Westminster Abbey » Rudyard Kipling Burial Date: 23 Jan, 1936 Field: Writer; poet Location in the Abbey: South transept, poets corner Type of memorial: Grave The ashes of Rudyard Kipling, poet and writer, were buried in Poets' Corner at noon on 23 January 1936, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. The inscription on the stone reads: RUDYARD KIPLING. BORN 30th DEC. 1865 DIED 18th JAN. 1936. Order of Service for the Burial of Rudyard Kipling 1936 (PDF, 423 KB) The original gravestone (now at Kipling's house in Sussex) was replaced by the present Belgian marble stone in 1966. The pallbearers at the funeral included Kipling's cousin the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the marble casket was covered by a Union flag. Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, son of Professor John Kipling and his wife Alice (Macdonald).

His parents came to England on leave but did not take Rudyard and his sister Alice back with them and they were left in the charge of paid guardians. After attending the United Services College he did not attend university due to lack of means and he went to India to work as a journalist. His books Plain Tales from the Hills, Soldiers Three and Wee Willie Winkie were a success and he returned to England in 1889. The Jungle Book, Kim and many other works followed. His poems Mandalay, A Smuggler's Song and If are still well known. In 1892 he married American Caroline Balestier and they lived in the USA for several years. Their son John was killed in the war in 1915 and daughter Josephine died young. Their other daughter Elsie married George Bambridge. In 1907 Kipling was the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature but he declined many other honours. He was one of the first members of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission and advised on the inscriptions for the headstones in British war cemeteries.

He died on 18 January 1936 after an operation for a perforated ulcer. A photo of the gravestone can be purchased from Westminster Abbey Library. Further reading: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004. Kipling's home, Batemans, at Burwash in Sussex is open to the public BBC - History - Stanley Baldwin z Stanley Baldwin © Baldwin was British prime minister three times in the 1920s and 1930s . Stanley Baldwin was born on 3 August 1867 in Bewdley, Worcestershire, the only son of a wealthy industrialist and member of parliament. The author Rudyard Kipling was Baldwin's cousin on his mother's side of the family. After graduating from Cambridge University, Baldwin joined the family iron-mongering business. He became Conservative MP for Bewdley in 1908, a seat his father had held. Following various ministerial appointments, in 1922 he was appointed chancellor of the exchequer. The following year he became prime minister when ill health forced Andrew Bonar Law to retire.

He soon called a general election to seek approval for the government's plans to introduce protective tariffs, but failed to gain a majority. Ramsay MacDonald's first Labour government came to power, backed by Liberal support. It was short-lived. By November 1924, the Conservatives were back in power with a landslide majority and Baldwin as prime minister. In the General Strike of 1926, Baldwin proclaimed a state of emergency and refused to negotiate further until the strike was over. The following year he passed the Trade Disputes Act, which declared general strikes to be revolutionary and illegal. The Conservatives lost the general election of 1929 and Labour came back to power. Baldwin considered leaving politics, and spent much of the next two years fighting elements within his own party. But in 1931 he returned to government as a member of Ramsay MacDonald's National Coalition and in June 1935 he became prime minister again when MacDonald resigned. This term of office was dominated by rising tension in Europe and the abdication crisis. Baldwin believed that Edward VIII's wish to marry the divorcee Wallis Simpson was unacceptable.

The king was given the choice of renouncing her or abdicating, and chose to abdicate in December 1936. Baldwin resisted calls for re-armament and took a conciliatory approach towards Nazi Germany. Baldwin retired in May 1937 and was made Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. He died on 14 September 1947. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: The British Connection [Mackinac Center] By Lawrence W. Reed , published on March 18, 2003 Just seven miles north of Escanaba in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula sits a little town with a very big name. More than a hundred years after the death of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, the town’s namesake, it’s unlikely that many of Gladstone, Michigan’s 5,000 residents could tell you much about the man. But he is widely considered to be one of the greatest statesmen of the 19th century. The town of Gladstone was originally christened “Minnewasca,” the Sioux Indian word for “white water,” in 1887. But local businessman William D.

Washburn pushed to rename the town after Gladstone because a nearby railroad was partially funded by British capital. Area residents wanted to show their appreciation for the resulting economic development. Stay Engaged Receive our weekly emails! email address It should be noted that the Upper Peninsula, or “UP” as we Michiganians affectionally call this northern, thickly-forested portion of our state, was an important battleground in the 18th century wars between Britain and France. Parts of the territory changed hands between the French and British more than once, and local history is rich with remnants of decades of rivalry between these two European powers. Just what kind of man was William Ewart Gladstone? We are told that he read 20,000 books in his lifetime and could speak Greek, Latin, Italian, and French as well as English. Biographer Philip Magnus wrote that “at the time of his death [in 1898] he was . . .

the most venerated and influential statesman in the world.” Another biographer, who currently sits in Britain’s House of Lords, Roy Jenkins, declares that Gladstone “stamped the Victorian age even more than did [Queen] Victoria herself, and represented it almost as much.” No individual in history had a longer or more distinguished career in the British government. Gladstone served 61 years in the House of Commons, was in charge of the nation’s finances as Chancellor of the Exchequer for 14 budgets in four administrations, and was also leader of a major political party for almost 40 years. Four times he was elected Prime Minister, serving in this capacity for a total of 12 years. He was 84 when he retired as Prime Minister in 1894, the oldest PM in British history. Hailed affectionately as the “Grand Old Man” for his influence and stature, Gladstone also was known as “England’s Great Commoner” because he had not a drop of royal blood and refused to accept any titles of nobility. When he died, a quarter of a million citizens attended his funeral.

What made this son of Scottish parents both great and memorable, however, was not simply a long career in government. Indeed, as a devoutly religious man he always put service to God ahead of service to country and felt that what he did as a politician should be unequivocally faithful to both. What made Gladstone great and memorable was what he actually accomplished while he served in government. Biographer Magnus says Gladstone “achieved unparalleled success in his policy of setting the individual free from a multitude of obsolete restrictions.” Today, when a citizen is elected with a mandate to cut the government down to size, but ends up moderating his positions while in power, conventional wisdom credits him with having “grown in office.” Gladstone “grew” but in precisely the opposite direction. When he entered Parliament at age 22 in 1832, Gladstone was a protectionist on trade, a defender of the state-subsidized Church of England, an opponent of reform and a protector of the status quo. By 1850, he had become an ardent advocate of free trade and by 1890 had reduced Britain’s tariffs from 1,200 to just 12.

