‘We need each other…’

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.

© John Polkinghorne & Patrick Miles, 2020
With thanks to Jim Miles for recording and transcribing

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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

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.

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.

Jim Corbet c. 1914

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.

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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

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.

© Andrew Tatham, 2020


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 fascinatingGyles 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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 11

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 periodThe 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 BritainAnd 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.

29

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?’

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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

(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

© John Pym, 2020

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Fit for purpose, then?

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!

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

‘Spectator’

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.

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Explanatory notes to ‘Thunderer’

I give here some of the facts from my and my team’s experience that lie behind statements I made in the preceding post, whilst preserving the anonymity of most of the offending institutions because I think to name them would be a distraction.

‘Be prepared for nobody to answer your emails.’ See below under ‘Archive tourists don’t work in archives’ and ‘Attempts to communicate with an archival manager’.

‘Be prepared for…promises to be broken.’ The most common promise made by archivists when an item is donated to holdings is that they will contact you when the material has been curated, and invite you to view it. In our experience this never happens. I sold a collection of rare books, some inscribed and annotated by Russian Chekhov scholars, to a university library who told me that the provenance and nature of the books would be indicated by a bookplate and note in the catalogue. Neither ever happened.

‘…binned as a duplicate.’  This is V. Pokrovskii’s Anton Chekhov’s Life and Works: A Collection of Literary-Historical Articles. At 1062 pages, it was by far the most important source of contemporary Russian writing about Chekhov’s work. As you can see from the image below, George owned a copy. He annotated it, and his annotations are particularly significant for his views on The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. George’s copy was found in a provincial bookshop by the first Professor of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge, Elizabeth Hill, and donated to the Slavonic Library there at some point between 1936 and 1955. In 1983 I persuaded the then professor, Lucjan Lewitter, that it was historically too valuable to be left on the open shelves, should be replaced by a reprint that was just coming out, and transferred to Special Collections at the University Library. Professor Lewitter, who was a very efficient administrator, arranged for this to be done. After a decent interval, I decided I should check where it was, but no record of its location at the University Library could be found. The late and greatly lamented Russian Librarian there, Ray Scrivens, then frantically searched for it and discovered it buried in a wicker basket labelled ‘Duplicates’ about to be trundled out of the Library… To be honest, I suspect the same happened to many of the collection of inscribed and annotated books I referred to in my first paragraph, viz. the fact that they were inscribed and annotated was completely forgotten by the receiving library, catalogue checks were made to see if they ‘had’ these books already, and if they had that title, the annotated copy was binned.

Photocopy of the half-title of  George’s copy of Pokrovskii, 1907

‘Be prepared for… cataloguing never to happen’ andthey disappeared without trace.’ In my experience, smallish military archives are particularly bad in these regards. Regimental museums, for instance, seem to be managed mainly by volunteers, who are good at dealing with inquiries from the public, enjoy that and the razzmatazz around family donations, but get irretrievably behind with their cataloguing. When an item has been acquired, ‘accessioned’, but not then catalogued (whether on paper or online) and a researcher needs to see it, it often cannot be found. The euphemism is that it has been ‘mislaid’. Doubtless archivists justify this to themselves by thinking ‘I know it’s here somewhere’, but that is delusional: it’s lost.

In 1987 I was presented with the massive bronze Chekhov Centenary Medal by the head of the Soviet delegation to the colloquium ‘Chekhov on the British Stage’, Aleksandr Anikst. It was not awarded to me personally, but to the British hosts of the event, which I organised and which was a significant development in the early stages of perestroika. Indeed, Anikst explained to me afterwards that he had been directed to award the medal by Gorbachev himself; Oleg Efremov, the Artistic Director of the Moscow Arts, also told me that Gorbachev had been in touch with him about the importance of attending the event and another in Oxford at the same time. The Cambridge host of the colloquium was the University’s Department of Slavonic Studies, so the medal was passed for safe keeping to the Slavonic Library and thence to the ‘reserved’ section of the Faculty Library. Ten years later it could not be found. Ray Scrivens informed me that valuable donated and framed manuscript letters held in that library had disappeared around the same time whilst being ‘transferred’ to the University Library.

Of course, it is a great mistake to try to control something once you have given it away, but it’s still disappointing when people whose job is to conserve it, lose it.

Whilst researching my biography, I regularly trawled the Web for new references to George Calderon. In 2009 an excellent brief description of the archive of George’s composer friend Martin Shaw (1875-1958) popped up on the website of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, who were selling it.  The archive included ‘a rare manuscript by the young playwright George Calderon’. Actually, this is the only known manuscript of a play by George, so the news was sensational. In February 2011 the Martin Shaw Papers were bought by the British Library. I am glad to say that, following labryrinthine email correspondence, a curator was able to find the uncatalogued George manuscript and let me see it (in an obviously uncurated state). It turned out to be the 134-page autograph of the ‘musical play’ The Brave Little Tailor, which George wrote with William Caine. So it wasn’t lost in the sense that it could not be found by the people who now owned it. But there was no trace of it on the Web between 2011 and 2018, when it was catalogued. Can no-one at the British Library see that in effect all the Martin Shaw papers were lost to researchers for the whole of that period? It is, whatever the cause, indefensible that it takes seven years to catalogue an acquisition, but failing that the Library could at least have put out to the world a short announcement of the fact that they had acquired it and what it contained. It is good practice, followed by some archives, to produce a skeleton list of a collection as soon as it is received (something that takes at most a morning, I should think), put it straight online, and even make clear that materials can be ordered and consulted on the basis of this list, but that they will not be fully catalogued until date x.

