March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________1_ 2___________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________3 THE KIPLING SOCIETY Registered Charity No. 278885 PRESIDENT Sir George Engle, K.C.B., Q.C. PAST PRESIDENT Dr Michael G. Brock, C.B.E. VICE-PRESIDENTS Joseph R. Dunlap, D.L.S. Mrs Margaret Newsom Norman Entract Professor Thomas Pinney, Ph.D. Professor Enamul Karim, M.A., Ph.D. Mrs Anne Shelford Mrs Rosalind Kennedy J.W. Michael Smith Mrs L.A.F. Lewis G.H. Webb, C.M.G., O.B.E. J.H. McGivering, R.D. COUNCIL: ELECTED AND CO-OPTED MEMBERS Lt-Colonel R.C. Ayers, O.B.E. (Chairman) Robin Mitchell John Radcliffe (Deputy Chairman) Bryan Diamond Dorothy Sheridan Sharad Keskar Judith Flanders David Page COUNCIL: HONORARY OFFICE-BEARERS Lt-Colonel R.C. Ayers, O.B.E. (Membership Secretary) [his e-mail address is: roger295@ntlworld.com] R.A. Bissolotti, F.C.A. (Treasurer) Jane Keskar (Secretary) [her address is: 6 Clifton Road, London W9 1SS; Tel & Fax 020 7286 0194; her e-mail address is: jane@keskar.fsworld.co.uk] Dr. J.D. Lewins (Meetings Secretary) Sir Derek Oulton, G.C.B., Q.C. (Legal Adviser) John Radcliffe (On Line Editor) [his e-mail address is: johnradcliffe@blueyonder.co.uk] John Slater (Librarian) John Walker (Assistant Librarian) David Fellows (Publicity Officer) David Page, B.Sc. (Editor, Kipling Journal) [his e-mail address is: davpag@yahoo.co.uk] Independent Financial Examiner Professor G.M. Selim, M.Com., Ph.D., F.I.I.A. THE SOCIETY'S ADDRESS Postal: 6 Clifton Road, London W9 1SS; Web-site: www.kipling.org.uk Fax: 020 7286 0194 THE SOCIETY'S NORTH AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVE David Alan Richards, 18 Forest Lane, Scarsdale, New York, NY 10583, U.S.A. Tel: (212) 609-6817. Fax: (212) 593-4517. e-mail: drichards@mccarter.com 4___________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 SECRETARY'S ANNOUNCEMENTS SOME FORTHCOMING EVENTS Wednesday 13 April 2005, 5.30 for 6 p.m., in the Mountbatten Room, Royal Over-Seas League, Dr Susan Walsh on "Modern Critical Readings of Kipling". Wednesday 4 May 2005, 12.30 for 1 p.m., in the Hall of India and Pakistan, at the Royal Over-Seas League, the Society's Annual Luncheon. For details and advance booking for tickets, please see December 2004 flyer. Wednesday 6 July 2005, 4.30 p.m., in the Mountbatten Room, Royal Over-Seas League, the Society's A.G.M. A cash bar will serve drinks from 5.30 p.m., before "Parody, Plagiarism and Pastiche". Members are invited to bring their own choice to read or have it read for them. Tea will be available before the meeting for those who book in advance. Details to follow. Tuesday 19 July 2005, the Society's visit to the University of Sussex Special Collection, hosted by Dorothy Sheridan, Head of the Special Collections. Further details to follow. Wednesday 21 September 2005, 5.30 for 6 p.m., in the Mountbatten Room, Royal Over-Seas League, Clara Claiborne Park on "Wiser and More Temperate: Lockwood Kipling and his Son". Wednesday 16 November 2005, 5.30 for 6 p.m., in the Mountbatten Room, Royal Over-Seas League, Dr Tom Paulin. Details to follow. March 2005 JANE KESKAR & JEFFERY LEWINS MORE EVENTS Sunday 22 May 2005, 2.00 p.m., in Seminar Room 1, Victoria and Albert Museum, Dr Graham Parlett, curator, Asian Department of the V&A, on John Lockwood Kipling's detailed drawings of Indian craftsmen. These will be on dis- play. Tickets £5 from the Secretary. A great opportunity to see these unique drawings, discussed by Bryan Diamond on pp.28-33. Tuesday 21 June 2005, Members are invited to Bateman's as part of a Kipling week when Society members will be con- tributing readings. Volunteers welcome! Please contact the Secretary. 9-12 June 2005, Olympia Book Fair. We have been advised by the Antiquarian Booksellers Association that members can obtain free tickets for this Book Fair. These will be available, in due course, from the website or email: www.olympiabookfair.com or tickets@aba.org.uk. Until 10 April 2005 at The British Library, "The Writer in the Garden". Bryan Diamond has drawn our attention to this exhibition. In the penultimate section "Closing Time in the Gardens of the West?", the following Kipling-related items are displayed: "The Glory of the Garden" (a version of this poem published by the Whittington Press with coloured pic- tures); "The Gardener" short story collected in Debits and Credits; The Graves of the Fallen written for the War Graves Commission 1919; and the manuscript of the poem "Gethsemane" (showing one line scored out and rewritten). Michael Ducarel has produced a delightful reading of the Just So Stories on two CDs. It can be ordered from him by telephone on 0845 456 1052 (UK only) or by e-mail from michael.ducarel@ducarel.co.uk or by writing to Mr Ducarel at 14B Kennington Oval, London SE11 5SG. The price of the two disc set, including P&P is £15, within the UK, and £16 abroad. Cheques should be drawn on a UK bank and will only be pre- sented once the CD is sent out. March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________5 THE KIPLING JOURNAL published quarterly since 1927 by the Kipling Society (6 Clifton Road, London W9 1SS) and sent free to all members worldwide Volume 79 MARCH 2005 Number 313 CONTENTS THE KIPLING SOCIETY: OFFICERS, ETC 3 SECRETARY'S ANNOUNCEMENTS 4-5 DRAWING OF A WOOD CARVER by John Lockwood Kipling 7 EDITORIAL 8 KIPLING AND THE CHRONICLE by Richard Maidment 9-19 KIPLING AND FRANCE by Max Rives 20-27 J. LOCKWOOD KIPLING MATERIAL AT THE V&A MUSEUM by Bryan Diamond 28-33 BACON AND EGGS: KIPLING'S CALLING by William B. Dillingham 34-46 THE RESIDUE OF VICTORIAN IDEALISM by Dr Deborah Wiggins 47-57 THE EMERY WALKER TRUST by the Editor 57 THE NEW READERS' GUIDE: AN ANNOTATOR REPORTS by Lisa Lewis 58-60 BOOK REVIEW by the Editor THE ABSENT-MINDED IMPERIALISTS by Bernard Porter 60 MEMBERSHIP NOTES & Subscription Reminders 61 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 62-63 ABOUT THE KIPLING SOCIETY 64 Rudyard Kipling Copyright by The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. Cover Image with Acknowledgements to Macmillan & Co Ltd All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the Kipling Society, London. March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL________________ 7 DRAWING OF A WOOD CARVER by John Lockwood Kipling (Simlah, 24 October 1870) Copyright by The Board of Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum, whose permis- sion for this reproduction we gratefully acknowledge. Please see the Secretary's Announcements on p.5, and Bryan Diamond's article beginning on p.28. 8___________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 EDITORIAL OXFORD DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY and THE LETTERS Ever since the publicity machine first spun into action for the new D.N.B., I had been wondering who would write the Kipling entry, and would it be a fair one? The first D.N.B. contribution, by G.M. Young, was reviewed in Journal No.96 and whilst much was completely acceptable to the reviewer, there were several personal judgements by Young with which he completely disagreed, as did I on reading the D.N.B. article. Would the new edition, published by Oxford University Press in October 2004 be any better? I am delighted to report that there is no reason for concern – how could there be when the contributor is one of our own Vice-Presidents, Prof Thomas Pinney? As one would expect, this is an accurate, even- handed article, and because the Oxford D.N.B. has been made available on-line as well as in print, it will be the reference source of choice for most students in the future. With the same sense of gratitude, we note that Vols. 5 and 6 of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, edited by Prof Pinney, were released by Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. in the autumn of 2004, together with reprints of Vols. 1-4. These can never be "reviewed", just accepted with heart- felt thanks to Prof Pinney by all members of the Society. Returning to the D.N.B. for the moment, it is interesting that Mrs Alice Kipling, his mother, gets an entry mainly as a Macdonald Sister, but that Lockwood Kipling, his father, is ignored. Dunsterville also earns a place for his military achievements and writings although "Stalky" is mentioned. These entries are both "linked" to the Kipling article. "PARODY, PLAGIARISM AND PASTICHE" Now is the time for all good men (and ladies) to come to the aid of the Society. The meeting after the A.G.M. in July is reviving a habit of ear- lier days by asking members to provide their own entertainment. However, to discourage any feelings of diffidence, let me quote from "The Last Term" where 'Beetle dropped into a drawling parody of King's most biting colloquial style—the gentle rain after the thunder- storm.' For views on 'imitators' and 'plagiarism', I suggest that you try Something of Myself, "Working Tools", pp.218—220. Let us gird ourselves for some pre-prandial exercise and once you have decided what you would like to read, or have read if you are truly diffident, please write or email Jeffery Lewins with your choice in order to avoid duplication: Dr J.D. Lewins, The Kipling Society, 133 Thornton Road, Girton, CAMBRIDGE CB3 0NE or jdl@eng.cam.ac.uk March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________9 KIPLING AND THE CHRONICLE By RICHARD MAIDMENT [Richard Maidment graduated from the University College of Swansea in 1966 and wrote an M.A. thesis on Kipling's schooldays in 1981. He recently retired after teaching at schools in Norfolk, Somerset, Gloucestershire and Bristol. He has written two previous articles for the Journal which appeared in 1981 – "Muddied Oafs"(No.217) and "Crofts and King" (No.218), the latter being well-illustrated with several photographs. – Ed.] The United Services College was, in Kipling's phrase, "a caste school". Eighty per cent of its original pupils were Army officers' sons – many of them born in India – and they brought with them something of the hard, laconic ethos of the Anglo-Indian military. In its early days it was also a rather rough school, even by Victorian standards: "ragging" was a traditional feature of life in both the Army mess and the public school dormitory – and it was indulged in with zest by the new collegers, especially that handful of tough characters who had already been expelled elsewhere. While trying to channel the excess energy into hobbies and sporting activities, Cormell Price, the headmaster, also believed that it was no bad thing for boys to let off steam and "learn to take knocks" and when Kipling arrived, fresh from six months in his mother's company, he found himself in a tumultuous world of casual blows, wild pillow-fights and compulsory rugby matches, presided over by an élite of prefects chosen for their prowess at games. 'It is the roughness of the lads he seems to feel most,' wrote Alice Kipling to Price, adding, two months later, 'The boys exercise tyranny in the bedroom.' 1 It was a difficult environment for a self-willed, myopic twelve year- old with literary interests. For six months he floundered, then life gradually took on a new equilibrium as he found consolation in his books, made some friends and generally learned how to cope. When, in his second year, he learned to swim in the open, sea-water baths, he wrote a proud letter to his father, who commented: 'a great thing for so unathletic a child.' 2 A College contemporary summed him up thus: His fondness for literature was early developed, and he was usual- ly smeared with ink. Precociousness and eccentricity marked him out from the first as a butt for boyish wit, yet although short-sight- ed, and by no means a strong boy, he had a dogged determination not to be 'sat on' that carried him through many a successful encounter with master and schoolmate.3 10__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 THE ROUGH LADS (Photograph of the Nassau Baths, Westward Ho! in the 1880s taken from Major H.A.Tapp's The United Services College 1874 – 1911: Gale and Polden, Aldershot, 1934.) Opened in 1875, this was probably where Kipling learned to swim in his second year at the school. Although they were pleased that their son was more settled, the Kiplings continued to be worried about him, as the correspondence with Cormell Price – who was an old friend – makes clear. The stream of verses which Rudyard sent to India over the next two years left them in no doubt of his poetic gifts and aspirations, but they were not rich – and a knack for writing poetry seemed a most unlikely basis for a sat- isfactory career. At one time he had hopes of joining the Navy, but his eyesight made that impossible and, by his third year at school, a new note of anxiety began to show in the letters to Westward Ho!. His par- ents were worried by his changes of mood, his 'tendency to shirk the collar' and his 'interest in out of the way things' 4 and they wondered what the future could hold for him. He proclaimed a vague ambition to be a doctor and, early in 1881, Cormell Price offered to arrange extra coaching so that he might try for a scholarship to study medicine, either in Oxford or London. The Kiplings were relieved. Approving of the scheme, John Lockwood Kipling wrote in reply. 'I hope that ... the boy will stick to his work and drop all verse until he can try for the Newdigate . . .!' 5 Fortunately for literature, Price did not take this too seriously and, in the summer of the same year, he made an inspired decision which was to have remarkable consequences for his gifted but wayward pupil. He revived the defunct school magazine – The United Services College March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________11 Chronicle – and gave Kipling responsibility for running it. It may be that the would-be doctor was not taking his new studies too seriously and that Price was trying to motivate him – remembering his own enthusiasm when he and Kipling's uncle, Harry Macdonald, had worked on a magazine together at King Edward's School in Birmingham, over thirty years before. Whatever the reason, Rudyard certainly took to his duties with great zeal; he enlisted the assistance of his friends Dunsterville and Beresford, and the first number appeared on 30 June, 1881. Suddenly his letters to relatives and friends were full of the Chronicle – cajoling them to take out a subscription, enquiring about pictures and advertisements, making much of the onerous tech- nical nature of the work: ... the men about here are most abominably slow. I have to trot into Bideford nearly every day and explain how the thing is to be done. Sometimes I have to set the type myself and tell them how I want it spaced. They are very dull.6 In "The Last Term" [Stalky & Co.], we are given a gently ironical picture of the editor in action: The little loft behind Randall's printing-office was his own territory, where he saw himself already controlling the Times. Here, under the guidance of the inky apprentice, he had learned to find his way more or less circuitously about the case, and considered him- self an expert compositor. The school paper in its locked formes lay on a stone-topped table, a proof by the side; but not for worlds would Beetle have corrected from the mere proof. With a mallet and a pair of tweezers, he knocked out mysterious wedges of wood that released the forme, picked a letter here and inserted a letter there, reading as he went along and stopping much to chuckle over his own contributions. Several biographers have pointed out that, in view of his later achieve- ments, Kipling's writing for the Chronicle was undistinguished. For me, the interest of this youthful journalism lies in the contrast which it makes with the private and highly personal verses which he was secret- ly composing at the same time – verses that later became Schoolboy Lyrics and "Sundry Phansies". These were passionate, melancholy and romantic pieces – conscious and often skilful imitations of the fashion- able decadents – and he wisely kept them hidden from his fellow-Collegers. After reading the manuscript of "Sundry Phansies", Professor Cornell has concluded that, if Kipling had not gone to India, 12__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 he would probably have become 'an aesthete of the nineties, a triste Georgian, a thin and minor version of the early Yeats.' 7 However, the Chronicle contributions show that the "other" Kipling was already in existence, carefully keeping up his guard and instinctively adapting his writing to the unemotional and unliterary ethos of his United Services College readers. There is no fashionable pessimism in the Chronicle; instead we have robust editorials about the "healthy, regular" atmosphere of the Coll (probably intended for parental consumption), a variety of light verses on College topics, bantering articles on school life and manners, magisterial replies to correspondence and plenty of enthusiastic reports on College sports fixtures. No-one would guess that the writer was, in his mother's phrase, 'in the troubled waters that beset most young men.' 8 Indeed, in the two serious poems which he put before his fel- low-Collegers, he seems to have been consciously attempting to write the type of rhetorical public verse that was soon to make him famous. "The Battle of Assaye"—written as a prize poem in a competition arranged by Cormell Price and not published in the Chronicle until later—contains overtones of the familiar patriotic militarism. It is set out in the form of an old soldier's letter, telling how four thousand out- numbered Englishmen defeated the 'wild Mahratta ranks' and contrasting this former heroic time with the present age: Save where our huge sea-castles from afar Beat down, in scorn, some weak Egyptian wall, We are too slothful to give heed to war. As a gorged lion will not stir at all, Although the hunter mock him openly,— So are we moveless when the trumpets call.9 In "Ave Imperatrix" Kipling goes even further, to present himself as a spokesman for the military aspirations of his fellow-Collegers: One school of many made to make Men who shall hold it dearest right To battle for their ruler's sake, And stake their being in the fight, Sends greeting humble and sincere— Though verse be rude and poor and mean— To you, the greatest as most dear— Victoria, by God's grace Our Queen! Such greeting as should come from those Whose fathers faced the Sepoy hordes, March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________13 Or served you in the Russian snows, And, dying, left their sons their swords.10 In this we can recognise the authentic voice of Kipling the public writer. His industry and his obvious enjoyment in his new role as editor soon made it clear to his parents and to Cormell Price what his future should be. His mother wrote to him: Have you ever, in thinking of the future, had any idea of a literary career? You have tastes and certain abilities in that direction I know, has it ever seemed possible that you might choose it for your life's work? If it were so, the field of Indian journalism offers a good open- ing for a good man, and why should you not be he? . . . There would be no difficulty in procuring for you upon this paper, the Civil and Military Gazette, work, as soon as ever you were ready for it, once done the Future, I feel sure, would open itself out satisfactorily.11 There was no doubt of what he wanted to do, and – probably at the sug- gestion of the editor of the Civil and Military Gazette – arrangements were made for him to spend extra time at school on the English and précis-work which would be useful to a reporter. It was at this point that his mother went through his poems and brought out the volume of Schoolboy Lyrics – an act usually portrayed as the unwise indulgence of a fond mama, but more probably, I think, an effort to demonstrate his talents to his future employers. In his last year at school Kipling was being carefully groomed for a career in journalism, and the ease with which he took up his work in India must have been largely due to his experience on the Chronicle. Within ten weeks of arriving in Lahore, he was writing to Cormell Price: Altogether, I find that this sort of life suits me down to the ground. I have about seventy men to bully and hector as I please and am liable to bullying if I don't do my share of the work properly. This is quite as it should be and I take any bullyings with a good grace.12 Not long after, another of his favourites on the staff, the chaplain, George Willes, received a poem on a common Anglo-Indian theme — the exile's lament; E'en now the Heron treads the wet Slush swamps of Goosey Pool, And proses vex my Latin Set, That first Set, Upper School. 