Gladstone slashed government spending, taxes, and regulations. He ended state subsidies for the Church of England in Ireland. He pushed through reforms that allowed Jews and Catholics to serve in Parliament and that extended the vote to millions of taxpaying workers who had previously been denied the franchise. He extolled the virtues of self-help and private charity. And he lived what he preached. Even as prime minister, Gladstone was so moved by the degraded plight of London prostitutes that he would search the streets of London to talk them out of their destructive occupation. Gladstone even urged the British people to look to the ideas of America’s Founding Fathers for inspiration. “I was brought up to distrust and dislike liberty; I learned to believe in it,” he told a friend in 1891. Today, a portrait of Gladstone hangs in the town’s city hall. The residents there should be proud that their town pays tribute to the Grand Old Man. Meanwhile, Michigan’s British connection involves more than just Gladstone. Two other Upper Peninsula towns with different names a hundred miles apart are both named for another famous Brit—though he never set foot in either one. The towns are Kipling and Rudyard, and the man was Rudyard Kipling.

(The town of Kipling, believe it or not, is a “suburb” of adjacent Gladstone). Born a British subject in Bombay, India, in 1865, Rudyard Kipling is remembered mainly for his significant contributions to English literature. His novels, short stories and poetry earned him an immense following and in 1907, a Nobel Prize in Literature. Before the age of 40, he was acclaimed the world over for his Jungle Books, poems like Recessional and Barracks Room Ballads, and his masterpiece novel about life in India, Kim. He was an unofficial Poet Laureate of Great Britain—unofficial only because he could have had the title but declined it. His professional writing spanned 50 years until his death in 1936. It was in the 1890s, before Kipling was even 30 years of age, when his fame was enough to prompt one Frederick D. Underwood to name two stations on a railroad route through the U.P. after his favorite author. As General Manager of the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste.

Marie Railroad (known as the “Soo Line”), Underwood certainly had that right, but local townspeople enthusiastically approved. The tiny settlement at the head of Green Bay on the northern end of Lake Michigan became the town of Kipling. About 30 miles south of America’s third oldest city, Sault Ste, Marie, the hamlet of Pine River was changed to Rudyard. When the esteemed author learned of the honor, he immediately wrote to Underwood to thank him. In his letter, he said “. . . I write to beg you to send me a photograph if possible, of either Rudyard or Kipling or preferentially both. I shall take a deep interest in their little welfares.” He may have appreciated the irony of the town of Kipling being situated next to the larger city of Gladstone, named for a famous British Prime Minister of the late 19th Century. Kipling the author didn’t much care for Gladstone the politician. The former was an unabashed advocate of British imperialism while the latter worked to scale back the costly reaches of the British empire.

Rudyard Kipling’s outspoken views on the foreign and domestic policies of his day made him some powerful enemies and sometimes rattled his friends. He coined the phrase, “white man’s burden,” when he urged the U.S. to take a more active role in civilizing backward regions of the world. He so vehemently criticized America’s “belated” entry into World War I that the governments of Britain and France publicly disavowed his remarks. He opposed compulsory military service but argued that a man who had never enlisted should lose the right to vote. When his beloved cousin Stanley Baldwin became Prime Minister of Great Britain, Kipling chastised him as “a socialist at heart.” His views on labor unions were forever colored by an experience he had while on a visit to Australia. The purchase of superior lifeboats made in Britain was rejected there in favor of buying inferior ones made in Australia. Kipling saw this as unions sacrificing the safety of the larger community. Thereafter, he regarded the well-paid leadership of organized labor as self-serving and irresponsible. Both towns of Rudyard and Kipling remain small today, with a few hundred residents in each.

But named as they are for a man of large stature and notable accomplishments, they should be proud their very existence helps keep his memory alive. British roots in Michigan run deep, but perhaps the most public evidence of them are these three towns that bear the names of two very illustrious British subjects. # # # Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Michigan. Two Michigan Towns with the Same Name [Mackinac Center] By Lawrence W. Reed , published on May 6, 2002 Kipling was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize in literature for his "power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration." All across Michigan are places whose names are rich with interesting but sometimes forgotten history. "Mackinac" means "big turtle," which is what the local Indians thought the now-famous resort island looked like. In 1861, while surveying a road through the Thumb area, a man camped at an old hunter's cabin where he found a well-worn hatchet—giving rise to the community known as Bad Axe.

The Livingston County town of Hell offers two conflicting theories as to the origin of its appellation, but this much is certain: It's not the same place many of us have often been told to go to. In the Upper Peninsula, two towns, one hundred miles apart, have different names but were named for the same man—though he never set foot in either one. The towns are Kipling and Rudyard, and the man was Rudyard Kipling. Who he was and how the towns came to honor him is a story worth retelling. Born a British subject in Bombay, India, in 1865, Rudyard Kipling is remembered mainly for his significant contributions to English literature. His novels, short stories, and poetry earned him an immense following and in 1907, a Nobel Prize in literature. Before the age of 40, he was acclaimed the world over for his "Jungle Books," poems like "Recessional" and "Barracks Room Ballads," and his masterpiece novel about life in India, "Kim." He was unofficial Poet Laureate of Great Britain—unofficial only because he could have had the title but declined it.

His professional writing spanned 50 years until his death in 1936. It was in the 1890s, before Kipling was even 30 years of age, when his fame prompted one Frederick D. Underwood to name two stations on a railroad route through Michigan's Upper Peninsula after his favorite author. As general manager of the Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad (known as the "Soo Line"), Underwood certainly had that right, but local townspeople enthusiastically approved. The tiny settlement at the head of Green Bay on the northern end of Lake Michigan became the town of Kipling. About 30 miles south of America's third-oldest city, Sault Ste. Marie, the name of the hamlet of Pine River was changed to Rudyard. When the esteemed author learned of the honor, he immediately wrote to Underwood to thank him, saying ". . . I write to beg you to send me a photograph if possible, of either Rudyard or Kipling or preferentially both.

I shall take a deep interest in their little welfares." He may have appreciated the irony of the town of Kipling being situated next to the larger city of Gladstone, named for a famous British prime minister of the late 19th century. Kipling the author didn't much care for Gladstone the politician. The former was an unabashed advocate of British imperialism while the latter worked to scale back the costly reaches of the British Empire. Rudyard Kipling's outspoken views on the foreign and domestic policies of his day made him some powerful enemies and sometimes rattled his friends. He coined the phrase, "white man's burden," when he urged the United States to take a more active role in civilizing backward regions of the world. He so vehemently criticized America's "belated" entry into World War I that the governments of Britain and France publicly disavowed his remarks. He opposed compulsory military service but argued that a man who had never enlisted should lose the right to vote. When his beloved cousin Stanley Baldwin became prime minister of Great Britain, Kipling chastised him as "a socialist at heart." His views on labor unions were forever colored by an experience he had while on a visit to Australia.

