Papers of Thomas Newbold Codman (1868-1963)

Description

Thomas Newbold Codman began to save his personal correspondence in 1875, when he was seven years old, and he continued until 1958, when he was ninety. Some of the most interesting letters of this voluminous correspondence are those from fifteen-year-old Harry Thorndike. Harry's family, like the Codmans, had lived many years in Dinard, France, where Harry had been Tom's schoolmate at the College de Saint Servan. In 1883, the Thorndikes returned to Boston and the perceptive Harry describes the excitement of Boston for the school boy. He tells of the first Christmas trees to appear in the formerly Puritan city. He sends a pen and ink sketch of the new horse cart with "booby hut" explaining that the Back Bay line is the "swellest, no woman with a market basket or workman with tools to be seen, six rides for twenty-five cents." He discusses the half cut-away jackets and pumps the boys wear to Mr. Papanti's dancing class. He complains of the 100 lines of Virgil he must do daily at Mr. Noble’s. He gives details of the snow cave and the rugby games at the corner of Marlborough and Berkeley Streets. He boasts of his new tricycle and the two sparrows and a cat which he shot in Cambridge and the wager he won on the Harvard boat races. He bemoans the difficulties in finding a new German governess and other servants at 258 Beacon Street and at cottages at Beverly (seven bedrooms, tennis court, and stable), Bar Harbor, and Lennox. Letters from the family are spiced with the latest gossip of Boston and of Americans in France. Two bound volumes of Ogden's neatly typed letters tell of dinners with Edith Wharton and Cole Porter and architectural plans for Chateau Gregy and the Villa Leopolda. Seven bound volumes of Hugh’s letters tell of the musical world of Boston from 1922 to 1939. Cousin Ben Crowninshield II requests Tom to purchase for him in France and ship secretly, a pair of geese. The most intriguing as well as the largest correspondence is from Adrien Yaouang, "Didi, Tom's young Breton friend."

There are some 650 French letters describing concerts and parties and frequently pleading for money. There are also many bundles of Tom's letters to Adrien, "returned to sender" because of the German occupation. Adrien is left $50,000 in Tom's will. As Treasurer of the American Fund for French Wounded (AFFW) Tom kept accounts of money collected and packages sent. After 1925, the AFFW facility in Riems became the American Memorial Hospital under the direction of Dr. Marie Lefort. Tom remained one of its Directors. For forty years a large part of his correspondence in French or English came from Yvonne Carbone, Bessie Winters, Edith Bangs, Katherine Bliss, and Madame Klug, who were all deeply involved in this work and became Tom's friends as well. Other groups of letters are from the French war prisoners to whom he wrote personally: Eugene Vermesse, Louis Hadingui, H. Delley, Louis Badoux, and M. Torillot. More interesting is the correspondence with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bernard, which lasted until 1940, and with the Gustav Pierce family, which continued into his ninetieth year. There is also a large and long French correspondence with the two orphaned Lecoublet sisters and Visele Boschel, the nun who cared for them in a Dinard orphanage. These letters to Tom as godfather begin in 1927 and continue to his death, including photos of Tom, showing the girls growing up, marrying, and finally having babies of their own. Another forty-year correspondence is that of Tom with Dr. Philip Place, beginning in 1914 when Philip is a medical intern at Yale and anxious to have Torn arrange for him to serve with the ambulance corps. After the war, for reasons not clear, Dr. Place gives up medicine and becomes the caretaker on the Lincoln estate, living in a house on the property and being left $500 in Tom's will. Generous as Tom was to servants, wounded prisoners, and orphans, several amusing letters indicate his stubbornness when he was asked to pay $75 by Eugene Garipay, the desperate New Hampshire owner of a cow, pregnant with heifer, which his car had hit. After World War II, there are eighty-seven letters from Daisy Henney, the servant who had cared for Ogden for twenty-five years, telling of the war years and Ogden's last illness. Tom translated, typed, and duplicated these and others of his letters from France and mailed them on to friends and relatives. There are many letters from the overseers of Codman properties here and abroad, Frances White's neatly typed English letters from Ogden's Chateau Gregy, Robert de Montoron-Brackets earlier French ones, Paul Arrecky's from La Leopolda, David Sibley's semi-legal comments on the French properties as well as the letters from Dr. Place regarding repairs on the Lincoln estate. Letters from friends, Gaby Gigout, Molly Borda, Sophia Masterman, Gerry de Kossekowsky and her niece Rosemary Howard, Blanche D'Anglemont, Sophie Ritchie, Louise Leavitt, and Henrietta Lowell are primarily from abroad, describing first the round of parties all over the continent, then the devastation of the war, and finally gratitude for the C.A.R.E. packages Tom is constantly sending. Tom kept copies of his important letters, sent after 1940 to France because of the uncertainty of their arrival. Many, in fact, were returned undelivered. His many postcards include interesting World War I cartoons and cards from the wounded French prisoners. The telegrams deal primarily with arrival and departure times. More interesting are those sent in search of Ogden and Adrien. Most of the unrelated letters are copies sent to Tom in his capacity of Treasurer of AFFW and Director of the American Memorial Hospital.

Among Tom’s papers are detailed lists of plays, movies, concerts, ballets, teas, and dinner parties which he attended. There are lists of Christmas presents sent and received, books and records purchased, photographs taken, letters, and packages sent and received. There are lists of the 16 tips he gave weekly at the Hotel L'Albion, Paris. On the Cunard liner, he ''was quite gratified to know that what [he] had arranged to give for tips was just what the Carnegies were giving" as "they are very economical and not at all anxious to splurge." There is a list of the prices of rooms and service in all the Paris hotels in 1923. There are account, address, and appointment books. There is a "Dinner Book" with menus, recipes, guest lists, and comments. There are books of memoranda and books of automobile expenses, a subject on which Tom was very knowledgeable. There are records of the Ogden Codman, Sr. Trust, which Tom managed for the family, and details of just how the approximately $10,000 annual dividends for each were spent, since Tom kept the personal accounts for Dorothy and Hugh as well as his own in detail. Among the printed matter there are significant propaganda leaflets for World War I from France, England, and Germany. There is, finally, as large collection of explicit visual material, including lithographs, limericks, cartoons, photographs, and a 1797 edition of the Marquis de Sade's "Justine," which Tom carefully hid in a hollowed-out account book.