‘Customer care…was surreal.’  I had come across the letters in the invaluable University of Reading Library Location Register of  20th Century English Literary Manuscripts, a publication known, surely, to British archivists. I corresponded by email with a very efficient Historic Collections Administrator at the given library, and she informed me that the items would be transferred for me to the Manuscript Reading Room two days before I was coming from Cambridge to look at them.

The person at the Reading Room desk cast a cursory glance over her shelves and told me the ordered file was not there. She offered no further action. I explained how and when I had ordered the letters. She denied it was possible, and asked how I knew that the library possessed them. I referred to the Register, but she said she had no knowledge of it. She would engage in no further dialogue. I pleaded that I had come all the way from Cambridge to see the items and she intimated I should go all the way back. Fortunately, I insisted on calling out the Administrator I had dealt with by email. The young woman came and seemed to understand the situation immediately. The lady at the desk had, I gathered, spent a part of her life cataloguing the large collection which contained George’s letters, and was determined to control who had access to it. She had concealed my file in another one that a reader was working on at that moment. It occurred to me that as well as misguided possessiveness, her motive might be misandry.

Of course, this is a very sad story. One can well understand that archivists may, over a long period, develop extreme tunnel-vision and paranoia. However, it is up to their managers to intervene long before that. The case of this lady archivist is really one of appalling line management. The buck should never have been passed to me, the user.

‘An archivist’s mission is to collect…’ I am aware that archivists will disagree with me. The modern criterion for acquiring archives, possibly foisted on traditional archivists by uninformed consultants, is ‘research value’. As far as I can tell, this is ‘measured’ by the ‘public impact’ that the acquisition has, the number of requests to view it, etc, and may be entirely dictated by fashion (a recent top priority has been ‘gender studies’). However, ‘research value’ must mean ‘value to researchers’, if it means anything, and no-one can predict what that will be. Any experienced researcher could give examples of acquisitions that nobody looked at for decades but whose significance was suddenly realised. I will give only one. Eleonora Duse’s archives were thought to have been lost. In fact her papers and her richly annotated library, which she described as her ‘artistic wardrobe’, had been given to New Hall (now Murray Edwards College), Cambridge, by her daughter in 1962, mainly, I suspect, because she lived across the road from the college. There, in effect, the collection mouldered for fifty years. But it is enormously to the credit of New Hall’s librarians that they did not throw it out on account of its ‘proven low research value’. It was eventually ‘discovered’ by theatre historian Anna Sica from Palermo University, who realised that it showed Duse’s intellectual evolution, her erudition, her meticulous preparation of her roles, indeed exactly why she made such a profound impression on contemporaries like Chekhov, Stanislavsky and James Joyce. The impact of Sica’s subsequent book cannot be measured. Had New Hall not had such an eclectic, comprehensive and inclusive acquisitions policy — had it not collected, I would say — none of this would have happened. Similarly, some libraries have the inspired policy of collecting ‘ephemera’, such as posters, menus, or product packaging, whose research value cannot be predicted.

‘Archive tourists don’t work in archives…’  Obviously archives should be open to the general public and display their holdings. There is a world of difference, however, between visitors and the professional researchers for whom archives principally exist and always have. One or two archivists have complained to me that having to set up ‘back-to-back exhibitions’ is a distraction from their ‘real’ work. Worst, though, in my experience, is the effect that archive tourism can have on archivists’ communication. We had an enthusiastic approach from a major library about buying the Calderon Family Papers. The archival manager wanted to view the Papers as soon as possible, but was ‘heavily committed to an exhibition we have opening in the Library’ and therefore had to postpone his inspection for a month. Indeed, I visited the exhibition incognito and saw him hugely enjoying performing to a large group from the Townswomen’s Guild. Despite two emails and a letter, I could never catch his attention again. It occurred to me that perhaps he was really unhappy as an archivist and should have been an actor. But the idea, seemingly beloved of PR consultants and accountants, that archives and libraries exist to provide public entertainment, is grotesque. If it is entertainment, why not charge for it?

‘Attempts to communicate with an archival manager.’  Everyone I know who has wished to donate or sell papers to a major archive has complained about the difficulty of communicating with the right person and about the latter’s complete inability to manage their emails. There is usually no obvious portal to a process for making such offers to the archive. I would have thought the process should be a top-down-and-back-up line of management. But if, faute de mieux, you tackle the top person about donation/sale, you tend to get referred to a middle archival manager who wields power of life and death over whether your inquiry goes any further. Most people will find it is not answered. The top person will not hear about it again unless they ask. One colleague found that her emails to an archival manager about her donation of a serious collection of papers were simply blocked. The reason email communications about donation/sale prove tenuous may not just be that archivists don’t know how to manage their in-boxes, it may be that the archival manager has his/her own agenda and is simply playing politics. Internal archive-politics seem to be vicious because the stakes are relatively small.

‘A 68-page manuscript of Jane Austen’s.’ This is the fragment of The Watsons bought by the Bodleian Library in 2011 at Sotheby’s for £993,250. The Bodleian’s deputy librarian told the press: ‘We will make the manuscript available to the general public, who can come and see it as early as this autumn, when The Watsons will be a star item in our forthcoming exhibition.’ Good entertainment, then, but surely low research value, as the manuscript was first published in 1871 and has been available digitally for some time.

