Galsworthy

I have now brought to a conclusion a first pass of 'Caravan', the collected short stories of John Galsworthy, first noticed in the margins of reading one of Freud's books - ‘Civilization and its discontents’ - something over a year ago, as noticed at reference 1. It picked up steam at the beginning of this year with a new copy, as noticed at reference 2. I have now finished a first pass of the last story, 'Had a horse'. A horse with the odd name of 'Calliope' of reference 4, from where the snap above is lifted. Google Images adds the information that 'The work is attributed to the Italian painter Cesare Dandini (1596–1657) ... She is shown with books labeled "Odyssea," "Iliade," and "Eneide," representing the epic poems The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid...'.

Gemini offers me a nice essay on the prompt 'What do you know about horses called 'Calliope'? Why might a horse be named for such a person?' and it seems that upper class owners were quite fond of names of this sort. Furthermore, Galsworthy may have known of the famous Queensland stud called 'Calliope Station'. He does not mention Galsworthy, but when I feed that in, he is off again, telling a good story, but getting the name of the bookmaker hero, James Shrewin, wrong.

When pulled up, he recovers well. All quite impressive. He has come on a bit since his early days as Bard, first noticed just about three years ago at reference 5. And I was impressed even back then.

The bad news is that while I got the gist of the story, now tidied up by Gemini, I did not understand the intricacies of shady characters manipulating the odds of horses and so arranging things to make lots of money our of getting the jockey to pull their horse. My excuse is that it was just too hot and too much of the brain was offline, taking a time out. I shall have another go when it cools down a bit.

On the other hand, while it might have taken me more than a year to get through the 950 odd pages of these stories, more than fifty of them, I have enjoyed them. Enjoyment which was greatly facilitated by having a proper reading copy, printed on good quality, thin paper and properly bound. A modern version would have taken a lot more cubic inches to do a comparatively poor job.

A first thought was that while I had enjoyed them, some of them had not sunk in very far, as revealed by glancing down the contents page this (Friday) morning.

A second thought was that I do not read short stories much. But then I remembered that Tolstoy, Chekov, D.H.Lawrence and Simenon all wrote short stories. A lot of which I own and some of which I have read. So this morning I got down my collected stories of Lawrence, a contemporary of Galsworthy and producer of some 1,150 rather longer pages of short stories, another decently made book from 1934. A book into which I had dipped, rather than reading it from end to end, as here. It is probably relevant that one needs to be sitting at a table, or at least upright in an easy chair, for it to be an easy read. A bit heavy otherwise.

Maybe I will now go back over some of these other stories? Maybe 'Tickets, please', the subject of someone's enthusiastic puff at some point, some years ago?

PS 1: it must have been a while ago, as I had already forgotten who the puffer was back in 2018, at reference 6.

PS 2: I do not seem to have made much progress with Freud since reading at Galsworthy's 'The apple tree'. However, a quick look at my notes from that time this morning, suggests that it would be worth going back to them. We shall see.

'...The Australian "Waler" Heritage: In equestrian history, Calliope Station in Queensland, Australia, was a massive, historic 19th- and 20th-century stud station famous for breeding exceptionally hardy, high-quality stock horses and "Walers" (the iconic Australian military horses used in WWI)....'

PS 3: after a break, I have now taken a look at Gemini's Calliope Station, snapped above.

Not a very promising start at reference 6, where there were no horses and no studs, although there were a few students.

Gmaps turns up a Calliope Station Road, a little to the west of Calliope proper, itself quite near the sea to the east. So Calliope Station was attached to Calliope, itself named for a visiting sixth rater.

[Garden Reach, Calcutta, HMS Calliope saluting 1841, by Francis Meynell R.N. Calliope is being towed by a naval paddle wheel tugboat. Meynell entered the navy as midshipman during the campaign in China, on board the Calliope. He was mentioned for the assistance rendered at the capture on 13 March 1841 of the last fort protecting the approaches of the city of Canton (Guangzhou)]

I leave finding out about the rating of 19th century warships as an exercise for the reader. Clue: I imagine that H.M.S.Victory was a first rater.

I do rather better at reference 7, where I learn that while the station started out with raising cattle for beef, they did use horses and they did move into raising horses. Walers certainly exist, but I did not find out much about Walers at Calliope. In any event, hard to know whether Gemini's gloss is overdoing it or not. The connection is real enough, but is he making too much of it? 

And then, is Galsworthy likely to have heard of the place? Wikipedia mentions a visit to Australia, but did he spend much time there? He did ride and he did take a serious interest in horse welfare - a big issue in his day - but was he that interested in horse breeding?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-apple-tree.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/galsworthy.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galsworthy.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calliope.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/bard-one.html. There is lots more 'Bard' scattered around these pages.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/song-without-dance.html.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calliope,_Queensland.

Reference 8: https://walerdatabase.online/calliope-station/.

Reference 9: https://walerdatabase.online/old-fashioned-horse/.

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