14__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 E'en now across the Summer air The call-bell's clamour floats Down to the weed-hung rock pools where The juniors sail their boats. No call bell rings for me, alas! For me no proses are, No loungings on the playground grass No sails across the bar. The hot wind blows, the punkah flaps Incessant to and fro. Ah well, for those most lucky chaps Who lark at Westward Ho! The sunlight through the palm tree falls Down on the whitewashed roof And worse than any College 'calls' Are printer's 'calls' for 'proof . . .13 Although the writer is apparently filled with nostalgia for Westward Ho!, it should not be taken too seriously; in fact we can sense the desire of the "working man" to cut a dash before the teachers and lads still at school. The wafting punkah instead of Atlantic breezes; the native printer's proofs instead of Latin proses: surely, for the Anglo-Indian pupils of the U.S.C, this was a voice from the real world. Soon after, Kipling—never reticent about offering advice to his elders, whether headmasters or Viceroys—was sending suggestions to "Uncle Crom" on the best ways to promote the school among the Anglo-Indians. He arranged for advertisements to be placed in the Civil and Military Gazette and in 1883-4 he wrote a series of three poems for the Chronicle, designed to show the school in a good light to parents and would-be parents. The first, "The Song of the Exiles", describes how young men from "that long white Barrack by the sea" are successfully taking their place in the working society of Anglo-India: Some write voluminous reports On 'forest land increase', Some work at Survey in the Ghats And some in the Police. Some prance beside their gorah-log On bony beasts and strange, March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________15 Some test, at Murree or Jutogh, The flashing signal's range. A scattered brotherhood, in truth, By mount, and stream, and sea, We chase, with all the zeal of youth, Her Majesty's Rupee.14 "On Fort Duty" – sub-titled "an O.U.S.C. singeth sorrowfully" – is signed with a suitably military nom-de-plume, "Z 54 R.A.". It describes the frustration of a keen young officer who has been left on guard at base while his regiment is battling with the Afghans. Kipling confided to Cormell Price: 'It is written at the parents rather more than the boys, but no-one will know that if you don't say so.' 15 The last of the series — "The Ride of the Schools" – shows the clan- destine publicist at his most blatant. Written at the hill-station of Dalhousie in the hot weather of 1884 it was, according to the accom- panying letter, based upon a real incident: Herewith the first fruits of my labours in the shape of a poem for the Chronicle. A Crofts' House boy took 'first spear' off a thirty inch boar at one of our tent club meetings—to my intense disgust, and I have recorded the fact in verse of the White-Melville order. There aren't many poetic licences in it beyond an inch or so added to the boar and I fancy it will please the parents of a good many boys—so it is yours to do with as you will. . . 16 The setting is a pig-sticking expedition in which old boys of vari- ous well-known public schools are taking part. The scene opens with a little scholastic name-dropping: There was Cheltenham perched on an Arab)—so rich are these thrice-born R.E.'s; And Rugby—his mount was a Waler; and a couple of O.U.S.C.'s. . . They race for the boar together and the O.U.S.C.'s – one from Crofts' House and one from Pugh's – get there first. The cry goes up "Fight for the love of your Houses!" and after a battle, the Crofts' boy wins: So we drank in the shade of the lunch tent to the Barrack that stands by the Sea; We drank to the health of its fellows—to all who have been and may be ... 17 16__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 These three poems are advertising copy, particularly aimed at Anglo- Indians. The message is: not only do U.S.C. boys pass their exams and get good jobs in India, but the competitive values which they have acquired at school also enable them to excel at the most socially- desirable of sports; a boy from Crofts' House can leave Old Rugbeians floundering in the Race of Life, and successfully stick the pig. It was a long way from the little Rudyard of six years before, who, after being whacked for not watching a house match, wrote to his mother: 'as if it mattered to me a fig whether my House won or not. .,' 18 but he had a sure eye for what would appeal to prospective parents. Kipling's motives in all this were of the kindest. It was the head- master, even more than the school, that he was supporting. Cormell Price was an old and close friend of his mother's and he had been "Uncle Crom" to Rudyard since long before his schooldays. He was a generous and broadminded man who had treated him with kindness and tact during his early, difficult days at the U.S.C. and had later gone out of his way to encourage and help launch his literary career – and Kipling repaid him in the best way he knew, with his pen. "The Ride of the Schools" was the last thing he wrote especially for the Chronicle, but he freely gave permission for the use of his published works and in 1888 he outlined a letter which Price could send to the Times of India, opposing the establishment of a new services college there. On his return to England he paid several sentimental visits to Westward Ho! And – after talking to Cormell Price – promised to write a "school revisited" as soon as possible, for after fifteen very successful years in preparing boys for the Army, the U.S.C. had, in the early nineties, run into a financial crisis which threatened its existence. Fashion in educa- tion had turned back towards the traditional public schools, which had now begun to set up Army classes of their own; at the same time, a fall in the value of the rupee had compelled some of the less well-off U.S.C. parents to withdraw their sons. Kipling's response to this situation was "An English School" – pub- lished in October 1893 in an American children's magazine and, two months later, in the Chronicle. As in the earlier pieces, he was writing at his readers, not falsifying the truth but skilfully polishing it a little. We are shown an institution which combines sound preparation for the Army with most of the fashionable virtues of the late-Victorian public school. There is no mollycoddling. The masters do not gush over "Dickie or Tommie or Johnnie": it is "Smith" and "Thompson" and a wandering mind is corrected by a cane that stings like a hornet. Much is made of the mystique of the First XV and its relationship to the mil- itary exploits of Old Boys ('When they got into tight places they behaved very much as they had at football'). No mention is made of March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________17_ Cormell Price's easy-going radicalism and his unorthodox enthusiasm for a modern curriculum: the emphasis is strictly on his military virtues. When the time came to read for the Final Army Examinations, he knew the temper and powers of each boy, the amount of training each would stand and the stimulus or restraint that each needed, and handled them accordingly till, they had come through the big race that led into the English Army. "An English School" was a shrewd piece of image-building. Purposeful, but not unhealthily academic; traditional, but not dis- turbingly religious; disciplined, but good fun – it was just the sort of school to which any Indian Army officer would want to send his boy. Jokingly, Kipling called it 'a flagrant puff,19 but in reality it gave tes- timony to the deep affection he felt for his old headmaster. However, it was too late to affect the financial situation and, not long after, Cormell Price decided to retire. It was then, of course, that Kipling wrote Stalky & Co. – the climax to his public writing about the U.S.C, in which his admiration for Crom Price was to receive a grand, imperial apotheosis. Price himself commented wryly that the book was "an amusing travesty"20. The true story was something far simpler and more human, as Kipling finally confessed in Something of Myself: 'Many of us loved the Head for what he had done for us, but I owed him more than all of them put together; and I think I loved him even more than they did.' The last Collegers left Westward Ho! in 1904 but 'the long white bar- rack by the sea' is still standing, saved from demolition by Sir John Betjeman in 1972. For a time, part of the building was used as a language school – and where the would-be officers of Empire had once crammed for the Sandhurst Exam, young overseas students studied for certificates of proficiency in English! Then that too failed, and the terrace was con- verted into holiday flats. At the old front gate, now disused and partly blocked by brambles, there stands a plaque commemorating the fact that for four years Rudyard Kipling was educated here under Cormell Price M.A., B.C.L., first headmaster of the United Services College. NOTES References are made in this article to letters in the collection sent by Kipling and his parents to Cormell Price (C.P.P.) and to letters in the Kipling Papers at Sussex University (K.P.): I am most grateful to Mrs Lorraine Bowsher (née Price) for allow- ing me to study copies of the correspondence between the Kiplings and her grandfather. 1. C.P.P. (i) Alice Kipling to C. Price, 24 Jan., 1878; (ii) Alice Kipling to C. Price, 10 Mar., 1878. 18____________________KIPLING JOURNAL____________March 2005 THE EDITOR OF THE CHRONICLE Caricature of Kipling used to illustrate a critical review of Stalky & Co. which appeared in The Bookman (published by Hodder and Stoughton) in November 1899. March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________19 2. C.P.P., J.L. Kipling to C. Price, 17 June, 1879. 3. Cyril Harrison, Pearson's Weekly, 5 Dec, 1896, p.325. Can it be an entire coinci- dence that a few weeks after the appearance of this article Kipling began to write Stalky & Co., in which one of the bungling prefects is called "Harrison"? 4. The phrases quoted are taken from C.P.P., J.L. Kipling to C. Price 15 June, 1878, but the Kiplings' worries about their son's future are detailed in C.P.P., Alice Kipling to C. Price, 25 Jan., 1881. 5. C.P.P., J.L. Kipling to C. Price, 22 May, 1881. 6. Letter from R. Kipling, said to be to his mother, dated 9 Mar, 1882; reproduced in W.M. Carpenter, Kipling's College (Evanston: privately published, 1929). However, see The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed T. Pinney, Vol.1, pp.16-18. The addressee, 'Dear Mater', is identified as Mrs John Tavenor Perry. 7. Louis L. Cornell, Kipling in India, (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p.35. 8. K.P., Alice Kipling to Edith Plowden, Simla 1881-2 (sic). 9. According to Something of Myself, the poetry competition was arranged shortly before Kipling left the school in the summer of 1882.The poem was printed in the U.S.C. Chronicle of 2 July, 1886, and was collected in Early Verse (Sussex Edition). 10. U.S.C. Chronicle, 20 March, 1882. The Queen may have read it, as Cormell Price sent a copy to her Lady-in-Waiting, Lady Portsmouth. 11. The date of this letter is uncertain, but a copy of it was sent with a letter from J.L. Kipling to C. Price, C.P.P., 23 Oct., 1881. 12. C.P.P., R. Kipling to Cormell Price, Lahore, 30 Dec, 1882. 13. This poem, entitled "The Song of the Outsider", is printed in two versions in The Kipling Journal no.54, July 1940. The letter to Mr Willes which accompanies it is undated, but comes from a series written in 1882-3. 14. U.S.C. Chronicle, 15 Oct., 1881. Later Collected in Early Verse. (Kipling's note on gorah-log—"European soldiers".) 15. C.P.P., R. Kipling to C. Price, 19 Feb., 1884. 16. C.P.P., R. Kipling to C. Price, 10 Aug., 1884. 17. U.S.C. Chronicle, 30 Oct., 1884, Reprinted in Early Verse as "The Boar of the Year". 18. C.P.P., quoted in Alice Kipling to C. Price, 10 Mar., 1876. 19. C.P.P., R. Kipling to C. Price, 17 Jan., 1892. 20. The phrase occurs in the manuscript of some "Reminiscences of Brasenose" which Price sent to B.N.C. in 1910. Later he changed it to 'a vivid and amusing account' of Kipling's school life, adding that 'more exact if less diverting accounts' than Stalky & Co. existed elsewhere – presumably referring to "An English School". The final ver- sion of the reminiscences was printed in The Brazen Nose for November, 1910. (c) 2004 by the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty 20__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 KIPLING AND FRANCE1 By MAX RIVES [Max Rives gave this talk to the Society on the occasion of the A.G.M. in July 2004. Max is well-known to those members who use the Kipling Mailbase, and to all of us for his translation of an expert commentary on "The Bull that Thought" in the Journal for June 2003; also for Un Taureau Intelligent, his book of translations of five Kipling stories into French, which was reviewed in the Journal of June 2004. Regrettably, cold print cannot convey our enjoyment of the Gallic expressiveness of Max's speech to those members who were unable to attend the meeting. – Ed.] As far as I can understand, my main title to be here, besides almost sev- enty years of love for Kipling's work, is that I am a French retired plant geneticist. Genetics, as everyone knows has been invented by a German-speaking Slovac priest, but it is ninety-nine percent in English. I suspect also that this second Wednesday of July falling on the four- teenth may have something to do with it. The subject has been treated by a former Chairman of Council of the Society, Basil M. Bazley, in 1948. I am afraid that I did not invent or discover anything new on the subject. I have only relied heavily on the very interesting and monumental Ph.D. thesis of W.E. Weld 2, an American who spent a whole year in Paris in 1950, and could interview quite a few witnesses of the story. It is almost absent from the literature list of most modern biographies, but it is a must for anyone wishing to investigate on the French history of Kipling. I also used André Chevrillon's several versions of his Études Anglaises, and Robert Escarpit's 3 very good book. It is a well known fact that Kipling became acquainted with France long before France was acquainted with Kipling. This was the story of the English boy of twelve who came to Paris in June 1878 with his father. Lockwood was overseeing the building and organisation of the Indian Hall at the Exposition Internationale. He gave Rudyard a pass to the exhibition, two francs a day and complete freedom. I personally think that Lockwood was rather daring to send him loose into that Gomorrha of a city, but everything went well, which is an early evidence of Kipling's ability to move in any kind of milieu, and absorb its substantifique moëlle as Rabelais would say. The boy was impressed as he could "look through the eye of Liberty", when vis- iting Bartholdi's Statue, and the whole of the city. He himself testified later that his lasting friendship for France started there. It remains uncertain whether his finding that "in a country beyond the sea, the food at Bouillon Duval was excellent" is to be taken as a March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL__________________21 tribute to French gastronomy or to young Rudyard's lack of experience in that domain. Another result was that he was prompted by his father into learning to read French, beginning with Jules Verne, administered as a first dose in English, substituting then the remainder in French for a second dose. His spoken French was reported to be pittoresque, but the French are always happy when a foreigner addresses them in the only language they know! He found good use of his ability to read French when in Lahore, reviewing the Russian newspapers written in French for infor- mation on their views on the North-West. It was twenty years later that France became really acquainted with Kipling. Ten years after he had come back to London, and had sud- denly and rapidly become famous in his own country. The story of "How Kipling conquered France" has been told in the Kipling Journal 4 by one of his supporters of the time, Henry D. Davray. From 1890 to 1898, translations of thirteen Kipling stories as well as a few critical reviews had been published in France in five literary revues, without however, attracting much attention. The spark that set Kipling's rocket into its French orbit was initial- ly fired at a dinner that André Gide organised in honour of Oscar Wilde, who had just been freed from jail. Among a number of young hommes de lettres, were Louis Fabulet and Robert d'Humière. To Fabulet who was praising the merits of a life close to Nature, Wilde said: "I can see what would appeal to you: do read Kipling." Chance had Fabulet finding The Jungle Book on the next day at Galignani the English bookstore in Paris. Having devoured the book overnight, he summoned d'Humière and enrolled him to translate it. Once done and following many ups and downs with publishers, and thanks to money provided by Davray, they convinced the director of the young radical revue Le Mercure de France, to publish it, together with two other books, to start a "Collection d'Auteurs Étrangers", under Davray, that lasted at least through the Second World War. Le Livre de la Jungle was published in February 1899. Then a last booster was fired in March and April 1899, in the guise of two critiques by André Chevrillon, an already noted young critic, be it only because he was a nephew of the famous critic and specialist of English literature, Hippolyte Taine. France and the French liked Mowgli and the animals, and editions after editions sold out. In September 1899, Le Second Livre de la Jungle appeared and had the same success. Kipling had conquered France. As Weld notes5, 'It must ever remain one of the little ironies of lit- erary history that Oscar Wilde was responsible for Rudyard Kipling's fame in France.' 