they are going to remainder, and the authors have felt bound to buy back say 400 copies and sell them themselves; which is difficult and not helped by the fact that there will be plenty of copies available by then on Amazon and ABE.

22 December
I bumped (metaphorically) into a neighbour who was delivering his Christmas cards. His mother, aged about ninety and in a care home, is very fed up with the latest Christmas restrictions. Although he has been able to visit her for 30 minutes once a week, she cannot see her family over Christmas itself. His response was robust: ‘Never mind, mother: think of March! The days will soon be getting longer and we must all just think of Spring!’

He didn’t tell me how she reacted, but he is right: the worse it gets, the harder we must think of Spring, which only cosmic disaster can prevent coming. In that spirit, I offer a sequence written in Russia forty-six years ago to celebrate the event there:

Note that these were written in the early days of English haiku, when the syllable count was flexible. On this occasion I decided not to capitalise the sulphurous butterfly. Haiku 4 was published in Presence 35, May 2008, p. 16, and the crow in 5 seems prophetic!

30 December
I had the huge honour of reading two pre-publication electronic versions of Andrew Tatham’s I Shall Not be Away Long: The First World War Letters of Lt Col Charles Bartlett, but the experience can’t compare with a slow reading of the final superbly designed and produced book published last month. This reading, which has taken me five weeks, has significantly altered my appreciation; greatly deepened it, I feel.

Available from: www.ishallnotbeawaylong.co.uk

When I originally read the book, it was still in the context of our national experience of the centenary of the ‘Great War’. Followers of this blog will know what I mean: our personal empathy and agony day in day out. My foci, therefore, were (1) the military narrative of the Battles of Loos and the Somme as told in Bartlett’s letters, (2) the life stories of the men he commanded, knew, and loved, but who were slaughtered around him.

This time I found myself concentrating on Bartlett’s own story and character, his wife Margaret’s story and character, and the story of their relationship. This may sound more like reading a novel — being absorbed by psychology and a love interest — but there is no conflict here with the twin foci of the epic military narrative. The latter are as integral to Tatham’s ‘novel’ as the psychological development. Think of War and Peace.

Where personality and personal relationships are concerned, these letters constantly prompt you to speculate — and that is hugely enjoyable, even if you know you may be wrong and that you will never know the truth. For instance, this slow reading produced a strong feeling in me that I understood why, despite all his credentials, Charles Bartlett was never permanently promoted to Lieutenant Colonel of the 8th Berkshires at the Front (a fact which depressed him no end). His attitude to the war was simply not that of the stereotypic upper class officer. He says things in these uncensored letters that stiff-upper-lipped officers were not supposed to say. Nor does he care that his superiors are reading them. But (such is my theory) his superiors concluded he wasn’t ‘sound’. In fact his letters demonstrated that he wasn’t ‘one of us’. Remember that at the time of most of the following excerpts he was acting CO of the battalion:

‘It [Loos] has been a ghastly business too awful to describe. […] God what a sight it has been’ (p. 83). ‘We have had another dusting and done no good’ (p. 107). ‘The strain and reaction is telling and I cannot eat or sleep’ (p. 116). ‘I have several men who are trying to get out of going into the trenches with various excuses […] Personally I hate going’ (p. 132). ‘Am just fed up to the teeth with soldiers’ (p. 226). ‘I don’t think I am any more efficient now to command a Battn than I was [six months ago], in fact I think less as I am more frightened than I was’ (p. 240). ‘I am sorry to say I am FED UP with this bloody war’ (p. 246). ‘Our new tin helmets have saved any amount of lives, and it seems a pity we did not have them before’ (p. 283). ‘The Battle of Loos was nothing to this [Somme] and you cannot imagine the noise stink or number of dead about. It is awful, & rather gets on one’s nerves’ (p. 290). ‘I am rather disappointed with my new men […] but carrying heavy loads in pitch darkness when one has had no experience must be a bit trying, & I am sure I should chuck my load down & run for the nearest shell hole if I had to do it’ (p. 333). ‘I feel so depressed about the show I don’t know what to do’ (p. 343). ‘Am sorry I have not given you much news lately but when one is living in mud up to one’s knees & doing only what one is forbidden to talk about, it is rather difficult to say much’ (p. 365).

But it is vital to stress that he also NEVER GIVES UP. In the Battle of Loos only two of his 20 officers and 184 of his 900 Tommies are left standing, but ‘we made our objective […] and if others had done as well we should have gone further on’ (p. 82). Though he hates going into the trenches as much as his men do, ‘I don’t say and [I] pretend I like it’ (p. 132). The noise of the artillery drives him mad, he can’t wait for leave, but he always returns to the task. He is freezing cold, soaked to the skin, up to his waist in mud and water, infested with lice, forced to defecate in his own trousers, plagued with lumbago, prey to all the trench infections going, deeply depressed, shocked and nauseated, but he still goes on and right to the end his concern is the state of his men and the performance of the battalion. I would never describe Bartlett as a ‘war hero’, but to hate the whole show as much as he does and yet fight on with utter dedication is, surely, heroic-grade grit. It’s this combination of normal uncensored responses that any of us would be capable of, with dogged determination that I’m sure I wouldn’t, which makes him so likeable.

My slow reading has also made me see Margaret (‘Peggy’) differently. She never joined the Red Cross and worked tirelessly in a hospital in France, say, because, I now realise, being ‘the Colonel’s wife’ was a full time job. She had to communicate with the families of her husband’s soldiers, even visiting bereaved parents in various parts of the country; she had to send a constant stream of food parcels to Bartlett and his officers at the Front, along with clothing, medicines, reading matter, daily letters and news; she had to meet returning officers and take them out to lunch; she had to negotiate with her husband’s superiors at home over such delicate matters as his lack of promotion and securing a cushier posting… I had not previously realised that ‘the Colonel’s wife’ was as much a full time job, and expected to be, as being ‘the vicar’s wife’. Like a vicar’s wife, Peggy is not paid a penny for it, but seems never to complain.

There was another expectation of ‘the Colonel’s wife’ that she fulfilled perfectly, too: she was ten years younger than him, attractive, always fashionably dressed, well manicured, and sexy. As befits ‘the Colonel’s wife’, when she is photographed next to her husband and with other officers on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice in 1917 you can see that she is ‘the centre of attention’ as Tatham puts it (p. 377).

Why Bartlett had a fling with another woman once when he was home on leave, and why his very vibrant-seeming marriage broke up in 1922, I find myself speculating about endlessly; and that is another pleasure of Tatham’s creation. With some knowledge of the Edwardian theatre, I am tempted to think that Peggy (a starlet of London musicals) thought Charles a better financial catch than he turned out to be. One could come away from the letters thinking she was manipulative, spoiled, contrarian and impossibly demanding… There is a suggestion in one letter (p. 46) that she was having to fend off men’s attentions herself; but she may also have been a compulsive flirt… Then there is the suggestion (p. 150) that she wanted more babies; but, argues Bartlett, ‘I fail to see how you can say it is my fault’… Did communication, affection, even sex, eventually fail between them because the Bartlett who had been through the war was an utterly different person from the one who had set out for it?

All life and death is in Andrew Tatham’s two masterpieces, A Group Photograph and I Shall Not Be Away Long. Read them in that order. They are the English War and Peace of the 1914-18 catastrophe.

5 January 2021

Today I started my second reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in three months. The reasons for this will emerge in my next post, on 1 February. We are going to devote five posts from that date to Women in Love, which some people consider the greatest English novel of the twentieth century (1916). The first guest post will be by film critic John Pym about Ken Russell’s 1969 film of the novel, the second by seasoned Lawrentian Damian Grant about the novel itself, and the third by historian Laurence Brockliss about what Edwardian marriage was really like. Expect fireworks.

A very happy New Year to you all!

Patrick Miles

The haiku-accompanying icicle image came from this Icicle of the Day entry on “Christine’s blog”, the butterfly image is by Calderonia-follower Katy George, and the hare below it is from this Wildlife Trusts entry.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged ABE, advertising, Amazon, Andrew Tatham, Battle of Loos, Battle of the Somme, biography, Brimstone, British Expeditionary Force, care homes, Charles Bartlett, comments, coronavirus, COVID-19, D, Damian Grant, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, H. Lawrence, haiku, hare, I Shall Not Be Away Long, icicles, John Pym, Katy George, Ken Russell, Laurence Brockliss, Lev Tolstoi, Margaret Bartlett, marketing, Nice, publishing, Russia, Russian Studies, Russianists, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, spring, subventions, The Great War, Times Literary Supplement, TLS, War and Peace, winter, Women in Love, woodpecker, World War I | Leave a comment

A Christmas Story by George Calderon

Posted on December 18, 2020 by Patrick Miles

THE ACADEMY OF HUMOUR.

BY GEORGE CALDERON.

Woodham Daintry, Essex: October 15.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – I do not wonder at your surprise on hearing that I have again entered at an educational establishment, and I believe you will be still more surprised when you hear the kind of establishment it is. At the age of twenty-eight, as you very justly observe, a man has generally finished with that sort of thing, and is old enough to educate himself. What will you think when I tell you that two of my fellow pupils here are over sixty?

You must not suppose that I have abandoned my long cherished ambition of at last securing the Chair of Metaphysics in one of our Universities; not for one moment! And do not wrong me by imagining that the comfortable competence which has fallen to my lot through the generosity of poor Aunt Susan’s testamentary dispositions is sufficient to divert me from the principal object of my life. After one term here I intend to resume my independent researches in Ontology, and mean to be heard of at last. Cambridge itself will ring with my name; alma mater shall have no cause to blush for her alumnus.

Photo by Christian Richardt

As it is a great gratification to me to give you the fullest confidence, and impart to you all the details of my circumstances and aspirations, I will tell you the whole story of my new departure in full.

First I will premise that the establishment at which I am now residing, amongst the pleasant fields of Essex, is Professor Larrion’s Gelæological College, or Academy of Humour. Gelæology – the word, as I need hardly point out to you, comes from the Greek γελοϊος – is the science of the laughable, or ridiculous; and Professor Larrion, who has made a philosophical study of the subject, undertakes to teach to any man of good understanding the art of being humorous and amusing in the short space of some ten weeks. The College is only just opened; but from what I can judge of Professor Larrion on so brief and acquaintance, I feel sure that it is bound to be an extraordinary success. His hopes are very high; so also – I may be permitted to add – are his charges. (You see that the humorous atmosphere of the place is already beginning to tell on me, and I am commencing to make little jokes of my own.)

Now for the reason of my coming here. When I went down in September to stay with your friend, and, I venture now to add, my friend, Admiral Timminer, for the Chelmsford ball, it was still my intention, as it always has been from my Cambridge days, to remain single, in order the better to devote myself to the arduous pursuit of Mistress Metaphysics. But by what strange chances is a man’s fate altered! As soon as I set my eyes on Miss Kitty Timminer, all my plans were upset. Chairs of Metaphysics had no longer any charms for me, if Miss Kitty could not share them with me. (Is not this another joke?) If any one had described her to me beforehand I should have said at once that she was the last person in the world with whom I need have feared that I should fall in love. I never met anyone less interested in serious things in the whole of my life. You know her, of course; you must have seen her when you visited the Timminers at Chelmsford; so I need hardly describe the many particular beauties whose synthesis is so utterly bewitching. I really cannot write about her; whatever adjective I find is so hopelessly inadequate and tawdry. I cannot understand how any one who has seen her, even for a moment, can ever think of marrying anyone else.

However, to return to my subject. I pursued her with the most strenuous attentions. I was cheerful with her and even gay. At times I thought that she felt some little touch of what I felt, and I was on the point of declaring my passion. But something checked me. There were other men staying in the house, lively creatures, without a glimmer of intellect. When we were all together they cracked jokes and were always merry; she laughed and talked with them, while I sat glum and silent in the corner. I soon saw that one of these men, a certain Captain Bunching, of the Essex Light Infantry, was as deeply in love with Miss Kitty as the shallowness of his nature would allow. I was jealous; I envied him. Why, I thought to myself, why has this fat, brainless creature the art of making her rock with laughter while I, with fifty times his intellect, can bring nothing but the faintest of smiles to her lips? I listened to the conversation of these men and made mental notes of what they said; there was nothing in their ideas beyond my range of thought. Much of their success, it seemed to me, depended on the confidence of their manner. I strove to imitate them. I made attempts at saying funny things; but when, after much effort, I blurted them out a little late in the conversation, people looked at me blankly, with bewildered faces, and I sank back in my chair, hot, and blushing with mortification.

I saw my great defect. I was not humorous. I had been so long occupied with serious things that I had lost the art of being amusing.

Walking along the streets of London or any other city on a Sunday, I have often noted the happy faces of lovers that frequent them on that day. The man whispers two or three words in the girl’s ear, she throws down her eyes, and blushes and laughs delightedly. What is this secret of conversation, I wondered, that these common people have and from which I am excluded? Had I whispered three words in that girl’s ear, putting all my intellect into the effort, would she have laughed? I think not. I doubt whether she would even have blushed.

I determined to begin at the very beginning. I saw that in order to make any girl fall in love with me, I must first of all learn to be funny. Returning to London, I confided much of my trouble to Jack Sloper, a young barrister who was up at Trinity with me. He said he knew the very thing I wanted. Larrion, the man who had got him through his law examination, was giving up ‘cramming’, as it is called, for the bar, and was setting up an Academy of Humour in Essex, only a few miles from Chelmsford. I jumped at the idea, put myself into communication with Mr. Larrion – his title of Professor is only assumed for business purposes – and here I am!

Mr. Larrion is a man of powerful analytic intellect, and, I am told, very amusing. I have as yet heard no jokes from him myself, at least, not that I know of. His face wears such an air of imperturbable gravity that it is often hard to know whether he is being funny or not. When I arrived, he called the boot-boy to take my portmanteau, saying: ‘What ho, within there! Go, scullion, bear this traveller’s baggage to the donjon-keep.’ We none of us smiled except the boot-boy; he roared. I think very likely it was only a quotation.

In person Mr. Larrion is short and broad. He has a very large and muscular face, clean-shaven, and quite inscrutable.

His career has been a varied one. Finding his early years at the bar unremunerative he took to literature; he was the author of a series of articles called ‘Topsy Turtledove, by the Last of the Joneses’, which appeared in a paper known as the ‘Pink Un’. The sketches are very clever, I am told; I have not read them myself. However, literature proved no kindlier than law. He went to Paris and lived a chequered life, getting along as best he could with English lessons &c. I hear that at one time he was even a waiter at the Café Boulanger. Two years ago he returned to London and was very successful in preparing a certain class of law students for their examinations; he made them work only an hour a day, and fixed the leading cases in their minds under the form of amusing little stories and jingling rhymes. Now he has set up this Academy, and he has, I think, a real career before him.

I can best convey to you some notion of the daring and originality of his intellect by giving you an extract from one of the extremely sensible letters which he wrote to me when I first thought of joining him.