The purchase of superior lifeboats made in Britain was rejected there in favor of buying inferior ones made in Australia. Kipling believed the unions were sacrificing the safety of the larger community. Thereafter, he regarded the well-paid leadership of organized labor as self-serving and irresponsible. Both towns of Rudyard and Kipling remain small today, with a few hundred residents in each. But named as they are for a man of large stature and notable accomplishments, they should be proud their very existence helps keep his memory alive. ##### (Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the author and his affiliation are cited.) ISSN: 1093-2240, SKU: V2002-17 Summary All across Michigan are places whose names are rich with interesting but sometimes forgotten history. In the Upper Peninsula, two towns one hundred miles apart were named for the same man: Kipling and Rudyard, after British author Rudyard Kipling. Who he was and how the towns came to honor him is a story worth retelling.

Main text word count: 701 Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling Location of death: London, England Cause of death: Cerebral Hemorrhage Nationality: England Executive summary: The Jungle Book Rudyard Kipling was a 19th and 20th century writer of great renown, the most widely read British author of his era, and winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born to British parents in Bombay and spent his first six years in India, before being left in the care of an unrelated family in England for what was deemed a more "normal" upbringing (though Kipling said later that he was abused and tortured while in the custody of this foster family). He later attended boarding school at the United Services College in north Devon, and embarked on a career as a journalist and, eventually, a writer of poetry and fiction. His best known work is The Jungle Book, a warmhearted collection of children's stories about a boy named Mowgli, raised by wolves and befriended by other animals in the jungles of India.

Kipling's other noted works include the poems "If," "The Ballad of East and West," "Mandalay," and "The White Man's Burden," the short story "The Man Who Would Be a King," and the novel Captains Courageous. The artists Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter were his uncles, and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was his cousin. Science fiction maestro John W. Campbell frequently cited Kipling as a key inspiration. Father: John Lockwood Kipling (museum director, b. 6-Jul-1837, d. 26-Jan-1911) Mother: Alice Broune MacDonald (b. 4-Apr-1837, m. 18-Mar-1865, d. 23-Nov-1910) Sister: Alice MacDonald Kipling Fleming ("Trix", b. 11-Jun-1868, d. 1948) Brother: Baby Kipling (b. 1870, d. 1870) Wife: Caroline Starr Balestier (b. 31-Dec-1862, m.

19-Jan-1892 until his death, d. 19-Dec-1939) Daughter: Josephine Kipling (b. Dec-1892, d. 1899) Daughter: Elsie Kipling Bambridge (b. 2-Feb-1896, m. 23-May-1976) Son: John Kipling (b. 1897, d. 1915 WWI, Battle of Loos) High School: United Services College, North Devon (boarding school) Hunting for a Home After Destruction and Loss: Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book | Tor.com Hunting for a Home After Destruction and Loss: Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book Mari Ness Thu Aug 13, 2015 2:00pm 25 comments These two things fight together in me as the snakes fight in the spring. The water comes out of my eyes; but I laugh while it falls. Why?

–Mowgli in The Jungle Book Unlike most of the other works covered in this Read-Watch, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is not one work or story, but rather a collection of short stories and poems first published in the late 19th century. The first half of the book contains stories about Mowgli, a young boy raised by wolves, a bear and a panther in the jungle, and his great enemy Shere Khan the Tiger. The second, better half of the book tells tales about a fur seal searching for an island free from hunters; a fighting mongoose; a young boy who witnesses an elephant dance; and a story that involves a lot of horses complaining about their riders. Only two things connect the stories: all of them include animals, and all focus on the struggle to find a place to belong. Rudyard Kipling was very familiar with that theme. Born in India to British parents, he was sent to Britain when he was only five, an experience he remembered with misery for the rest of his life. He did not do well in school, so his parents recalled him to British India at the age of 16, finding him a job in Lahore, now in Pakistan.

Just seven years later, he found himself heading back to London, and then to the United States, then back to London, and then to Vermont, before returning again to England. It was not quite a rootless life—the adult Kipling found houses and homes—but Kipling was never to feel himself entirely English, or, for that matter, entirely Anglo-Indian, and certainly not American, though later critics were to firmly label him as imperialist, and definitely British. Having Conservative British prime minister Stanley Baldwin as a cousin helped that label stick. That seeming rootlessness drove much of his writing, something he was virtually addicted to. From his return to India until his death in 1936 at the age of 70, Kipling wrote almost constantly. He won the Nobel Prize in 1907 for his often controversial novels and poems (most notably “White Man’s Burden,” which has alternatively been read as pure propaganda or satire). The stories in The Jungle Book were largely written in Vermont, with Kipling reaching back to his past for inspiration, and they have, at times, almost a nostalgic feel.

I’ll confess it right now: I’ve always found it difficult to get into The Jungle Book, and this reread was no different. Part of the problem might be the thees and thous that litter the first part of the book: this tends to be something I have little patience with in more modern books (that is, the 19th century and onwards) unless the text provides good reason for it, and “Talking animals” doesn’t seem like a particularly good reason. (I came to this book after Oz, Narnia, and Wonderland had introduced me to the idea that animals could talk, even if they usually did so in other worlds, not ours.) As proof of that, I’ll note that the thees and thous used in the final story, “Toomai of the Elephants,” for instance, are somehow a little less annoying because they are voiced by humans. But they are still mildly annoying. I also find myself flinching at this: So Mowgli went away and hunted with the four cubs in the jungle from that day on. But he was not always alone, because, years afterwards, he became a man and married. But that is a story for grown-ups.

First, Kipling, of course Mowgli wasn’t alone—you just told us that he was with four wolf cubs who could speak, if, admittedly, only with a lot of thees and thous! That is the definition of not alone! Second, as a kid, nothing irked me more than getting told that something was a story for grown-ups, and that, everyone, is the story of how and why I read a number of books not at all appropriate for my age level. As a grown-up, that remembered irritation still colors my reading. If you have a story, Kipling, tell me. Don’t tell me it’s a story just for certain people. Other editorial asides are equally annoying: “Now you must be content to skip ten or eleven whole years, and only guess at all the wonderful life Mowgli lived among the wolves….” No, Kipling, I’m NOT CONTENT. If it’s a wonderful life, let me hear about it. Don’t just tell me it would fill many books—that just makes me want it more. The presentation of the Mowgli tales doesn’t really help either.