22__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 In the fifty years that followed, Weld's enormous work informs us that between 1890 and 1949, 'in France fifty-six identified translators translated from Kipling's work two hundred and thirty-eight different short stories, three hundred and seventy-six poems, ... six novels . . . This activity amounted to approximately two million words or nine thousand pages equivalent to twenty-eight of the thirty-six volumes of the Outward Bound Edition . . . The total sales amounted to two and a half million copies.' In these figures, it must be noted that the "Kipling that nobody read", that is the "late tales", as well as most of the poems, were not included. An exception was the translation of T.S. Eliot's A Choice of Kipling's Verse by Jules Castier which however, in the words of Weld, in 1950 'was collecting dust in the storerooms of the publisher'. I will come to this later. After the end of the Occupation, under which Kipling's works were banned by the Germans in France, Kipling's lasting popularity could be measured by the publishers' rush to devote precious amounts of paper to republishing the translations extant. Up to the present days, it is rare that a good French bookstore do not carry a couple of these. As late as 1987, a number of old translations from diverse sources have been collected in three volumes of the cheap, thick paperback Bouquin collection. Then – very significantly – a series of four volumes of entirely new translations, some of them very good, have in the last ten years erected that French monument to the classic Kipling that is represented by its publication in the famous collection "La Pléïade". Again one notes that, while those poems that accompany the stories or are included in them are translated, this basic edition does not include any further poetry. Weld notes that the rush in translating and publishing that followed Le Livre de la Jungle took place at a moment of tension between England and France, opening with Fashoda and closing with the Boer war. The very source of the tension may have been at the same time a source of mutual interest and understanding: France was busy building an Empire of its own and many Frenchmen shared the colonial culture, however different were the approaches of the two countries. The French colonial writer André Demaison describes the enthusiasm he shared with his colleagues, somewhere deep in Africa, upon receiving the first translations. "My emotion was immense. Thus, a man who had lived our life in prestigious India took interest in us, the exiles, the adventurers. From the hard but magnificent life that we led, he expressed the tumul- tuous poetry, that we could endure, that we could feel, but which he was able to express in its actuality and its humanity." March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL__________________23 This was also the time when Jérôme and Jean (NOT THE REVERSE PLEASE !) Tharaud published their two versions of Bingley l'illustre écrivain, and also when the rumour was launched, that Kipling's Bandar Log represented the French, apparently by the French extreme-right, such as Maurras and Daudet, that was hostile to him as an Englishman. There was a short drop in sales, perhaps connected with that ten- sion, but the Nobel Prize in 1907, that coincided with the emergence of Albert Savine, a new, very prolific (and rather poor) translator, gave a new impetus to Kipling's fame. He had become a "classic" and out- lasted his own success in England until at least 1939. Of Dingley, we can only say that it is a nasty explicit caricature (for instance, in the novel, Dingley is the author of "The finest story in the world"). It must be admitted that, technically, this is a relatively good novel. And it must be proclaimed that it is a dishonestly libellous one. Whatever evidence there may be that the Boer war was no pleasure promenade, one cannot admit as an example of the behaviour of an Englishman, that Dingley refuses to save a man who has been his friend and who saved his life, and exploits the cinema film of his execution to plan a gutter-novel about it. Incidentally, Carrington and Lycett should be corrected: Dingley's son is not killed by the Boers, but dies of – apparently – pneumonia; which somewhat changes the perspective of the novel. It remains to understand what the French found in Kipling that pleased them so much that 'it commended more space in the French history of publishing, than any other English writer except William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.' 6 To begin with, I think, that is due simply and mainly to Kipling's being a jolly good writer. In the words of Chevrillon: 'He is brief, strong, dense, sharp, tense, photographic, and cruel'. A few more adjectives might be added to account for his remarkable evolution in the late two or three collections. We may note here that the French could not read these, as they were not translated, with a few confiden- tial exceptions, before "La Pléïade" There is a concurrence of advices to think that beyond these ele- ments of form and style, the main characteristics of Kipling's stories and novels were, in the words of Chevrillon again: 'his efficiency and fitness, his sacrifice of self to group, his sense of discipline, his respect for the law.' To which we can add a taste for action and a lack of interest for intellectual speculation. All this was being presented to the French in a period when a good part of their nation was seeking new principles of action following the cruel experience of a war lost, and perhaps in expectation of the next to come. Weld lends some 24__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 credibility to this hypothesis when he uses a third of his chapter on "Causes and Effects" to quoting praises to that effect, mostly, it must be said, from ostensibly nationalist French sources. There is, however, a very interesting paragraph in a section on "[Kipling] The man . . ." Weld writes 'As a comment on the astonish- ing fact that during his lifetime the French knew very little about him'7: 'Paradoxically, the scarcity of biographical information probably con- tributed enormously to Kipling's retention of the affection of his friends across the Channel. Unknown in France were his fierce attacks on American "pirates", the unfortunate episode of Brattleboro, his pri- vacy complex, which was manifest in all the Anglo-Saxon world in his snappishness toward reporters, his refusal to make radio speeches, his irate letters to the press, and finally his sullen flight in seclusion of Sussex, his sudden sallies out of this semi-retirement to berate his countrymen for stupidity and blindness' 8 — in short all of Kipling's attitudes which convinced some British and Americans that the poet was an irascible, arrogant, self-centered money grubber. Indeed, Karlin, in his "Introduction" 9 points out to one cause of the difference: 'Kipling's engagement with social and political questions, especially those of the British Empire, looks very different in his pub- lic speeches, articles, and correspondence than it does in his fiction.' As an example, he worshipped Cecil Rhodes and paid tribute to him in numerous public ways . .. but it never occurred to him to make Rhodes the subject of a story. Escarpit deals at length with that same engagement and one can notice that in quoting Kipling's works as evidence, he cites almost only poems (such as "Recessional", for instance). I have already said that in the enormous volume that translations occupy, the space allowed to poems and verse is quite restricted. This may be associated with the fact that for the French reader even with a good knowledge of English, English poetry, and especially Kipling's poetry, is much more difficult to understand than English prose. As a matter of fact, the French public never had but never sought access to Kipling's poetry. In his preface to the collection Simples con- tes des montagnes, Davray writes: 'His poems are impossible to translate; at least it seems impossible to transpose them into image and word equivalents that can convey the meaning and the scope of the original and induce in the French reader identical feelings and suggest the same ideas.' One reason for the difference is that there was no custom whatso- ever in France for someone who was willing to address the public or rather, the people, on political matters, to do it in verse. The days of Victor Hugo were gone, and it would never have occurred to Zola to March 2005_____________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________25 write J'accuse in verse! It may well be also that the French public for poetry, if any, was not at all the same as that which read Kipling's fic- tion with delight. In contrast to Weld's negative picture of Kipling's character, it looks as if he was completely modifying his manners when being in France. Long before he published his Souvenirs of France, his custom of wandering through France in one of his "Duchesses" and meeting the common Frenchman (as well as being met by the less common authorities and notables), his love for spontaneous conversation on the chance of a meeting and his gift to extract from them information about anything and everything had become well known and popular. He kindly agreed to answer questions by anonymous young interviewers who reported him as "a lovable little man, simple, modest, shy, inter- ested in everything . . . gracious, lively, tolerant. And yet a man who somehow radiated the impression of genius." It is said that his poem "France" which, exceptionally, was trans- lated and broadcast in France was important in changing the attitude of the average Frenchman in the years before the war by killing the rumour about the Bandar Log. This is the place for me to confess two sins: one that I find its English very difficult to translate, two that it gives me a feeling that is akin to Stalky's when listening to Mr Raymond Martin M.P. ? In addition to the well known awards of Honoris Causa Doctorates at La Sorbonne and Strasbourg's University, I cannot forget to note that in 1933, Kipling was elected to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, one of the five academies that jointly make up L'Institut de France. To the popular enthusiasm, to the recognition of the acade- mics, the highest intellectual state authority had added its official seal. Unfortunately, he died before having been formally introduced. Of his popularity I think that what I call his "French tales", that is "The Miracle of St Jubanus", "The Bull that Thought" and "Teem" are good evidence. All of them relate to and rely indeed on meetings and conversations or correspondences with Frenchmen in the course of his motoring adventures through France. Monsieur Voiron is obviously a portrait of M. Viollet, the owner of the famous apéritif "Byrrh" and an afficionado, whom Kipling met when taking the waters at Vernet les Bains and who took him to watch bullfights. Incidentally, Vernet retains a friendly memory of him, and dedicated its annual "festival" to him some years ago, naming a bridge over the local torrent after him. In the last issue of the journal, you can read a letter from Alan Mattingly, a member, who lives in Vernet and has produced a translation of the famous "Why snow falls at Vernet."10 26_______________________KIPLING JOURNAL______________March 2005 Vernet is also distinguished in hosting one of the two monuments to Entente Cordiale extant in France. A point I wish to make, following a couple of other critics, is to underline Kipling's virtuosity in writing an English that in its structure sounds distinctly French to a French ear with its short, simple sen- tences, the recurring order of the words, subject, verb, complements, etc, the balance of the discourse, plus a sprinkling of French tournures, such as "We others", directly transposing the frequent French "Nous autres". All this strikes a Frenchman as a very true picture of the lan- guage, not only of a Frenchman, but of a notable of the South, merchant of fertilizers, wines, cattle, in that small city of Chambres that you will find on your map under the name of Salon ... de Provence. Then we have Le Curé of "The Miracle of St Jubanus". Gathering the clues in the tale and the poem, you understand that he has been an officer in the Légion Étrangère, following some "peines de coeur". He is a well educated man and knows a Smyrna cigarette from le gris 11 in his pouch, treats a guest to his Martinique rum and his African coffee. His English is peculiar enough to raise suspicion, until you stumble on the word "Juggernaught". No normal Frenchman will ever know nor use this name. Together with quite a few other clues, this leads to the conclusion that, to the difference of Monsieur Voiron, whose French is transposed into English by the narrator, Le Curé is actually speaking English to him. A special kind of English, that is similar to that of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. As for Teem, the truffle dog from Cahors, who finds refuge with the Sussex charcoal maker, it is known that to write this study on Art and the Artist, Kipling relied on information given to him by a teacher, M Pierre Menanteau and some other sources in Cahors. Again in addition to be written in "dogese", Teem's language is coloured by French influ- ence, but in a different manner: Kipling creates new meanings for English words after French ones, such as "born" for "né" which means noble or gentry, or naturalises French words when they can be made to sound English, as with "clickety". And the born lady from the Château addresses Teem 'in the language of my lost world.' Finally, I think that to fully understand what Kipling was to France, and France to Kipling, one must read and reread his France at War and Souvenirs of France. There is also a footnote on p.258 of Weld's thesis 'The French were much moved by Kipling's memorial to his son . . . that the Sonnerie "Aux Morts" be sounded each night at sun- down over the cemetery at Loos.' March 2005______________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________________27 NOTES 1. This was the subject of a talk by a Member of Council, Basil M Bazley, in 1948. See Kipling Journal, Nos.85, 86, 88, 89; 1948 & 1949. 2. W E Weld, Rudyard Kipling l'illustre écrivain: a study of the fame and fortune of Rudyard Kipling in France, Columbia University, 1950, 499 pages – a must for any- one wishing to investigate the French history of Kipling. 3. Rudyard Kipling: Servitudes et Grandeurs Impériales, Hachette Paris, 1955. 4. Kipling Journal, No.33, pp.12-25, March 1935. 5. Weld,p.63. 6. Weld, p.212. 7. Weld, p.261. 8. Weld, pp.263 et seq. 9. D. Karlin, Rudyard Kipling, The Oxford Authors Series, Oxford University Press, 1999. 10. Kipling Journal No.310, June 2004, pp.65-66. He very friendly received us in his home there and provided me with a lot of precious information. 11. Tobacco. AN AFTERWORD Last autumn, while watching T.V., I happened to see a helicopter view of the head of the Statue of Liberty and, THE EYES WERE CLOSED by what looked like metal sheets obstructing the rear of the sockets. The Society was recently contacted by Dan Lynch regarding Kipling's arrival at Ellis Island in 1892, and I took the opportunity to ask him whether the eyes were or not closed. He very kindly sought and got information from the personnel of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, to the effect that the eyes of the statue were indeed closed. They "were always covered with copper. Leaving them open would have allowed water inside and would have damaged the internal struc- ture of the statue." Equally kindly, he suggested that "Perhaps Kipling viewed the statue as it was being constructed and only portions were in place." Since then however, because of an anniversary, French T.V. has been full of stories about the Statue, including the very first steps of the building of it. The eyes were closed from the very beginning. However, the head carries a diadem in the form of a circular colon- nade, behind which there is obviously a flat circular area, and you can see through it between the columns. That is probably what Kipling took for the eyes in his reminiscences.- M. Rives [After receiving this, I stumbled upon two references to this topic in the Journal. These are a letter in No.215, p.45 from Hermione Green, and an illustration of the Paris Exhibition with a research note by George Webb (the then Editor) in No.217 p.6, both reaching the same conclusions as Max Rives. – Ed.] 28_______________________KIPLING JOURNAL______________March 2005 JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING MATERIAL AT THE V&A MUSEUM By BRYAN DIAMOND [Bryan Diamond, now just starting his second stint as a member of Council, has pursued his 2003 idea that the J.L. Kipling material originally deposited with the India Museum was moved to either the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum in S. Kensington. In this article he reports on the successful outcome of that search, and we must all be grateful to him for his persistence in illuminating and recording yet another aspect of the Kipling heritage. – Ed.] All who have read the biographies of Rudyard Kipling know that he had a close relationship1 with his father John Lockwood Kipling. In 2003 I wrote in this Journal of Lockwood's work as a modeller or designer at the then South Kensington Museum in 1861-65 just before he took up his teaching post in Bombay;2 in 1882 he described his work there as being a "Decorative Artist and Sculptor" employed on the sculpted and decorative embellishments of the New Court3. An article in the same issue by Roger Ayers4 quoted from an 1890 guidebook by W.S. Caine M.P. that Lockwood and his pupils of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore had contributed to the India Museum at S. Kensington. This led Roger Ayers to inform me of the India Museum's collections as of 1879 and of the Manikiala sculptures therein, and I deduced that the contributions referred to could have been passed on at the break up of the India Museum to the British or V&A Museums in 1880.5 The official history of the India Museum6 does not mention Lockwood nor any contributions from Lahore; this does not support Caine. I have now researched the London Museums. The British Museum database shows 450 items received in 1880, but no mention of any Kipling as a donor. The curator informed me that from the India Museum they got classical sculpture, the Amaravati collection and archaeological material, and added 'I am at a loss to know how any- thing that may have come to the S. Kensington Museum from the Mayo college or L. Kipling himself cannot be found. Did anything really come? Is the source of the information (i.e. Caine) trustworthy?'7 The V&A however does own Indian material both by Lockwood and collected by him; I describe this below under (a) to (c). The histo- ry of the India Collections is summarized by Skelton,8 who mentions that appreciation of Indian art was confined to admiration of decorative arts, and following condemnation by Ruskin, most writers dismissed Indian sculpture and painting as unworthy of inclusion among the Fine Arts, until William Rothenstein and others promoted Indian art from March 2005______________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________________29_ 1910. A principal rôle of the S. Kensington Museum was to educate students, who were allowed to sketch the collections. (a) The V&A Accessions Register has an entry for an acquisition from the India Museum in 1879: "22 photographs, from the Sculpture Class, School of Art; Bombay. J.L. Kipling, Superintendent", who presum- ably gave them to the India Museum; they were destroyed in 1909. I surmised that these may have been photos of Hindu sculptures for use by the students. Roger Ayers has commented to me: 'We seem to know little