‘To the careful observer of the intercourse of men,’ he says, ‘nothing can be more patent than the Uniformity of Humour. To him it is plain that below the shifting surface of humorous conversation lie certain immutable principles or laws to which all Jokes conform. I have made it my task, by patient comparison and inference, to discover what those laws may be; to find a scientific basis for one of the most important arts of life; to save that art from being the privilege of the few, and even in their hands an instrument of uncertain success. My aim, like that of the Sage of Verulam, is to establish a method which shall be able exæquare ingenia, to make the fool and the philosopher equally good fools. That, Mr Jones, is what you want… You may often hear people say, ‘It was only a Joke’, as though a Joke were a trivial thing beside a serious remark. Those who speak in this way show a lamentable misapprehension of the position of Jokes in the scheme of nature. The philosopher, knowing that he has no excuse for existence but as a member of Society, sets himself to cultivate that faculty which is to win him his diploma of membership – the faculty of Rational Intercourse. Now of Rational Intercourse there are three kinds, consisting in the communication respectively of facts, of theories, and of Jokes. To communicate theories is the function of the intelligent bore; to communicate facts is the function of the unintelligent bore; nous autres, my dear Mr. Jones, we must crack our Jokes. The bores must still play a part in conversation; we cannot have conversation without theories and facts; these are the boughs on which the golden fruit is to hang. I shall have three or four paid bores at my Academy to start conversations and to act as the whetstones of our wit.’

Mr. Larrion’s household is in a very topsy-turvy condition at present; for all the pupils, myself included, were in such a hurry to begin, that we arrived three days before the time appointed – all except one, that is: he is expected tomorrow; I haven’t heard his name.

The servants are in such fits of laughter all day at what we do and say that they are quite incapable of work. Knowing the purpose of the Academy, they are prepared to find humour in everything. When the boot-boy awoke me the morning after my arrival, I said, ‘I shall want some hot water to shave with.’ I have never seen anybody laugh like he did; he knocked over the jug and rolled about on the floor. I also laughed, but not so immoderately, being in bed. Half an hour later, finding that no water came, I rang the bell. When I took the boy to task for his forgetfulness, he defended himself by saying that he ‘did not know I was serious’.

There are eleven pupils in all: three City men, five cavalry officers, two High Church curates, and myself. There are also six bores, i.e. people paid to be quite serious. They spend the morning reading the ‘Times’ and ‘Standard’, besides things like ‘Whitaker’, Encyclopedias &c. Two of them are specialists; one of these got a First in History at Oxford. Another is a decayed man about town; he takes in ‘Truth’ and the ‘Morning Post’, and knows an immense number of interesting things about people in London. In the afternoon we poke fun at them and play practical jokes on them. I am very glad I am not a bore.

You can have no conception of the gaiety of this place – apple-pie beds night after night, and booby-traps on every door. Mr. Larrion says he will lead us to higher things once we can get our studies ‘under way’.

Once a day we all go for a walk together. We walk in threes, with a bore in the middle of each trio, and a pupil of the Academy on either side. Of course we don’t keep to this order, but get running about in the open, knocking off one another’s hats, and all that sort of thing. The country people fly with every sign of terror when they see us approaching, for somehow or other the absurd rumour has got about that Mr. Larrion’s Academy is a private lunatic asylum.

However, it is getting late, and I must close this long letter, as Mr. Larrion has given me a number of anecdotes and puns to learn by heart before I go to bed.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

II.

Woodham Daintry: October 18.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – I am delighted to find that you are so much interested in the Academy, and that you so heartily approve of my coming here. I have, as you say, always been conspicuously wanting in humour; no man can feel it more keenly than myself. It is by no means for lack of effort; I have always tried my best, and now we shall see what a little study can do for me.

Imagine my disgust when Captain Bunching, of the Essex Light Infantry, the very man that I am studying to emulate, turned up yesterday at the Academy and entered himself for the term. I do not think it is fair that people who are already so humorous as he is should come here. However, I am not afraid of him; his presence will be an additional incentive to industry; I feel as if I were a boy at school again, preparing for the examination at the end of the term – but, oh! What a prize awaits the successful one! As soon as the course is over I shall fly into Chelmsford and bombard Miss Kitty with jokes. Captain Bunching, I feel certain, will do the same; we both have the same end in view. We shall sit on either side of Miss Kitty, plying our wit, and we shall soon see who is the better man!

Mr. Larrion’s first two lectures, on the History of Humour, have been profoundly interesting. I have made copious notes, and am sure that you will be interested to learn what he said. It may make you humorous too if I keep you ‘posted’ in his lectures; not that I mean for a moment, my dear uncle, that you are in any way wanting in comicality; but, with Christmas coming on, you may be glad of a little help.

Mr. Larrion began with Aristotle. I quote from my notes.

‘Aristotle defined wit as a mean between buffoonery and stolidity; but inasmuch as people are far too fond of jokes,’ says he, ‘buffoons are generally called wits.’ In all these philosophical writers there is to be noticed a certain shade of bitterness when they speak of the humorists. Hobbes, in speaking of the cause of laughter, says: “That it consisteth in wit, or, as they call it, in the jest, experience confuteth; for men laugh at mischances and indecencies wherein there lieth no wit nor jest at all.” One can scarcely help thinking that someone must have stolen his clothes while he was bathing.’

The professor was still more interesting when he launched into wider generalizations of the History of Humour.

‘Laughter being the distinctive characteristic of man, the more human we become, the more we shall laugh; and inasmuch as we must have something to laugh at, the progress of civilisation will be always accompanied by an advance in the Art of Humour. Taking Humour, in accordance with this theory, as a criterion of the civilisations of the past, many archæologists have been disappointed at finding no traces of it in the records of the Egyptians. Taking it as a criterion of the future, there are some who go so far as to believe that, in the course of evolution, the lower animals will learn to laugh; and that the jokes of today will in the end be relegated to the lowest orders of creation, sponges and the like; that the quip which used once to rouse the laughter of kings will at last shake the sides of the jelly-fish… The circumstances of life are always altering, and each new combination affords an opportunity for a new joke. Even language changes; twenty years ago it was impossible to make a Volapük pun.’ I shall certainly learn Volapük when I have finished the course.

He also made a very interesting calculation that if every male person in the British islands were to make a joke on coming of age we should have 150,000 new jokes every year. If these were all passed round we should hear 480 new jokes every day – Sundays, of course, excluded.

As you may well imagine, all this was Greek to Captain Bunching. He did not even take notes, but kept scribbling caricatures in his exercise book and winking at another of the military men. I don’t think he will have a chance.

Much as I admire Mr. Larrion’s intellect, I cannot fully agree with all that he says. He quoted a remark of Sydney Smith’s today as one of the best impromptus on record. On seeing a little girl stroke a tortoise one day, Sydney Smith observed that what she did was like stroking the dome of St. Paul’s to please the Dean and Chapter. I really must confess that I see very little point in this, for I am sure that the present Dean, at any rate, would be quite the opposite of pleased if he knew that anyone had been taking such a liberty with the building.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

III.

Woodham Daintry: November 12.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – Thank you for your letter. I will try to make up the joke you want and will send it as soon as it is ready.

I have been a little uneasy this afternoon, for Captain Bunching drove away in his dogcart as soon as lunch was over; and Pawley, one of the bores, who has become a great friend of mine, tells me that he has gone over to Chelmsford – to the Timminers’ of course. I do not think it is fair his going there like this in term time, because he knows that I am not yet far enough advanced to compete with him. What a beast he looked as he drove away! With his hat on the back of his head, and a great cigar sticking out from the middle of his fat red face!

Mr Larrion was very interesting this morning in dealing with the principles of joking.

‘We may roughly define a joke,’ he said, ‘as a thing which provokes laughter. Laughter is an intermittent, inarticulate sound due to the expulsion of breath through the larynx by a series of nervous convulsions of the diaphragm; and the humorist must always bear in mind that it is this phenomenon, and this alone, which he is endeavouring to produce.’

He recommends constant practice. ‘If you are not in form one evening, persevere. You will perhaps inadvertently say something funny; you may discover a joke if you cannot invent one… You must begin with the simplest form of joke, the joke which is made in answer to another person’s remark. Your answer must be pertinent in form, but impertinent in matter.

‘If, however, there was any personal animus in the remark addressed to you, you may best express your contempt for the speaker by a rejoinder which makes no pretence to relevance, such as “You go and dye your hair”.

‘A lone-joke is made on the same principle as a joke in answer.

‘You must always be ready with answers to the commonplace openings of conversation, especially to weather-gambits. For instance, if anybody says “The rain is coming down!” your best answer is: “Did you expect it to go up?” If an old gentleman, a friend of your father’s, say, observes to you, “I think I’ve seen your face before”, you should reply, “You didn’t expect to see it behind, did you?”’

After the lecture we practised latent gambits; that is, given a commonplace, to joke in two moves. I made up one or two and tried them on the bores, but somehow I could never get them to give the right answer to my first remark, so they didn’t come off.

To my great relief Captain Bunching has just come back from Chelmsford, looking very glum, while I write. What a beast he is! How I hate him!

I have a hedgehog that I am going to put in his bed to-night. Of course he will have no right to be angry, as it is only a joke. I hope he will hurt himself.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

IV.

Woodham Daintry: November 20.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – I hope to have your joke ready in a few days.

There has been a little unpleasantness in the house since I last wrote. Captain Bunching must have found out beforehand about the hedgehog. When I got up to my bedroom in the evening and opened the door – it was quite dark in the passage – a whole pailful of potato-parings came down on my head, and I narrowly escaped being hit by the bucket; and when I got into bed, there was the hedgehog there! I pricked my feet in the most abominable way. Naturally, I was very angry; and the Captain and I had words at breakfast. Larrion, in the most unjust way, took the Captain’s side; he said that of course it was a joke, not a first class joke, but quite good of its kind – and appropriate. Certainly I did not agree with him; it is not the sort of joke that amuses me. I thought of leaving the house at once, but I stayed on and swallowed my wrath for her sake, for Miss Kitty’s sake. What would I not give for the term to be over!

Four of the pupils and two of the bores have already left. Some of the people here seem quite unable to understand the difference between humour and horse-play.

The servants have got so used to humour that they never take the least notice of it now. The boot-boy doesn’t raise the ghost of a smile when I let off my most screaming jokes at him. This seems to me a pity. I think the servants ought to be discharged once a month. Of course we don’t laugh much at one another’s jokes, and it is not to be expected of the bores; so that one hardly realises how funny one really is.

Our lecture this morning was on Style, which is much more important than many people think.

You complain that you have as yet had no opportunities of seeing what progress I have made. I must acknowledge that I still find it difficult to make actual jokes, but with the Professor’s lecture on Style in view, I think I could be humorous, or funny in the narrower sense of the word. It is, of course, rather difficult to do it without having any very definite subject to apply one’s methods to, but I will do my best.

Now I will be humorous.

‘Here goes! Tittup my hearties! How are you, old Cocky? As the monkey said when he met the parachute. How’s your delectable boko today? Not too catawamptious, but just catawamptious enough? That comes of the beamish bottlemilk. Then the coal-dust came down on the giddy pantechnicon.’

This is, of course, not as funny as I could have made it if you had given me a subject. But don’t you think it is rather amusing? It is in what Mr. Larrion calls the ‘Happy Chappie’ style; next time I will try to show you something in the ‘New Humorous’ line.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

Woodham Daintry: November 22.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – I am exceedingly sorry that you take the humorous part of my letter amiss. I assure you that I had not the least intention of being offensive. You know how sincerely I respect you. Perhaps it was rash of me to try to be funny before I was further advanced. I will promise not to write funnily to you again, since you dislike it so much. Many thanks for your advice about Miss Kitty; but I can assure you that it was, in a way, superfluous: I had no intention of endeavouring to engage her affections by that particular vein of humour.

You will hardly believe how eager I am now for the end of the term. We are going to wind up on the last day with a ball, at which we are all going to be screamingly funny. A committee of pupils – I am not a member of it – has been formed to devise a few good practical jokes, to be played off on the guests; and we are all working very industriously on private jokes about the floor, the music, &c.

The fame of this institution has gone abroad, the rumour of our ball has spread like wildfire through the country and everybody is clamouring to be invited. Of course I asked the Timminers as soon as I heard of the ball; but I was disappointed to find that they had already accepted an invitation from Captain Bunching. Never mind! On that night I will do or die. Even Larrion himself shall be dazzled into silence by the scintillation of my wit. I shall not use any of the jokes that we have learnt during the term; I shall make up mine on the spot, one after another.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

P.S. – I enclose the joke you wanted. It was Pawley, the bore – he is one of my most intimate friends now, you know – who first thought of it. I have only worked it up a little.

VI.

Chelmsford: December 20.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – The end of term has come at last, and I am the happiest man that ever lived. Oh, if only I could tell you one tenth of what I feel! Life hasn’t been life till now. I can’t imagine how I could have endured it. I can hardly sit still even to write to you. Isn’t she the dearest, sweetest, loveliest creature you ever saw? To think that Kitty should be mine after all!

The ball the day before yesterday was a complete fiasco. Larrion is in despair; he as been tearing his hair and cursing and swearing like a madman ever since. He says his business is ruined, and I expect it is. When the guests went away that evening – as they did before half the programme was finished – he got up and said that we were the stupidest lot of men it had ever been his misfortune to meet with; he said there wasn’t a spark of humour or a grain of common sense in the whole pack of us.

We collected in the drawing-room at eight, all rather nervous. We none of us liked to talk, for fear of letting out one of our jokes, which would, of course, have been common property at once. We walked up and down, putting on our gloves and looking at the pictures on the walls – Punch cartoons, and comic valentines by Larrion, of which we were already sick to death. The bores were the only members of the party who seemed at ease. They chatted gaily, and made jokes amongst themselves; of course they were allowed to do as they pleased that night. They were not to dance round dances, however, unless there was somebody sitting. Both the High Church curates came down to dance. I noticed one of them going about with a placard saying: ‘Beware of the dog’ on his tails. He didn’t know. It was most amusing. Later on I found that I had a paper on my back saying ‘This style 18s. 6d.’ I think I can guess what humorist did that; but I can forgive him now.

During the first three dances people simply yelled with laughter the whole time; one really couldn’t hear the music at all. But I think everybody was too excited to be really funny. The men jumped about rather boisterously in the Lancers. I was too nervous even for that. I was so nervous that, to tell you the truth, I did not get off a joke the whole evening. In fact, one of my partners mistook me for a bore.

Practical jokes, Mr Larrion had arranged, were not to begin till supper time; so we had supper early on purpose. There was a tremendous turkey at one end of the big table. Captain Bunching – he was one of the Practical Jokes Committee – asked Admiral Timminer to carve it. As soon as he put the fork into it, it exploded with a loud report; it was made of inflated india-rubber. The Admiral was very indignant; so was Kitty. Bunching had secured her for supper, but she left him and went to another table. Here she was still more unfortunate, for one of the curates, next to whom she found herself, offered her a little scent bottle from the table, asking her if she was fond of stephanotis. As soon as she opened the top of it, a stream of black ink ran out of the bottom, making a very ugly stain down the front of her dress.