‘But perhaps you want to sell the papers you have inherited?’ This subject is the core of my experience and quarrel with British archives. The whole of my next post, on Monday 13 July, will be devoted to it.

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Thunderer’

Curate your own

stuff – British archives

can’t cope

PATRICK MILES

Thinking of depositing your family papers in a public archive? Be prepared for nobody to answer your emails, promises to be broken, cataloguing never to happen, and to discover a few years later that your papers cannot be found.

Such has been my and my friends’ experience whilst working on the life of Edwardian polymath George Calderon, who was Britain’s first modern Russianist, introduced Chekhov’s plays to Britain, and was killed at Gallipoli.

Calderon’s annotated copy of a 1907 Russian book about Chekhov is of national importance, so I negotiated its transfer to Special Collections at a famous university library. When it got there, it was binned as ‘a duplicate’. A friend donated his grandfather’s Gallipoli photos to a military museum, where they disappeared without trace. The British Library acquired composer Martin Shaw’s archive, containing a sensational Calderon manuscript, but they never mentioned this acquisition on their website in the seven years they took to catalogue it.

Customer care at a famous London archive was surreal: when I arrived to read previously ordered Calderon letters, I was told by the curator that she knew nothing about them, the published description of them did not exist, and I should go home!

Our archives are failing us and we are always told the reason is underfunding. I don’t think so. From my point of view, an archivist’s mission is to collect, conserve, catalogue, and communicate. Accountants and PR consultants, however, have persuaded our archivists that they must ‘sell’ their institutions through the media, conferences, and endless exhibitions. Although this raises archives’ public profile and may be rewarded with more funding, it is not strictly speaking productive because archive tourists don’t work in archives, only researchers do. Judging by the amount of self-publicity that archives now generate, I doubt whether their employees spend half their time on what matters most to researchers: curating the collections and facilitating access through prompt cataloguing.

But perhaps you want to sell the papers you have inherited? Even if you succeed in your attempts to communicate with an archival manager, these salaried process-driven folk believe you shouldn’t be ‘making money’ out of family papers. It is your duty to donate them. In any case, our archival institutions always have ‘no money’. This is because they are addicted to celebrity (£1.1m for Harold Pinter’s papers, £32,000 for Wendy Cope’s emails). They need to buck this trend and free up money for less pretentious purchases. What is the point, in the digital age, of spending all your funds on a 68-page manuscript of Jane Austen’s?

Fortunately, there are ways of avoiding tangling with Britain’s hopeless archives. First, you could become a ‘citizen archivist’ and curate your papers on your own website. Second, you could sell them to one of the impressively managed American institutions, whose motto tends to be: ‘More Product, Less Process’.

Patrick Miles is a freelance writer and the author of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius (Sam&Sam, 2018).

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Health Warning

The Calderon Family Papers, Cambridge, February 2019

I have decided I must go public about the nine years of frustration that the owner of the Calderon Papers and I endured as we tried to find a permanent home for them in a British archival institution. It was one of the worst experiences of my professional life. I need to get it off my chest, but my account of it might also be useful to Calderonia’s readers and I shall of course welcome Comments on it from all quarters.

As followers will be well aware, the experience of researching and writing my biography of George was one of sheer pleasure, marked by a blessed serendipity at every stage and a host of wonderful new acquaintances who helped me in every possible way. My experience of dealing with British archives on behalf of a vendor has been merely the black lining to that silver cloud. I must hereby issue a health warning, however, that my anger about how we were treated is intense and, I believe, justified. My words in the next four posts will doubtless seem to some readers very hard; possibly unbelievably so. But I stand by them.

I hasten to emphasise that my criticisms are not directed at how I was treated as a user by the thirty-seven archives I had dealings with in the course of researching my book. On the contrary: whether working in their space, buying copies from them, or corresponding with their staff about specific questions, the service I received from over 90% of them was highly civilised, informed and efficient. The trouble, for both me and my team, concerned issues of safe keeping, cataloguing and communication that arose from our donations to archives or attempts to sell to them.

I have written a 450-word piece for the ‘Thunderer’ column of The Times that will be reproduced in my next post whether the newspaper publishes it or not (I fear they will not regard archives as a subject to set the world on fire!). That will be followed by a third post in which I flesh out the points I make as a Thunderer. Last week I wrote a 1500-word article for The Spectator, and that will be reproduced in my fourth post whether published or not. In a final, short post, I shall attempt a summing up, for example naming the kind of British archives that I think perform best. Personally, I never want to donate or sell anything to a British archive in my life again.

The Calderon Family Papers arrive at Harvard University, 9 April 2019

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘People are reading an awful lot…

…and many booksellers are doing mail order,’ writes Susan Hill in The Spectator. I should say they are! Click the prompt at the bottom of this post to buy my blockbuster biography from Sam&Sam while stocks last!

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

Obsessed with self-image, spin, media, travel, sport, new technology, feminism, the trade unions, relations with Europe, populism? Yes, that’s us! But it was also true of our ancestors the Edwardians — the Brits who lived in that very turbulent channel in our nation’s history, the Edwardian Age of roughly 1897-1916.

There has never been a period in the life of Britain when democratic discourse was as vibrant, exciting and individualistic…it very nearly blew the country apart, writes Patrick Miles. It was the time when the modern nation was born. To understand the Edwardians is to understand more of OURSELVES.