of J.L.K.'s field of work when in Bombay, but the general impres- sion I have from my past reading, strengthened by Lycett's biography,9 is that Lockwood's students would have been more likely to have worked on architectural sculpture, which, despite any Indian influence, is likely to have been a long way from true Hindu sculpture. It may have been for this reason that the 22 photographs were destroyed in 1909, in that they were too practical and insufficiently artistic' But per- haps the photos were of his students' carvings10 for the Bombay railway station? (b) Some 70 drawings (size 10 x 14 inches) by Lockwood, also from the India Museum, are in the V&A Indian Study Room. With the kind assistance of a curator of the S. & S.E. Asia Section, Dr Graham Parlett, I have looked at these; one series relates to the cultivation and processing of cotton in Maharashtura, the others to Indian crafts, all carefully observed, some fairly simple, others more finished, some with wash or Chinese white, all seem dated 1870-72; an example is repro- duced on page 7 of this Journal. This exemplifies the "first-hand observation and accurate statement of fact" which the Indian lacked.11 These drawings have not been pub- lished, although the curator is preparing a catalogue of all the India section drawings, in which they will be listed. Roger Ayers comments: 'The area of Maharashtura, now Maharashtra, is on the Deccan plateau east of Bombay, so the drawings of growing cotton are more likely to have belonged to J.L.K.'s second commission, namely drawing the ancient village system of the Deccan.' According to Ankers, this is said to have been a year after his tour of the N.W. Provinces, so possibly 1871. Lockwood wrote in 1882 that he had been commissioned by the Government in 1870 to tour the N.W. Provinces and Punjab and make a series of sketches of Indian craftsmen, these were placed in the Indian Museum (not now clear which), and in 1871 he was sent to sketch the cultivation of cotton and the ancient village system. Both series of drawings were exhibited in London, Vienna and Philadelphia (it would be interesting to see a catalogue).12 30__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 (c) The Accessions Book has an entry13 for "Album, containing 196 prints, paintings and pen and pencil drawings, together with 37 loose pages of paintings ... and drawings ... mainly lithograph pictures formed by the late J. Lockwood Kipling C.I.E. when Director of the Lahore School of Art;" there is a more detailed description of the subjects and a Note re seven lithographs used in his book [of the customs, proverbs, superstitions, religion, folk-lore and dress]14 Beast and Man in India (1891); in the book they are described as "From an Indian Lithograph", i.e. anonymous, apart from two calligraphic pictures by an artist M.N. Muhammad; these two are in the Note in the V&A listed as "Tugra, Barak" and "Tugra, Tiger".15 In a letter dated 28 July 1917 from Burwash Rudyard explains: 'In going over the books &c of my father ... I have come across a collection made some 25 years ago of the cheapest & most popular form of native lithograph pictures as sold at the local bazars & fairs of upper India & Bengal. The subjects embrace popular legends— Hindu & Sikh—of heroes & Gods as well as native renderings of scenes from European life... I should think that the whole might be of some eth- nological use or interest in your Museum—if only to students of India "popular" art of a generation ago. It is contained in one large scrapbook which I should be very glad to present to the Indian Section of the V&A Museum.' The letter of acceptance said: 'We have been paying special attention to the development of the Indian drawings, and your gift will be a valuable addition. . .', and there is another letter (3 August 1917) in which Rudyard indicates that he is sending the scrapbook by registered post and hopes that he may be able one day to see the Indian collection and meet the Director. In November the Director wrote 'We are charmed to have the prints'. Rudyard's "some 25 years ago" would refer to ca. 1892, by when some at least must have been collected; Lockwood may have commenced collecting after his move to Lahore in 1875. This dona- tion is referred to by McLeod,16 several items (mainly gurus and heroes) being reproduced there; he says the collection was made by Lockwood in Lahore and is valuable since such ephemera rarely survives. The V&A woodcuts collected by Lockwood are referred to in another book on Sikh Art17 which reproduces some (showing Sikh Gurus and their leader Ranjit Singh,18 and a railway train); the author comments on some items of particular interest and says that the prints probably offer a reasonably representative choice from the ephemeras available in the earliest years of Punjabi printing. The Kipling Archive19 also includes six volumes and 100 loose sketch- es by Lockwood. The sketches, 1870-90, preliminary and finished, are in pencil, ink and wash, and include portraits (mainly heads), crafts- men, animals and scenes from Indian life; these seem to be of the same March 2005____________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________31_ type as category (b) described above. In a book of folk-tales,20 he pro- vided pictures, some showing countrymen and domestic animals, similarly to those in his V&A drawings; I have not discovered if any of these drawings survive. Rudyard used the old Lahore Museum, founded in 1867, as the start- ing point of his famous novel Kim. 'There were hundreds of pieces, friezes of figures in relief. . . that had encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the pride of the Museum.' The star exhibit was 'a large alto-relief representing a coronation or apotheosis of the Lord Buddha.'21 Kim saw a white-bearded Englishman looking at the lama: this was a portrait of Lockwood, who is remembered as curator of the Museum and principal of the adjacent Mayo School of Industrial Art since April 1875. The school was intended for the revival of native art rather than import- ing European ideas.22 He brought about considerable improvements to the Museum as is apparent from the artefacts listed in his 1876 guide- book and from the continuous stream of visitors that daily thronged the galleries,23 so that it became 'the most popular resort in the Punjab.'24 In 1881 Lockwood was planning the Punjab Contributions to the Calcutta International Exhibition 1883; he was Secretary of the Punjab Committee. The exhibition was intended25 to be confined to "Native Industrial Art and Manufactures"; the advance catalogue includes, from the Mayo School, sculptured busts by Lockwood, architectural drawings by students, a painted cabinet, and a carved showcase. (Rudyard reached Lahore in October 1882 and initially helped his father in the Museum.) In 1880-81, there were connections with the South Kensington Museum; the Précis of the Board Minutes of the British Government Science and Art Department includes: Approved of proposed action in respect of exchanges to be negoti- ated in India of Department's reproductions and publications in lieu of objects of Indian Art procured by Schools of Art in Bombay, Lahore, and elsewhere. Approved acceptance of casts and sculpture presented by Lahore Museum.26 The Director wrote in 1880 'It seems opportune to interest the Schools of Art in India in the development of the Indian Section. Notably at Lahore and Bombay there are Principals who have been trained here and would gladly see some of their surplus treasures shown here.'27 The "trained here" presumably refers to the National Art Training School28 which taught art and design, and in particular it 32__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 trained art teachers; its buildings adjoined those of the South Kensington Museum. I have found no other reference to Lockwood attending this School. The Director recommended that £150 of repro- ductions in metal be sent to the "Government School of Lahore" (i.e. the Mayo School). The purchasing agent was in Lahore in March 1881, but there is no record of any purchases made there.29 Sadly, the V&A acquisition books for the period from 1881 do not list any casts or sculptures from Lahore Museum; in 1955, when the India Museum building was pulled down, most of the casts were destroyed, pre- sumably not then deemed to be proper Museum "objects".30 In 1890, Prince Albert Victor, later Duke of Clarence, arrived in Lahore to lay the foundation stone of a new Museum building amidst the usual pomp and splendour of the Raj. The ceremony, details of which were carried by the Civil and Military Gazette for two consecu- tive days, was performed in the presence of a small knot of British notables. In his address, Lockwood pointed out that the existing Museum, though limited in space, had steadily grown in popularity and an average of 646 visitors daily testified to the interest with which it was regarded. He added that there was a growing desire in India for special instruction in practical science; this had resulted in the propos- al of adding an institution which, with the Museum as the nucleus and the adjoining School of Art as the pillion, would gradually expand into a Technical College31. So although I have not located the sculptures suggested by Roger Ayers and Caine, there is indeed considerable Lockwood material at the V&A, known to experts on Indian art but not to Kipling enthusiasts, and this throws more light on Lockwood's career. One may wonder if there is more material to find? There will be a meeting at the V&A on 22 May 2005 [see p.5] at which at which some of this material can be viewed.32 NOTES 1. As exemplified by Beast & Man in India, see below, note 15(b). 2. Diamond, Bryan, "John Lockwood Kipling and the Victoria and Albert Museum", Kipling Journal, Sep 2003, No.307, pp.45-8. 3. "Memorial of J. Lockwood Kipling, Principal of the Mayo School of Art, to Sir R. E. Egerton, Lt.-Governor of the Punjab" [1882], Printed, pp.5. Kipling Papers, 3/11, Papers re career of J.L. Kipling, deposited by The National Trust in Special Collections, University of Sussex [He sought official status within the Education Department.], paras.1 & 2. 4. Ayers, Roger, " The Original of 'Pagett, M.P.'? ", Kipling Journal, loc.cit, pp.27-28. 5. Ayers, Roger and Diamond, Bryan, "The India Museum, South Kensington", ibid, Dec 2003, No.308, pp.31-2. 6. Desmond, Ray "The India Museum 1801-1879", H.M.S.O., 1982. 7. Knox, Robert, Keeper of Asia, The British Museum, personal communications, January 2004. March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL__________________33 8. Skelton, Robert, "The Indian Collections", The Burlington Magazine, Vol.CXX, No.902, May 1978; quotation from p.303. 9. Lycett, Andrew, Rudyard Kipling, 1999; at p.24 he mentions Ruskin's lecture in 1859 when he 'railed against the artistic lessons to be learnt from ... the Indian race', and at p.25 he describes the Governor's encouraging "municipal finery" on new buildings. 10. Ankers, Arthur. R., The Pater, John Lockwood Kipling, His Life and Times 1837-1911, 1988, p.106; animal and bird carvings for the new station by his former students. 11. Kipling, John Lockwood, Beast & Man in India, Macmillan & Co, London, 1891, p.13. 12. Memorial, see note 2, paras.6 & 7 re the commissions; also referred to by Ankers, loc.cit., p.55. 13. V&A catalogue I.M. 2, 1917. 14. Quoted from Ankers, p.105; see also Carrington, Rudyard Kipling, 1955, p.207: 'The book is a record of the mutual stimulus between Lockwood and his son.' 15. Notes re Beast and Man In India: (a) V&A drawings were used for the dedication & pp.61, 124, 176, 233, 338, 368 (referring to the first, 1891 edn.; 2nd edn 1892 was dif- ferently paginated). (b) The book includes work by Rudyard, see Stewart's Bibliographical Catalogue, 1959, p. 106. (c) 'Tugra' means here a calligraphic drawing made of letters from the Persian alphabet, Barak was the Prophet Muhammad's steed. 16. W.H. McLeod, Popular Sikh Art, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp.20-23. 17. W.G. Archer, Paintings of the Sikhs, V&A Museum, H.M.S.O., 1966; Lockwood reproductions in Pl.108-112. 18. Ranjit Singh's throne as Maharajah of the Punjab is on view in the V&A Nehru Gallery; his sword is in the Wallace Collection armour display. 19. Kipling Papers (see note 3), 3/4: Papers of J.L. Kipling. 2/4- 2/6. 20. Steel, Flora Annie, Tales of the Punjab Told by the People, with illustrations by J. Lockwood Kipling, Macmillan and Co, London, 1917; on the website, including illustrations : http ://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/steel/punjab/punjab.html 21. Kipling, Rudyard, Kim, 1901, Chapter I. 22. Kipling, Lockwood, Memorial, see note 3, para. 8. 23. Qureshi, M. Naeem, "A Museum for British Lahore", History Today, Sep 1997; the Museum was also mentioned by Sir Nicholas Barrington, Address to the Society's Annual Luncheon 2003, Kipling Journal, Sep 2003, No.307, p.38. 24. Memorial (see note 3), para. 9. 25. V&A Archive, AAD/2003/10, file 8; letter from J.L. Kipling to Charles Holme, Oct 1881; and Catalogue 1883. 26. ibid. ED 84/37, 8 July 1880 and ED 84/38, 28 July 1881 and Abstracts of corre- spondence MA/4/38, viz. a memo from the V&A Director to the Dept. of Science & Art. recommending this exchange. 27. ibid, MA/2/12; 7 July 1880, re Caspar Purdon Clark's visit to India, 1881-2. 28. Formerly known as the Government School of Design, then the Central School of Art; now the Royal College of Art. 29. MA/2/1 & 2. 30. Personal communication from Dr Parlett, who searched the V&A acquisition books. 31. Qureshi, loc.cit 32. See Something of Myself, Chap.I, pp.19-20 for Rudyard's experiences at the V&A. 34__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 BACON AND EGGS: KIPLING'S CALLING By WILLIAM B. DILLINGHAM [Professor Dillingham, who is the 'Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus' at the Department of English, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A., has contributed several articles to the Journal since 1999 and in consequence, needs little introduction. The works that he has discussed have included that early poem " 'Way down the Ravi River' ", "The Children of the Zodiac", "Mary Postgate", and now, "His Gift". He has a new book to be published by Palgrave Macmillan, tentatively titled Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism. Incidentally, it is no coincidence that we published a speculative arti- cle on this story in the December 2004 Journal. – Ed.] Rudyard Kipling's little noticed short story about a boy's learning to cook, "His Gift", was composed for inclusion in the collection Land and Sea Tales (1923), which was intended primarily for an audience of Boy Scouts and those interested in Scouting. In part the volume was Kipling's response to praise and requests from Robert Baden-Powell. The founder of the Boy Scouts expressed his gratitude to Kipling for his public approval of Scouting and asked him to contribute writings in support of the movement. "His Gift" is the only story in the collection that had not been previously published, and it is the only one in which Boy Scouts actually appear as characters. It is little wonder, then, that what commentary there has been on "His Gift" – and there has been precious little – has tended to consider the work mainly in connection with the Boy Scout Movement. Hugh Brogan, for example, writes that a 'careful reading shows it to be an intelligent and sensitive tribute to the possibilities of Scouting.' l Oddly enough, as Brogan himself indi- cates, the Boy Scouts do not really come out very well in "His Gift", for they are tormentors of the young hero before they finally come to see him in a new and different light. Furthermore, their values and motivations, especially the drive for more and more merit badges, are called into question in the story. Although Kipling was unquestionably interested in the Scouting Movement and anxious to do what he could to see it spread, "His Gift" is not at its most fundamental level about the Boy Scouts. One must look elsewhere to discern Kipling's deepest concern in "His Gift", per- haps to his own past. He seems to have put a good deal of himself and his background into the work by creating a situation where an awkward boy is taunted and devalued by those around him. In a sense, William Glasse Sawyer is a version of Kipling himself when he was, say, in his earliest days at the United Services College. Numerous autobiographi- cal suggestions appear in the work though they seem not to have attracted the attention of biographers and critics. About fifteen when March 2005_____________KIPLING JOURNAL______________________35_ the events of the work take place, William has come from a kind of House of Desolation himself. As in the case of Kipling, his parents are absent, either dead or living elsewhere. His unhappy situation involves a 'ferocious uncle,' who is 'responsible for his beginnings' 2 and who brooks no foolishness. The feminine influence in his life is limited to a woman named Doughty. She tried as his Den Mother to form him into what she considered usefulness and respectability at an early age, when he was 'entered as a Wolf-Cub,' but she 'confessed that she could make nothing of him' (p.79) and threw up her hands in disgust. His early experiences thus resemble those of Kipling at Lorne Lodge and those of Punch in the autobiographical "Baa Baa, Black Sheep". Punch is viewed as being 'of no account.'3 Similarly, William has come to real- ize that he is considered 'a most unprofitable person' (p.79). Of no account and unprofitable have the same meaning, "worthless," and that is precisely how both Punch and William are regarded and, of course, how Kipling felt that he was regarded in the House of Desolation (as well as during his earliest days at Westward Ho!). "His Gift" is essentially an anatomy of transformation. Kipling could delineate accurately and poignantly such a dramatic change because it happened to him: the transformation that occurs when a gift- ed person experiences for the first time that impulse commonly known as a calling, that is, when he realizes that he has a talent for some kind of work that will enable him to be respected and useful. Kipling wrote a great deal about the necessity of finding and doing well one's work in life. In fact, it is one of his most insistent subjects. "His Gift", how- ever, is special among those writings in that it alone details the psychology of the calling itself, that magic moment when a young "unprofitable" person discovers his "work." 4 Chances are, then, that in writing "His Gift," Kipling was remem- bering his own uplifting responses to his calling to the profession of letters. Precisely when that happened is difficult to say, but a likely time is the summer of 1881, when Cormell Price, Headmaster of the United Services College, brought the school journal out of mothballs and made young Kipling its editor. Price recognized that Rudyard had a gift, that he was a 'born writer,' as Charles Carrington puts it, and probably told the boy that. It was at this time that Kipling's career, his lifework, seems to have been decided. His writings for the United Services College Chronicle were 'the first injection into his veins of the printer's ink that he never again worked out of his system. He was delighted with his school magazine, wrote three-quarters of it, sub- edited it, corrected proofs, and took the deepest interest in its produc- tion at a little printing shop at Bideford.'5 Kipling was fifteen