After supper Captain Bunching somehow got her to dance with him. I think he threw the blame of the turkey on somebody else, or said he didn’t know. He took her into a little bower which had been made in the conservatory, and asked her to sit down on a thing like an ottoman. As soon as she sat down she tumbled into a box; the top was only a sham. She tore her dress very badly on some nails there were at the sides.

This quite destroyed all the Captain’s chances with Kitty. I have never seen anybody so angry as she was. She came running up to me in the dancing-room, and led me away by the arm into another room. She said, ‘You, at least, will not be funny, Mr. Jones’; and, to tell the truth, I really wasn’t.

She said that she had never been to such a ghastly entertainment in her life; ‘ghastly’ was the word she used. She said that the perpetual stupid jokes, idiotic riddles, and facetious answers that she had had to listen to perfectly sickened her, and she hoped she would never meet a funny man again. I comforted her as best I could; the conversation became more and more intimate, and suddenly I found that I had proposed and been accepted.

I saw the Admiral about it next morning. He consented, and invited me to stop over Christmas.

I have sworn never to make another joke as long as I live. Last night, towards the end of dinner – the Admiral had been talking in a very interesting way about the proposed new international code of marine signals – he said, ‘Will you have some port?’ I replied, ‘No, thanks, Admiral; I should prefer a little starboard.’

For a minute or two I could hardly realise the full force of what I had said. There was no effort; it simply dropped out. A long pause followed. We all seemed to be gasping for breath.

Imagine my utter astonishment when Kitty suddenly jumped up, pale and trembling, from her place at the table, and said, in a low, firm voice:

‘Bilbury, if you ever make a joke again I shall break off our engagement.’

I did not seek to fathom her motives. I was ready to make even this sacrifice for her sake. I promised her I would never make another. And I never will! So you must not depend upon me for the future.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

This story was published in The Cornhill Magazine for April 1899, when George and Kittie were in the second calendar year of their engagement following the death of Kittie’s first husband. They were married on 10 November 1900. As Calderonians will know, ‘Jones’ was the name of Kittie’s dog.

In a letter to Kittie of 11 February 1899, George wrote that he was ‘awfully afraid of becoming a bore. I have the makings of a bore in me’. Kittie knew him to have a tremendous sense of humour and wit, but this story seems to suggest he had also ‘researched’ the subject of laughter. At least two reviewers later called him a ‘laughing philosopher’.

Here are a few Notes that may be useful:

‘a young barrister who was up at Trinity with me’: George, of course, was an alumnus of Trinity College, Oxford, not Cambridge.

‘Topsy Turtledove…the Last of the Joneses…Pink Un’. I am unable to explain ‘Topsy Turtledove’, or what Jones’s involvement could be, but ‘the Pink Un’ was the Sporting Times (printed on salmon paper).

‘the Sage of Verulam’: Francis Bacon (1561-1626).

‘exæquare ingenia’: ‘to level out capabilities’. A phrase from Bacon’s Novum Organum on the scientific method.

‘apple-pie beds’: beds made with a single bottom sheet doubled back to look like the top sheet, so that victims cannot cannot stretch their legs. Thought to come from French, ‘nappe pliée’.

‘buffoons are generally called wits’: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, chapter 8.

‘That it consisteth in wit…’ Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic.

‘Volapük’: the ‘international language’ created by Johann Schleyer in 1880.

‘On seeing a little girl stroke a tortoise’: a ‘true anecdote’ of Sydney Smith (1771-1845), but it seems the commonest version concerns a turtle.

‘a round dance’: a ballroom dance such as a waltz in which couples move in circles round the ballroom.

My heartfelt thanks to Sam2 (aka James Miles) for illustrating the story so aptly.

AND THANK YOU ALL OUT THERE FOR FOLLOWING ‘CALDERONIA’ INTO ITS EIGHTH YEAR!

HAVE YOURSELVES A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS

IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES

AND A HEALTHY, SAFE AND PROSPEROUS 2021!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged Admiral Timminer, Aristotle, Bilbury Jones, bores, Cambridge University, Captain Bunching, Chelmsford, Christmas story, comedy, comments, engagements, Essex Light Infantry, Francis Bacon, gelæology, George Calderon, humour, jokes, Jones, Kittie Calderon, Kitty Timminer, laughter, metaphysics, ontology, practical jokes, Professor Larrion, The Academy of Humour, The Cornhill Magazine, The Pink Un, Thomas Hobbes, Volapük | 1 Comment

Hello chronotopia old friend..?

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Patrick Miles

‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’, said Kierkegaard. Regrettably, this is of course true. We are like maggots, chewing our way relentlessly forwards through Time, but we are thinking maggots who constantly need to look back and make sense of their lived life, what they have left behind them… It is a regrettable truth, however, because if we are living life forwards we are always at a different point in Time when we turn round to look at our past life, so it will always look different; which means it can never be understood. (Except, who knows, at the moment of death.)

Personally, I had resisted looking back to the beginning of Black Crow and trying to make sense of it all, until now. The present phase is so static, so boring, so unrelenting and apparently prospectless, that one’s mind turns idly to reading it all forwards in the memory (or in this blog) and trying to make sense of it that way.

The first phase, as I recall it, was marked by frenetic activity within sudden spatial limits. When Lockdown 1 was declared, anyone with any creative urges threw themselves into production. Very often, I think, it was of things that they had been putting off for years. I have never, ever, been sent so many manuscripts: four longish books, three plays, about a hundred poems, six short stories, numerous articles…

The second phase, when Lockdown 1 was lifted and we could travel about a bit, is associated in my memory with fine weather, sparkling day-visits to Norfolk, a long weekend in Bungay where enormous chub lazed in a sunlit mill stream, another weekend at a hotel for senior citizens, with spectacular sunsets over the marshes…

The third phase, the one we are in now, began with a definite event — 12,000 students returning to Cambridge — and initially had forward propulsion, a narrative: they milled about a bit, they gave each other Black Crow rather than the usual start-of-term glandular fever, the University rigorously clamped down, so successfully that according to BBC Look East the Government congratulated it. Cambridge was spared being put in Tier 2, although statistically it should have been. But then Lockdown 2 began and each day began to resemble another, ‘nothing happened’, life became a daily round, week in week out of the same. All narrative seems to have gone. Linearity has been replaced by the circle. Time has become cyclical…

Contemplating this, I suddenly realised that it is how Bakhtin describes the ‘chronotope’ of stories by Gogol, Turgenev, Flaubert or Chekhov set in a provincial town: ‘Time here is devoid of event and therefore seems to have almost stopped. In this form of time all people do is eat, drink, sleep, play cards…’ (Bakhtin, you will recall, took Einstein’s concept spacetime and applied it as timespace (chronotope) to literature, in order to describe the fusion of time-form and space-form that characterises a particular genre.)

Each phase of Black Crow as I’ve experienced it has had its own chronotope. The first was that urgency of creation combined with unwonted spatial confinement. I think it had burned itself out by June, but in any case it was superseded by the second chronotope, which was a relaxed time of enjoyment of the wider world enabled by newly permitted travel. The third chronotope, our present, is repetitive time+spatial immobility. Has one ever had to live through three distinct chronotopes in eight months before?

The thing that these three chronotopes have in common, though, is that we haven’t chosen them; they have been imposed upon us by Black Crow (or, some would say, the Government). These chronotopes are products of unfreedom. That’s what makes them so irksome, I think, and not just the fact that we have had to live through more changes of chronotope than we are used to. I therefore propose a second variety of ‘chronotopia’ to the one that long-term followers of Calderonia will be familiar with. It seems that the psychosis called ‘chronotopia’ afflicts us not only when we have to juggle two different forms of time in our brain simultaneously, but when we have to cope with one distinct form of chronotope following another and imposed upon us arbitrarily.

* * *

What has one achieved during two lockdowns?

Well, I have read, i.e. reported on and edited or proofread, four longish books, three plays, about a hundred poems…and even been paid as the consultant to one book.

But all this was other people’s creativity. What have I created myself?

When I come down to it, my most prolonged creativity has been this blog; dare I say it, I’m particularly proud of my unpublished article for the Spectator…

However, I am still privately staggered that between 19 March and 23 August 2020 I finished ‘Making Icons’, the poem in 34 stanzas that I began in 2008 and had written only 26 stanzas of by 4 April 2019. Thank you, Black Crow, for something.

It has taken me twelve years to write a poem of 408 lines. To put this into perspective, it also took Dante twelve years to write the Divine Comedy — but it has 14,233 lines!

I am very pleased to offer here, then, the last three stanzas of ‘Making Icons’. The icon of the Pantocrator, made and painted at St Seraphim’s church in Walsingham, has been completed, including being varnished with olifa (special linseed oil), and has been taken in February to an Anglican chapel where the Cambridgeshire and Norfolk Fens meet, for consecration in a service performed by a Russian Orthodox priest and choir. My first image below is of the icon, the second is of an officiating Russian priest, the third is of the ‘master’, the iconographer Leon Liddament, and the fourth is of oak tree branches. For some information on the verse form, see here.

‘He gef vs to be his homly hyne,/And precious perles vnto his pay. Amen. Amen.’
(Pearl, ll. 1211-12)

Skiwanken slightly, an oak-tree stands
in sallow grass beside the path.
We notice stubs of leaves, some stags,
as, silenced, we approach and pass
into the porch…which opens on fast-
ness of Saxon white, grey diamonds,
dark rafters hewn into lissom arcs!
The master is here, he clasps his hands
in prayer for his icon laid on its ambo.
We file onto tough rush chairs, we spy
space fill with folk: friends, locals, and
an -ov and an -aya, -eva and -sky.

skiwanken: a Norfolk word meaning ‘crooked’.
stags: dead branches in the crown.
ambo: a kind of lectern with sloping front.
-ov, -aya, -eva, -sky: i.e. Russian people.

Skywards the censer sears, ‘Glory!’
the choir soars, we all rise agleam,
‘For ages of ages!’ Taut priest tones the story
of Christ’s first icon that Abgar healed,
of how homage and love ascend to their home.
‘…endue with power, that we before it
may pray,’ he whispers, and three times
swishes across it, thrice bows, thrice thuri-
fies human work, then sings his tropari:
‘O good One, you filled all with joy
when you came, O Saviour, to save the world,
raised on a Cross against the sky.

swishes across it: asperges the icon with holy water.
thurifies: perfumes it with a censer.
tropari: Church Slavonic for ‘troparion’, a hymn in one stanza.

Skywards we look to you through your pure Icon.
Forgive our transgressions, send your grace
upon us, O Christ God, and heal all division.’
He slowly bows and kisses the Face.
Glory and alleluia thrice!
Veils of very beauty they sing us
in lovely lines of Jesus’ kondak.
‘…for he loves mankind’ ends the dismissal.
Some kiss a corner of the image.
Outside, the priest blesses us. I see
the master climb into his Hillman,
and branches rooted in the sky.

Jesus’ kondak: the first kontakion and ikos of the canticle ‘To Our Most Sweet Lord Jesus Christ’.
blesses us: individually.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'Making Icons', 'real time', 'The Pearl', Albert Einstein, alliterative verse, Anglicanism, Anton Chekhov, Black Crow, Bungay, Cambridge University, Cambridgeshire, chronotopes, chronotopia, chub, comments, coronavirus, COVID-19, creativity, Dante Alighieri, editing, glandular fever, Gustave Flaubert, icons, Ivan Turgenev, Leon Liddament, lockdowns, maggots, Mikhail Bakhtin, Nikolai Gogol, Norfolk, pandemics, psychosis, reading manuscripts, Russian Orthodoxy, Russians, Space, spacetime, stasis, students, Søren Kierkegaard, The Divine Comedy, The Fens, The Spectator, time, viruses, Walsingham | 2 Comments

Guest Post: Andrew Tatham, ‘The Pursuit of Uniqueness and Originality in Self-Publishing’

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Patrick Miles

I have just been asked for advice about self-publishing from someone who has come into the possession of a First World War soldier’s original memoir. It’s hundreds of pages long and includes many photographs and colour drawings. Obviously such a thing from that era has value as a view of an extraordinary time, but whether it is worth the toil and expense and risk of self-publishing it as a large colour book is a whole different proposition. As a self-publisher you do not have the advantages of a major publisher with their financial clout and publicity machine, so your book has got to really make an impact in order to get noticed and have people talking about it. So I asked him the question: ‘What does this material say (or allow you to say with the way that you present it) that is unique and original, that will make it stand out from all the other books about the First World War?’

Being on the verge of publishing my own large colour book after three years of work and with a print run costing £29,000, I realise that that question is one that I also have to answer. I Shall Not Be Away Long is based on the First World War letters of Lt Col Charles Bartlett. The letters provide an immediate and uncensored portal into the life and times of a rather roguish infantry officer, full of humour and surprises as he attempts to navigate the challenges presented by the war and his marriage. On their own they make fascinating reading but to really make use of them to transport you to that time I have presented them visually to give the idea that you have opened them yourself and I have included images that evoke the circumstances in which they were written. I can’t recall seeing another book that has done this in this way, nor one where nearly every person and item and event mentioned in the letters has been investigated to be able to present the wider context of the main story in the letters. In particular, the lives that have sailed alongside Charles Bartlett’s, some for only very brief times, have in many cases got quite incredible stories attached to them. Just as with the people that we meet in our own lives, there are secrets that are hidden from contemporary view. Sometimes these have not escaped the historical record and so we end up knowing more about Charles Bartlett’s acquaintances than he probably did. We also get to see what happened to them all and get some idea of the long-term effects of the War. All of this gives context as does the benefit of hindsight to be able to take the views and beliefs that were held at a particular time and compare them with what we know now to have been the case. This is nowhere more starkly shown than in his comment one week after the start of the Battle of Somme (albeit from 13 miles behind the lines) that ‘The news seems very good and everyone seems very pleased’. If there is anything to be taken from all this it is that there is always a story beneath the surface and we would do well to question our assumptions about most things – and indeed it is only by asking questions and seeking answers that we can make progress, whether that be in self-publishing or in life in general.