There are very few books that can take you into the Edwardians’ mindset as effectively as Patrick Miles’s George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, because George Calderon (1868-1915) was the quintessential Edwardian — an all-rounder, a man for all seasons, a polymath of genius, or what we would call today a master of the portfolio career.

Using George and Kittie Calderon’s archive discovered by him in a Scottish attic, Patrick Miles has seamlessly reconstructed the action-packed story of Calderon’s traumatic time as a journalist in Russia, his clandestine courtship, his comic novels, his nervous breakdown, his life on Tahiti, his brilliant reviews for the TLS, his Communitarian political activism, his career in the New Drama, his determination to fight at the Front in 1914 despite being over age, and his death at Gallipoli. The book also focusses on Calderon’s heroic wife and her lifetime relationship with another woman.

George Calderon is best known as the first modern British Russianist and the man who introduced Chekhov’s plays to the British theatre; but the mission of this first full-length biography is to show that ‘there is far more to George Calderon than his Chekhovian legacy’. As a Russianist, writer and theatre man himself, Patrick Miles has what one reviewer has called ‘a natural empathy for his subject’ — an empathy with Edwardianism.

THE STORY OF GEORGE AND KITTIE IS ONE THAT HUNDREDS HAVE ALREADY FOUND AS ABSORBING AND ENJOYABLE AS FICTION. TO BUY A COPY OF THIS FINE LIMITED EDITION CLICK ON THE LINK THAT FOLLOWS THESE EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:

‘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.

Click here to purchase my book.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 10

7 April
Walking home the three quarters of a mile or so from the centre of Cambridge, I saw six people and no cars. As in Georgio de Chirico’s surreal paintings, people are now weirdly visible even from a distance by their sheer verticality…

Something small but significant has happened in the local side streets. A squirrel hopped unhurriedly across the road right in front of me, then two Jays flew out of a garden and settled in another front garden, only feet from the house and someone watching them at the window. The Jay is such a woodland bird and so exotic-looking, that many urbanites would surely not know what they are looking at.

Jay illustration from RSPB.org.uk

The natural world has begun to creep back as the streets and skies fall silent and humanity retreats. A neighbour has long-tailed tits nesting in his front hedge flush with the pavement, which in my experience is unprecedented for such a nervous bird. Other people report seeing hedgehogs for the first time in years. I have never seen goldfinches and chaffinches at our bird-bath before, and the dawn chorus seems much louder.

I don’t find anything sinister about this, but it does bring home to you with a jolt how other to human existence the life of the natural world is. A great naturalist once said to me concerning over-anthropomorphic attitudes to conservationism: ‘We have to remember that the animals don’t know they are dying out.’ Either for religious, philosophical, or Darwinist reasons, we feel continuous with the organic world, so it is a jolt to see it getting on without us. But it’s not such a jolt as when people talk of COVID-19 being ‘the planet fighting back’. We think of the Earth as living, but this phrase implies it is inanimate, alien to us and hostile — which we don’t really like to think it is, since it is our home. Is it right to identify COVID-19 with ‘the planet’, when viruses aren’t organisms?

21 April
It suddenly occurred to me that I don’t recall Kittie Calderon mentioning the ‘Spanish flu’ (which killed 100 million people) once in all the extant correspondence of hers that I have read for 1918-19. Then I remembered that Charles Evelyn Pym (‘Evey‘) bracketed that flu and Kittie in a letter to his young wife Violet on 29 October 1918:

I am so distressed to hear of Jack [their ten-year-old son] getting this beastly flu. I do trust you will keep him thoroughly warm for a long time and I hope they [Ludgrove School, where Jack was a boarder] have got a good doctor. I am sorry you are going to Kittie now, as Hampstead must reek of it. I got your two letters together this evening and do hope you will get good news, and that it is a mild form.

Violet and Kittie were very close and Violet would occasionally stay with her at 42 Well Walk in the heart of Hampstead whilst visiting London. Presumably Violet was hoping to collect Jack from the school, which in those days was at Cockfosters. Evey was writing from the huge military camp at Etaples, Pas-de-Calais, where he was Assistant Provost Marshal. As Catherine Arnold writes in Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History, Etaples is ‘a strong contender for the birthplace of Spanish flu’, although its epicentre is thought to have been China.

As ever, I am indebted to John Pym, Jack’s son, for showing me his grandparents’ correspondence back in 2011 and allowing me to quote from it here.

29 April
Referring, I fancy, to three uncommon words and a neologism in the sample of ‘Making Icons’ that I pushed out to sea in my last diary-post, a loyal follower quotes to me in an email the first verse of a poem by Hilaire Belloc that I did not know:

I mean to write with all my strength
(It lately has been sadly waning)
A poem of enormous length —
Some parts of which may need explaining.

It so happened that, although I regard Notes as an admission of defeat, I had decided only the day before that ‘Making Icons’ would need a few. Well, three quarters of the poem doesn’t need them, but it’s a different matter when you get to the eight stanzas that engage with the long process by which this:

[seasoned lime]

becomes this:

[unfinished icon by Leon Liddament]

For instance,

27

To author, he easters from praise and prayer
his hearted image, in slow, soft strokes.
Himation…book…halo and hair…
with pencil, then scribed on space. An acre
of gold he lays on bole’s yellow ochre:
leaf lifted on squirrel tuft through the hushed air
and suddenly sucked to sturgeon’s lock,
then burnished and buffed, basted with glair.
He puddles raw umber, indigo, terre
into cut-outs of colour like late Matisse.
Such basal abstraction might make us stare,
seeing an icon where nothing fays.