For instance, the initial story, about Mowgli’s introduction to the wolf clan, ends with the haunting sentence: The dawn was beginning to break when Mowgli went down the hillside alone, to meet those mysterious things that are called men. Except that rather than getting this meeting, we get a poem and a story that functions as a flashback. It’s not a bad story, as it goes, but since I already know that Mowgli lives to the end of it, the attempt in the middle of the chapter to leave his fate in suspense is a failure from the get go. The third story, however, gets back to the more interesting stuff: Mowgli’s meeting with men. It’s something that absolutely must happen, since Mowgli never quite manages to become fully part of the wolf world: he needs additional lessons from Baloo the bear just to understand the animal language, and the Laws of the Jungle, and even with a wolf family and two additional animal tutors, he still misses important lessons like “Never Trust Monkeys.” I summarize.

But as the third tale demonstrates, Mowgli is not quite part of the human world, either: he has lived for far too long among wolves to understand humans and their customs, in an echo of Kipling’s own experiences. Kipling, of course, had hardly invented the idea of a child raised by wolves or other animals—similar stories appear in folklore from around the world, often as origin tales for heroes or founders of great cities and empires, common enough that we’ll be encountering two such figures in this reread alone. But though couched in mythic language (which, I guess, partly explains those thees and thous), his take on these tales is slightly different. The stories are less interested in Mowgli’s strength and potential heroism, and more in discussing his position as outsider in nearly every culture: wolf, monkey, and human, with law, control, and allegiance as important subthemes. And they end on a somewhat ambiguous note: Mowgli chooses to leave humanity and return the jungle, to run with wolves, but the narrative immediately undercuts that, assuring us that eventually he returns to humanity. In other words, leaving us with a character still shifting between two worlds.

Other characters in the later stories are a bit more successful at finding their place in the world, and a home: the mongoose fights his way into a home and a place; the fur seal finds an island untouched by human hunters; the young boy earns a place among the elephant hunters. It’s probably important to note, however, that the mongoose needs to do this in part because he’s been displaced—he lost his home and parents through flooding. The fur seal, too, finds a home—but only after his fellow seals have been brutally slaughtered. The elephant overseers work under white overseers, in continuous danger of losing their homes. The animals brought to India to serve as mounts for the British army never do completely lose their uneasiness. Each tale offers an ambiguous, nuanced look at displacement from a writer who was all too familiar with this. And now for a slightly less comfortable topic: The Jungle Book features many non-white characters along with animals.

Not surprisingly for a 19th century book written by a British citizen who was to pen a poem titled “The White Man’s Burden,” however, Kipling does occasionally use some words that are or can be considered offensive towards these characters—most notably when describing the young Toomai as “looking like a goblin in the torch-light,” and in a later statement, “But, since native children have no nerves worth speaking of,” drawing a sharp divide between British and native children—in context, not in favor of the Indian children. Kipling was certainly aware of and sensitive to racial distinctions in colonial India, and aware that many Indians strongly disagreed with British laws and regulations. This is even a subtheme of the final story, “Toomai of the Elephants,” which includes Indians criticizing British hunting practices: one Indian character openly calls the white character (his employer) a madman. The criticism seems deserved. The white character also tells jokes at the expense of his employees and their children, and although they laugh, their resentment is not that well concealed. The story also contains a later hint that the father of the main character, Toomai, does not want his son to come to the attention of white supervisors.

“Her Majesty’s Servants,” while focused more on the issues faced by horses and mules in the British Army, and which has a crack at the Amir of Afghanistan, also contains the sidenote that non-British elephant drivers weren’t paid on days where they were sick—something that does not happen with British cavalry officers, another stark disparity between the two groups. Kipling also includes the quiet note that in war, people and animals bleed, and in this war, led by British officers, native people are among those bleeding. The Mowgli tales also contain multiple hints of racial conflicts, notably in the way that the jungle animals have created rules to help prevent further attacks and encroachments from invaders and colonists. Many of these rules frankly make no sense from a biological point of view, or even from the point of view of the animals in the story, but make absolute sense from the point of view of people attempting to avoid further subjugation. As do their efforts to cloak these rules in self-pride: the animals tell themselves that animals who hunt humans become mangy and lose their teeth, and that humans are too easily to kill anyway. But the real reason they don’t: they fear reprisals from humans if they do.

It’s a legitimate fear, as the next stories show: Mowgli might have been raised by wolves, and he needs the assistance of his fellow pack members and a bear and a panther and a snake from time to time, but he is still superior. A few other related points before we leave this: Kipling very much believes in the power of genetics over training. Mowgli, for instance, is skilled at woodwork not because anyone has taught him (until he heads to a human village, no one could), but because he’s the son of a woodworker. It’s strongly implied that Toomai is able to attend an elephant dance because his ancestors have always worked with elephants, creating an almost mystic bond, though it also helps that Toomai has basically been raised with elephants. And, well, the fur seal that just happens to lead all of the other little fur seals off to a safe island? Is a fur seal with pure white fur. This is not always a good thing for the fur seal, though it later helps to save his life, since the hunters think that a white seal is unlucky and decide not to kill him.

Given the rather large numbers of pure white harp seals killed then and now, this superstition seems, how can I put it, unlikely. Then again, my sense is that Kipling did not research fur seals or seal hunting in any great depth before writing his story—for instance, he briefly mentions that the Galapagos Islands are too hot for fur seals, apparently unaware of the Galapagos fur seals that haul out on those islands on a regular basis. It’s not, after all, really a story about seals, but rather, like the other tales here, a story about finding safety and home. As universal as that theme might be, I can’t quite say that The Jungle Book is written from a universal, or even a non-British, point of view. But it’s also a book sharply aware that growing up, and changing worlds, is not always easy or safe, a book aware of inequities, and a book of quiet horrors, where the worst part may not be the scenes of stripping seals for fur. Disney was to ignore almost all of this, as we’ll see next week. Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

History of Stanley Baldwin - GOV.UK GOV.UK Stanley Baldwin Conservative 1935 to 1937, 1924 to 1929, 1923 to 1924 Born 3 August 1867, Bewdley, Worcesterhire Died 14 December 1947, Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire Dates in office 1935 to 1937, 1924 to 1929, 1923 to 1924 Political party Conservative Major acts Trade Disputes Act 1927: following General Strike, introduced to limit powers and of trade union movement. Affected funding of Labour party too. Government of India Act 1935: gave limited powers of self-government. Heavily opposed by Winston Churchill. Public Order Act 1936: introduced to deal with street disturbances following marches by supporters of British Union Fascists and their opponents. Interesting facts He served under 3 monarchs.

“There is no country … where there are not somewhere lovers of freedom who look to this country to carry the torch and keep it burning bright until such time as they may again be able to light their extinguished torches at our flame. We owe it not only to our own people but to the world to preserve our soul for that.” Stanley Baldwin had a double inheritance. His father’s family were wealthy industrialists and he helped his father create what was, from 1902, one of Britain’s largest iron and steel firms, Baldwins Ltd. His mother’s family had artistic and literary interests: his uncles included the artists Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, and Rudyard Kipling was a cousin. His father, Alfred Baldwin, was also Conservative MP for West Worcestershire (Bewdley) from 1892. On Alfred’s death in 1908, Stanley succeeded him as MP. His business experience helped his appointment as Financial Secretary of the Treasury in 1917, in David Lloyd George ’s wartime coalition government.

Concerned at the financial costs of the war, under the false name of ‘FST’ in a 1919 letter in The Times he appealed for voluntary donations by the rich to help reduce the war debt. He himself gave a fifth of his own wealth. In 1921 he entered the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, but in October 1922 he played a leading part in a Conservative rebellion that overthrew the coalition government and the premiership of Lloyd George. In Andrew Bonar Law ’s Conservative government he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Bonar Law retired through illness in May 1923, Baldwin became Prime Minister. Determined to help reduce unemployment, he called a general election in November to seek support for a policy of trade protection. Failing to retain a majority, his government resigned in January 1924. Its replacement, the first Labour government also lacked an overall majority and, after it was defeated in another general election in October 1924, he returned as Prime Minister.

His second Conservative government was responsible for several notable achievements: the Locarno non-aggression pact, expansion of pensions and house building, local government reform and extending the right to vote to women aged over 21. Baldwin’s particular concern was to reduce social tensions and secure industrial peace. Although faced by the General Strike in May 1926, his combination of firmness and conciliation guaranteed its defeat. After the Conservatives lost the May 1929 election, Baldwin endured a severe party crisis, with attempts to force his resignation as party leader. Against considerable criticism from the main popular newspapers, he successfully fought back with a still-famous condemnation of the great ‘press lords’. During the 1931 financial and political crisis, he contributed to the formation of a coalition government, led by the former Labour Prime Minister, James Ramsay MacDonald . As Lord President of the Council, Baldwin at first sought to promote international disarmament, warning of the difficulty of defence against air attack: “the bomber will always get through”. However, as the threat from Nazi Germany became obvious, he accepted the need to arm again and introduced new defence programmes each year from 1934 to 1937, against Labour and Liberal opposition.

He became Prime Minister of the national government in June 1935 and in the autumn he won a general election, promising to continue to improve national defences. When seeking to avoid war with Mussolini’s Italy over Abyssinia, in order to focus effort against Hitler’s Germany, his Cabinet was embarrassed by an early disclosure of a compromise settlement (the Hore-Laval pact). In retrospect, the national government’s policy of combining armed deterrence with efforts to bind Hitler and Mussolini into a general European settlement seemed not enough. After the Second World War broke out in 1939, Baldwin became a leading target for those – especially Winston Churchill – who thought more could have been done to speed up rearmament and prevent war. Faced in late 1936 with King Edward VIII’s proposed marriage to the twice-divorced Mrs Wallis Simpson, which met widespread disapproval, he took the lead in making it plain that if the king persisted he should give up the throne. His management of this abdication crisis was highly praised. Baldwin’s most notable position was his support of parliamentary democracy during times when revolution and dictatorship were common European experiences.

In the 1920s he sought to prevent class conflict and mix the Labour movement into the party system and, in the 1930s, he became an international figure in the defence of democratic and Christian values. From 1938 to 1939 he led a major appeal to provide financial assistance for Jewish refugees from Nazi brutality. His post-1939 reputation as a guilty man who failed to resist Hitler or to rearm persists as a popular myth, but has been overtaken by modern historical scholarship. On his retirement from government and party politics in May 1937, he was created Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. Help us improve GOV.UK Andrew Hamilton on Rudyard Kipling's "The Burden of Jerusalem" | Counter-Currents Publishing Andrew Hamilton 2,469 words Rudyard Kipling is out of favor, in large part because his work was so politically and racially incorrect. One of his suppressed poems is “The Burden of Jerusalem,” which is considered “anti-Semitic.” Indeed, several of his poems have social or racial themes that render them verboten.

His books even had swastikas—Aryan Indian symbols—in both right- and left-facing orientations on their covers or title pages. In “Mr. Eliot’s Kipling,” a review of T. S. Eliot’s edition of A Choice of Kipling’s Verse in the Left-wing Nation magazine in 1943 , Jewish chauvinist Lionel Trilling expressed disdain for Eliot’s admiration for Kipling, and drew analogies between the two poets. He also accused Eliot of anti-Semitism. In a letter written from Jerusalem to his only surviving child, Elsie, Kipling reportedly observed that “many races are vile but the Jew in bulk on his native heath is the Vilest of them all.” “The Burden of Jerusalem” exhibits the same non-sycophantic attitude. Consequently, it was suppressed for many years. Kipling’s widow made the decision to withhold the poem from publication.

(The fact that it disparages Muslims did not bother anyone.) English poet, novelist, and short story writer Rudyard Kipling was born to English parents in Bombay (due to the demographic and psychological implosion of the white race, it is now called “Mumbai”) in 1865. (His mother was of Scottish descent.) In addition to his high literary reputation during his lifetime, he was one of the most popular writers in England in both prose and verse. Buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey next to Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, Kipling’s cousin, Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, was a pallbearer at his funeral. Over the course of his life, Kipling lived in India, England, and, for four years, Brattleboro, Vermont. (His wife was American.) He won the Nobel Prize in 1907 at 42, and remains the youngest recipient of the Literature Prize. He was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship, the Order of Merit, and a knighthood, but declined all those honors.

Kipling used swastikas in the published versions of his books In the early 1940s copies of “The Burden of Jerusalem” were circulated among Anglo-American elites through the auspices of Sir Alfred Webb-Johnson, a physician who attended Kipling during his final illness. Kipling’s widow entrusted copies of two unpublished poems to Webb-Johnson, “Burden” and “A Chapter of Proverbs” (which contains no discernible censor-worthy material). Webb-Johnson deposited copies of the poems in the British Museum and gave others to Prime Minister Winston Churchill (which was placed in the Churchill Library, Cambridge), President Franklin Roosevelt (placed in the Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York), and Queen Mary (placed in the Library at WindsorCastle). ( Source .) Churchill also sent a copy of “Burden” to President Roosevelt, bound between blue-and-gold covers. In his October 17, 1943 cover letter , Churchill wrote, “I understand that Mrs.

Kipling decided not to publish them in case they should lead to controversy and it is therefore important that their existence should not become known and there should be no public reference to the gift.” Again, a reading of the two poems proves that “Burden,” not “Proverbs,” was what frightened everyone. The late Christopher Hitchens published the two poems in an anti-white book he wrote, Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (1990), pp. 86–93, which is where I first read them. He reissued the book with a new preface in 2004 as Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship. Hitchens said he unearthed the poems and correspondence at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park in 1988. About Churchill’s October 17, 1943 letter to FDR Hitchens wrote, “This is practically the only communication from Churchill, in an entire file of correspondence which extends in print over three volumes, to which Roosevelt made no reply or acknowledgement of any sort.” (p. 93) This is untrue. FDR wrote letters to both Churchill and Dr.

Alfred Webb-Johnson dated October 25, 1943. In the letter to Webb-Johnson FDR said , “I had read ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’ before and I could understand why Mrs. Kipling thought it would be best not to publish it. Nevertheless, it is a gem.” To Churchill he wrote , “Dear Winston: Those two little books are gems—and I can well understand why they should not be made public at this time. Perhaps ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’ should wait until you and I are strong enough to carry Ibn Saud to Jerusalem and Dr. Weizman [sic] to Meca [sic].” Again, this was 1943. How ultra-sensitive the “leaders of the Western world” were! Compare Kipling’s mild, inoffensive poem to the inexpressibly vile anti-white messages that pour daily into the impressionable minds of hundreds of millions of people the world over—including elites, alien and native—through television, motion pictures, songs, and video games—not to mention books and poems! Be honest. Who really rules?

Swastika on Kipling book cover, 1929–1930 It should be noted that despite the frequent invocation of Biblical motifs (primarily Old Testament?) in Kipling’s work, he apparently was not a Christian . The Bible and its cadences were a literary, not a sacred resource for him. Moreover, he was a Freemason, and Freemasonry is incompatible with orthodox Christian belief, Protestant or Catholic. Since most of us are no longer versed in our Christian heritage, it is necessary to explain the Old Testament background of the narrative, which traces Jewish and Muslim myth/history from the Hebrew patriarch Abraham to the present day. Abraham or Abram is mythically regarded as the founder of Judaism, the progenitor of the Hebrew race through his son Isaac, and of Arabs through his son Ishmael, Isaac’s half-brother. As recounted in Genesis, Isaac (later the father of Jacob and Esau) was the only son of Abraham and Sarah. He was born after Sarah was too old to conceive.

Following Isaac’s birth, Sarah grew jealous of her servant Hagar, Abraham’s concubine, and cruelly drove Hagar and Ishmael (Hagar’s son by Abraham), into the desert to die. However, through God’s grace they survived. Today, Ishmael is honored as the forefather of the Arabs by Muslims who esteem him as Jews do Isaac. Consequently, the use of the name “Ishmael” to mark a social outcast, common in Judaism and Christianity (e.g., the famous opening line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: “Call me Ishmael”), is unknown in Islam. In the final stanza of the poem, the narrator blames Abraham for the age-old strife between Arabs and Jews: Yet he who bred the unending strife, And was not brave enough to save The Bondsmaid from the furious wife, He wrought thy woe, Jerusalem. Immediately following the poem I’ve provided brief, conventional definitions of terms within it, in the order of their appearance, which might be unfamiliar. With such background, the meaning of Kipling’s text is self-explanatory. To be clear, I don’t take most Old Testament “history” of this kind literally.

I lean heavily toward Old Testament minimalism . (More detailed summary here .) THE BURDEN OF JERUSALEM But Abram said unto Sarai, “Behold thy maid is in thy hand. Do to her as it pleaseth thee.” And when Sarai dealt hardly with her she fled from her face. Genesis 16:6 In ancient days and deserts wild There rose a feud—still unsubdued— Twixt Sarah’s son and Hagar’s child That centred round Jerusalem (While underneath the timeless boughs Of Mamre’s oak ‘mid stranger-folk The Patriarch slumbered and his spouse Nor dreamed about Jerusalem.) But Ishmael lived where he was born, And pastured there in tents of hair Among the Camel and the Thorn— Beersheba, South Jerusalem But Israel sought employ and food At Pharaoh’s knees, till Rameses Dismissed his plaguey multitude, Across the wilderness they came And launched their horde o’er Jordan’s ford, And blazed the road by sack and flame To Jebusite Jerusalem. Then Kings and Judges ruled the land, And did not well by Israel, Till Babylonia took a hand And drove them from Jerusalem.

And Cyrus sent them back anew, To carry on as they had done, Till angry Titus overthrew Then they were scattered North and West, While each Crusade more certain made That Hagar’s vengeful son possessed Mohammedan Jerusalem. Where Ishmael held his desert state And framed a creed to serve his need— “Allah-hu-Akbar! God is Great!” He preached it in Jerusalem. And every realm they wandered through Rose, far or near, in hate and fear, And robbed and tortured, chased and slew, The outcasts of Jerusalem. So ran their doom—half seer, half slave— And ages passed, and at the last They stood beside each tyrant’s grave, And whispered of Jerusalem. We do not know what God attends The Unloved Race in every place Where they amass their dividends From Riga to Jerusalem. But all the course of Time makes clear To everyone (except the Hun) It does not pay to interfere With Cohen from Jerusalem. For ‘neath the Rabbi’s curls and fur (Or scents and rings of movie-kings) The aloof, unleavened blood of Ur, Broods steadfast on Jerusalem.

Where Ishmael bides in his own place— A robber bold, as was foretold, To stand before his brother’s face— The wolf without Jerusalem. And burdened Gentile o’er the main, Must bear the weight of Israel’s hate Because he is not brought again In triumph to Jerusalem. Yet he who bred the unending strife, And was not brave enough to save The Bondsmaid from the furious wife, He wrought thy woe, Jerusalem. Mamre’s oak: An oak tree on the West Bank regarded as “Abraham’s tree” since the 16th century. It was situated in a grove where Abraham several times resided. The Patriarch: Abraham Beersheba: Spot where Abraham resided for many years, and from which he sent Hagar and Ishmael into the desert to die. It was the southern limit of Palestine in Biblical times. Thus: “South [of] Jerusalem.” Rameses: Egyptian pharaoh, a reference to the Jews’ expulsion from Egypt as described in Exodus. Jordan‘s ford: The crossing of the Jordan River by the Hebrews, leading to the subjugation of Canaan (Palestine).