You can get an idea of the contents of I Shall Not Be Away Long from this flick through the book:

Find out more and order your own copy from www.ishallnotbeawaylong.co.uk

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Tatham, Battle of the Somme, biographies, biography, book design, British Expeditionary Force, Charles Bartlett, comments, Facebook, I Shall Not Be Away Long, indie publishing, letters, memoirs, self-publishing, The Great War, video-link, World War I | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 12

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Patrick Miles

26 September
Today I suddenly realised what life under Black Crow reminds me of: living in the Soviet Union. It would be unfair to compare Britain at the moment to the view from a window in Moscow University’s Stalinist hostel in the winter of 1970…

…but it feels similar. And the reasons aren’t difficult to find. You prepare yourself to go out into a hostile environment (on some days, western students I knew in Moscow didn’t get further than that). You have to wear special headgear, people keep their distance and stare straight through you, there’s only one subject on everyone’s mind anyway: how awful the regime(n) is. You return to your room with a deep sigh of relief, because it’s the only place where you feel FREE. You can think freely, even talk freely (to yourself, not the microphones). Unfortunately, of course, if the inside of our own houses is the only place we now feel at liberty, we don’t have it. We have to curtail our freedom for the sake of our physical health and we shall get our freedom back, but in the meantime it doesn’t surprise me that Russians’ mental health suffered so much under communism.

12 October
Dahlias are vibrant, but chrysanthemums are the great survivors. ‘Lates’ come into flower in November and can last a month either outdoors or in a vase. Dahlias still breathe summer, chrysanths fight against winter with their subtler shades, forms and smell. No wonder they are synonymous in the East with happiness and long life. My own chrysanths are only just coming out, but I’ve certainly been cheered by this brilliant new book:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

It covers nearly four thousand years of growing and showing, is full of riveting detail, and superbly illustrated with everything from blooms of infinite variety to paintings, pottery and cigarette cards. I was particularly fascinated by the working class origins of much chrysanthemum-growing in this country and the penultimate chapter, ‘A Literary Bouquet’, which amongst other things looks closely at John Steinbeck’s short story of 1937 ‘The Chrysanthemums’. As you would expect of a garden historian whose most famous book is about garden gnomes, it is all enhanced by Twigs Way’s hilarious dry wit. She closes her book with a haiku by Bashō:

When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there’s nothing to write about
but radishes.

21 October
Some bestselling writers have complained on television that their sales are being undermined by the recent explosion of indie publishing. Rose Tremaine diplomatically implied that many of these books were of poor quality and shouldn’t be published…

But many should, and never would be by your bestselling publishers. Does Ms Tremaine actually not want competition? Is she against a free market? Because that is what digital self-publishing has created in the teeth of the commercial closed shop.

Moreover, the ‘explosion’ has made it more difficult for everyone including self-publishers. Most people would be stupefied to contemplate the obstacles to publication and selling copies that, say, Andrew Tatham has to confront. It takes real grit.

Speaking personally, publishing and marketing my own book has been a never-ending learning curve because the last book I published in this country as Sam&Sam was in 1987. One learns the hard way. For instance, the late John Dewey assured me from his own experience that a review in the TLS was worth a hundred copies, because that many readers and librarians throughout the world took their cue from it. It was a very long fight to get a review there. When it appeared, completely out of the blue, it omitted the Web address from which copies should be bought. Consequently, TLS readers went straight to Amazon and ABE, where it sold out before we could get more copies up ourselves. For that reason, I think, we sold only one copy through the Sam&Sam website.

It’s all a question of learning fast and spotting opportunities. Because of the pandemic, commercial publishers have been producing fewer books and advertising less in the TLS. Consequently I’ve just secured an amazing deal for an ad there in the Russian issue of 11 December, and I’m delighted to say that the paper itself has complimented Sam2 on his ‘striking’ design:

We might sell a hundred copies, we might sell none, but the only way to find out whether advertising in the TLS is worth it is to do it — and at a time when COVID has pushed the price down. A bonus is that this ad will in effect be one for both my book and Sam&Sam generally. So we are reorganising the website to showcase all our books Russian and English. Watch this space for an account of the results!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged advertisements, Andrew Tatham, Bashō, chrysanthemums, comments, coronavirus, COVID-19, dahlias, depression, freedom, garden gnomes, indie publishing, John Dewey, mental health, Moscow, Moscow State University, pandemic, psychosis, Reaktion Books, Rose Tremaine, Sam&Sam, Sam2, self-publishing, Times Literary Supplement, Twigs Way, USSR | Leave a comment

John Baines: exemplar of a young officer

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Patrick Miles

Available priced £10 including postage from joannaps2015@gmail.com

‘Exemplar’, not ‘exemplary’, because John Stanhope Baines, son of the Herbert Stanhope Baines who features in Laurence Brockliss’s recent guest post, would not have wanted anyone to regard him as an exemplary young officer of World War I. When he is invalided home from Ypres with a light wound in July 1915, and his nerves are suffering, he almost falls out with his fiancee-to-be Elisabeth Wicksteed over this very issue:

I felt that she admired me an awful lot & I couldn’t help feeling that it was the good she saw in me she was loving […] and that she mightn’t care so much about me if she realised that I wasn’t a hero after all. (p. 115)

Moreover, coming from four generations of the Baines family to edit the Leeds Mercury, he clearly had journalism in his blood: he described a military action so well in a diary he sent Dear Mother that she could not resist sending it to The Times as a more accurate account than their own, and when they published it he was hauled over the coals by a General (p. 71). He later got into trouble with the censor, too, for describing his billet in ‘highly dangerous’ detail (p. 103). He liked his whisky, he liked his pipe, he played bridge for money, winning at one point nearly £400 at today’s prices (p. 159), and in 1918 he even became, as the editors of his letters interpret it, ‘tired and disenchanted’ (p. 222).

But an exemplar he is. Born in 1894, he was a classical scholar at Winchester, went from school into the Royal Engineers (‘Sappers’), and at the age of twenty was a lieutenant on the Western Front. Here he shows himself to be a complete professional, hard-working, always retaining his humour, brave on perilous ‘wiring’ expeditions, sociable, very able at managing his men, given to attending church, curious about everything going on around him. In three adjectives, he is clean-living, gallant and stalwart. I cannot recall ever reading a better portrait of the archetypal young British officer of the Great War.

The editors of this 270-page volume, John Baines’s grandchildren Andrew Baines and Joanna Palmer, have done a magnificent job in presenting his letters: on the right hand page you have the letter, on the left hand a whole article about something touched on in its text, and these are very readable and entertaining in themselves. Their subjects range from bully beef, trench construction, military chaplains and malaria to…the recipe for traditional Yorkshire parkin, ‘wire obstacles’, and Raphael Kirchner’s pin-ups (illustrated). Those articles that explain the military campaigns John Baines is part of, and the wider background of the war as it unfolds, are outstandingly lucid and informative. In short, this book is not only about John Baines, it is a whole education in the realia of the 1914-18 War.

For me, two aspects of the book were a revelation. First, as reviewer Angela Holdsworth has put it, this is ‘at last a book outlining the dangerous and vital work of the Sappers, so often overlooked in accounts of the war’. I now understand their mind-boggling contribution to warfare. Second, I had always thought that the Salonika campaign, aimed at breaking the Germans’ Macedonian front, was another failure like Gallipoli, but this book shows it was quite the opposite. With maps and brilliant analyses on the left hand pages, Baines’s letters detail a crushing endgame that in Ludendorff’s words ‘sealed the fate of the quadruple alliance’, i.e. precipitated the armistice.

Having married Elisabeth Wicksteed (‘my Betsy’) whilst on leave in April 1916, John Baines was posted to Salonika in 1917 for the rest of the war. Here he was engaged less in frontline sapper work than building a network of roads behind the lines. These were a vital element in the eventual rout of the Bulgarians facing the British section of the Macedonian front. If anyone thought soldiering is not about people, this part of the book would convince them otherwise. Baines displays an extraordinary ability to get on with the local mixed races and organise and pay large numbers of women, men and children to construct his roads. The post-war tributes paid to the conduct of the British troops are glowing. Here is Baines writing to his mother on 26 May 1918:

A lot of my women bring their babies to work with them and leave them under a hedge somewhere. The hail was rather rough on the babies & the Sappers put their own coats over them as far as possible. The women were awfully pleased and brought them eggs next morning. Some of the Sappers are just like the head of a large family — say 20 wives and 20 daughters — and their family is very fond of them. They bring flowers for them and sometimes make them little bead purses or similar things to send home. (p. 217)

After the Bulgarians surrendered, John revisited the Turkish village he had been based at in Macedonia and was very honourably received. The villagers feared greatly for their future under post-war Greek rule. A panel on the opposite page explains that they were right to: the terrible history of Macedonia in the twentieth century was concluded by independence only in 1991. Despite the fact that Turkey was our war enemy, Baines had come greatly to admire the Turks, started to learn Turkish, and wanted after the war to continue with it at the London School of Oriental Languages so that he would be ‘in a position to agitate strongly for a job in some place inhabited by Turks’ (p. 243).

Local women breaking stones for road making 1917 (IWM Q32693)

A final quality to mention of John Stanhope Baines — one that we don’t perhaps associate with young public school officers in World War I — is empathy. It is tempting to think he acquired it as a result of losing his father when he was two and developing very deep relationships with his mother Elizabeth and sister Honor (who is the other recipient of his war letters published here). He seems to be able to tell his mother anything, for example that some of the Kirchner ladies ‘in various stages of dress or undress’ are ‘really rather nice’, and that he is ‘wildly in love’ with an 18-year-old called Salonina, who has ‘very nice hair’, depicted on a Roman coin he has dug up! This is well after his marriage to the rather severe-looking Betsy, to whom none of his letters seem to have survived. He sends his mother hefty chunks of his pay and winnings. When she protests, he writes: ‘You shouldn’t write that you’ve “no one to bring your troubles to”. What else is a son for?’ (p. 213).

Dearest Mother is both militarily and humanly a dramatic narrative, and I am not surprised that a successful theatrical entertainment has been made from it:

The editors, Andrew Baines and Joanna Palmer, appearing as John and ‘Dearest Mother’ in a presentation of their book in the Guildhall, Windsor, as part of The Windsor Spring Festival 2016

The book is a wonderfully fresh and readable contribution to the literature of World War I and I’m delighted to have come across it long after completing my own research on George Calderon’s war. Dearest Mother was published by Helion in 2015, the first edition sold out, and the second is now obtainable directly from the editors at joannaps2015@gmail.com

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Baines, Armistice, Austro-Hungary, Baines dynasty, Belgium, British Expeditionary Force, Bulgaria, Dearest Mother, Elisabeth Wicksteed, Elizabeth Baines, Erich Ludendorff, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Germany, Greece, Helion, Herbert Stanhope Baines, Honor Baines, Joanna Palmer, John Baines, Laurence Brockliss, Macedonia, Raphael Kirchner, roadmaking, Royal Engineers, Salonika, Sappers, The Great War, The Leeds Mercury, The Times, Turkey, Winchester College, Windsor Spring Festival, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

‘We need each other…’

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Patrick Miles

Image: credit Michael Polkinghorne

John Polkinghorne, physicist, priest, Fellow of the Royal Society and Founding President of the International Society for Science and Religion, will be 90 on 16 October. Patrick Miles recently interviewed him by Skype in his care home.

Patrick Miles: Our warmest congratulations, John, on your approaching birthday. Do you have any special reflections on the occasion?

John Polkinghorne: I think the best thing is to have a father who makes it to ninety, as mine did. Heredity!

PM: Shortly after you entered a care home, it was locked down. This must have been difficult for you, wasn’t it?

JP: Well, I’m here because these disabilities accumulated and I couldn’t live outside of a care home. That’s why I’m glad to be here, where the people look after me very well. I was entirely in favour of the lockdown, but obviously it has had consequences, and the most irritating for me is that my friends can’t drop in on me, have a little chat… That is something that I miss very much.

PM: And presumably during these seven months you have not been able to take communion?

JP: No, that’s been a real deprivation for me. The communicating side is an important part of my spiritual life. I believe that church services play a very important part in most people’s Christian life. You know, despite their appearances most people need a communal development. My family is allowed to visit me once a week and I was talking the other day to my son who is an accountant. He’s locked in at home and he is competent with communications, so he can carry on with his job perfectly straightforwardly, but he really misses having the company of his colleagues. I think we all need that kind of company. And it’s true of the religious side too. I mean, there are people with a special calling, hermits, who live a solitary life; but most of us are not like that and I think not being able to have a form of Christian gathering is a desperate loss. We need each other and we need God. If we read the New Testament, they are always gathering together, and that’s a very important part of it.

PM: The church has been doing amazing social work during the pandemic…

JP: Yes. I mean my local church here every Sunday have sent me readings and prayers that would be used in church that day, so that I can incorporate them into my individual worship, churches have been very active with food banks, delivering hot meals and other services in the community. But there are some things about a communal gathering that are important.

PM: An agnostic said to me recently that she felt the pandemic had depressed millions of people because they could see no ‘justification’ for it and viruses are so impersonal and powerful that they make life look meaningless.

JP: Well it’s the whole problem of bad things happening to good people. It’s a very serious problem. I find very helpful something that Darwin’s Christian friend Charles Kingsley wrote to him after he had read On The Origin of Species. He said that what Darwin really showed is that if God had wanted he could have created a ready made world with a snap of his fingers, but he’d chosen to do something cleverer and better than that, bringing into being a creation so charged with potentiality that it can be left to explore that potentiality and make itself. I think that’s a very very very helpful thought. And if God’s world is like that, you have to accept the consequences, one of which is that you can’t just take terror out of things.

PM: But viruses seem to have only bad potentiality!

JP: I don’t know enough biology to explain exactly what we need viruses for, but my biological colleagues assure me we do, so let me give you a physics example that I’m more at home with. Earthquakes cause terrible suffering. What are they? The surface of the earth is layers and the innermost layer is a series of plates. When one of those plates slips earthquakes happen, often with these terrible human consequences. So you might say: ‘Don’t bother about having plates, just have a solid shell underneath the surface and…no earthquakes!’ But equally, there would be no people, no life even. The reason being that there are certain chemicals that are only made in the vast, hot interior of the Earth, they permeate through little chinks between the layers, some of them get to the surface, and it’s only thanks to them that you and I, and in fact every living thing, become possible. So if you shut that interior of the Earth in completely tightly, there would be no earthquakes, but no life. When you have these very complicated, beautifully interacting systems like plate movements or viruses, you have to be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

PM: You still read an enormous amount, I know. What kind of reading do you enjoy most, and what kind do you find most comforting at this challenging time?

JP: Reading and praying are my two main activities now. The first thing I read every day is the daily office from the Prayer Book. That has prayers, and praises, and a whole variety of things. It’s not very extensive, it takes me perhaps not much more than twenty minutes to read, but it’s a staple. It gives me hope and assurance. We will come through this pandemic, but obviously it will not be a costless experience. Hope is a justified reliance on the goodness of God, really. After the daily office, I just read what I’m interested in – mostly classic novels. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are my two favourite authors. Unfortunately, a black blank in my life is that I cannot listen to music because of my hearing difficulties. I miss music, but there we go.

PM: I’m sure you have continued in lockdown to think about the issues that have engaged you all your life. If you had the opportunity to write another book, what would it be about?