(This kind of verse is ‘concatenated’. The last line of each of the four stanzas in a set ends with the same rhyme, which may be the same word or a variation on its sound, and the same word/similar sound must start the first line of the next stanza. In this particular set of four the last words are fays:faith:face:Face and the first words of the last three stanzas and first one of the next set are faze:phaseless:facings:to face.)

However, I’m very grateful to my correspondent for also quoting to me a footnote that Belloc himself appended to the first verse of his poem (‘Dedicatory Ode’):

But do not think I shall explain
To any great extent. Believe me,
I partly write to give you pain,
And if you do not like me, leave me.

7 May
The social distancing observed in the queue outside our local greengrocer’s is admirable: people stand four metres apart in a line stretching across the shopping court, so that others heading for shops beyond can pass precisely two metres between them. However, the greengrocer’s itself is small and allows four customers at once. There are also up to two staff in it. This means some very tight choreography if you are to observe distancing inside the shop. The other day, seeing a short but well built woman charging at me, I was about to move to one side but noticed just in time that I’d be coming perilously close to a third person, so I performed a two-hop manoeuvre, smiled at the woman and warbled: ‘You do the hokey-cokey and you…’ Not a flicker of response.

If you do go out, people who would normally just wave insist on gassing at you from an ever-diminishing distance. This happened to me this morning. A neighbour crossed the road to talk to me, standing in the road to my right whilst I remained on the pavement. To my left was a seven-foot privet hedge. Suddenly a couple appeared twenty yards away walking towards me on the pavement. Without wishing to offend my neighbour, I had to move further up the pavement then step into the road infront of a parked car two metres from him and two from the pavement. However, as I moved a bloke came out of his drive in front of me back first, sweeping stuff into the gutter. Trapped! I executed a pirouette and double chassé, smiled and did my hokey-cokey thing, but again no-one responded.

Has this virus killed the Great British Sense of Humour, or is it just me?

14 May
As an example of one of the unpredictable spinoffs of the pandemic, my brother-in-law told me about a first-year university student who, when his course was abruptly suspended, got a job at an Amazon warehouse and enjoyed it so much that he decided not to go back to university. Apparently the young man could not praise highly enough Amazon’s observance of COVID precautions for its staff, enjoyed the working conditions and money, and persuaded himself that a ‘real job’ like this was for him.

The story pricked my conscience. Back in December, I posted about the Morning Star attacking Amazon as the worst violator of workers’ rights in Britain. The newspaper’s claim disturbed me not because I use Amazon much (I positively prefer shops), but because we had just published our first book with Amazon. Stalwart Calderonia-follower Clare Hopkins then described in a Comment feeling ‘sickened’ by reading the section on Amazon in James Bloodworth’s newly republished Hired: Undercover in Low-wage Britain and I replied that I would ‘definitely investigate Bloodworth’s book’. I didn’t, but I have now. Ironically enough, Bloodworth sells his book on Amazon:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

The book is described by the blurb and its author as an ‘exposé’, ‘revelations’ and ‘research’. Anyone expecting those activities from the 66-page section on Amazon will, I fear, be disappointed. Bloodworth does not even tell us how long he worked at the Amazon centre in Rugeley, Staffs. To describe something as ‘research’ that is based on four fragmentary interviews with people who have worked there and an inexplicably undetailed account of his own experiences, betrays an ineptness with English words that is woefully visible throughout. Only three of the chapters in this section are actually about Amazon, the other two concern Rugeley and its mining past.

Maybe I have missed something, but I have read this section three times and could not put my finger on anywhere that Amazon broke British labour or health and safety laws. Bloodworth makes much of the penalties for going to the loo whilst working at an Amazon centre, but the ‘bottles of urine from employees too scared to take bathroom breaks’ on page xvi become ‘on one occasion I came across a bottle of straw-coloured liquid perched inauspiciously on a shelf’ on page 50. Bloodworth has been compared to George Orwell, but I am afraid this is absurd, as Orwell showed and Bloodworth merely tells.

Nevertheless, I agree with Clare that the regime at this Amazon centre is sickening. There may be nothing illegal about it, but its robotic and totalitarian essence is completely alien to our own work culture. Bloodworth is certainly right to identify it with Modern Times maniac Frederick W. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management. For me this is the point. British manual workers never have accepted the culture of the American factory, and never will: ninety per cent of the workers Bloodworth describes at the Rugeley centre come from Eastern Europe and feel they have no choice but to work for Amazon, whilst British locals hate the idea. Immigration is a serious theme of this section. Another is the truly disgusting iniquity of the agencies who control Amazon’s workers, regularly pay them late, regularly underpay them, and regularly fiddle their payslips. These agencies should be investigated, prosecuted and stopped.

I am sorry to say this, but the book as a whole is a bit of a fraud. Bloodworth tells us as much on page xi of his introduction, but does not seem to realise it. The book is marketed as an exposé etc of zero-hours contracts and the gig economy, especially at Amazon, and Bloodworth tells us himself that he ‘set out to write about the material poverty that often accompanies such work’, but ‘quickly realised that it was just as important to write about the British towns I was living in’. Consequently half of the book is about these towns, present and past; particularly past. Bloodworth is steeped in the socialist writers of the 1930s, whom he regularly quotes, and loves nothing so much as to spend an evening at a social club listening to reminiscences of the glorious days when miners were ‘rich’ (p. 59) and had a belligerent union fighting for them.