when this momentous event took place, the age that he makes William in "His 36__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 Gift" ('fifteen or thereabouts,' p.80). To be sure, William Glasse Sawyer's gift is not for writing but for the art of cookery, and that bit of effective camouflage has doubtlessly been responsible for the failure of critics and biographers to place "His Gift" where it deserves to be, namely alongside other important autobiographical fiction like "Baa Baa, Black Sheep", the first chapter of The Light that Failed, and "The Last Term". The autobiographical aspect of "His Gift" comes clearly into focus when one realizes that wherever cooking is mentioned in the story, writing can be substituted with enlightening results.6 William's excitement and subsequent metamorphosis, however, are also intended to reflect a universal situation – the marvellous feeling that comes when one discovers his gift, whatever it is, and realizes that he has been called to work that will be based on that gift. Such an expe- rience can transform a quietly rebellious but subservient and bumbling oddity in whom anger and hatred are the companions of loneliness and despair into a person of confidence and hope. In "His Gift" Kipling recalled with pain what it was like before he found his worth and with exhilaration what he felt when his calling lifted him into a new world. He makes that pain and that exhilaration the keynotes of his psycho- logical portrait of William Glasse Sawyer, who, like himself, was 'shot into a new world' (p.87) upon his calling. The process by which this happens is divided into four parts in the story, the first of which depicts William as he is before he discovers his gift. He is a boy engaged in what Kipling suggests is a kind of sleep- walking. He is the very personification of somnambulism. His fellow Boy Scouts find him impossible to sway to their way of thinking and acting because in his unresponsiveness he appears not to heed them. When a Scout of a neighbouring troop ridicules him in verse, he sim- ply 'wrapped himself up in long silences' (p.80). One of his fellow Scouts admits that 'he used to bite William Glasse Sawyer on the leg in the hope of waking him up' (p.79). William, however, gives the impression of taking no notice of or interest in what is going on around him despite the bites of his fellows. His movements are awkward and mechanical, and he manifests no skill expected of an alert, always pre- pared, Scout: 'He could accomplish nothing that required one glimmer of reason, thought or commonsense' (p.80). He constantly loses his bearings as well as his belongings – all this resembling nothing as much as a boy walking in his sleep. Although sleepwalking behaviour is often considered comical, William's is taken as deplorable: 'To crown all, his innumerable errors and omission were not even funny' (p.80). At this stage of his life, he thus exists in a kind of sleepwalking nightmare – as did Kipling himself during much of his boyhood. William gives every indication of being detached and insensitive, March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL__________________37 but within him hatred rages, the kind of hatred that as a youth Kipling knew so well for those who humiliated and tormented him. Just as in Something of Myself Kipling gives credit to his steadily evolving hatred of Mrs. Holloway and especially her son Harry for bringing out a form of creativity in him, so in "His Gift" he depicts William's hatred for a certain Boy Scout as the catalyst for the most important event of his life, that which changes him forever: the realization of his talent. 'Hate—raging hate,' Kipling writes, 'against a too-badged, too virtu- ous senior—had shot him into a new world' (p.87).7 Unknowingly, the cruel and self-righteous Harry Holloway did pretty much the same for the younger boy at Lorne Lodge. It is for this reason that a retrospec- tive Kipling ends "His Gift" by having William tell The Prawn that he is grateful to him – for reasons of course that his former adversary can- not understand. The first section of the story comes to a conclusion as William slips away from The Prawn, a wide-awake 'energetic soul' (p.83) of a Boy Scout, one who expects gratitude from his dozy vassal for trying to reform him. Finding a clump of high fern, William wig- gles himself into it deeply, stretches out, and goes to sleep. Considered a kind of sleepwalker during this entire introductory section of the story, he now falls asleep literally. Up until now, Kipling writes, 'be it remembered, William had given no proof either of intelligence or ini- tiative in any direction' (p.83), and with that reminder, this first part of the story ends. The groundwork has thus been laid for William's awakening in the second section of "His Gift". Within him all this time intelligence and initiative have been present but dormant. Now with the voice of one E. M. Marsh, baker, confectioner, and master cook, William stirs from his long slumber to discover a new world. Marsh's role in "His Gift" is scarcely less important than that of the young hero himself, for if William is a version of the author's remembered self, the cook is a ver- sion of Kipling at the time the story was composed. The situation is highly original: in this imaginative scenario, a mature craftsman who has found his lifework and practiced it with skill and dedication meets himself as a youth, still unaware of his gift, and tutors him with wis- dom, patience, and affection as the boy gloriously perceives what he is meant for. In Something of Myself, Kipling comments that "The Phantom 'Rickshaw" (1885) was the first story in which he tried 'to think in another man's skin' (p.200). He did not mention "His Gift" in his autobiography, but if he had, he might have said that by the time he composed that story he was able not only to think as one of his charac- ters would think but to pour himself into two characters, one young and one of mature age, the one a kind of double figure of the other. It is a feat worthy of an extraordinarily inventive and accomplished author.8 38________________________KIPLING JOURNAL______________March 2005 Kipling hints at Marsh's being an older double of William by making them physically similar. They are both short of stature and stout (as cooks should be, according to Marsh). William thus resembles Rudyard as he was in his time at the United Services College. G. C. Beresford describes a Kipling of schooldays as "podgy," and "round- ed" and refers to his "fat" face.9 By the time Kipling was Marsh's age, however, he had lost much weight because of his persistent stomach problems, but the author attached himself to his character in other ways. For example, they have both had a son – an only son – whom they have deeply loved. John Kipling, Rudyard's son, was killed in World War I, which ended just four or five years before "His Gift" was written. The establishment that the accomplished cook in the story owns is called 'E. M. Marsh & Son,' but the son is absent from the story and by implication from his father's life, though not from his heart, for he mentions him three times during the course of the story (as having once been a Boy Scout). The situation is similar to that in another of Kipling's late stories, "In the Interests of the Brethren" (1918), in which a prominent character who owns a shop called 'Burges and Son' has lost his boy in the war and is undemonstratively but deeply grieving for him, a situation painfully familiar to Kipling himself. As Marsh begins to speak in the second section of "His Gift", it is clear that he resembles Kipling in more ways than in his love of and possible loss of a son. As he wakes, William overhears Marsh con- versing with The Prawn about cooking and admonishing the boy, who is explaining that he is only a 'sort of temporary Cook.' Marsh replies with impatience: "Temp'ry! Temp'ry! ... Can't be a temp'ry Cook any more'n you can be a temp'ry Parson. Not so much. Cookin's cookin'" (p.84). This outburst about cooking as a serious enterprise of skill requiring full-time dedication and the subsequent distinction that he makes between 'cookery' and 'mere vittles!' to an intimidated Prawn both delight and enlighten William. He is delighted because the words chastise the arrogant Prawn, and he is enlightened because he has never thought of cookery that way before. Marsh's words reveal Kipling in the act of creating double-entendre, for everything that Marsh says about a born cook can also be said about a born writer, at least from Kipling's perspective. Surely, one concludes, Kipling is speaking about more than just grocery shops and their goods when he has Marsh pas- sionately explode to The Prawn: 'They sell people things out o' tins which save 'em trouble' but are not worthy of consumption. 'An' the muck that's sold for flour,' he continues, his ire rising. His anger sud- denly turns to compassion, however, and he concludes by expressing concern for those who have no choice but to accept what inferior cooks March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL__________________39 like The Prawn serve up. 'Pore boys! Pore boys!' (p.86), he exclaims as the second section of the story ends. It is not much of an imaginative leap to realize that Marsh's words of pity for those who have to eat The Prawn's cooking are also those of Kipling expressing compassion for the suffering public, which constantly has junk-food literature placed before it written by those who lack what Marsh calls in the story 'the Genuine Touch.' By the opening of the third section of the story, William's transfor- mation – its beginning initiated by Marsh's words about the art of cookery – is underway. It is a changed William that crawls from his sleeping place: 'For once in his life William was alert and intelligent' (p.86). What is happening to him he does not fully understand, for 'William was no psychologist' (p.87). He does not know why the fol- lowing night after he had overheard Marsh speaking to The Prawn he remained awake for a length of time unusual for him, a time 'during which he thought intensely, rapidly and joyously' (p.87). He does not yet realize that he 'had been shot into a new world,' but he does know that the 'next morning something sang in his ear,' and he takes steps to begin his apprenticeship as a gifted cook (p.87). In taking those steps, William finds himself suddenly blessed with Stalkyism, that form of creativity named after Kipling's most famous exhibitor of it, that quality of mind and body that enables one to "Be Prepared" in a sense that goes far beyond what is meant in the Boy Scout motto. Widely exemplified in Stalky & Co. by the residents of Study Number Five, it is what the Headmaster calls 'constructive dev- iltry.' It manifests an ability to think ahead, to create strategies, and to exercise a pronounced degree of creative imagination – attributes that provide enormous advantage in the pursuit of one's calling. His affini- ty for cooking having surfaced, William now discovers that with 'this new and active mind of his,' he is capable of a heretofore untapped ability to plan creatively. He does so by manoeuvring a meeting with Marsh and by seeing to it that the expert cook visits the Scout campsite again. During that visit, William receives his first lesson in cookery, learns that his middle name (Glasse) is that of a famous author of a cooking text – thus giving him a new sense of identity as part of a great tradition of cooks – and listens as Marsh gives him information about what it is like to be a professional cook. The emotional heart of the story beats here as Kipling delineates convincingly and movingly William's joy of discovery. It was an emotion that Kipling knew well and one that he noticeably manifested. In fact, G. C. Beresford uses that very phrase, "joy of discovery" when describing a characteristic that Rudyard exhibited at Westward Ho!10 Amazement and delight take the place of boredom and despair as young Sawyer finds that cooking 40__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 'seemed to him natural and easy' (p.83). It is to him what writing was to Kipling, 'a physical pleasure.' 11 "His Gift" is a rarity among Kipling's writings not only because it presents a detailed account of what a neglected, misunderstood, and undervalued youth feels when he discovers that he has a distinctive innate ability but also because it comments fairly extensively on the advantages and responsibilities of a life devoted to the profession of letters. Kipling wrote fairly extensively about writing,12 but he was generally reserved on this particular aspect of it. The vocation of cook- ing is the overt subject of Marsh's tutoring comments to William, but Kipling through Marsh is most surely remarking as well on the gifted writer and on the profession of letters. Marsh wishes William to under- stand first of all that the 'Genuine Touch' is innate, not learned. One must have, as he puts it, 'the instinck' (p.93). Without it, 'mere vittles,' not cookery result. If one possesses the instinct (Kipling in other places called it his 'Daemon'), then it, that inner voice or intuition, must be followed and obeyed. If that is done, certain rewards of the calling fol- low, among which are a livelihood, a vocation, and a strong sense of identity. Kipling's realization that he could actually make a living, and a good one at that, by merely doing what was a physical pleasure to him was the source of perhaps his greatest satisfaction. 'You're provided for life,' Marsh explains to William, and you can become 'thunderin' well off (p.93). With a steady and adequate income, of course, comes a sense of security. As Marsh puts it, 'It's the only sure business in the whole round world' (p.93). At his tender age, William may not under- stand all that Marsh tells him, but Kipling's spokesman for the art of cooking (and less obviously, the profession of letters) continues to detail what awaits one with the gift: prestige and power. When he says that 'everything which a man is depends on what 'e puts inside 'im,' his generalization rings true for what people read as well as for what they eat. Therefore, his comment about prestige, 'A good cook's a King of men,' applies to a gifted writer as well (p.93). For most of his life Kipling was fascinated with the idea that an artist with the Genuine Touch possesses some kind of special power often acquired after a period of trial and suffering. In 1888 he described the Tower of Victory in Chitor as the work of an artist whose talent aided him in winning a victory over the dark chaos of life and the cer- tainty of death, a personal triumph achieved through the exercise of his courage, independence, and creativity, all of which make for power. What Kipling perceived in the work of that 'builder of old, in sentences of fine stone' was, in a sense, how 'to attain power.'13 Largely because of his own gift perhaps as well as his unwavering fidelity to his calling, Kipling frequently impressed others, especially in his later years, as March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL__________________41 possessing the power he has Marsh describe. Hildegarde Hawthorne remembered that Kipling 'gave you the feeling that here was force, power, control.'14 When he met Kipling, William Webster Ellsworth was somewhat cowed, for 'he seemed like a being out of another world. ... I can't remember ever being really intimidated by an author except Kipling.'15 Power is his theme when toward the end of the third section of "His Gift", Marsh 'holds forth on the art and science and mystery of cooking as inspiredly as Mr. Jorrocks, Master of Foxhounds, had lec- tured upon the Chase.' 'The "burden" of this lecture,' adds Kipling, 'was Power' (p.94).16 The power that accompanies the calling is also a central idea in Kipling's parody of Chaucer, "Prologue to the Master- Cook's Tale", which he placed after "His Gift" in Land and Sea Tales. Its conclusion is that 'Cookes [for which we can substitute "gifted writ- ers"] over alle men have dominion, / Which follow them as schippe her gouvernail.' If Kipling meant for cooking to carry a double meaning in the story, he unquestionably intended the title to do the same. On the one hand, "His Gift" refers to William's inborn talent for cooking. He has a gift. On the other hand, Marsh makes it clear that he must give a gift. He must serve others. His gift must be a gift to humanity, for service to others is an essential aspect of the calling. The psychological impor- tance of finding oneself, that is, of coming to know who and what one is and what one is to do in life, cannot be overstated. Kipling also insists, however, that pursuing one's work or calling always involves generosity, unselfishness, and compassion. Marsh's identity ('I'm a cook') is symbolized by his apron, which is mentioned twice in this third section of "His Gift". As he begins to teach William, 'Mr. Marsh clad himself in a long white apron of office' (p.91). This part of the story ends with his removing the apron to return to his shop. To under- score the point that identifying oneself with his gift rightly entails the awareness of a certain responsibility – that of service – Kipling uses the seemingly odd word sacrificial in conjunction with Marsh's apron: 'He unloosed his sacrificial apron and rolled away' (p.94). The badge of his identity is thus the emblem of his sacrifice as well. The gifted must give. Part four of "The Gift" finds a new William now liberated from the hatred that had previously embittered him and enjoying a quicker mind and a greatly enriched imagination. He is filled with 'fresh flights of glory' (p.95) as he remembers Marsh's telling him that he may have the Genuine Touch. His new sense of identity is enhanced when he recalls that he has 'a middle name which filled that great man with respect' (p.95). In describing William's joyous anticipation that 'all the 47th Postal District should ring with [his] name, even to the exclusion of the 42_________________________KIPLING JOURNAL______________March 2005 racing-news, in its evening papers' (pp.95-96), Kipling seems to be remembering his own early dreams of fame as he responded to his call- ing. His desire as a boy to escape from his confines and from the mental torment it fostered is reflected in William's happy awareness that now he can 'escape for ever from the foul business' of his previous life (p.96). What he is escaping to is a new identity. Having found in the back of Marsh's shop a copy of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by a Lady, the author of which bears William's middle name, he is totally convinced that H. Glasse is 'his ancestress' (p.98). What's more, with stunning ingenuity Kipling merges in these final pages of the story William's identity with that of Marsh. That is, they become as it were one character. William takes on the identity of his older double. What Marsh says earlier in the story is echoed in what William says toward the end. For example, he explains to The Prawn that cooking is a talent or gift. 