JP: That’s a good question. I love writing. Trying to find the words to express the thoughts that are in my mind. And as you know, I’ve written a lot of books both scientific and theological. Usually – in the past – when I finished one book I knew what I wanted to write about next. But I don’t at the moment. I can’t go on forever. So I think I have to rest my case with the opportunities I’ve been given and that I’m very grateful to have had. I have to be satisfied with what I have written.

PM: Thank you John. I was planning to ask a Russian Orthodox choir to come and sing you a Mnogoletie, a hymn for long life…

JP: That would be a real experience, Patrick, but I don’t know if it would fit smoothly into the lockdown regulations!

PM: Indeed. But we all wish you a very happy birthday, and many more of them.

John Polkinghorne was awarded the 2002 Templeton Prize for ‘exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension’ and has written over thirty books, of which his latest is What Can We Hope For? Dialogues about the future.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged birthdays, care homes, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Christianity, Church of England, church services, coronavirus, COVID-19, earthquakes, evolution, God, International Society for Science and Religion, Jane Austen, John Polkinghorne, music, New Testament, Origin of Species, pandemic, plate tectonics, Prayer Book, reading, Sam&Sam, science, social work, Templeton Prize, theodicy, theology, viruses, What Can We Hope For? | 2 Comments

Guest Post: Laurence Brockliss, ‘George Calderon and the Demographic Revolution’

Posted on September 15, 2020 by Patrick Miles

King Edward VII
replica by Luke Fildes
oil on canvas, 1902-1912, based on a work of 1902
NPG 1691
© National Portrait Gallery, London

(He had six children, against his mother’s nine.)

George Calderon married Kittie shortly before his thirty-second birthday. For a professional man at the turn of the twentieth century, this was not an uncommon age to wed. For the last ten years I have been leading a cross-generational study of professional families in eight different towns in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Based on an original cohort of 778 professional men drawn from the 1851 census, the team has collected biographical data on 16,111 individuals, male and female, whose lives span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout this period very few men from these families got married before their late twenties and many were in their mid- to late thirties when they did so. This was older than the average male age of marriage, around twenty-five, but it made economic sense. Entry to a profession was seldom possible before the age of twenty-one: even though few professions demanded attendance at university or an institution of higher education, most required a five-year apprenticeship. Once admitted to a profession, too, it was difficult to make ends meet for several years, and it was commonplace for military officers, lawyers and medics especially to continue to be supported by their fathers throughout their twenties.

Early marriage for a professional man was therefore deemed imprudent and even immoral by many contemporary commentators. This was one of the reasons why the University of Oxford was reluctant to accept female undergraduates, unless they were carefully segregated. It was feared that a co-educational university would lead to romance, marriage at a young age, and a life of poverty. There was some opposition to late male marriage from social reformers who considered it to be the reason for the large numbers of prostitutes in London and other large cities. By and large, though, prostitution was accepted, even by the established church, as a necessary evil. The primary concern that led to Parliamentary action in the 1860s was ensuring that prostitutes were disease-free, not with clearing them from the streets.

The career of a writer was one of the few professional occupations which had no entry qualifications at all: cub reporters could earn a salary from their mid-teens and freelance writers were their own man (or woman). But authorship was a notoriously insecure and ill-paid profession, except for the lucky few, as George Gissing graphically reminded his readers in his 1891 novel, New Grub Street, a cautionary tale of an author who placed scholarship and art above the iron law of the marketplace. By abandoning the bar in favour of earning his living by his pen, Calderon had put aside one notoriously overstocked and hazardous profession for another. His father’s success as a portrait painter, yet another occupation that created paupers rather than princes, might have convinced him that he could buck the trend, but he would have been acutely aware of the wisdom in delaying marriage as long as possible. How he dealt with his sexual needs in his twenties will remain, as it does for almost every other professional man of the period, a closed book.

George’s bride, Kittie, was two years older than her husband. Had this been her first marriage, she would have gone down the aisle as an old maid. Most of her social peers would have found a partner when they were in their mid-twenties, if admittedly the evidence from our own project suggests that the age at which daughters of professionals married was creeping up across the Victorian and Edwardian eras. But George was her second husband. She had married her first, Archie Ripley, at the age of twenty-eight, much closer to the norm. Where Kittie was unusual was in losing her husband at such a young age, then taking another. As divorce before the First World War was extremely rare and most professional men lived into their sixties and seventies, very few of their wives were widowed before their late fifties. As a result, only between one and two per cent of the 5,000 or so married women in our study ever married more than once. For the most part, in the early twentieth century, these were war widows, such as Hazel Louisa Furse (1883-1962). Hazel Louisa, née Forrest, was the daughter of an Indian Civil Servant who married Captain George Armand Furse (1881-1914), a professional soldier, in 1905. Through her mother she was distantly related to the Gladstones and the Bazalgettes. Her husband’s early death on the Western Front left her with three young girls to bring up, and in 1917 she married for a second time, Major Ernest Cole Fleming (1884-1917), the son of a Scottish doctor. Sadly, he perished almost immediately, and in 1920 Hazel tried her luck for a third time by marrying Captain Wentworth Holder Alleyne (1878-1950), who appears to have survived the war by being taken prisoner. Hazel’s unhappy life did not improve. Her third marriage eventually ended in separation, while one of her three daughters by her first husband, Aileen Alison Furse (1910-57), was destined to compound her woe by becoming the mistress, then neglected second wife of Kim Philby, before taking to drink and dying of influenza. Luckily, Hazel died before Philby was exposed.

Kittie’s age when she married George might explain why the pair had no children. There again, at the beginning of the twentieth century, only 7 per cent of couples were thought to be infertile. It is much more likely to have been the result of personal choice, especially as only two of George’s seven siblings produced children. The average annual birth rate per thousand in England and Wales peaked in 1866-70 at 35.3.

Calderon family photograph, 1 January 1894.
Clockwise: seated on floor George Calderon, Jack Calderon, Marge Calderon, Fred Calderon, Alfred Merigon Calderon, Evelyn Calderon, seated next to table Clara Calderon.

(Clara had eight children; they produced three of their own.)

It remained at this figure until 1876-80 and then began to fall to a pre-Baby Boom low of 15.9 per thousand in 1941-5. (Today it is 11.5.) The resultant collapse in the number of children per household was pioneered in particular by professional families. The mean number of children born to professional fathers who were married before 1861 was 6.4; the mean number of children born to those married in the years 1881-91 was 3.5. These figures come from a government report before the First World War drawn from the information in the 1911 census. If anything, they understate the collapse. Leeds is one of the towns studied as part of our professions project. Among the male and female descendants of the original cohort of 150 Leeds professional men, the average number of children produced by those who had been married for between eleven and twenty-two years in 1911 was 2.5. At the turn of the twentieth century, at the moment George and Kittie wed, these men and women were having none, one or two children in the main: only a quarter had more than two.

Authors and journalists were as likely to have substantially reduced their families as any other profession. In the Leeds case, this is borne out by the demographic history of the Baines dynasty. The Baines family, it may be recalled from my previous post, were staunch nonconformists who owned the Leeds Mercury throughout the nineteenth century. The founder of the dynasty, the MP Edward Baines Senior (1774-1848), had nine children (four boys and five girls), through his wife of fifty years, Charlotte Talbot, who was pregnant when he married her when he was twenty-four. His successor as owner-editor of the newspaper, the MP Edward Baines Junior (1800-90), had seven children (three boys and four girls). Thereafter the family became more circumspect. One son died at the age of thirty-one unmarried; another married but had no offspring; while only the third, John William Baines (1839-75), who took over the Mercury from his father and also had seven children, had a large family. The girls were just as unproductive: they managed only five children between them. The next generation, who began to marry in the 1890s, confirmed a new demographic regime had dawned. John William Baines had four girls and three sons. Two of the four girls never married; one had no children; the last had four. The three sons all married but had small families: Edward (1867-1946), a senior surgeon who lived in Whitby, married in 1900, and had a boy and a girl; Alexander (1873-1945), a government solicitor, married in 1903, and produced three children; while the Cambridge-educated Herbert Stanhope (1868-96), the last Baines to own the Mercury, might possibly have had more than a boy and girl, had he not died after only three years of marriage to an Irish-born Newnham undergraduate, Elizabeth Graham, whom he had met while up at Gonville and Caius College.

Herbert Stanhope Baines, c. 1895, the last member of the Baines dynasty to own the Leeds Mercury. He was born in the same year as George Calderon, 1868, and attended Cambridge University. His father John William Baines (1839-75) had seven children. Herbert Stanhope Baines married Elizabeth Graham, a Newnham undergraduate. They had two children, but Baines died aged only twenty-eight. © Andrew Baines, 2020

Herbert Stanhope Baines’s card for the 1895 election. His Liberal programme is impeccably progressive, but the heraldic symbols are probably intended to reassure voters that he believed in Home Rule within the Union. It was his first attempt to enter Parliament and the sitting Conservative and Liberal Unionist MP William Jackson defeated him by only 1500 votes on a 77% turnout after a 14-day campaign. For a full treatment of the Baines dynasty see Professor Brockliss’s previous post. © Andrew Baines, 2020

George and Kittie, then, would not have seemed peculiar in their social circle in being childless, and would have raised few eyebrows. They were part of a demographic revolution which was sweeping not just Britain and the white Dominions but the whole of Western Europe and the United States in the twenty years before the Great War. It is an insufficient explanation of their action, therefore, to say that they and their peers, unlike their parents, simply chose to have small families or none at all. Why was their particular generation, and class, rather than any other, empowered to make this decision, break with tradition, and trigger a completely novel demographic regime, which remains the default position today?

Many explanations of the revolution have been advanced by social scientists and historians but none has succeeded in gaining widespread consent. The most common argument promoted by those seeking to promote family limitation in the rest of the world has been that the revolution was the inevitable result of economic growth and improvements in health care. With industrialisation, there was an ever-increasing supply of desirable consumer goods for the better-off to purchase: a large number of children reduced the amount of money available to spend on such goods, and made it difficult to maintain the new inflated material lifestyle which was now the mark of respectability, i.e. keep up with the Joneses. At the same time, improvements in sanitation and medical knowledge greatly reduced infant mortality: as it became possible for the first time to know with reasonable certainty that a baby would live to be an adult, there was no need to keep adding to the family to ensure the survival of the family line. Unfortunately, it is not an argument that fits with the British historical reality. First, there was little improvement in infant mortality (that is, deaths of children before the age of one) in any social group across the long nineteenth century: the improvements in child mortality came in the five to twelve-year-old cohort. Secondly, the decades that witnessed the fastest growth in the standard of living of the middle classes and the landed, 1840-70, were precisely those when the national birth-rate, among all classes, rose to an historical high. It was only in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, when the growth rate slowed, that families, led by professional families, began to reduce in size.

Arguably, the most successful attempt to come up with a chronologically accurate solution to the conundrum was produced by the historical sociologist J.A. Banks in his 1981 book Victorian Values: Secularism and the Size of Families. In the third quarter of the twentieth century, Banks wrote three books on the cause of the demographic revolution in Britain, where he explored the relative weight to be apportioned to a number of variables that could have played a part, such as changing levels of prosperity, secularisation and the women’s movement. In the end, he opted, cautiously, for an explanation built around state modernisation. Around 1870 the British state replaced a system of appointment and promotion in the armed forces and the civil service based on patronage with one based on merit demonstrated through examinations and evaluation. The new system, which was adopted by the private professions and increasingly in business as well, had a profound effect on the mind-set of the generation moving into the workplace in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It taught them that success in life was not serendipitous or in the hands of others; rather, they were now masters of their own fate. How far they were to rise up the career ladder would depend on choosing an occupation that suited their talents and the extent to which they applied themselves. It was only natural that taking control of their lives in one sphere led the young men of the late Victorian and Edwardian age (and women, too, in that it was at this date they began to infiltrate at least certain professions) to believe they should control the size of their family as well. And if they failed to imbibe the message by transference, the very fact that entrance to the best careers required long years at boarding school and even university encouraged young professional fathers to think twice about having a quiverful of sons.

Banks’ argument, however, equally fails to cut the empirical mustard. The British state may have embraced meritocracy after 1870, and entry to the military and the home and imperial civil service may have depended on a public-school, and in the second case, Oxbridge education. But he was wrong to believe that meritocracy had replaced patronage and family connections in the private professions and business. Significant changes in the careers that absorbed the mass of middle-class sons occurred only after the Second World War. Our own research, moreover, has shown for the first time that the large majority of professional men, even those who entered their careers in the Edwardian era, did not go away to an expensive boarding school. Social polish and a good acquaintance with Ancient Greek were unnecessary for those entering the private sector. Instead, they attended cheap and local day grammar and proprietary schools where they learnt useful subjects, such as mathematics and simple accountancy, then moved on at sixteen to articles or an apprenticeship. It is a hoary myth, still continually peddled by present-day politicians and policy makers, that Britain’s comparative economic decline before the First World War was caused by the pernicious classical grip of the public schools and Oxbridge that taught the young to place service to the Commonweal and the Empire above the pursuit of profit.* That public-school was largely eschewed did not mean that young professionals were slow to join up and fight for King and Country. A very large proportion of young professionals of the right age, captured by our study, did good service in the Great War, but few would have carried a copy of Aristotle, Homer or Thucydides in their pocket. The educational background of Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and, of course, George Calderon, was not typical of the subaltern officer during the First World War. Wilfred Owen was a more representative figure.

Sir Roland James (‘Jim’) Corbet, son of Kittie Calderon’s closest friend Nina Corbet and the last in an unbroken male line since 1066

The Great War is a good place to end. If we cannot yet properly understand the causes of the demographic revolution, it is possible to reflect on its unexpected and tragic short-term consequence. The death-rate among British and Imperial subalterns in the First World War, as everyone knows, was appallingly high. Every death of a young soldier would have been heart-breaking for their families, but it must have been particularly so for the mothers and fathers of many of the junior officers. It was they who, for the first time in human history, had decided to limit their families to often just one boy and girl. When a son and heir died on the Western Front, for many professional families there was no spare.

* Banks wrote before the Cambridge School of Historical Demography had begun to study the demographic revolution in detail. We now know that the national pattern obscures complex regional, confessional and occupational differences that may explain why no-one since has attempted to isolate a dominant explanatory variable. For the present state of research, see especially Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860-1940 (Cambridge, 1996), and Michael Anderson, Scotland’s Populations from the 1850s to Today (Oxford, 2018).