Although Bloodworth warns several times against ‘romanticising’ the ‘working-class’ past, his book is built around an academic nostalgia for it. So powerful is the nostalgia that it, together with Bloodworth’s matchless command of left-wing clichés and his tendency to rant, filled me with yearning for the good old days of Dave Spart’s column in Private Eye.

20 May
Let’s be honest, this diary is pretty boring, cerebral stuff. If you want to know the really exciting things that have been happening in our lives during lockdown, go to Mrs Miles’s new blog at: adiaryofdoing.wordpress.com. I can’t compete!

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Weighty Calderonian matters

The above is described in an auction catalogue of 2001 as ‘A Victorian set of jockey scales by Youngs of Bear Street, London WC on oak stand with spiral-turned supports. Width 3ft’. The auction in question was of ‘The Residual Contents of Foxwold, Brasted Chart, Westerham, Kent’.

For fans of Merchant Ivory’s 1985 film of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View — and there are very many — Foxwold is better known as ‘Windy Corner’, the Surrey residence of Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter), her mother (Rosemary Leach) and Tiggerish brother Freddy (Rupert Graves):

But to followers of this blog Foxwold is dear as practically Kittie and George’s second home. For most of the time covered by my biography of them Foxwold was owned by Charles ‘Evey’ Pym, who was married to Kittie’s niece by her first marriage, Violet née Lubbock, to whom Kittie was devoted. The Calderons regularly spent weekends or parts of their holidays at Foxwold, most memorably George’s last Christmas (1914).

Violet and Evey’s grandson, the film critic John Pym, to whom the whole Calderon project owes so much, has emailed me to say that he was recently ‘glancing through The Foxwold Weigh-in Book’ when he discovered:

and:

Sensational! There is a wealth of explicit and implicit biographical detail in these two pages! In fact, they are probably the most interesting new Calderon documents to have come to light since my biography was published in 2018! I am deeply beholden to Mr Pym for alerting me to them, allowing me to post images of them, lending me the catalogue of the 2001 auction, and providing me with his family gloss below.

The explicit detail, of course, is George and Kittie’s weights during this 1904-05 period, which help me picture more accurately what they looked like at the time. I don’t know whether this matters to all biographers, but it was always very important for me to ‘see’ George and Kittie, hear their voices, know their facial skin texture, as it were, and almost smell them. I laboriously calculated from a 1901 photograph of George standing in a doorframe of standard dimensions that his height was five foot ten; I subsequently discovered from his enlistment form of 1914 that he gave it himself as five foot nine and a half. Altogether, I had got the impression that he was on the slim side, even underweight, as in her memoirs Kittie said that he hadn’t the physique for sustained manual work.

But on 30 September 1904 we see that he weighed in at twelve stone, which on the height/mass chart given me by my G.P. places George just short of the ‘You are beginning to get fat’ area. Put that together with the Army’s note in 1914 that his ‘general physical development’ was ‘good’ and that he had a four-inch chest expansion, and he doesn’t seem so slight after all. He is the third heaviest of the seven men whose weights feature on these two pages. Mind you, we don’t know the others’ heights and they all seem remarkably light by today’s standards.

I have never found a record of Kittie’s height, but from photographs of her standing next to George I estimate she was at most five foot five. According to my weight-watcher’s chart, this would mean that at ten stone twelve she was just inside the ‘beginning to get fat’ boundary. This may explain why there are no further records of her weight in the book!

At the end of September 1904 George was lingering at Boulogne with his doctor, Albert Tebb, and the latter’s son, Christopher, on a recuperative holiday. He was desperately missing Kittie, who had been with him earlier but was now staying at Emmetts, the Lubbocks’ home near Foxwold. He felt he could not leave the others, as they were both ‘sickly’, but he hoped to join Kittie at Emmetts before she returned to London. In my biography (p. 192) I wrote that it seemed unlikely the party left early enough for George to join Kittie at the Lubbocks’. There is no extant Visitors Book for Emmetts, but ‘The Foxwold Weigh-in Book’ proves that he did get there in time.

The next two entries for George look alarming. Three months later, on 31 December 1904, he had lost three pounds. Five months after that, on 21 May 1905, he had lost another four pounds and was down to eleven and a half stone. However, on 30 December 1905 he weighed in at eleven stone thirteen, meaning that he lost seven pounds in eight months but put six of them back again within eight months. Clearly he had some reason for weighing himself each time he visited Foxwold over these fifteen months, and one assumes it wasn’t that he was slimming. The decline in his weight perhaps corroborates the course of his nervous breakdown 1904-06 that I suggested in my biography. Incidentally, Kittie and George shared Christmas 1905 at Foxwold with the Punch contributor Anstey Guthrie, whose couplet was inscribed by Evey in the front of ‘The Foxwold Weigh-in Book’:

A better, aye, a bulkier man, this earth has hardly seen:
He was the first that ever burst a ‘Try your Weight Machine’!

Why, though, did these Edwardians use the machine and religiously enter their weights in ‘The Foxwold Weigh-in Book’?