'You see, Prawn,' he indicates with a Marsh-like matu- rity and wisdom, 'cookin' isn't a thing one can just pick-up' (p.99). The compassion that William feels toward those he feeds is a reminder of tender feelings Marsh expressed earlier for those 'Pore boys! Pore boys!' (p.86), who are forced to consume the poorly prepared vittles of The Prawn. As "His Gift" comes to an end, a 'wave of pity—the Master's pity for the mere consuming Public' (p.100) sweeps over William. That Kipling refers to him as the "Master" makes it clear the he has, in a sense, become Marsh, thinking, feeling, and acting as does the older version of himself. The last words of the story reveal how William has merged with Marsh in another sense. At this later time than that of the events of the story, William is an older man, now an accomplished and noted cook, who is depicted as looking back on his boyhood: 'After all, as he was used to say in later years, if it hadn't been for The Prawn, where would he have been?' (p.100). William's helping another boy discover his gift late in the story replicates Marsh's service to him. He finds 'a new and specially hope- less recruit; oily-skinned, fat, short-armed, but light on his feet and with some notion of lifting pot-lids without wrecking or flooding the whole fire-place' (p.99), and he begins to tutor him in cooking exactly as Marsh had taught him. The calling, Kipling makes clear, requires the Master to respond to the gifted apprentice with interest and unselfish- ness, for the older possessor of the Genuine Touch inevitably sees himself in the younger. That Kipling as he aged tended to so regard younger men who sought him out for advice about writing is indicated by his recorded reactions to some of his youthful visitors to his home in Sussex. Rupert Croft-Cooke and Arthur Gordon, for example, both attribute to a generous Kipling remarks about the craft of writing and the profession of letters that startled them with their truth and that, March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL__________________43 especially in the case of the latter, resulted in their finding a somewhat clearer direction for their lives. Arthur Gordon was amazed when Kipling said to him at the end of their visit: 'Thank you. . . . You've done me good.'17 That comment poignantly suggests another aspect of the code of the calling that is evident in "His Gift". Marsh does not guide William and provide him with the wisdom of a master craftsman simply to help the young man. He is also helping himself. What he does for William does him "good," for his encouragement of a youth who is obviously gifted gives him an opportunity, as it gave Kipling, to under- gird his own identity in the work for which he was called, to articulate to receptive and eager ears his ideas and ideals in connection with the craft. Kipling also found that instructing his young guest had, as he put it, 'done me good' for a second and equally important reason. It gave him the satisfaction that he was being faithful to what he considered the code of the calling, a satisfaction that is manifested in his character Marsh as he generously takes William under his wing. The final section of "His Gift", reveals not only how fidelity to the calling changes the gifted but also how it changes others. Upon Marsh's recognition of William as a born cook, the scoutmaster of the troop, Mr. Hale, takes steps to encourage the boy and to give him, as the headmaster at Kipling's school had similarly done, new responsi- bility and new opportunities to exercise his gift. When the Scouts return to town from the campsite where William had discovered his affinity for cooking, he finds that his fellows treat 'him with a new respect' (p.99). That respect is the result not merely of William's newly demonstrated ability to feed them better cookery than they have ever had before in the field but also of his newly acquired self-confidence. William begins to experience the prestige and power that the gifted enjoy who are true to their calling. "His Gift" is, to use a phrase of Kipling's, 'wonder-revealing' (p.99). The author reveals the wonder that William feels when the boy realizes that he is truly gifted, but at the same time creates a kind of reader response of wonder by subtle revelations here and there that "His Gift" is not one story but two, the first about a boy who finds his gift and learns from an older man, the second about Kipling himself as he looks both backward and at the present. This aesthetic duplicity is manifested in numerous places, but one example will perhaps suffice to summarize how it works, a passage in the story's last section in which Kipling describes William's daydreams about his future. He had dismissed The Prawn altogether from his miraculously enlarging mind. Very soon he was on the High Seas, a locality 44__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 which till that instant had never appealed to him, in a gale, issuing bacon and eggs to crews on the edge of mutiny. Next, he was at war, turning the tides of it to victory for his own land by meals of bacon and eggs that brought bemedalled Generals, in troops like Pelicans [the name of his Boy Scout troop], to his fire-place. Then he was sustaining his uncle, at the door of an enormous restaurant, with plates of bacon and eggs sent out by gilded commissionaires such as guard the cinemas, while his uncle wept with gratitude and remorse, and The Prawn, badges and all, begged for scraps. (p.95) On the surface this passage is about the rather wild imaginings of an excited boy. Though a bit vapid if not silly, it is, after all, humorous because such flights of fancy are not so unusual among the young, and so they are excused with an indulgent smile. If examined carefully, however, it becomes clear that though the author is ostensibly writing about William's dreams of what great things he will accomplish through his marvellous bacon and eggs, Kipling is at the same time looking back on his life and covertly commenting on what he has accomplished through his writing – his bacon and eggs. In times of internal strife in his country, 'in a gale,' his writings have inspired and unified like- minded people. During the Great War, his 'bacon and eggs' helped turn the tide to victory, and because of that service 'bemedalled Generals' and distinguished leaders of the land did, indeed, seek him out to receive their respect and gratitude. All this time, his writings enabled him to sus- tain his immediate family and sometimes those beyond it, his generosity meriting gratitude. Thus the passage is both an account of William's hopes for the future and an expression of what Kipling believed that he had already brought about, those achievements he was most proud of but unwilling to enumerate except in the ingenious disguise of a boy's laughter-provoking daydream. Such is the nature and the method of "His Gift". In it, Kipling remembers what his bacon and eggs have done for him and for the world. When he describes Marsh at a gathering of Boy Scouts, he is thinking of himself and his contributions to humani- ty. As his audience consumed what through his gift he had prepared, 'he convulsed them with mirth or held them breathless with anecdotes of the High Seas and the World, so that the vote of thanks they passed him at the end waked the cows in the Park' (p.98). NOTES 1. Hugh Brogan, Mowgli's Sons: Kipling and Baden-Powell's Scouts (London, 1987), p.59. 2. Rudyard Kipling, "His Gift", in Land and Sea Tales, The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling (Scribners, New York, 1923), XXXV, p.79. Future refer- ences to this edition are given in the text. March 2005______________KIPLING JOURNAL________________________45 3. Rudyard Kipling, "Baa Baa, Black Sheep", in Under the Deodars, The Story of the Gadsbys, Wee Willie Winkie, The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling (New York, 1899), VI, p.336. 4. "The Last Term" in Stalky & Co. depicts Beetle-Kipling as already much changed from the earlier stories in the volume. He has decided what he wants his lifework to be, and that decision has altered him for the better. He is no longer in this story sub- servient, as he has been throughout the book, to his two friends. Kipling does not, however, describe in "The Last Term" as he does in "His Gift" that wonderful moment when it dawns on one that he has the ability to do something extremely well and is then flooded with new and marvellous emotions. 5. Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, rev. ed. (London, 1978), p.68. 6. Curiously, in the final chapter of his autobiography, Kipling uses terms associated with cooking when he is actually talking of writing. In that chapter, he speaks of some of his early writings as if he had been trying out new recipes in cooking 'exper- iments,' and he comments that his father helped him by not helping him, by not advising him as to what ingredients to add or leave out. He uses phrases like 'a fer- ment of new things,' and he says that he knew that each word he used must 'taste' and 'smell.' Since he liked so well what he was doing (writing was pleasurable for him), it 'made it easier to throw away anything that did not turn out well.' Sometimes he found, however, that 'much salt went out of the work' (p. 199). In dis- cussing the process of rereading what he had composed and revising it, he does not so much relate how he worked. Instead he gives directions as to how this process should be done . That is, he uses language extraordinarily odd for a commentary by a writer on writing but certainly appropriate for a recipe in a cookbook. He says, for example, 'take of well-ground Indian Ink as much as suffices and a camel-hair brush proportionate to the interspaces of your lines' for revising the manuscript. Then 'let it lie by to drain as long as possible' (p. 199). He ends the chapter by listing the var- ious tools or utensils that he uses and the 'gadgets on my work-table' (p.221). Gadgets seems strange when used this way, in connection with writing, but not strange at all when used to describe certain Working-Tools (the title of Kipling's chapter) in the kitchen. All references to Something of Myself axe to vol. 36, The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling (New York, 1937). 7. Gillian Avery comments that "His Gift" "turns on one of his [Kipling's] favourite themes, hatred. Here 'raging hate against a too-badged, too virtuous senior' at last stirs the buffoon of the troop out of his torpor." "The Children's Writer," in Rudyard Kipling: The Man, His Work and His World, ed. John Grosse (London, 1972), p.116. It is important to point out, however, that hate is not what changes William. It pre- conditions him for the change that is actually brought about by his calling. Hate is not the instrument of his transformation but the catalyst. 8. This claim is put forward with the hope that it will serve as an alternative to the rather blunt but apparently widely influential evaluation of J. M. S. Tompkins, who writes of "His Gift": 'This is not a very good tale.' In fact, she declares that Kipling's Daemon 'was absent from this [entire] collection' in which the story appears (Land and Sea Tales). The Art of Rudyard Kipling (London, 1959), p.129. 9. G. C. Beresford, Schooldays with Kipling (New York, 1936), pp.1, 262. On the last page of his book, Beresford describes Kipling as he first appeared in Lahore: 'There he stood, a short, round figure in his white ducks' (p.270). 46________________________KIPLING JOURNAL______________March 2005 10. Ibid. p.268. 11. In Something of Myself, Kipling writes that the 'act of writing was, and always has been, a physical pleasure to me' (p. 198). 12. See the excellent collection of Kipling's commentaries on the subject of writing, Rudyard Kipling: Writings on Writing, ed. Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis (Cambridge, 1996). 13. Rudyard Kipling, Letter XI, Letters of Marque, in From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel, The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling (New York, 1899), XV, p.112. 14. Hildegarde Hawthorne, "Rudyard Kipling, Maker of Magic," in Kipling: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Harold Orel (Totowa, NJ, 1983), vol. 2, p.262. 15. William Webster Ellsworth, "A Children's Story for St Nicholas Magazine," in Orel, vol.2, p.260. 16. Kipling compares Marsh to Robert Smith Surtees' character John Jorrocks not mere- ly because both are somewhat comic figures but principally because both are prime examples of men who are gifted in a certain way and who become totally devoted to their callings. Jorrocks has worked his way up from a sweeper of floors to the owner of the business. At a certain point, however, he realizes with the joy of discovery that commerce is not his true lifework. His calling is to fox hunting; consequently, when he is appointed Master of Fox Hounds (M. F. H.) in Handley Cross; or, Mr. Jorrocks's Hunt, he feels that he has at last heard his calling, and he responds with elation and dedication. His acceptance speech is both comic and moving, for it reveals a crude but decent and unselfish man who is grateful for having found his gift: "Of all sitivations under the sun, none is more enviable or more 'onerable than that of master of fox 'ounds! Talk of a M. P.! vot's an M. P. compared to an M. F. H.? Your M. P. lives in a tainted hatmosphere among other M. P.'s and loses his consequence by the commonness of the office, and the scoldings he gets from those who sent him there, but an M. F. H. holds his levee in the stable, his levee in the kennel, and his levee in the 'unting field— is great and important every where.... And oh, John Jorrocks! my good frind," continued the worthy grocer, fumbling the silver in his small clothes with upturned eyes to heaven, "to think that you, after all the hups and downs of life—the crossin's and jostlin's of merchandise and ungovernable trade— the sortin' of sugars—the mexin' of teas—the postin' of ledgers, and handlin' of inwoices, to think that you, my dear feller, should have arrived at this dis- tinguished post, is most miraculously wonderful, most singularly queer. Gentlemen, this is the proudest moment of my life!" Robert Smith Surtees, Handley Cross; or, Mr. Jorrocks's Hunt (Bath, 1926), p.88. 17. Arthur Gordon, "Six Hours with Rudyard Kipling," in Orel, vol. 2, p.386. March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL__________________47 THE RESIDUE OF VICTORIAN IDEALISM: RUDYARD KIPLING AND THE IMPERIAL WAR GRAVES COMMISSION By Dr DEBORAH E. WIGGINS [Deborah Wiggins has taught history for several years and is currently an independent scholar. This article came out of research on the burial laws of Great Britain. She wish- es to thank the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Special Collections of the University of Sussex Library for their kind assistance. Despite best efforts, we have been unable to trace the copyright holders of the Ware and Weller letters.. – Ed.] All that they had they gave—they gave— In sure and single faith. There can no knowledge reach the grave To make them grudge their death Save only if they understood That, after all was done, We they redeemed denied their blood And mocked the gains it won. ("The King's Pilgrimage", by Rudyard Kipling, 1922) The name Rudyard Kipling brings to mind many images – writer and poet, reporter and traveller. Proclaimed in verse and cartoon as the embodiment of an Englishman, he is best known for his works about the land of his birth – India. His politics and his writings have been reg- ularly excoriated by his critics. He has been proclaimed a racist and a misogynist, a shallow intellect enamoured of violence. His work has been disparaged as too subtle or not subtle enough, too common or not common enough; his poetry criticised as having too much rhyme and not enough heart. His intense love of country and the military dove- tailed with the apogee of the British Empire in the late 1800s. The best-known British author at the turn of the century, he was also one of the most reclusive and private. Throughout his career, Kipling disliked the mechanics of publicity. He usually refused to talk to reporters. When he travelled, he regularly declined invitations to meet with local officials or adoring fans. His autobiography, written in the last years of his life and published posthumously, has proven to be a manuscript equally enlightening and confusing, and no solace to his biographers. His private papers shed little light on his innermost thoughts, and those who would look to his writings to deconstruct his psyche should be extremely cautious.1 In light of these habits, Rudyard Kipling's accep- 48__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 tance of membership on the Imperial War Graves Commission was an extreme departure from his usual way of life. But one need only look at what Kipling did in his work with the Commission to understand the depth of his devotion to this duty, for in the commission of this duty, he gave freely and openly of himself to the Commission, the other members of the Commission, and bereaved families. THE GRAVES OF THE FALLEN Text by Rudyard Kipling. Illustrations by Douglas Macpherson. (Reproduced by courtesy of H.M.S.O.) Before and during the Great War, he was a powerful voice of sup- port for the war and the military, even after the death of his only son, John, in 1915 at the Battle of Loos. Kipling was asked to become a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1917, because of his personal standing in Britain, his activities (and writings) supporting the military, and the fact that he had suffered a family loss in the war. Lord Derby had been insistent that Kipling be on the Commission, as he was "the soldiers' poet."2 Kipling officially became a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission in October 1917 and continued to serve until his death in 1936.3 He carried out his duties as he lived his life, quietly and out of the public eye. Even in the difficult years after 1918, he never thought that British society was irretrievably destroyed or required radical changes. He never wavered in his belief that the March 2005______________KIPLING JOURNAL________________________49_ British Empire was a positive force for the world. In a private conver- sation the year before he died, he talked about imperialism. 'The word is out of fashion now, and some Englishmen are weak enough to be ashamed of it. I'm not.' 4 It should be noted that his membership on the Imperial War Graves Commission was the first office Kipling ever assumed. He did have some involvement with the Boy Scout movement, including allowing Lord Baden-Powell to use the Jungle Books for preparation of The Wolf Cubs' Handbook. But he had refused the laureateship in 1895 and declined the Order of Merit three times on the grounds that whatever services he might perform for the Empire or King would be most effec- tive out of the public eye.5 ARMY CHAPLAIN TENDING BRITISH GRAVES 'An Army Chaplain is arranging a border of stones around a "Tommy's" grave in a little field cemetery sacred to many of our fallen heroes.' A postcard from the Daily Mail Battle Pictures Series VII, No.52. The Imperial War Graves Commission was born of the need for proper burial for the thousands of dead in France and other theatres of war. In the first months of the war, the dead had been buried in the trenches, but the British stopped this practice by 1915.6 The British Army created a Graves Registration Unit in 1914. This group took over work that had been done up until that time by the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. In 1916 this unit was renamed the Directorate of the Graves Registration and Enquiries and worked with the National Committee 50__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 for the Care of Soldiers Graves (whose President was the Prince of Wales). Eventually there were calls for a larger committee to look after all the graves of the Empire, and the Imperial War Graves Commission was created in 1917. While the Army recognised the necessity of handling burials, the early view was that the Graves Registration workers were simply a requirement that might detract from more important activities. In a let- ter from March of 1916, General Sir Douglas Haig discussed the request for more motor transports for use by this Unit. It is fully recognised that the work of this organisation is of purely sentimental value, and that it does not directly contribute to the suc- cessful termination of the War. It has, however, an extraordinary moral value to the Troops in the Field as well as to the relatives and friends of the dead, at home. . . Further, it should be borne in mind that on the termination of hostilities the nation will demand an account from the Government as to the steps which have been taken to make and classify the burial places of the dead, steps which can only be effectively taken at, or soon after burial.7 The first members of the Commission included the Prince of Wales as President. The Chairman was Secretary of State for War (Lord Derby, who had recently lost his son-in-law in the war). Other mem- bers included the Vice-Chairman, Fabian Ware, who had spearheaded the British Red Cross involvement with registration of graves; General Sir Nevil Macready; Admiral Poe; Sir William Garstin of the Red Cross; Harry Gosling of the Transport and General Workers' Union; and Rudyard Kipling. Both Garstin and Kipling had lost sons in the war.8 At the start of the Commission, the members decided that there would be three general concepts that would guide the development of all the cemeteries. All memorials would be permanent, the headstones would be uniform, and there would be no distinction as to rank. As Frederic Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, noted, 'where the sacrifice had been common, the memorial should be common also.' This was a departure from past practices, but the members of the Commission decided that the task ahead of them required both innova- tion and precise planning.9 Seven architects were appointed to plan the cemeteries. Kenyon was also consulted as to design. The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew were in charge of the horticultural features. To Kipling went the job of inscriptions for the memorials. It was his feeling that March 2005______________KIPLING JOURNAL_______________________51 this was not the occasion for the invention of some new form of words, but that the idea which the stone intended to convey could be best expressed by the choice of some familiar phrase from the Bible.10 The Commission considered several possibilities, including "You live and die, and die and live," and "All's Well" from J. M. Barrie. Other suggestions included "To the Brave" and "Peace be with you." One of the architects, Sir Edwin Lutyens, suggested simply "Amen." But the choice was really Kipling's, for as Lutyens complained, 'the question is coming to a head and if Kipling says the ukase, the Royal Commission will say yes.'11 Kipling took his choice from the Apocrypha in Ecclesiasticus 44, verse 14, "Their name liveth for ever- more." Kipling was responsible for the composition of most of the inscrip- tions used in the British memorials located in French cathedrals, including the words placed on the headstones of unmarked graves, "A soldier of the Great War. . . Known unto God." He is also given credit for beginning the evening ceremony of playing of "The Last Post" at the Menin Gate memorial. Kipling is also mentioned as being one of the originators of the idea of the Unknown British Soldier whose body was interred in Westminster Abbey on November 11, 1920.12 On one occasion soon after he joined the Commission, Kipling was asked to assist in drafting a revision of the letter sent from the King to the bereaved family on the death of a member of the military. Lord Derby felt that the original letter was too brusque. 'I cannot myself think of the right words,' Derby wrote, 'but I am sure in this respect you could very much help me.' Kipling wrote back immediately with several suggestions, although as he commented, 'It's a bit hard to com- bine the impression of national thanks with a personal letter from the King.' As it turned out, Derby did not use Kipling's suggestions, but basically stayed with his own first draft.13 The numbers of dead were overwhelming, and the work involved in designing the cemeteries and carrying out the designs was equally demanding. The early annual reports of the Commission reveal the tremendous amount of work involved. The year 1921 saw the employ- ment of 876 staff gardeners in France and Belgium, who had that year planted fifteen and a half miles of hedges (thorn, beech, hornbeam, holly, box and yew), seventy-five miles of flowerbeds and had sown 195 acres permanently to grass.14 Another challenge was the lack of proper grave registration. The Commission quickly realised that a complete set of references was nec- essary, and they planned to publish reference works, which would be 52_________________________KIPLING JOURNAL______________March 2005 placed in libraries. They also decided to produce a register for each cemetery with an alphabetical listing and a guide to the location of each grave. This project eventually created three card indices—alphabetical by name, by country and by regiment. These indices required 3,000 drawers that were stacked four drawers high, and stretched for 450 feet. The registers would obviously be an enormous help to family members who were searching for the graves of their loved ones. The first of these registers was published in 1920. In September 1920 Kipling urged the Commission to establish local enquiry offices in Britain to assist fami- lies in their searches. Many family members planned trips to France to visit the graveyards; Thomas Cook was advertising tours to the battle- fields. On Kipling's frequent visits to France, he had seen 'many bereaved relatives wandering, confused, distressed and helpless.' The Commission eventually allotted a budget of £4,500 for these local offices.15 Kipling was a determined traveller to the various cemeteries, view- ing this oversight as a part of his work for the Commission. In 1920 he travelled approximately 1,500 miles visiting thirty cemeteries includ- ing Ypres, Amiens and Rouen.16 In March of 1925 he was back to France to visit the Rouen Cemetery. He wrote to his close friend, H. Rider Haggard, that One never gets over the shock of this Dead Sea of arrested lives— from V.C.'s and Hospital Nurses to coolies of the Chinese Labour Corps. By one grave of a coolie some pious old Frenchwoman (bet she was an old maid) had deposited a yellow porcelain crucifix!! Somehow that almost drew tears.17 In February of 1929 the Kiplings travelled to Egypt for warmer weath- er and also to visit the cemeteries of the Palestine campaign in an official capacity.18 Since there were many differing viewpoints on these most person- al and emotional issues that the Commission dealt with, it is not surprising that there were debates over various aspects of the Commission's decisions. The idea of leaving the dead where they per- ished was controversial, but the expense of repatriation of so many casualties was too great to be considered seriously, and allowing the individual families to sustain the costs of repatriation would have cre- ated an unwanted distinction between the classes. The most passionate arguments occurred over the desire for a cross instead of a headstone. In the spring of 1919, a petition of over 8,000 signatures pleaded with the Prince of Wales (President of the Commission) to reconsider the issue and allow crosses. March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL___________________53 It is only through the hope of the cross that most of us are able to carry on the life from which all the sunshine seems to have gone, and to deny us the emblem of that strength and hope adds heavily to the burden of our sorrow.19 The Commission was even criticised for allowing Kipling to be in charge of the inscriptions, because he was "not a known religious man." The opponents of headstones bitterly reproached the Commission for its decisions and lobbied members of Parliament for changes. Winston Churchill, the new Commission Chairman, seemed to support the fundamental policies, but some committee members doubted his solid backing of headstones. However, the Commission gained a supporter in the person of Burdett Coutts, Member of Parliament for Westminster, who had no connection with the Commission and knew little of the matter but felt inherently that the opposition was misguided. Henry Gosling of the Transport Union secured the support of labour which strongly promoted the idea of equality. On 4 May 1920 during three hours of debate over the issue, Burdett Coutts began his speech in support of the Commission by quot- ing a letter from Kipling. You see we shall never have any grave to go to. Our boy was miss- ing at Loos. The ground is of course battered and mined past all hope of any trace being recovered. I wish some of the people who are making this trouble realised how more than fortunate they are to have a name on a headstone in a known place. The opposition also made fervent speeches, reiterating that the per- sonal wishes of relatives should be more important than Commission policy. An example of this was a letter read from a grieving mother who resisted the idea of uniform headstones, for in her words, 'I do not wish to desecrate my son's memory by countenancing in any way the hideous and unchristian memorials which they propose.' Finally Churchill spoke and effectively ended the argument and the attacks on the Commission. He scoffed at the idea that the design of the cemeter- ies and the headstones showed a lack of religious feeling by the designers. He described the Stone of Remembrance, with its inscrip- tion, "Their name liveth for evermore," as an emblem designed to last throughout time, for even if our language, our institutions, and our Empire all have faded from the memory of man, these great stones will still preserve the memory of a common purpose pursued by a great nation. 54__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 The Commission and its ideas won that day in Parliament, and there were no further serious attacks on policy.20 In 1922, King George V made a visit to Belgium and France to tour the cemeteries and meet with the workers of the Commission. The royal entourage arrived in Brussels on 9 May. Their travel itinerary included the Congo Museum and the Tir Memorial commemorating Nurse Edith Cavell's execution. On 10 May, the King visited ten war cemeteries including Tyne Cot, one of the largest of the British ceme- teries.21 While Fabian Ware made most of the arrangements for this trip, Kipling was a vital part of the preparations, as he was to bring along with him the Canadian dignitaries travelling from Folkestone. Later he was to meet with the representative from the India Office.22 The coastal cemetery of Terlincthun was the last location visited by this convoy of dignitaries, and here the King spoke to the crowd and the world, but his words were written by Kipling. In the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.23 Meanwhile the work of constructing and landscaping the cemeteries moved ahead, but one question had not been addressed by the Commission. In Kipling's work, The Graves of the Fallen, which was a description of the policies of the Commission, he mentioned, 'the dead who have no resting-place will be made equal with the others.'24 However, this led to a torrent of letters to the Commission from anx- ious relatives who wanted to know the exact plans for commemorating the missing dead. The Prime Minister of Australia wanted a headstone for each of the missing, but Ware thought that inappropriate. The Commission finally decided to place the names of those missing on cemetery walls or monuments in the cemeteries nearest to the places they had died. But the overall confusion in the aftermath of the war caused severe problems for the staff of the Commission. The War Office had not completed regimental lists of casualties, and the infor- mation on prisoners of war was incomplete. The problems of documentation would be a continuing issue for the Commission for years, as information was reprocessed and clarified. Still, in 1927, Commission workers were finding approximately 50 corpses a week in the Ypres area.25 In the last few years of his life, Kipling was bothered more and more frequently by recurrent digestive tract illnesses, and his trips for the Commission were fewer. However, he was present on 4 August March 2005_____________KIPLING JOURNAL_____________________55 1930 in an official capacity for the unveiling of a war memorial to com- memorate the Battle of Loos. The memorial was designed to honour all those who had fallen in the battle, but especially those whose bodies were never found. General Sir Nevil Macready addressed those assem- bled, and the buglers of the Irish Guards sounded the "Last Post". Kipling was to have spoken at the ceremony, but according to reports, he was "completely overcome by emotion."26 This chronicle of Kipling's accomplishments on the Commission reflects not only his continued dedication to this duty, but also reflects his idealism, ideal- ism which by the time of his death was considered by many to be not only passé but pathetic. Siegfried Sassoon lamented 'these intolerably nameless names'27 which adorned the cemetery memorials. But these were not nameless names to Kipling. Each name symbolised the nobil- ity, virtue and loss of the British Empire. His work for the Imperial War Graves Commission was a painful labour of love and a public demon- stration by a very private man. Above all, it was duty fulfilled. NOTES 1. According to Frank Doubleday, Kipling's publisher and friend, Kipling burned many of his papers. Kipling was reported to have said, 'No one's going to make a monkey out of me after I die.' Harold Orel, ed., Kipling: Interviews and Recollections (New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983), II: 298. More recently, Dr. Thomas N. Cross wrote one of the more bizarre bits of analysis of Kipling, with pseudopsychoanalysis and diagnoses ranging from homosexual repression to racial conflicts. East and West: A Biography of Rudyard Kipling (Luckystone Press, 1991). 2. Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), p.277. In a letter from Fabian Ware, the Vice Chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission, to Kipling asking him to join the Commission, Ware wrote, "Lord Derby very much hopes that you will see your way to helping us in this work. There is no need for me to tell you what it will mean to the relatives of those who have fall- en and also to the Empire as a whole." Kipling Manuscripts, University of Sussex Library, "Membership in the Imperial War Graves Commission," 21/3, letter dated 5 September 1917. 3. Kipling's date of appointment was 27 October 1917. Public Record Office, WO 32/9433. [P.R.O. hereafter] 4. Orel, Kipling, II:385. The recollection was that of Arthur Gordon, a Rhodes scholar, who spent a day with Kipling. 5. Tim Jeal, The Boy-Man, The Life of Lord Baden-Powell (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990), p.500. In a letter to a friend in 1930, Kipling allowed that "Boy Scouts are all right as a means toward disciplined young 'uns, but the League of Nations is strong among 'em." Letters from Rudyard Kipling to Guy Paget, 1919 1936 (privately printed, 1936), p.25. L. G. Wickham Legg, ed., Dictionary of National Biography, 1931-1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1949),p.514. 6. P.R.O., WO 30/57. In his first visit to the graveyards in France in July 1917, the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens described "a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way 56__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 across miles of country, where men were tucked in where they fell—ribbons of lit- tle crosses." Christopher Hussey, The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens (London: Country Life Limited, 1953), p.373. 7. Letter from General Haig, 15 March 1916, P.R.O., WO 32/5846. 8. Fabian Ware, The Immortal Heritage (London: Cambridge University Press, 1937), pp.23-26. Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil (London: Constable, 1967), p.29. 9. Ware, Immortal Heritage, pp.30, 73. Frederic Kenyon, War Graves, How the Cemeteries Abroad will be designed (London: HMSO, 1918), p.5. 10. Kenyon, War Graves, pp.23-24. Kenyon also noted "in general, I do not think that the planting of fruit trees in cemeteries is to be recommended." p.13. 11. Hussey, Edwin Lutyens, pp.388-389. Lutyens is known for his design of the Viceroy's House in New Delhi. He also designed the Cenotaph. In his work on the Commission he planned approximately fifty war memorials. L. G. Wickham Legg and E. T. Williams, eds., The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 1959), pp.537-540. 12. Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling, His Life and Work (London: Macmillan and Co., 1955), p.442, and Longworth, Unending Vigil, p.43, also several letters (dated 1922 and 1923) from Kipling regarding various inscriptions, Item SDC 8, Catalogue #1052, Box 2018, The Archives of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. 13. Letter from Lord Derby to Rudyard Kipling dated 21 November 1917, and letter from Rudyard Kipling to Lord Derby dated 23 November 1917. P.R.O., WO 32/4841. Lord Kitchener began this Royal Message of Sympathy. P.R.O., WO 32/4674. 14. Annual Report of the Imperial War Graves Commission, 1920-1921 (London: H.M.S.O., 1921), p.6. By 1923 the hedges planted increased to a total of forty-two and three-quarter miles, and the flower borders increased to a total of 418 miles! Annual Report of the Imperial War Graves Commission, 1922-1923 (London: H.M.S.O, 1923), p.7. 15. Longworth, Unending Vigil, p.78, The Times, 10 August 1920, 2c. 16. Longworth, Unending Vigil, p.79. In a letter to Kipling dated 8 October 1920, Mr. and Mrs. A. Weller wrote "We beg to tender our Sincerest thanks for the kindness and trouble you have taken regarding the additional inscription on the headstone of our son's grave. It has been a great comfort to us to see the care and attention that is being so nobly rendered to assuage a little the many broken hearts. We feel proud Sir of having had the honour and pleasure of meeting you and wish you every reward for your unselfish and humanising labour." Kipling Mss, University of Sussex Library, "Membership in the Imperial War Graves Commission," 21/3. 17. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Thomas Pinney, Vol.5. pp.211-213, (2004, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.) Letter to Sir H. R. Haggard, 14 March 1925. 18. Carrington, Kipling, p.498. 19. Longworth, Unending Vigil, p.47. 20. 5 Hansard 128 (4 May 1920): 1934, 1944, 1971. 21. The Times, 10 May 1922, 10f and 12 May 1922, 10c. 22. Letter from Fabian Ware to Rudyard Kipling, 5 May 1922, Kipling Mss, University of Sussex Library, "Membership in the Imperial War Graves Commission," 21/3. 23. Longworth, Unending Vigil, p.80. 