© Laurence Brockliss, 2020

Laurence Brockliss is an Emeritus Professor of History of the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. 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 writing-up an ESRC-funded study of the professions in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Aileen Alison Furse, Archie Ripley, Baines dynasty, biographies, birth rate, Cambridge Scool of Historical Demography, Charlotte Talbot, Clara Calderon, Demographic Revolution, Edward Baines Junior, Edward Baines Senior, Edward VII, Elizabeth Graham, George Armand Furse, George Calderon, George Gissing, Gonville and Caius College, grammar schools, Hazel Louisa Furse, Herbert Stanhope Baines, infant mortality, J.A. Banks, Jim Corbet, John William Baines, Kim Philby, Kittie Calderon, Leeds, Leeds Mercury, Liberal Party, marriage, New Grub Street, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, professional class, prosopography, prostitution, public schools, Sir Roland James Corbet, The Great War, Victorian professions, Wilfred Owen, William Jackson, World War I | 1 Comment

Guest post: Andrew Tatham, ‘A Group Photograph and the Pursuit of Personal History’

Posted on September 8, 2020 by Patrick Miles

If there’s anything to be learned from biography it is that chance meetings can change lives. I first met Patrick Miles next to the warmth of the Aga in my cousin’s kitchen in 2006. I had met many of my cousin’s B&B guests over the years but what was different this time was that I was now living in Norfolk too and it so happened that I was then taking part in Norfolk Open Studios. Patrick and his wife Alison were pointed in the direction of my house for an afternoon’s outing. I have a picture in my mind as clear as day of Patrick emerging from my shed ‘cinema’ with tears in his eyes and barely able to speak so moved was he by the art film I’d made based on my Group Photograph.

This was twelve years since I’d first laid eyes on the First World War group photograph that had taken over my life, and I had been struggling to see a way forward with it. Patrick’s response and his efforts to find a wider audience for my work were something that helped convince me that my project had meaning for humans other than just myself and that it was worth persisting.

Fast forward nine years and my project reached a fruition in ‘A Group Photograph – Before, Now & In-Between’, a major exhibition in Ypres. All my energy was put into making the exhibition and the book that went with it, so when I returned home with boxes of books to sell, I was suddenly pitched into a whole world I knew nothing about. I did not start well but was spurred on by ‘It’s a magnificent book’ arriving in a letter from Melvyn Bragg and the chance to get on the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2 led to an astonishing response. Still, it was all a very up-and-down business and once again Patrick was cheerleading beyond the call of duty.

Looking back now, I realise that my obsession with my own work coupled with Patrick’s self-effacing manner meant that it took far too long for it to penetrate my skull that he too had his own all-consuming project, but penetrate it did and then our correspondence intensified as we shared the experience and exasperations of research, self-publishing, getting permissions, getting noticed. And then when I read George Calderon: Edwardian Genius I really understood why Patrick particularly tapped into my work.

It seems to me that a lot of people think of history and biography as just the telling of stories about interesting people and events, as if that history can be compartmentalised into ‘the past’ almost without relation to today. For history to be most effective, though, I think it really needs to produce thoughts and questions about what it is like to be a human being in any time, and what remains of us after we are gone – to see what people have lived for, what they have died for, and whether any of that makes any sense. The richness of the material that Patrick found enabled him to show the complexities of George Calderon with all his maze of passions and contradictions and relate them to the era in which he lived. He may not be famous now but George Calderon’s story certainly made me think about my own life and what I should be doing with it.

I hope the same might be the case for readers of my new book. I Shall Not Be Away Long is based on the First World War letters of Lt Col Charles Bartlett, one of the men in my Group Photograph:

Highlighted in blue: Lt Col Charles Bartlett (click image to enlarge)

The only people who will have heard of Charles Bartlett are attentive readers of my first book, and his family (and in fact even his great-nephews who were his first relatives that I contacted had no idea who he was). What marks Charles Bartlett out, though, is that somehow his letters from his time on the Western Front have survived, all 341 of them, and they are an uncensored and almost stream-of-consciousness view of not only his war experience but also of his marriage and his friendships and acquaintances. Of course many of the latter are with military men but he was also connected into the theatre world through work before the war and from his wife being a West End singer and actress, and that really does open up the view, as does his bluff humour. I decided early on that I wanted to give context to the letters by showing the fuller lives of these people he encountered, and that proved to be hugely rewarding.

Some stories have particularly stayed with me, and here are two:

On 10th December 1915, Charles Bartlett wrote: ‘This morning I have been sitting on a General Court Martial the accused being an officer, who was being tried for being drunk in the trenches.’ I discovered that the officer in question was a Second Lieutenant Stephen Lucena. His story is a saga of bad luck and tragedy, involving the early death of his father, the murder of his grandmother, shell shock from the close explosion of a mortar in January 1915, a court martial after being found drunk behind the lines in October 1915, and another court-martial when found drunk in the trenches. He could have been shot but instead was dismissed from the service. No doubt he was still suffering from shock but, in the vernacular of the time, he must have ‘pulled himself together’ and joined up again as a gunner in the Artillery and served through the rest of the war. In 1945 he was a resident in a poor house in Toronto and died near there in 1949. Meanwhile his only sibling Theodosia had been found wandering about in London in 1915 suffering from delusions and spent 60 years in mental institutions until her death in 1976, aged 84. A great aunt, an aunt and a cousin had also been certified insane. Both Stephen and his sister were dealt terrible cards on top of terrible cards. I never met them but I will not forget their stories and I will make sure to count my luck.

On 21st April 1915, Charles Bartlett wrote: ‘Kingerlee has just this moment been hit but don’t say anything about it until you hear more from me, as I know no details. A sniper got him, & the bullet went in through the cheek and out at the neck, so I am afraid it sounds bad.’ Cyril Kingerlee was another man who was dogged by misfortune. When the bullet hit him he must have thought his life was over but in 10 months he was back in the trenches. He somehow managed to survive Passchendaele and the rest of the war, though he was deeply affected by what he had been through and, after his first wife died young in 1928, his world started collapsing. To try to take him out of himself, his father took him to a hotel for Christmas and there he met Elaine Nind. 50 years later they were still married and you can see the love they had for each other in this picture (compare it with the picture from during the war – he kept his military moustache to disguise the scar from where he was shot in 1916). Whatever bad luck he suffered in his life, not many are so fortunate to find such long lasting and true love.

Cyril Kingerlee during the war

Cyril and Elaine Kingerlee in old age

Obviously this is a book set in war but I don’t want you to come away thinking that it is entirely po-faced. It couldn’t be with a narrator like Charles Bartlett, and here is an example of one of his letters that shows a very wide spectrum of life (and also illustrates the visual approach I’ve taken to presenting the letters):

p. 206 from the book (click image to enlarge.)

The first reader of this new book was Patrick and I was bowled over by his response:

The achievement of it, the depth, breadth, humanity, suspense (what on earth was Charles going to be up to next?), the 300-strong cast, the meticulousness, brilliant structure and design… It is a more than worthy sequel to ‘A Group Photograph’ and the two fit beautifully, seamlessly, together.

Not only did he write that but he also asked to confirm whether he was the first person to read it in its entirety because he thought his descendants would be proud as he felt sure it would become a classic! Well, indeed he was the first reader, and what he said gave me the confidence to approach William Boyd to write the Foreword for the book, and in turn I was beyond thrilled to see how his words echoed Patrick’s:

This is not only a beautiful-looking book, generously and wonderfully illustrated, it is also a remarkable human document, as rich in detail and commentary on the human condition as a long novel. Tens of thousands of books have been written about the First World War and who would have thought that, over a hundred years since it ended, there was anything more to say. But I Shall Not Be Away Long fully earns its place in the Pantheon of literature about the Great War. We come away from it amused, moved, informed, baffled, shocked, saddened and, with a bit of luck, wiser. It is a classic of its kind.

You can see more of I Shall Not Be Away Long at https://www.groupphoto.co.uk/2nd-book/ with details of how to order as well as a competition to win a copy.

Work on this book has been very difficult at times and I know I couldn’t have done it without Patrick and his support. You never know what might happen on any day in your life. I hope that you have the great good fortune that on one of your days you happen upon a friend like Patrick Miles.

SOME RESPONSES TO A GROUP PHOTOGRAPH

‘It’s a magnificent book’ Melvyn Bragg

‘Honestly I can’t recommend it enough – the whole year we’ve done different books on this show but this is the one that is just so powerful’ Jeremy Vine

‘Endlessly fascinating and profoundly moving. It brings the past to life with matchless vividness.’John Carey, The Sunday Times

‘The book really is a glorious achievement and completely fascinating‘ Gyles Brandreth

‘Magnificent’ Rt Hon Keith Simpson MP in his Summer Reading List for fellow MPs

‘I give you my highest level of congratulation. It’s a beautiful piece of work’ Martin Middlebrook

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged A Group Photograph, Andrew Tatham, art films, Battle of Passchendaele, Belgium, biographies, biography, British Expeditionary Force, Cyril Kingerlee, Elaine Kingerlee, exhibitions, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Gyles Brandreth, history, I Shall Not Be Away Long, Jeremy Vine, John Carey, Keith Simpson MP, Martin Middlebrook, Melvyn Bragg, Norfolk Open Studios, Passchendaele, Patrick Miles, Stephen Lucena, The Great War, William Boyd, World War I, Ypres | 1 Comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 11

Posted on September 1, 2020 by Patrick Miles

1 August
It is now seven weeks since I submitted to The Spectator my 1500-word piece Save it for the (American) nation! How British archives fail us, so I fear they have missed an historic opportunity… It’s been delightful corresponding with Clare Asquith, Mary Wakefield, Leaf Arbuthnot and Thomasina Dalrymple, but in an earlier age I would have known instinctively that they are ‘out of my class’. Good night, sweet ladies, good night!

On the other hand, my posts on Calderonia about the state of British archives received a stack of personal feedback (emails and phone calls) from four emeritus professors, a former chairman of the National Council for Archives, a retired senior archival manager at the British Library, a top current curator, a leading consultant in archival acquisitions, the Archivist of a Cambridge college, and six other interested and qualified persons. I had hoped, of course, for a lively discussion through the Comment columns of Calderonia, but I fully understand their reluctance.

In any case, there might not have been much discussion to have, because all but one of these people agreed enthusiastically, even ‘absolutely’, with my analysis. I really was not expecting this. The consultant, for example, wrote that she used to have ‘a good relationship with the British Library, directing smaller and not expensive collections to them, but now I don’t even bother’.

I can’t pursue this subject, as I have other fish to fry, but it seems to me clearer than ever that the egregious failings of our archives will one day have to be tackled by someone. I thank my lucky stars it is unlikely I shall ever have to work in them again.

10 August
I wrote to Simon Heffer today asking him if, even two years on, there is any chance of him prominently reviewing my biography of George. The context to this is that although sales were up at the beginning of lockdown, they now seem to have gone dead and need something in the media, whether positive or negative, to kickstart them. (‘There is no such thing as bad publicity.’) Heffer offered to review it back in 2018, but the organ he would have been writing for declined to pay him, and I agreed it wasn’t on.

The thing is, Heffer really knows about the Edwardian period. The Spectator has just published one of the best written and most judicious book reviews I’ve ever read there — by Simon Heffer of John Campbell’s new book Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman Who Shaped Modern Britain. And there are clear parallels between the public ignorance about Richard Burdon Haldane and about George Leslie Calderon.

Richard Burdon Haldane, Viscount Haldane
by Philip Alexius de László
oil on millboard, 1928
NPG 2364
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Haldane’s achievements are staggering. He deeply reformed the British Army after the Boer War débâcle, in particular establishing a British Expeditionary Force, which turned out in 1914 to be the finest army Britain has ever had. Heffer writes: ‘It was widely believed that by this act of planning he had saved the country.’ As well as being Lord Chancellor in both Liberal and Labour governments, he improved and extended secondary education, helped found LSE and Imperial College, and grew new universities throughout Britain.

Why, then, is Haldane in Heffer’s words ‘a great man who has had a rough deal from history’? Lord Northcliffe’s relentless campaign against Haldane, which led to his resignation with Churchill in 1915, has not helped: this slander stuck to him just as the accusation of causing disaster at Gallipoli has stuck to Churchill. But I think the basic reason for Haldane’s lack of recognition is the same as with George: they were too clever by half for those around them, they were suspiciously at home in foreign languages and cultures, and they are perceived to have been…mavericks!

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
by William Rothenstein
lithograph, 1903
NPG D39039
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Another unjustly neglected Edwardian, in Heffer’s view, is Haldane’s friend John Morley, ‘one of the most brilliant men ever to sit in a cabinet’. A Gladstonian who is often thought of as the last of the great nineteenth century Liberals, Morley resigned from the cabinet in 1914 over Britain’s entry into the war as an ally of Tsarist Russia. He was a political hero of Kittie’s, probably because of his support for Irish Home Rule, and Kittie in fact owned the original of the lithograph above in the National Portrait Gallery. It was presented to her by William Rothenstein on her thirty-seventh birthday in 1904.

The other biography of a relatively unknown Edwardian to have come out in the past two years is that of the Marquess of Lansdowne (1845-1927). It was published at the same time as mine, has been reviewed with roughly the same enthusiasm in the same organs as mine, and I would love to know how many copies it has sold… Perhaps, indeed, Sam&Sam could do a marketing/discount deal with its publisher, our old friend Lord Strathcarron, and Hurst Publishers who have brought out Haldane?

20 August
One of several reasons why I gave up ‘teaching’ Russian literature over twenty-five years ago is that I found some of the works I had to ‘teach’ young people specious, pernicious, and bad art. One was Alexander Blok’s 1918 poem The Twelve.

I would place it as a work of modernist poetry on a par with The Wasteland (1922); or at least its revolutionary technique, which resembles some of the method of Eliot’s poem. But in the last stanza of Blok’s poem a pearly (sic) Jesus Christ wearing a crown of white roses (sic), waves a red flag (sic) as he leads the homicidal twelve Red Guards through the Petrograd snowstorm ‘forward’ into the Future. I can just about accept that for Blok’s own purposes such a saccharine Christ might have to be put at the head of the marauding, murdering twelve Guards and keep the red flag flying there, but what I can’t forgive Blok is rhyming pyos — cur, mongrel, tyke — with the last two words of the poem, Isus Khristos. Some, of course, would say it’s blasphemous. For me it is just so gratuitously offensive and ‘in your face’ as to be both puerile and seriously barmy.

Well, thirty years ago I could never have imagined that I would one day write a 408-line poem about making an icon of Christ…and now I have done something in it that alarmingly reminds me of Blok.

In stanza 29 I finally tackle the painting of Christ’s face by the icon-maker — the longest, most painstaking and difficult part of the creation of this icon. Even this close-up doesn’t show the fineness of some of the lines around the eyes; they are a few brush hairs thick.

The icon painter deliberates for days, perhaps weeks, over these lines, agonising over their appropriateness and what expression his own spirituality drives him to convey. He wants, of course, to express Christ’s person in these eyes. How is the writer to express that in words? Is it empathy, compassion, humanity, suffering, humility…what? I felt that in the case of this (unfinished) icon it was a sense of complete, alert understanding. I found myself writing, then, that the eyes were ‘awake’. But that is feeble, as it could be read as merely ‘not asleep’. So I changed it to the more archaic adjective, ‘wake’ — and didn’t mind the dissonantal rhyme ‘yoke/wake’, in fact I relish that kind of rhyme when it’s appropriate. But then, automatically, I changed it to… ‘woke’. WOKE?! I was shocked myself, tried every way to get round it, but each time concluded it was right.