It seems that the custom came in during the eighteenth century, when you could weigh yourself at a coffee house or wine merchant’s, for instance, but many homes possessed stand-on scales anyway for verifying the weight of produce. Given the number of ‘wasting’ diseases about, I take it that monitoring your weight, and particularly your children’s, could be important. Where the jockey scales at Foxwold are concerned, John Pym gives the following explanation:

I think Horace Pym (1844-1896) acquired the scales because he (like many Victorians) was fanatical about weights and measures and keeping properly scientific records. Horace was the first to make an entry: 16st 11lbs in June 1886, and 17st 9lbs in September 1887. The man who was always rumoured almost to have burst this ‘Try Your Weight Machine’ was Horace’s cousin R. Ruthven Pym, who recorded 19st 12lbs…

Patrick mentions the film A Room with a View. Many of the objects, books and pictures that were used as set-dressing at Windy Corner would have been familiar to George and Kittie — and had they seen the movie they might have smiled ruefully at the scene, shot at the foot of the main staircase at Foxwold, in which Lucy breaks off her engagement with Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day Lewis). After he has received the bad news, Cecil sits on the stairs and puts on his shoes. If he had then taken two steps forward (to the right) he could have sat on the jockey scales and been reassured that although he’d been rejected in love he was at least not overweight.

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 9

Common Brimstone Butterfly by Charles J Sharp

22 March
A very sunny day and I saw the first Brimstone butterfly flying in the garden; in fact two at once, both males (the females are a greenish white). This is something of a relief, as a local insect spotter emailed me ten days ago to say he had seen a Peacock and Comma in his garden ‘but still no Brimstone’, and in the old days you usually saw a Brimstone long before Nymphalids like the Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell and Comma. My theory is that Brimstones actually need bright sunlight, as their colour perhaps suggests, but all that the brown and furry jobs need is a certain warmth. The spotter saw his Peacock and Comma on a day when the air temperature was high (I saw a Small Tortoiseshell flying on the same day), but the sun was not bright. Also, I remember some discussion on Autumn Watch last year of reports that Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells were now going into hibernation a month earlier than before.

Last year there was a male Brimstone flying around on 22 February:

february sun
everyone’s talking of
the brimstone they’ve seen

(An example of the difficulty of writing haikus in English: you are supposed not to use capitals any more, but ‘brimstone’ suggests a local volcano eruption or a daytrip to Hell.)

26 March
I went to deliver John Polkinghorne’s post at the care home he went into for respite before Black Crow came over all the land. I discovered the home was self-isolating and all I could do was hand the package over at Reception. As always, there were a few ladies sitting at the tables in the foyer chatting, knitting or reading the paper. I say ‘ladies’ because although perhaps in their early nineties they are all immaculately turned out and have impeccable manners. It seemed only polite to say good morning to them and remark on the beautiful indoor temperature of the home. They all turned their heads and smiled radiantly as they returned the greeting. They looked like zinnias:

The mystery, though, is why you never see any men partaking of the communality of this foyer. I invite explanations in the Comments column. Obviously, there are men in the home. John is waiting for delivery of a motorised wheelchair before he can get about.

30 March
A journalist has written that during times of plague Shakespeare’s theatre was closed down and ‘he could not write his plays’. Au absolute contraire, surely: if he had any sense, which he did, he must have used every moment of self-isolation to get ahead of the dramatic game for when the theatres reopened. Not only that, tied to his desk during the plague of 1593 he wrote his first long poem, Venus and Adonis, which became a best seller and must have considerably made up for loss of earnings.

I have decided to try to follow his intimidating but very inspiring example. In 2008 I started a poem (‘Making Icons’) that is in two parts of seventeen stanzas each and each stanza has twelve lines. I see from the pencil manuscript that I finished stanza 22 on 3 August 2011…eight years later I had got as far as stanza 26…in the last ten days I have written two more…  Great William, stand over me and urge me on.

It’s a tricky subject and taxing stanza form. For reasons best known to the poem, it’s both alliterative and rhymed (assonantal). The only sample I can think of that may be comprehensible out of its context is:

18

The rage-raked branches by the sea
lie still, like cerebrums of coral,
their wiry line seems hardly leaves,
so punched and packed by weather’s worry,
a fierce frisure, not fioritura,
the sheer survivance of a tree,
while ‘watercolour sky’ of Norfolk
clouds out the curlew and the seal.
Brandish and bray what you may feel,
time like the tempest, rain and sun
transmutes it into topiary:
something has died, some thing lives on.

Having just read that again, I can’t help thinking the last line describes the state of the country (‘some thing’ is meant to be two words). And I had intended to keep this post as bright and springtime as its images!

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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From the diary of a writer-publisher: 8

13 March
Within seven hours of my last post going up, the organisers of the 2020 conference of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) emailed everyone to say they were calling it off. Only an hour or two earlier I had emailed Sam1 in Russia that I thought cancellation was inevitable, given the momentum of both the virus and the, well, perhaps not panic, but societal proactivity… He, Sam1, replied that he thought Britain had one of the lowest incidences of Black Crow in Europe, and that he was quite happy still to come to the UK, even though he would have to self-isolate for a fortnight when he got back to Russia. What he did not know was that by then British epidemiologists were estimating there were already another 10,000 cases in the country.

Sam1 has a son who helps him with the computer side of Sam&Sam Moscow — indeed, he designed the Russian poster for our stall — and I am proposing referring to him as Sam1(a). Our younger son Jim does exactly the same for Sam&Sam Cambridge, of course, and I propose referring to him as Sam2(a). As a result of the cancellation, Sam2(a) and I (Sam2) will be having lunch at our favourite Polish restaurant this week to start designing a new website for Sam&Sam in the West. It will be much more like an online bookshop, based on the actual copies in stock here in Cambridge.