24. Rudyard Kipling, The Graves of the Fallen (London: H.M.S.O, 1919), p.12. March 2005______________KIPLING JOURNAL________________________57_ 25. Minutes of the Committee on National Monuments and Battlefields, 4 May 1928. P.R.O., WO 32/3136. In a note of bitter irony, the Kipling Journal printed a notice in the September 1992 edition relating that a War Graves Commission staff member had noted a discrepancy in a map reference, and that a grave that had previously been marked as an unknown soldier is that of John Kipling. The headstone has been altered to reflect this. Kipling Journal, No.263, September 1992, p.9. Tonie and Valmai Holt explored this issue in their work 'My Boy Jack' The Search for Kipling's Only Son (Leo Cooper, 1998). Their work spends considerable time analysing Kipling's life, John's life, and, in their words, 'the father's feeling of remorse and sorrow and the influence on his subsequent work. ' p.xvii. 26. Kipling Journal, No.15, October 1930, p.70. 27. From "On Passing the New Menin Gate," quoted in Longworth, Unending Vigil, p.104. THE EMERY WALKER TRUST We have been advised that the house of Sir Emery Walker, 7 Hammersmith Terrace, London W6 9TS, will be open on Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the months of April to July this year. Tickets must be booked for a specific time-slot with a guide, and the maximum size of a group will be eight people. Admission is £6.00 for Adults, £3.50 for Concessions, but no children under 12 year. Contact Monica Grose-Hodge, Assistant Curator by e-mail: mfo@emerywalker.org.uk or Tel: 020 8741 4104 or 07779 145372 . Emery Walker, a friend and advisor to William Morris, lived in this riverside house for 30 years and it preserves the only authentic Arts and Crafts urban interior in Britain, with furniture, wallpapers, textiles and ceramics by Morris & Co, Philip Webb, William de Morgan, etc. It has never been open to the public before and may not be again as its future is uncertain. Sir Emery was also an acquaintance of Kipling's and produced the end-papers and maps for both volumes of The Irish Guards in the Great War. Prof Pinney reproduces a letter from Kipling to Walker of 20 March 1921 (Vol.5) and notes that Walker was also one of the trustees for Cormel Price's son, Teddy. –Ed. 58__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 THE NEW READERS' GUIDE AN ANNOTATOR REPORTS By LISA LEWIS Many people are put off the late Kipling stories because they are "dif- ficult," i.e. they do not reveal themselves at a first reading. When I discovered Debits and Credits I was fourteen, and so was not surprised that an adult book should be slightly mystifying. There were two new Stalky stories to attract me, while others satisfied my curiosity about Masonic Lodges. And this wasn't just a men-only world: there were women's stories as well. I too enjoyed Jane Austen. But when I met these stories in anthologies, they seemed much flatter. Later in life, having read some Kipling critics and joined the Society, I tried to work out why. This involved a lot of background reading and a certain amount of travel. It resulted in several talks at discussion meetings and an article published in America. So when it was decided that Harbord's Readers' Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling (ORG) should be updated and made more widely available (NRG), and volunteers were called for to work on the different volumes, I felt qualified to undertake Debits and Credits. The book covers a wide range of topics, many of which are beyond my scope; but our team includes experts in different fields who could be called on to help, while previous annotators have also given permission to quote what they say. I found the ORG notes on the stories of variable usefulness. Some of them include specialist knowledge, or invaluable first-hand informa- tion about the times and places of which Kipling wrote. But some things that were still familiar in the 1960s have now disappeared, like the periodical Punch, once too well-known to need any comment. ORG often does not include information that more academic annotators would provide, such as dates of first publication in magazines and vari- ations in the text. It also seemed a good idea to include date of composition if known. For this I used Pinney's Letters, to which Vol. VI now provides an index, and Carrington's notes from Mrs Kipling's diaries, to be found in the Society's Library and at the University of Sussex. Neither of these resources was available to the compilers of ORG. Having found the dates, I then looked at the biographies to see if anything relevant was happening in Kipling's life at the time. I also consulted Something of Myself, a rich source of clues to Kipling's meaning, where every phrase is made to count. For NRG, we are required to start with a summary of the plot, since even the most Kipling-soaked of us can't identify every story from its March 2005___________KIPLING JOURNAL_________________ 59 title alone. But the task can feel impossible. How can one presume to re-phrase what Kipling has written, or to cut down still further what he has already trimmed to the bone? Close attention to the text is essential here. ORG didn't include critical opinions, but the editors of NRG have decided that we should. For these, I consulted contemporary reviews as well as more recent critics. The Kipling Journal included articles that seemed worth quoting. I tried to include a few adverse comments as well as laudatory ones, and to indicate any areas of controversy. Different stories need different approaches. Some, like "The Gardener," have been analysed many times and thrown up many differ- ent readings. Others, like "The Enemies to each Other," have been virtually ignored. The ORG annotator seems to have been baffled by the latter, having failed to find Mirza Mirkhond's The Garden of Purity, despite Kipling's "apologies" on the opening page. This is not easy to locate. The copies in the study at Bateman's and in the London Library are of an over-literal translation published in Bombay in 1891. Its curi- ous version of English is the key to the strange language of the story, without which "The Enemies to each Other" seems pointlessly eccentric. For "The Eye of Allah," it seemed necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy, taking a close look at Kipling's sources. But I learned to be careful here. It's all too easy to guess that Kipling read a certain text, only to find that he and the other author had both been reading something else. If he owned a copy of a book, or quoted it else- where, or referred to it in a letter, then I assumed he read at least some of it. And in the case of "The Eye of Allah" he had personal contacts with experts on medical history. He is known to have made a practice of cross-examining any experts he met for the material he wanted. Here again the biographies were useful, especially Lycett. The most important thing was to re-read the story, paying careful attention to every word to make sure that my earlier memories of it were correct. Then I went through it again underlining any word or phrase I thought needed to be explained. Here I tried to bear in mind that readers on the internet may not be Christians, may know little of European his- tory or British institutions, and may live almost anywhere in the world. For my 1983 talk on "The Eye of Allah," I had amassed a large quantity of slides reproducing illustrations from mediaeval manuscripts and other sources. Thanks to my husband and to John Radcliffe's expertise, four of these now accompany the NRG notes on the story. The result looks attractive – and might even encourage random visitors to read the story again. It is not one of Kipling's best-known works, but recent events have given it topical relevance. However any such com- ment by an annotator risks giving some people offence and is certain to become dated, so I refrained. 60__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 All this may sound like a lot of work and a lot of reading, but it's been a rewarding experience. It took me up fascinating byways and left me with more respect for Kipling than ever. And there was one truly magical moment: staying at a hotel in the Camargue, while eating breakfast I was able to watch the local cattle through the window as they grazed, played and scuffled among themselves, only a few yards away – a delightful way to research "The Bull that Thought"! BOOK REVIEW THE ABSENT-MINDED IMPERIALISTS: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain by Bernard Porter, published in 2004 by Oxford University Press, (ISBN 0-19-820854-5, Hardback, £25.00), xxii + 475 pages including 154 pages of Notes and Index. 16 Illustrations. This is a curate's egg of a book. One should praise it since it attempts to refute some of the wilder flights of fancy concerning imperialism and the British Empire that have been, and still are being, promulgat- ed. As he makes clear, though not in so many words, some historians tend to follow the Humpty Dumpty principle of 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less', particu- larly about the Empire. But it is clear that Prof Porter has similar biases, apparently accepting without question that imperialism is bad, and seeking to demonstrate that the interest in Empire and its benefits accrued only to the upper and upper-middle classes whilst the lower- middle and working classes knew very little, and cared less, about it. His exposition of the reasons for this lack of interest in Empire by the majority of the country is credible and is in agreement with Kipling's own views expressed in "Pharaoh and the Sergeant" (1897) – 'For she thinks her Empire still is the Strand and Holborn Hill. . .' His use of semantically loaded terms and derogatory labels for selected groups is no less partisan that that of some other historians,. There are references to the "propaganda" disseminated by the "imper- ial zealots" (Milner, Curzon, Rhodes, Chamberlain, Kipling and Rosebery), a reference to the use of funfair rides such as the "Flip- Flap" to distract visitors at the 1909 'Imperial International Exhibition' (even though it was built for the 'Franco-British Exhibition' of 1908), the "musical monologues like Kipling's notorious 'Gunga Din' ", the "rabidly imperialistic A School History of England" being an example of a "highly partisan" textbook. Too many more examples can be found, but this should be more than enough to demonstrate the bias. The occasional spelling mistake, though deplorable, can be ignored, and I did find this book interesting although disagreeing vigorously with some of Prof Porter's statements. –Ed. March 2005_____________KIPLING JOURNAL______________________61 MEMBERSHIP NOTES NEW MEMBERS Mr Paul Batt-Rawden (2027 Kjeller, NORWAY) Mr J.A. Burdon-Cooper (Crieff, Perthshire) Lord Clitheroe (Clitheroe, Lancashire) Mr Richard Jaffa (Edgebaston, Birmingham) Mr Douglas Moor (London, NW9) Mrs R.K. Nwume (Carlton, Nottingham) Ms Clara Claiborne Park (Williamstown, MA, U.S.A.) Mr Kevin W. Stone (Ashbourne, Derbyshire) SUBSCRIPTION REMINDERS Members who pay by annually by cheque, draft or bank transfer will be reminded on the reverse of the address carrier sheet, which accompanies each Kipling Journal, when their next subscription needs to be paid in order to continue to receive future issues. When due, the sub- scription should reach the Membership Secretary, whose address is given on the sheet, well before the month of issue of the next Journal, other- wise the member's name will be omitted from the list of labels used to distribute it. It will then only be sent on receipt of the due subscription. The Membership Secretary is grateful to members who respond promptly and to all those who have completed Standing Orders on a UK bank, making reminders unnecessary. All members are asked to use the carrier sheet to notify the Membership Secretary of a change of address or other membership details. MODERN TRANSLATIONS OF KIPLING INTO RUSSIAN Three new translations into Russian of works by Rudyard Kipling were published at the end of 2004; Actions and Reactions, Traffics and Discoveries, and 'Captains Courageous'. The translator is Captain Nikolai Tess, a Latvian by birth, educated there and in Russia. They have been copiously annotated to explain some of the 'English-isms' and subtleties of Kipling's tales. The print run has been limited, but copies may be obtained by contacting Captain Nikolai Tess, 126 rue du General de Gaulle, 95620 Parmain, FRANCE; e-mail ntess@yahoo.com. The cost is €14.00, plus postage and packing. [With grateful thanks to John Radcliffe, our On Line Editor. – Ed] 62__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR "INDIA'S REPLY" From: Mr Shamus O.D. Wade, 37 Davis Road, Acton, London W3 7SE. Dear Sir, A few years ago I saw a splendid later version of the sheet music of "India's Reply" (Editorial September 2004). The front cover had coloured illustrations of Indian soldiers by Richard Simkin and bore the words "Dedicated to Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree M.P.". Sir Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree, Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, was the Indian Conservative M.P. for the working class constituency of Bethnal Green from 1895-1905. Is he the only back-bench M.P. to have had a popular song dedicat- ed to him? Yours sincerely, SHAMUS O.D. WADE "IN THE PRESENCE" From: Assoc Prof Erling Bindseil, D.V.Sc., 11 B Selskowej, DK-3400 Hillerød, Denmark. Dear Sir, Recently I made what I consider a unique bargain which I think may be of some interest to the Kipling Society. I have got a copy of A Diversity of Creatures from a bookseller in England. I bought the book not only because I wanted it for my Kipling-collection, but also because it was an interesting association copy. The reason for this is that it has a handwritten front endpaper dedi- cation running: Mabel Coke from Sir James Dunlop Smith. May 1917. Not only that, but the book has an accompanying handwritten card from Sir James to Lady Mabel Coke. The card runs as follows: Brooks's, St. James's Street. S.W. 18/IV/17 Dear Lady Mabel. I am so sorry to hear that you have been laid up with measles, I hope you will soon be out and about again. A long time ago I promised to send you Kipling's new book. Here it is. I told him of the two events he describes in "In the Presence". One happened when I was in Patiala and the other when I was looking after these Gurkhas at King Edward's lying-in state. He gives me the name of "Forsyth Sahib" so the stories are true. Yours sincere- ly, J.R. Dunlop Smith March 2005______________KIPLING JOURNAL________________________63 It is obvious that Sir James' personal experiences had inspired Kipling not only to write in "In the Presence" but also to portray Sir James as the character Forsyth Sahib. The card roused my curiosity, and a search on various web-sites revealed to me that Sir James Robert Dunlop Smith (1858—1921) spent much of his time in India as a soldier and officer. He ended his professional career as a political A.D.C. to the Secretary of State for India. Sir James is said to have been a close friend of Kipling and that Kipling often turned to him for background for his tales. Unless I have misread the information from the web-sites Lady Mabel Coke (?-1967) was a daughter of Thomas William Coke 2nd Earl of Leicester and Hon Georgina Caroline Cavendish. As her date of birth is not known it is unknown how old she was at the time when the book was presented to her by Sir James, but she was probably quite young as measles is predominantly a disease of children and young people. As Sir James was a frequent source of inspiration to Kipling it remains to be clarified, at least to me, which other of Kipling's stories and charac- ters are based on true events and persons experienced by Sir James. Yours faithfully, Erling Bindseil KIPLING'S DESK From: Mr C.T. Hucker, 109 Bridge End, Warwick, CV34 6PD Dear Sir, For over fifty years I have enjoyed the Journal, and have had no reason to write to the Editor. However, I have recently seen a review of a B.B.C. World Service "Play of the Week" – Misery by Stephen King, who claims to have written it at a desk once used by Kipling. It is said that the playwright was subsequently "spooked" to find that Kipling had died at the desk. It is my understanding that Kipling died in hospital after a few days illness, and I think that Mr King has let his literary imagination run away with him. Yours faithfully, C.T. HUCKER [Mr Hucker, now our fifth member in terms of length of service with The Society, is of course correct. Kipling must have used many desks during his life, but in 1936 he died well away from all of them. To quote from Andrew Lycett, '. . . on 12 January, Rudyard was taken ill at Brown's Hotel. . . at 8 a.m. the following morning he was rushed by ambulance to the Middlesex Hospital.' There he stayed and '. . . at 10 minutes after mid- night on 18 January he died.' – Ed.] 64__________________KIPLING JOURNAL___________March 2005 ABOUT THE KIPLING SOCIETY The Kipling Society is for anyone interested in the prose and verse, and the life and times, of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). It is one of the most active and enduring literary societies in Britain and, as the only one which focuses on Kipling and his place in English Literature, attracts a world- wide membership. (Details from the Society's web-site and membership forms from the Membership Secretary, Kipling Society, 295 Castle Road, Salisbury, Wilts SP1 3SB. The forms quote the minimum annual subscription rates. Some members contribute a little more.) The Society is a Registered Charity and a voluntary, non-profit-making organisation. Its activities, which are controlled by a Council and run by the Secretary and honorary officials, include: • maintaining a specialised Library in City University, London, • answering enquiries from the public (schools, publishers, writers and the media), and providing speakers on request, • arranging a regular programme of lectures, and a formal Annual Luncheon with a Guest Speaker, • running the web-site at www.kipling.org.uk for members of the Society and anyone else around the world with an interest in the life and work of Rudyard Kipling, • and publishing the Kipling Journal, every quarter. The Journal of the Society aims to entertain and inform. It is sent to subscribing paying members all over the world free of charge. This includes libraries, English Faculties, and 'Journal – only' members. Since 1927, the Journal has published important items by Kipling, not readily found elsewhere, valuable historical information, and literary comment by authorities in their field. By not being wholly academic, the Journal is rep- resentative of Kipling, whose own diverse interests and versatile talent covered a wide range of literary writing – letters, travel, prose and verse. For the serious scholar of Kipling, who cannot afford to overlook the Journal, a comprehensive index of the entire run since 1927 is available. Apply to: The Librarian, Kipling Society, 13 Canonbury Road, London Nl 2DF, England. Back numbers of the Journal can also be bought. Write to; Mr Michael Smith, 2 Brownleaf Road, Brighton BN2 6LB, England. The Editor of the Kipling Journal publishes membership news, Society events, and the texts of talks given by invited speakers. In addition, he is happy to receive letters and articles from readers. These may be edited and publication is not guaranteed. Letters of crisp comment, under 1000 words, and articles between 1000 – 4000 are especially welcome. Write to: The Editor, Kipling Journal, 32 Merton Road, Harrow HA2 OAB, England or email to davpag@yahoo.co.uk