Jebusite Jerusalem: The Jebusites were a Canaanite tribe dwelling at Jebus (Jerusalem) before its conquest by the Hebrews. Kings and Judges: The period of Jewish hegemony described in the Old Testament books of Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. The kingdom split into Israel and Judah during this period. Babylonia took a hand: The northern Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians in 722 BC, the southern Kingdom of Judah to the Babylonians in 586 BC. Cyrus sent them back: Following the fall of Babylon to the Aryan-Persian Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, Persia financed the return of Judean exiles to Jerusalem, where a Jewish province was again established. Titus overthrew: Future Roman emperor who destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD. (In real life, the pagan Titus had a politically powerful Jewish mistress, Berenice!) Scattered North and West: The Jewish diaspora after the fall of Jerusalem to Rome. Each Crusade: The medieval Christian crusades in the Middle East.

“Hagar’s vengeful son,” Ishmael, etc.: At this point in the poem, Arabs and Muslims collectively, not the original man. Hun: Germans The aloof, unleavened blood of Ur: Beneath their modern-seeming exterior, Jews’ ancient, vengeful hatred still burns. This year “The Burden of Jerusalem” was finally published with more than 1,300 other poems in a new book: Thomas Pinney, ed., The Cambridge Edition of The Poems of Rudyard Kipling , 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). “Burden” can be found in Volume III: Uncollected Poems. Cambridge University Press states that this three-volume set is the first complete edition of Kipling’s poems, many of which had never been published before. Every authorized text of the collected poems, from original periodical publication to the final edition in the author’s lifetime, has been collated to produce a full record of the author’s additions, deletions, and alterations. A note to each poem provides a record of publication and, where possible, information about its occasion and context.

Through its completeness, its record of changes, and its notes, the edition provides a new basis for the study and appreciation of Kipling’s poetry. Poetic Structure Readers uninterested in the technical aspects of poetry can skip this section. But whenever I particularly like a poem or, as here, examine it in detail, I like to know something about its formal properties. What is the poet doing? Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an analysis of “The Burden of Jerusalem” online, and so had to do it myself. The first complication is the form of the poem. I’ve used the format presented by Christopher Hitchens. In addition, an American Kipling collector who owns a typescript copy of the poem, and has published a bibliography of Kipling, describes the typescript copy in the British Library as consisting of “seventeen 4-line stanzas,” which is consistent with the pattern I’ve followed. But the structure shown in a Web version of the poem looks very different. Most but not all stanzas are 7 lines long, and are markedly dissimilar, graphically, to the 17-4 version.

It would be nice to know which format was used in the new Cambridge Edition, but I have not seen it. Anyway, “Burden” is a 17-stanza narrative poem consisting of 4 lines each. So each stanza is a quatrain. I would classify “The Burden of Jerusalem” as a variation of the long ballad (hymnal, Horatio) measure. Like most English-language verse that isn’t free verse, it is “accentual-syllabic” in nature. In scansion, an unstressed word or syllable is marked with a small “u” above it, a stressed one with “/”. Each line of a poem is divided also into an appropriate number of “feet.” Here, each line has 4 feet (so, tetrameter), each of which is an iamb —a 2-syllable foot in which an unstressed syllable precedes a stressed syllable. Thus, the poem is written in rhymed iambic tetrameter.

Due to the vagaries of Word and WordPress formatting, it is convenient to illustrate this form by using a scanned line from another poem, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Iambic tetrameter: the 4th line in the final stanza of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” If you examine the fourth line in the final stanza (ignore the other lines)—”I took the one less traveled by”—you will see the metric pattern employed by Kipling in “The Burden of Jerusalem.” The small vertical lines divide the phrase into four feet, the stress marks above the syllables mark the accentual pattern. It is an iambic tetrameter line. Kipling’s rhyme scheme (I hope this formats properly on the blog) is: a The first and third lines of each stanza rhyme. The second line of every stanza contains an internal or midline rhyme: “There rose a feud—still unsubdued—” “Of Mamre’s oak ‘mid stranger-folk” Finally, I arbitrarily use “é” to symbolize the repeated word Jerusalem. “Jerusalem” is the last word in the fourth line of every stanza of the poem.

These lines aren’t refrains, nor does Jerusalem rhyme with other words. It is simply repeated. Related Related If you enjoyed this piece, and wish to encourage more like it, give a tip through Paypal . You can earmark your tip directly to the author or translator, or you can put it in a general fund. (Be sure to specify which in the "Add special instructions to seller" box at Paypal .) Kipling's House - A Bit About Britain A Bit About Britain South East 4 Comments We travelled to Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s Sussex home for 34 years, through the impossibly pretty village of Burwash, all whitewash and weatherboard. You reach the house down what Kipling described as “an enlarged rabbit-hole of a lane” to arrive in what is now a car park. I wondered how it had all looked when the Kiplings first saw, and fell in love with, the place. “At very first sight the Committee of Ways and Means (Kipling and his wife, Carrie) said: ‘That’s her! The only She! Make an honest woman of her – quick!’ We entered and felt her Spirit – her Feng Shui – to be good.

We went through every room and found no shadow of ancient regrets, stifled miseries, nor any menace, though the ‘new’ end of her was three hundred years old.” Joseph Rudyard Kipling is a controversial literary figure. Described by George Orwell as a “prophet of British imperialism”, Kipling was probably all that Orwell implied, including a racist; he was also a satirist, a master story-teller and, in my humble opinion, a fascinating egotist. Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 30th December 1865, though educated in England, Kipling was in many ways a product of the British Raj and, inevitably, a man of his time; why should he be otherwise? Judge Kipling with narrow political correctness and you are not only missing the point but also bound to come away disappointed.

The man brought us so many familiar characters – Mowgli, the man-cub, Akela, the great lone grey wolf (and scout leader), Baghera the black panther, Baloo the bear and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the brave mongoose – the tales of the ‘Jungle Book’ (written for his daughter, Josephine), ‘Just So Stories’, ‘Kim’ and ‘The Man Who would Be King’. Where would Walt Disney and Michael Caine be without Kipling? Then there was his poetry – ‘Gunga Din’, ‘White Man’s Burden’ and ‘If’, written for his son, John. ‘If’ was runaway winner of The Bookworm’s quest to discover the nation’s favourite poem in 1995, beating anything by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or anyone else, hands-down. I found, on my bookshelves, an 1897 edition of ‘Barrack Room Ballads’ that had belonged to my grandfather and a 1942 compilation, ‘Humorous Tales’ and dipped into them both.

I confess to finding a portion of the work almost totally incomprehensible and Kipling’s habit of writing in an excruciatingly awful mock cockney accent when reporting some speech – notably of private soldiers and NCOs – a little irritating: “I went into a public ‘ouse to get a pint ‘o beer, The publican ‘e up an’ sez, ‘We serve no red-coats here.’ ” I wonder what he’d make of ‘East Enders’? But the imagination is astonishing, the phrases are page-turners and a rather innocent humour rubs shoulders with a desire to explain why things are the way they are. If there’s romance in Kipling’s work, maybe he inherited it. He was named for Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, where his parents courted; presumably, a friend of mine had a similar idea when he called his son ‘Ford’. Kipling himself married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier, sister of a close American friend, in London in 1892 and the couple settled for awhile in Vermont. First, they rented a simple home called – I like to think appropriately – Bliss Cottage.

They then built their own house, Naulakha, where ‘Jungle Book’ was written. The house is still there, and you can stay in it if you’ve a mind to – it sleeps 8 and you can take a look at it via the Landmark Trust’s website . In 1896, circumstances brought the Kiplings, with two young daughters, to England – which they can hardly have known – first to Torquay and the following year to Rottingdean, near Brighton. Here, they rented “The Elms” (on the market for £1.45 million in May 2014), where their son was born and they were happy for awhile. But tragedy struck in 1899 when their elder daughter Josephine died, aged six, from pneumonia. They needed to escape memories and, apparently, trippers gawping at the house – Kipling was a celebrity, probably the most famous author in Britain at the time.

So it was necessary that Bateman’s should contain no regrets or stifled miseries; it would become a sanctuary, “The very-own house” and “A good and peaceable place”, situated in a tiny corner of the Sussex Weald, the Dudwell valley, and close to a rich English heritage that often inspired Kipling’s tales. Rudyard and Carrie bought Bateman’s for £9,300 in 1902. It had no bathroom, electricity or upstairs running water. But Kipling was earning around £5,000 a year, a huge amount in those days, and could afford to dabble. Within the 33 acre estate was an old mill; Kipling had the 18th century mechanism decommissioned and a modern water turbine and generator installed to bring electric light into the house. He enlisted the help of Sir William Willcocks, who had installed the first Aswan Dam (“a trifling affair on the Nile”), on the project. And that’s one of the things about Kipling: he was extraordinarily well-connected. Stanley Baldwin, politician and three times Prime Minister, was a cousin and particular friend.

Other friends included Henry James, H Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Cecil Rhodes, Max Aitken and King George V. By all accounts, he loved visitors and you get a sense of this from wandering round the house. It was built in 1634 for a local ‘ironmaster’ (iron producer); iron had been worked in this part of Sussex since before the Romans came. Yet despite its antiquity, Bateman’s is stuck firmly in a time somewhere between late Victorian and the 1920s. Which is exactly right – and what you want. It was bequeathed to the National Trust on Carrie’s death in 1939, and a first-class job has been done preserving the place so that it speaks of the man and his family. Outside, garaged and unfortunately behind glass, is Kipling’s 1928 Rolls Royce. He loved motoring, though he never learned to drive himself. The grounds, which in Kipling’s lifetime were gradually expanded, include a delightfully aromatic herb border. We watched iridescent-blue dragonflies skim around the pond, paid for out of the Nobel Prize Kipling won in 1907.

“I was just going to inspect my navy”, was Kipling’s opening to a youthful American visitor, meeting Kipling for the first time; he led his guest to the pond, where there was a 6-foot hand-cranked paddle-boat. Beyond the pond, an informal wild garden provides a riot of colour and the river Dudwell – a tiny apology for a river, really – flows gently through the estate. Inside, the house is full of treasures – genuine valuables, family paraphernalia and, like a memory of elderly relatives’ houses, fragments of old empire. One room is furnished for their son, John. Kipling was immensely influential and, after the First World War began in 1914, was delighted to write propaganda for the government in support of Britain’s war aims – one of 25 well-known authors to be invited to do so. Kipling viewed the war as a crusade against German aggression. He also used his influence, and friendship with Field Marshall Earl Roberts, to get John a commission in the Irish Guards. John, like his father hopelessly short-sighted, had already been turned down by the navy and other branches of the army.

He was just 18 when he went missing at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. His parents searched for years but never found their son. He was last seen blundering myopically toward enemy lines, screaming and with his face torn. This particular episode in Kipling’s life was captured in the play, and subsequent film, “My Boy Jack” by David Haig. The film starred Haig as Kipling, Kim Cattrall as Carrie and Daniel Radcliffe as John. Lieutenant Kipling’s body was tentatively identified in 1992, but the remains may be someone else’s. After the war, Kipling developed a close association with the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission and suggested “Their Name Liveth for Evermore”, from the book of Ecclesiastes, which is inscribed on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war cemeteries, and the phrase “Known Unto God”, which is inscribed on the graves of soldiers who could not be identified. He was vehemently anti-Communist and, as fascism grew in the 1920s and 30s, vehemently anti-fascist too.

He continued writing at Bateman’s and died of a duodenal ulcer aged 70 on his wedding anniversary, 18th January, 1936. His ashes are interred in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey. Bateman’s is a worthwhile visit, whether you want to sense something of the man who most recently lived there, or just enjoy wandering round pleasant houses and gardens. There is humour, and sadness, there. The staff were friendly and helpful when we last went, and there is the ubiquitous National Trust shop and café – where you’d like to think they sold exceedingly good cakes. There’s an interesting postscript: – The Kiplings’ surviving daughter, Elsie, had married Captain George Bembridge in 1924. They purchased Wimpole Hall, the largest house in Cambridgeshire, in 1938 and allegedly used the inheritance from Elsie’s father to restore the property. George died in 1943. They had no children. Elsie collected and catalogued many of her parents’ papers and, on her death in 1976, left both the property and the archive to the National Trust.

Go to A Bit About Britain’s directory listing for Bateman’s. For more about Rudyard Kipling, you might find the Kipling Society’s website useful. Share this:

Question: Which British Prime Minister was a cousin of Rudyard Kipling?
Answer: Baldwin