It may seem far off, but I have already committed to the next BASEES conference in Cambridge (2022). The poor organisers deserve every crumb of comfort one can offer them. When Black Crow has passed over, I would be extremely grateful for any suggestions from followers and viewers about where we could profitably mount our stall this year and next, bearing in mind that most of our books are in Russian.

14 March
Because Alison and I have had sequential colds all week, it feels as though ‘self-isolation’ has already begun. Bring it on! Living indoors takes one back to the unheated, very quiet, almost Trappist home life of the 1950s… Editing 200 pages of translations of Sergei Esenin for a friend, reading a long biography of Esenin and attempting to read a sociological work entitled Arts, Politics and Social Movements in the Fields and in the Streets, filing down haikus for submission to a magazine, researching the finer points of painting icons — suddenly I was about a week ahead with it all. Unprecedentedly, my reading pile was empty. What was I going to do, re-read Chekhov and Proust?

I stared at the books on my shelves that I had recently paid more than their auction value to have rebound, and decided it was time I read:

[William Blackwood & Sons, 1874]

My last acquaintance with George Eliot was in 1957/58 and roughly 1960/61, when I read abridged versions of Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss without even knowing that they were by a woman.

Middlemarch has been a complete revelation. I can’t put it down. From the two-page ‘Prelude’ alone I realised I was in the presence of a very fine nib indeed. Her choice of word is flawless. Her irony is ‘broader’ than Jane Austen’s, I think, but Eliot hasn’t stumbled once on that tightrope between showing and commenting. I love, for instance, her use of ‘theoretic’ rather than the modern ‘theoretical’:

[Dorothea’s] mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world  which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own role of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects […]

In my reading so far, Eliot has used ‘theoretic’ only twice, but as a word it is definitive, speaks volumes. It should be reintroduced. There isn’t a superfluous word in this, either:

She was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the society around her; and Celia [her sister] was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’.

Not to mention the wisdom of the local minister’s wife, Mrs Cadwallader:

These charitable people never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic.

I have 571 more pages to go. I may have to ration myself. Can anyone suggest the next George Eliot I should read?

16 March
As one becomes more certain of one’s opinions on every subject, the temptation to dash off letters to newspapers becomes irresistible… But it can be resisted by having a blog!

A couple of weeks ago Matthew Parris had an article in The Times denouncing Edmund Burke, in which he said that Burke was ‘not a philosopher’. I happened to be reading Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful at the time, in a coverless 1812 edition that I had had bound in the same batch as Middlemarch, and was all for riposting to The Thunderer that this is utterly philosophical. In any case, one can’t deny that Burke was a political philosopher, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France have had enormous influence down to our day…

Last week’s Spectator contained a review of Archie Brown’s The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War by a British ambassador to Russia in the Gorbachev era. Both Brown and the ambassador think Gorbachev was wonderful. Gorbachev was imbued with ‘courageous optimism’, he ‘confronted ossified thinking throughout the Soviet machine’, he ‘refused to spill blood to preserve Soviet power’, he ‘ended nuclear confrontation’. There is truth in these assertions, but they overlook the vital fact that Gorbachev never believed in democracy. He repeatedly said in 1988 that there would never be ‘multi-party parliamentarianism’ in Russia. This now looks like a prophecy that came true, but what he meant at the time was ‘over my dead body will there be Western democracy in Russia’. How could he believe in real democracy if he was a communist party general secretary? I don’t think that, as an establishment man and an elitist, he ever regarded democracy as other than a threat, and I doubt whether he believes in it now. He certainly hasn’t spoken up for democracy against the ‘managed’ and ‘sovereign’ so-called democracy of the endless Putin monocracy. The ambassador’s idea that Gorbachev ‘hoped for democracy’ like ‘the rest of us’ is therefore laughable.

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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Bloggering on!

Dress rehearsal for our stall

It is such a long time since I blogged, that followers would be excused for forgetting why the previous post has been up for five weeks.

The reason is that we have been preparing for Sam&Sam’s Moscow-Cambridge stall at the 2020 conference of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies, 3-5 April at Robinson College, Cambridge, and as part of the campaign for that we decided to put up a comprehensive statement about the book until after Easter.

Every Monday for eight weeks I was getting things together for our stall, from the Russian books (17 titles) and their correct pricing, the English-language books (5 titles), acrylic book stands, a drape with our logo, and the right-sized screens, to posters for these screens, captions for the displays, an iZettle widget for card payments, advertisements, blurbs, book lists and a cash bag. Meanwhile, my Russian publishing partner, with whom I founded Sam&Sam in 1974, has had his time cut out using my official invitation to buy a visa ($300) and plane tickets.

Finally, a fortnight ago, it was all ready for the 500+ delegates.  Then along came the Virus, or as I call prefer to call it CORVID-19 — Black Crow…

At the time of writing, both here in Cambridge and there in a village outside Moscow, we are still hoping and expecting to take part in the Conference and sell lots of books. However, in case it doesn’t happen, I just wanted to squeeze into Calderonia and Twitter a photographic testimony to the fact that we were ready to go!

Watch this space, then. I was quite looking forward to resuming blogging after Easter, but it may now be sooner than that. I think I’ve got a few juicy themes in store. If this year’s BASEES conference is cancelled, Sam&Sam will attend the next one in Cambridge in 2022.

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment