Clive Lewis - Collected Letters Volume One - Family Letters 1905–1931

42Frédéric Chopin’s Marche Funêbre was first performed in 1827.

43Edvard Grieg’s piano solo, the Peer Gynt Suite No. 2 (1893).

44The female Fates of Norse mythology.

45The ‘Honeymooners’ were probably Arthur’s brother, Thomas Greeves, and Winifred Lynas, who were married on 22 September 1914.

46Matthew 6:28: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.’

47This was Arthur’s mother, Mrs Mary Margretta (Gribbon) Greeves. See Arthur Greevesin the Biographical Appendix.

48The rumour that Germany would invade England persisted for a long time and worried Albert greatly. It may have started with an article in The Times (15 October 1914) entitled ‘Will Invasion be Tried?’ in which the war correspondent said: ‘Now that the war is reaching the climax of its violence we must anticipate that all the living forces of Germany will be thrown into the conflict, and that the German navy will no longer remain inert. We must expect to be attacked at home, and must not rest under any comforting illusions that we shall not be assailed. As an attack upon us can have no serious object, unless the intention is to land an expedition in England for the purposes of compelling us to sign a disastrous peace, it is well that we should look the situation calmly in the face, and reckon up not only Germany’s power to do us harm, but also our power of resistance and means for improving it’ (p. 4).

49‘Seize the day’. Horace, Odes, Book I, Ode 11,l.8, in which the poet urges Leuconoe to take thought for the present and not to worry inordinately about the future.

50In a letter of 12 October, in which Warnie asked his father for a loan, he explained that he was owed money by Sandhurst and that ‘I have communicated with my bankers’ (LP IV: 229).

51Their cousin, Hope Ewart (1882-1934), married Captain George Harding (1877-1957) in 1911 and they went to live in Dublin. Harding joined the army in 1900 and had been a member of the Army Service Corps since 1901. He was promoted to major in October 1914. He gained the DSO during the war and retired in 1928 with the rank of colonel.

52The programme at the London Coliseum between 19 and 24 October included the Imperial Russian Ballet’s performance of Fleurs d’Orange and G.P. Huntley acting in Eric Blore’s A Burlington Arcadian.

53Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonata No. 8, ‘Pathétique’ (1799).

54Robert Bagehot Porch (1875-1962) was a pupil at Malvern College 1888-94. From there he went to Trinity College, Oxford, receiving his BA in 1898. He joined the staff of Malvern College in 1904 and taught there most of his life.

55Prince Louis of Battenburg (1854-1921) was born in Austria. He moved to England when he was a boy and had risen through the ranks of the Royal Navy to become First Sea Lord. Despite all that Winston Churchill could do, as first lord of the Admiralty, Prince Louis was forced to resign. He relinquished his German titles and the family name was changed to Mountbatten.

56‘The voice of the people is the voice of the Devil’.

57W.B. Yeats had published many Celtic plays. Lewis may have been thinking of his Plays for an Irish Theatre (1911).

58Warnie crossed to France with the Army Service Corps on 4 November. They were part of the British Expeditionary Force stationed at Le Havre.

59Guy Nicholas Palmes (1894-1915) entered Malvern in 1908, and left in 1911 for the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He joined the Yorkshire Light Infantry at the beginning of the war and was promoted to lieutenant in 1915. He was killed in action near Ypres on 9 May 1915.

60He meant William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896).

61William Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (1876).

62William Harrison Ainsworth, Old St Paul’s (1841).

63 Le Morte D’Arthur is the title generally given to the cycle of Arthurian legends by Sir Thomas Malory, finished in 1470 and printed by Caxton in 1485. The version Lewis began with was Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, with an introduction by Professor Rhys, 2 vols., Everyman’s Edition [1906].

64John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667).

65This was probably Mrs Kirkpatrick’s ‘theatrical’ friend, Miss MacMullen, whom Lewis mentioned to his father on 13 October.

66Mr Russell was a harmless, but terrifying, lunatic who was for many years a well-known figure in and around St Mark’s.

67‘O dearest brother, I am sorry not to have written.’

68An opera by Charles Gounod, based on the Faust of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and first produced in 1859.

69 Il Trovatore, an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, was first performed in 1853.

70 Samson et Dalila, an opera by Camille Saint-Saëns, was first performed in 1877.

71Daniel Auber’s opera Fra Diavolo was first performed in 1830.

72W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911), playwright and librettist, and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), composer, together wrote many very popular operettas. They include The Pirates of Penzance performed in 1879, The Mikado performed in 1885, and The Yeoman of the Guard performed in 1888.

73‘Bright Star of Eve’ is from Charles Gounod’s New Part Songs (1872 or 1873).

74Camille Saint-Saëns’s orchestral work Danse Macabre was first performed in 1872.

75‘March of the Dwarfs’ is a piano piece in Edvard Grieg’s Lyriske Stykker (1891).

76Their mother’s sister, Mrs Lilian ‘Lily’ Suffern (1860-1934), wrote to Warnie on 3 February 1915 about the book party. ‘On 21st Dec.,’ she said, ‘Kelsie gave a book party which was very amusing… Some of the books were very good–too good for me, for I couldn’t guess them. Your father’s was Edged Tools , a fan and a knife. Clive’s was The Three Musketeers– a bit of paper with “Soldier’s Three” on it, it made us all mad because it was so plain, and we did not (many) guess it. Miss Murray’s was a cutting from that day’s Newsletter of the birthdays– The Newcomes. Another cutting from the Newsletter won the prize–Advt. of rise in the price of coals– The Sorrows of Satan. No one hardly guessed Hugh McCreddy’s–yet it was very good–a picture of a man with his mouth wide open in a laugh– L’’Homme Qui Rit. I had a picture of the Kaiser, nicely framed in ribbon– The Egoist (Meredith). Everyone guessed it The Lunatic at Large. Three old ladys sitting talking (picture of), tied with green ribbon was Gossips Green. Willie Jaffe’s was bad–a black African with a white line down it– Across the Dark Continent’ (LP IV: 289-90).

(Henry Seton Merriman wrote With Edged Tools (1894); Alexandre Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers (1844-5); William Makepeace Thackeray wrote The Newcomes (1853-4); Marie Corelli wrote The Sorrows of Satan (1895); Victor Hugo wrote L’’Homme Qui Rit (1869); George Meredith wrote The Egoist (1879); Joseph Storer Clouston wrote The Lunatic at Large (1899); Alice Dudeney wrote Gossips Green (1906); and Sir Henry Morton Stanley wrote Through the Dark Continent (1878).)

Kelso Ewart (1886-1966) was the fourth child of Lady Ewart, the cousin of Flora Lewis, and her husband Sir William. See The Ewart Familyin the Biographical Appendix.

77Mary Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Greeves (1888-1976) was Arthur Greeves’s sister. She married Lewis’s cousin Charles Gordon Ewart (1885-1936) on 15 December 1915. See The Ewart Familyin the Biographical Appendix.

78This was Arthur’s brother, William Edward Greeves (1890-1960).