Phaseless, but nourish it needs with yolk
and water… He fans out his finest sables.
So thinly, so thinly he works
up knuckle and nail with light into taper-
ing fingers that bless…builds entabla-
ture of sepias on sternum and neck.
The basket of hair is burnt browns layered…
Nose he tholes to nobility… Opaque-
st the line between lips with little yoke
of sorrow… And last the eyes for days
he tends with fittest fila, till woke.
He stands, breathes; has written the face.

(The making of an icon is a single continuous process, but if the painted surface is left for a day or two at any point, the egg tempera needs refreshing with yolk solution. This stanza contains more split rhymes than any other in the whole poem, for a reason.)

28 August
Hurray! Our favourite setting for important Sam&Sam meetings has reopened:

Club membership and business cards

Their menu today was slightly reduced (to the horror of the clientele, there were none of their famous herrings!), but our three-and-a-quarter-hour meal was a great ‘unlockdown’ occasion. Key decisions made were: to concentrate on reorganising the Sam&Sam website in time for an already booked advertisement in the Russian issue of the TLS on 20 November, but NOT to close Calderonia and start blogging on the Sam&Sam website.

Sam2 and Sam1 at Polonia, 28 August 2020

In the next post, Andrew Tatham will write about his superb forthcoming sequel to A Group Photograph: Before, Now & In-Between. On 15 September Laurence Brockliss will discuss the deep historical context to a question I am often asked: ‘Why did George and Kittie have no children?’

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Making Icons', Alexander Blok, Andrew Tatham, archival consultants, archival managers, archivists, biographies, British archives, British Expeditionary Force, Clare Asquith, Dardanelles, egg tempera, egg yolk, emeritus professors, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, icons, Jesus Christ, John Campbell, John Morley, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Brockliss, Leaf Arbuthnot, Lord Haldane, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Northcliffe, Lord Strathcarron, Mary Wakefield, National Council for Archives, Polish food, Polonia, rhyme, Richard Burdon Haldane, Sam&Sam, Simon Heffer, SWOT analysis, T.S. Eliot, The British Library, The Great War, The Spectator, The Twelve, The Waste Land, Thomasina Dalrymple, William Rothenstein, Winston Churchill, woke, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest Post: John Pym, ‘The Soldier, the Professor and the Portrait Photographer’

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Patrick Miles

(A reminiscence with Calderonian associations)

General Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough, France, May 1917, artist’s signature indecipherable, by courtesy of Peter Stone – Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

Once, when I was a boy in the 1950s, my mother led me to a large mansion block in Kensington, West London, so she could introduce me to her last surviving uncle, Hubert Gough, a general of the First World War. He must then have been nine or ten years older than I am today. Hubert was not in perfect health when I shook his hand. He was lame and his eyesight fading. But, in his day, ‘Goughie’ had been a fearless horseman and a notable if controversial soldier. By birth a member of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, he’d settled in England after Ireland gained her independence in 1922. And he remained in London throughout the Second World War making himself useful, on his own initiative, by organising the Chelsea Home Guard. One night during the Blitz an explosion blew in the windows of the family flat. No one was injured, but Anne, the second of his four daughters (an only son, Valentine, died young), and at that moment his unofficial chief of staff, found herself on the floor wrapped, like an Egyptian mummy, in a thick blackout curtain.

Anne told me this anecdote in 1971. I was an indentured reporter on the local newspaper in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and she was living in the nearby village of Langton Green, in an airy house next to a market garden that she’d worked for a number of years with her late partner, a retired military officer. After tea, on my afternoon visits to Langton Green, we usually moved on to large glasses of gin, poured lukewarm without the benefit of ice, and Anne, who had seen a lot of my orphaned mother in her youth, regaled me with stories of her own life – one incident, I recall, involved casually shooting squirrels from the gutters of her house with Hubert’s shotgun. I liked Anne. She had a quick laugh, a smart, upright bearing as befitted a soldier’s daughter (as a young woman she’d been a competitive ice-skater), and bright, narrow, slightly hooded eyes, unmistakably inherited from her father.

I don’t think that my mother Diana was particularly close to Hubert, the older brother of her father Johnnie, who died from wounds inflicted by a German ricochet bullet at Fauquissart, Pas de Calais, in February 1915 – four months before George Calderon disappeared into the smoke of battle on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Diana’s mother was acquainted with George’s wife Kittie – the bond of war widows – and in the late 1920s Diana came to know Kittie well through her future husband, Jack Pym, whose mother Violet Lubbock was a kinswoman of Kittie and one of her closest friends.

Politically, Hubert and Diana were at opposite ends of the spectrum. He was an uncomplicated Empire Loyalist; she a left-wing ‘political organiser’ who became, at the beginning of the Second World War, a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. But perhaps, she thought, meeting her uncle might give me a sense of the family’s living past and also its continuity. Hubert died in 1963, and my mother thirty years later.

To be frank, my memory, more than sixty-five years on, of my one encounter with my great-uncle Hubert, is opaque. The flat was certainly dark, the furniture heavy, and the atmosphere dominated by an odour of medicine and furniture polish. But I do not have a clear recollection of the man himself – a peppery and impulsive soldier, it’s been said, over whose career loomed the shadow of the battle of Passchendaele, in which he’d played a significant role. As Hubert made plain in his memoirs, a grateful nation had not showered him, as it had his fellow senior military commanders of 1914-18, with honours and wealth when peace finally settled, temporarily, over Europe in the 1920s. Norman Stone has described him as ‘a gallant man with a history of bad luck’.

Hubert’s last battle on the Western Front had been in March 1918 when Ludendorff’s vastly superior force broke the British line. A fighting retreat ensued and the German advance was halted, decisively, before Amiens. The breaking of the British line was, however, a national trauma that required a scapegoat and that scapegoat was Hubert Gough. He was removed from his command – of the Fifth Army, which had been at the centre of the battle – nine days after the start of the German offensive. Hubert’s shattered reputation was eventually restored (in as far as it could be) in 1937 when he received a private audience with the new King, George VI, and an award in the Coronation honours list. This had been preceded a year earlier by a contrite letter from David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister in 1918 who’d demanded Gough’s dismissal in the heat of battle, offering a careful, retrospective apology – but all this is another story.

On my visit to the Kensington flat, I do remember, however, as vividly as if it had happened this morning, Hubert’s hand running down the lapel of my school blazer and over my collection of enamel badges – Diana’s bronze swimming award for life-saving; the Esso oval; the plummeting gold Eagle of my favourite weekly comic. His touch confirming what he could not quite discern. ‘What a lot of medals you have!’ Hubert remarked. I was too young to have detected any irony in the old man’s voice, and, if there had been, I doubt it would’ve been intentional.

The title page of Hubert Gough’s copy

Marius Deshumbert was born in Lyons in 1856 and as a young man taught at the city’s Martinière boys’ school. He established himself as a writer in London at the age of twenty-three, and went on to hold the position of Professor of French at the Staff College, Camberley. In the Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (1920), Deshumbert is described as a ‘French Ethicist’, the founder of the Comité Internationale pour la Pratique de la Morale fondée sur les Lois de la Nature, general secretary of the Société Londonienne de Morale and president of the Croydon branch of the Alliance Française. ‘He has written works on French Grammar and the naturalist theory of morals’, the dictionary added. Deshumbert died in London (perhaps in Croydon) in the middle of the Second World War.

Although he once enjoyed a reputation as an established, if minor literary figure, acknowledged on both sides of the English Channel, Marius Deshumbert is today, it’s fair to say, a wholly overlooked name in the intellectual firmament of the late Victorian era through to the 1920s. He wrote an account of the Doctrines of Confucius (1897) and a Life of Jesus (1911); and his best-known work, An Ethical System Based on the Laws of Nature, was translated from the French by Lionel Giles in 1917 and went on to be published in eight other languages, including Russian, Dutch, Japanese and Bengali.

In January 1900, Deshumbert returned to France to lecture at the Sorbonne on ‘How to Teach and How to Learn Modern Languages’. This, one imagines, came about in part as an extension of his salaried post as a teacher of French to officers of the British Army. He’d compiled two dictionaries, comprehensively tailored to the needs of these professionals: Deshumbert’s Dictionary of Difficulties met with in Reading, Writing, Translating, and Speaking French (1889) and an Alphabetical French-English List of Technical Military Terms for Military Students (1892).

The flavour of Deshumbert’s style in the lecture hall – Napoleonic, authoritarian, and not without a dash of sarcasm – can perhaps be sampled in the tone of his address ‘To the Student’ in the fifth edition of the Dictionary:

You will probably spare yourself some mortification if – instead of waiting until you have actually made the mistakes pointed out in this book, and been corrected by the half-suppressed smile which you will be quick to detect on the faces of your listeners – you carefully read every page of this Dictionary of Difficulties, and mark with a pen or pencil the paragraphs which contain ‘something you did not know before’.

At first, perhaps, you will not follow my advice, but will use this book as you do any other dictionary; that is to say, open it only after meeting with a difficulty; but would it not be wiser to make yourself familiar beforehand with the danger-signals, and thus avoid the pitfalls?

Signed, ‘The Author’.

By his own admission Hubert Gough was not a natural linguist, though he had picked up some Urdu during his childhood in India, where his father Charles, another in the family’s long line of military men, had served for almost all his professional life, chiefly on the North-West Frontier. But in the late 1890s, when he himself had been posted to India and where he saw his first burst of active service, Hubert made time to brush up and improve what little French he’d learned while billeted as a sixteen-year-old in the house of a Protestant pastor at Versailles. This cramming in India was in preparation for the severe Staff College entrance examination. He passed the test and was admitted to the College in January 1899.

It was then, I assume, that he acquired his copy of Deshumbert’s Dictionary of Difficulties, 132 pages long and bound in sturdy blue oilcloth. Hubert signed his name with an unsharpened lead pencil on the inside front cover, and immediately beneath noted in blue and black ink, and blue pencil, a number of useful military words and phrases: ‘to be terrify [sic]’, ‘to leap’, ‘to fly’, ‘to take advantage’, ‘harmless (stupidly)’ and – thinking of his horse – ‘clover’ (trèfles, m.). These ‘difficulties’ do not appear in the dictionary, so were perhaps jotted down during one of Deshumbert’s Staff College lectures.

Hubert took Deshumbert’s words on ‘danger-signals’ to heart and marked the first 22 pages of the dictionary with a number of telling blue and red pencil ‘crosses’. He highlights three of the eight listed translations of the verb ‘to blow’ – though not ‘to blow out one’s brains’ (se faire sauter la cervelle or se brûler la cervelle). He committed to memory the French for a steep bank, a beast of burden, to give the cold shoulder, life is at stake, to raise to the peerage – and ‘a negro’s hut’ (une case), which merited two crosses.

Hubert Gough’s annotations to Deshumbert’s Dictionary of Difficulties

He wrote out the French for ‘to ask a question’ and noted how to express ‘picking a quarrel with somebody about nothing’, and that ‘un capon’ was ‘a coward (familiar)’ whereas ‘un chapon’ was a capon. A blue cross went beside ‘rester sur le carreau’, to be killed on the spot. ‘Une apologie’ was ‘a vindication, a justification’ (horizontal red line plus two vertical lines). Then in October of 1899, Hubert’s French studies came to an abrupt halt when he was ordered to embark for special services in South Africa. In due course, his useful ‘dictionary of difficulties’ was handed to his brother Johnnie who himself entered the Staff College in 1904, graduating two years later. And then after Johnnie’s death the book passed to his widow, Dorothy, and then his daughter, Diana, and then many years later to me. It is quite possible that George Calderon had his own copy of the Alphabetical French-English List of Technical Military Terms, which he used when preparing to be a military interpreter in Flanders.

Nearly fifteen years after Hubert Gough broke off his French studies with Marius Deshumbert, he found himself in France – where he was to remain for almost the entire course of the war. ‘I had always been particular, during the four years of the War’, Hubert wrote in The Fifth Army (1931), ‘to maintain a friendly attitude towards French officers. We were always obliged to speak French; I never spoke in my own tongue to a French General throughout the War. My French was quite good, though of the polite order more suitable to drawing-rooms than to sharp arguments…’ Hubert then goes on to lament his lack of the ‘stern phrases’ he should have used when General Foch, the French commander, visited his headquarters during the battle of March 1918 and delivered what Hubert considered an unbecoming and wholly irrational dressing-down.

In March 1940, shortly before the German invasion of France, Hubert was sent back across the Channel ‘to see something of the French Army’. It was a trip he clearly enjoyed, despite the dire wartime circumstances, and no doubt he had a chance once again to converse in French. One happy rendezvous was with General Anthoine, ‘my old friend and comrade of Passchendaele days’, who was living in a flat in the Boulevard Raspail in Paris. Alas, within a few months Anthoine was to be arrested and imprisoned by the Germans, only to die soon after his release without completing his memoirs of the First War.

Self-portrait by Gerty Simon, c. 1934. Courtesy of The Bernard Simon Collection, Wiener Holocaust Library Collections

In the 1920s, during the first years of the Weimar Republic, Gerty Simon, born Gertrud Cohn in Bremen in 1888, established herself in Berlin, and then in Paris, as an innovative, probably self-taught portrait photographer. She was in demand. Her work, from montage compositions, through records of working people, to popular glamour shots, was sold to newspapers, magazine and the avant-garde journals. The actress Lotte Lenya and her husband the composer Kurt Weill posed for a theatrical double portrait, staring at each other purposefully with arms defiantly folded – it was 1929 and The Threepenny Opera had just premiered in Berlin.

Albert Einstein; the great French actor Michel Simon, with his long lugubrious face; Käthe Kollwitz, white-haired in a sculptor’s smock, the pre-eminent German pacifist artist of the First World War; the two young stars of the movie Mädchen in Uniform; three French prime ministers; the theatre critic Alfred Kerr – and his six-year-old daughter Judith who would grew up to write The Tiger Who Came to Tea – all sat for Gerty Simon, together with many others from the arts, sciences and politics. Look at these photographs today and you know without a doubt that the dead were once alive.

While Gerty Simon built her career, her husband Wilhelm, a one-time assistant judge in Strasbourg and a decorated veteran of the war, worked for the reparations committee dealing with the contentious issue of the debt imposed on the Central Powers by the victorious Allies. Then came January 1933 and the Simons, established upper-middle-class German citizens, saw what lay ahead for the Jews of their country and the rest of Europe. By the end of the year, Gerty and her son Bernd (Bernard) emigrated to England, to be followed a few years later by Wilhelm.

Soon after her arrival in London, Gerty Simon established a home and studio in what is now Old Church Street, Chelsea. She resumed her career, seemed never short of clients, and in November 1934 mounted an exhibition titled ‘London Personalities’ at the Storran Gallery on the Brompton Road. A second, equally well-received exhibition of fifty-nine ‘Camera Portraits’, followed a year later at the Camera Club near The Strand. This was Gerty Simon’s last exhibition and after it closed she apparently stopped working as a professional photographer. For the rest of her life, and indeed for the next eighty years, she remained out of the public eye. Wilhelm died in 1966, and Gerty in 1970. Bernard Simon died in 2015, aged ninety-four, and left his mother’s archive to The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide in Russell Square, Central London.

In 2019, the Wiener Library marked an exhibition of Gerty Simon’s photographs with a book, Berlin–London: The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon, including biographical and contextual essays by Barbara Warnock and John March, on which I have drawn for the preceding remarks. I visited the exhibition and noticed a flyer for the Camera Club exhibition. Running my eye down the alphabetical list of Gerty Simon’s sitters I was astonished to see, at No. 26, ‘Sir Hubert Gough’.

How was it, that in 1934 or 1935, Hubert – who a few years earlier had published an exhaustive self-vindicating history of the Fifth Army in the First World War – had come to commission a photograph of himself from a German-Jewish refugee whose husband had served in the German Army in that same war and been awarded the Iron Cross? Perhaps there’s a clue in the name of No. 52 on the Camera Club flyer: Sir William Rothenstein – the close friend of George and Kittie Calderon – who in 1932 executed a chalk sketch of Hubert Gough that was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1970.

Rothenstein could have made the introduction, or Hubert may have liked what he saw at the Storran Gallery show. He may have known Gerty and Wilhelm personally as near neighbours. He would certainly have been invited to the opening-night party for the Camera Club exhibition along with Peggy Ashcroft and Constance Cummings. And there he may have talked to the stage designer Jocelyn Herbert or the painter Sir John Lavery, RA, and perhaps, too, to some of the other subjects of Gerty’s camera portraits – the art historian Kenneth Clark, the Austrian diplomat Baron Georg Franckenstein, or, maybe, ‘Lotte Lenja Weill’ (No. 36 on the programme). In any event, Hubert liked Gerty Simon’s portrait of himself well enough – above all others he’d sat for – to include it, twenty years later, as the uncredited frontispiece to his memoirs Soldiering On.

General Sir Hubert Gough (1870-1963).
Photographed in London by Gerty Simon, 1934 or 1935.
Courtesy of the Wiener Holocaust Library Collections

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr, Alliance Française, Alphabetical French-English List of Technical Military terms for Military Students, An Ethical System Based on the Laws of Nature, Anne Gough, Bernard Simon, Brigadier-General Sir John Edmond Gough, Charles Gough, Chelsea Home Guard, comments, Constance Cummings, Dardanelles, David Lloyd George, Diana Pym, Dictionary of Difficulties, Erich Ludendorff, Fauquissart, Fifth Army, Gallipoli, General Antoine, General Foch, General Sir Hubert Gough, George Calderon, George Franckenstein, George VI, Gertrud Cohn, Gerty Simon, Hubert Gough, Jack Pym, Jocelyn Herbert, John Pym, Johnnie Gough, Judith Kerr, Käthe Kollwitz, Kenneth Clark, Kittie Calderon, Kurt Weill, Langton Green, Lottle Lenya, Marius Deshumbert, Norman Stone, Passchendaele, Peggy Ashcroft, Sir John Lavery, Soldiering On, Staff College, The Blitz, The Great War, The Wiener Library, Tunbridge Wells, Valentine Gough, Violet Lubbock, Wilhelm Simon, William Rothenstein, World War I | 3 Comments

Fit for purpose, then?

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Patrick Miles

Some of my friends feel that I suffer from Low Frustration Tolerance (‘Foot Stuck on Indignation Pedal’, one calls it). They may be right, but I think Karl Popper would agree with me that you can’t improve the design of boats without rocking them. In the case of British archives, I think my range of experience qualifies me to do that.

I first researched in an archive when I was fourteen (at Sandwich Guildhall, I think), and as I said at the beginning of this series of posts, I had intensive dealings of all kinds with thirty-seven British archives in the course of researching my biography of George Calderon. Moreover, between 1970 and 1981 I worked in Russian state archives from Taganrog to St Petersburg and I have experience of archives in France, Germany and Sweden, so that gives me a wider sense of procedures and standards.

The Chekhov Library in Taganrog, designed by Fedor Shekhtel’, 1911 (Wikipedia, Public Domain)

I am inclined to perform a complete SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis on British archives as I have recently experienced them, but must resist the temptation: it should be done by the best management consultants in the business. It is overdue. Vital for such an appraisal would be for it not only to include end users’ experience but to be preponderantly based on that. It would be useless just to observe what archivists do, or take their word for it. It needs a real understanding of what archives exist for, rather than appreciating their potential as entertainment. Archives exist for people who want to research the past. This kind of user is their raison d’être, so such users’ experience should be sampled in depth and listened to above all.

If asked whether British archives are fit for purpose, I would be bound to say as a user (which includes as a donor/vendor) that many of them are only fifty per cent fit. That positive fifty per cent would almost certainly cover the institution’s person-to-person relations with users, namely fetching materials for them, serving them in a relaxed, courteous and friendly manner, advising them, making suggestions to them, helping them exploit resources to the full. Customer care in many European archives is famously surly. Somehow or other, the staff in even very large British archives, e.g. the Bodleian or the Imperial War Museum, achieve consistently radiant service.

I often have the impression, however, that the reason our archives are so strong in this area is that archivists enjoy it far more than the solitary labour of cataloguing and curating. Several have said to me things like: ‘You can’t imagine how boring it is when I’m working for weeks backstage on my own, and what a relief it is to talk to people and get involved in their projects.’ Well, I do acknowledge the dangers to archivists’ mental health of a life of cataloguing, conservation and filing. Getting a healthy and fulfilling balance between the spadework, customer relations and organising exhibitions, for example, should be a top priority of their line managers.

These are the areas in which British archives are not fit for purpose in my experience as set out in the previous four posts:

Safekeeping and retaining items
Communicating the fact of new accessions
Cataloguing accessions in real time
Line management
Evaluating materials to acquire
Managing approaches from donors or vendors
Managing funds for acquisitions

My personal proposed solutions to these dire problems are embedded in or may be inferred from my previous three posts. On the Popper principle, they are only as good as the results obtained from testing them.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there seems to be a correlation between bigness and failure in British archives. In my experience, small or medium-sized ones are the most efficient. They are leaner and fitter. When you work there, you feel an atmosphere of unofficious professionalism combined with vibrant purposefulness. Their staff are on top of their cataloguing and curation. They make ‘their’ collections work for you. For me such institutions would include Leeds Russian Archive, the Liddell Hart Military Archives at King’s College London, the Women’s Library Archive at LSE, the Theatre Museum Collections at the V&A, or Torquay Library. Oxbridge college archives are in a class of their own. They are relatively small, benefit from centuries of continuity, and are run by highly qualified archivists with an intense personal interest in the college.

Whereas…after my tortured dealings with the British Library and Cambridge University Library in the matter of the Calderon Papers, I honestly cannot bring myself to set foot in them again. (Fortunately, I am not planning to write any more biographies.)

The next post, on 3 August, will be a cracker by our stalwart contributor John Pym; a highly original and beautifully imaged guest post that brings together three very different persons and their life stories, whilst the spirits of George and Kittie hover over them all. Not to be missed!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged accessions, acquisitions, archival management, archives, archivists, British archives, Cambridge University Library, cataloguing, Clare Hopkins, conservation, curation, customer care, fitness for purpose, France, George Calderon, Germany, guest posts, John Pym, Karl Popper, Kittie Calderon, Leeds Russian Archive, Liddell Hart Military Archives, line management, Low Frustration Tolerance, management consultants, Oxbridge college archives, safeguarding, Sandwich, St Petersburg, Sweden, SWOT analysis, Taganrog, The Bodleian Library, The British Library, The Imperial War Museum, The Women's Library Archive, Theatre Museum Collections V&A, Torquay Library, Trinity College Oxford | 2 Comments

‘Spectator’

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Patrick Miles

SAVE IT FOR THE (AMERICAN) NATION!

How British archives fail us

Patrick Miles

It was a biographer’s dream. For decades Russianists had searched in vain for the archive of George Calderon, top Edwardian Slavist and the man who brought Chekhov’s plays to Britain. Then The Spectator published a letter from me appealing for leads, a reader wrote to me next day, and a year later I was examining the ‘Calderon Papers’ in a Scottish attic. Eight hundred letters from Calderon, Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Bell, Rupert Brooke…seven hundred photographs and watercolours…detailed memoirs of George by his contemporaries… My biography took seven years to write, came out in 2018, and was kindly received.

But running beneath it all has been the nightmare of dealing with British archival institutions as the Papers’ owner and I sought a permanent home for them. It’s an experience that Spectator readers may one day find useful.

We agreed that such a rich archive should never be split up; it must be exemplarily curated; and it must be sold because it was part of the owner’s patrimony. But as a British Library archivist put it to me, money was ‘a rather awkward subject’. We had not realised that archival politics are vicious because the stakes are so small. The first archive we approached proudly announced that they had recently raised £1m and would be interested in buying. Then their money was collared by the Library ‘over’ them, which changed its priority to gender studies. Talks were going well with another major library, until its archivist identified us as a threat to his personal plans for the bequest most likely to be drawn on. Four years were wasted on these shenanigans.

The common belief that British archives have ‘no money’ needs qualifying. George Calderon was an Oxford man and the Bodleian Library responded well to us. However, it had no funds available as it had just spent £993,250 on sixty-eight manuscript pages of Jane Austen’s The Watsons long familiar to scholars. Was this necessary in an age of digitisation?

Our archives are addicted to celebrity. The British Library paid £1.1m for Harold Pinter’s papers and £32,000 for Wendy Cope’s emails, yet who can say that posterity will rate these writers as highly as today’s cultural establishment does? There is a sense that archivists are being taken in – or cosying up to that establishment themselves. Obviously, if they want to buy more (small) archives they must set their own price bands that will leave them with enough money.

But I am not convinced that these institutions want to collect archives at all. I could give examples of holdings whose significance was not discovered by scholars for decades; fortunately, these papers were ‘collected’ by old-fashioned archives and conserved until that day. Awe of celebrity means that the archive of someone whose name is not instantly recognised will not be wanted. This fatally affected our attempt to sell the Calderon Papers to the British Library, even though Calderon had been one of their own Slavonic Librarians at the British Museum and they themselves had looked for his papers in the 1970s! If the people on the committees don’t know ‘who’ the subject of the archive ‘is’, they won’t be interested, although this may be dressed up as the archive having ‘low research value’ (something no-one can predict).

Whether British archives are impoverished or not, they will try to bounce you into donating. In retrospect, we were wrong to say that we were determined to keep the Papers in Britain, because that removed the competition. The owner was expected to extend her patriotism to giving the papers away. Worse, in our deliberations with British archivists we sometimes felt that these salaried, process-driven folk believe it is ‘wrong to make money’ out of inherited papers. Such people literally cannot imagine being self-employed or realising your assets.

British archival managers are also deeply suspicious of private sales and independent scholars. Their default is to involve ‘established’ dealers as brokers. These take at least 20% commission from the owner and drive up prices. The owner of the Calderon Papers was perfectly capable of conducting her own negotiations and I provided a detailed description of the archive gratis. These archivists had bought manuscripts through Quaritch and Rota, say, therefore they always must. And they did not trust me, because I wasn’t a tenured academic but some maverick probably after his cut. The alternative, in their view, was to get an ‘independent valuation’ from an auction house. But an auction house can only value ‘lots’, e.g. a letter by Conrad or Brooke. It cannot put a value to the whole for research purposes. Auction valuations of the Calderon Papers were less than a quarter of my own valuation of it as a study archive – the price for which it was eventually sold. To have settled for auction valuations would in any case have been to accept its being split up, which was not on.

We began trying to engage with British archives in 2009 and by 2016 were on our fourth major one. Problems other than money emerged. Many archivists do not have a long attention span. It is often difficult to contact the right person in the first place and he/she may suddenly stop replying, which is known to the rest of us as rudeness. Friends told me of their gifts to archives being ‘lost’. The British Library bought an archive in 2011 that contained a sensational Calderon manuscript, but no mention of it occurred on the Web for the next seven years. Was it being catalogued? Had it disappeared? Even some pages of The Watsons were ‘lost’ by a London library. Calderon’s annotated copy of a Russian book about Chekhov was to be transferred from the open shelves of a Cambridge department library to Special Collections at the University Library, but when it arrived there it was binned as a ‘duplicate’. The emerging picture of British archival incompetence was alarming. I told the owner that the ‘emphasis on PR and media image at the British Library’ made me ‘wonder’ whether core activities such as cataloguing and conservation were being neglected.

Meanwhile, various vultures began to circle. Two of these had ‘no money’, but fancied owning the archive because of an association with George Calderon. The third might find money but my personal experience of its curation did not inspire confidence. Since by this time I was writing a daily blog, ‘Calderonia’, and frantically trying to complete my biography, I found these unwanted attentions from archivists extremely stressful.

Nearly nine years after first approaching a major British library, the owner and I decided we must change tack. There was no point in saving the Calderon Papers for our nation if our nation’s archives did not want them enough. We would save them for the American nation. And there were excellent reasons for doing so: I knew from my own research that American curation is good, you could view in digitised form anything of theirs that you needed to see, and to cap it all George Calderon was an Americanophile, so he would have approved. On 19 June 2018 we approached the Houghton Library at Harvard University about buying the Calderon Papers, on 9 April 2019 they arrived there, and by 9 July 2019 they had been superbly catalogued online.

Given my experience, I cannot recommend tangling with British archives if you have a literary archive that you want to sell. It would be like trying to waltz with treacle. Frankly, I cannot recommend donating anything to a British archive either, as it is likely to be ‘lost’. In the first case, I would approach an American archive direct. In the second, you should conserve family papers yourself and if they are of public interest catalogue them on a home made website. You may be surprised to find how keen a younger generation is to do this.

Of course, we have archivists whose professionalism and vision are to die for. In nine years, however, I had to deal with too many who were dilettantes. They were not focussed on their work as a profession comparable, say, to the Law. Often they ploughed a modest research furrow and projected themselves as academics, complete with the jacket and bow tie. They had manifestly stayed too long in one job. A leading American curator said to me that the problem with British archivists was not that they have ‘no money’, but that they don’t know how to manage large amounts of money. Judging by the inflated prices they have rushed to pay for celebrity archives in recent years, that statement is correct. British archivists’ perennial excuse that they have ‘no money’ for anything from buying small archives to processing collections in real time, is a function of their dilettantism. As a profession, they have reduced themselves to a state of learned helplessness.

Patrick Miles is a freelance writer and Russianist. His biography George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is available from samandsam.co.uk.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.