Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  The Kiplings returned to the plains in the autumn buoyed by the thought that both their children would be able to join them in Lahore in the not too distant future. This was little short of a lifeline for Alice, who had given up making any effort to entertain or even to get out of the house. ‘I often wonder if this dull depressed woman can be the same she was in England,’ she confided to Edith Plowden just before Christmas 1881. And Lockwood’s character, too, had changed for the worse: ‘He is getting so dreadfully absorbed in things that he is rarely ever the conversational companion he used to be.’ Her one consolation was her children, whose companionship would bring ‘new life’ to them: ‘We therefore propose if all be well to have them both – Trixie and Ruddy – out here in two years time & get him newspaper work. We should be together a family square for a few years at any rate, and I think we should be very happy. John would grow younger with his son & daughter by him – a process he sadly needs … Ruddy thirsts for a man’s life with man’s work & if our plans be carried out he will get both when he is eighteen.’41

  Now that she had something to look forward to, Alice recovered her good humour and her malicious wit. ‘Other new young ladies are rather a failure,’ she declared in giving a detailed breakdown of Lahore’s Cold Weather ‘Fishing Fleet’ to Edith Plowden:

  Mrs Black’s daughter is a dumpy girl who I believe never speaks even when spoken to and we thought her very plain until Mrs Parry Lambert’s daughter came and by her transcendent ugliness made Miss Black seem almost beautiful. You remember Major Lambert who is no beauty[;] she is like him but much plainer[;] her eyes are like slits & her mouth a gash. The upper lips do not cover the teeth the nose turns up & the cheeks are large & shapeless. She is short, dumpy & has large hands – altogether she might be an Irish maid of all work in a lodging house. I am told, & can well believe it, that Mrs L is greatly distressed by her daughter’s appearance & no wonder.42

  This was from a letter written in March 1881, when Alice had further reason to be cheerful. George Allen was now in London and if all went well her boy would be coming out to India in eighteen months’ time: ‘Next spring I hope to go home & return with Ruddy & Trixie, one under each arm, in the cold weather. But for the cursed want of money I should have gone this year.’43 As it turned out, she had only to wait another five months.

  The key to this change of fortune was Allen’s acquisition of a second newspaper: the Civil and Military Gazette.

  When the Kiplings had first arrived in Lahore in 1875 the only local English newspaper was the Indian Public Opinion, owned and produced by the eccentric Orientalist and polymath Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner. After an extraordinary early career during which he had achieved the rank of colonel at the age of fifteen while serving as an interpreter in the Crimean War, Dr Leitner had been appointed Professor of Arabic and subsequently Principal of Lahore’s Government College. In the decade since his appointment he had worked tirelessly and often cantankerously for popular education and political reform, believing that the British Government in India had no ‘real hold on the people, who in sullen silence felt themselves to be disregarded, and their ancient civilisation despised’. He had also campaigned for Government College to be developed into a university college, which it had duly become in 1870, with Leitner as its Registrar.

  To the irritation of the Anglo-Indian community in Lahore, Dr Leitner’s Indian Public Opinion was stridently liberal, frequently launching attacks on persons and policies its editor considered to be standing in the way of progress. Two years after Lockwood Kipling’s arrival in Lahore he became one of the Indian Public Opinion’s targets when, in one of his regular columns for the Pioneer, he made the mistake of criticising Dr Leitner’s campaign to replace English with vernacular languages in schools and colleges in the Punjab. Lockwood had counter-attacked, questioning the way Dr Leitner had secured positions for himself on virtually every educational board in the Punjab and criticising his character. Not unreasonably, this provoked Dr Leitner to respond in kind, his attacks becoming, in Edith Plowden’s words, ‘more and more virulent’, until quite suddenly Dr Leitner sold his paper and left India. He returned to Lahore a year later, by which time the Indian Public Opinion had been renamed by its new owners the Civil and Military Gazette.

  The original Civil and Military Gazette had first appeared in 1872 in Simla as a weekly news-sheet, owned by a retired British Army major, George Fenwick, and intended for an exclusive readership of Civilians and army officers. Three years later Fenwick was bought out by two men from the same entrepreneurial mould as George Allen: William Rattigan and James Walker. Rattigan was the elder of the two, the illegitimate son of an illiterate Irish private in the EICo’s Ordinance Department, ‘country-born’ and ‘country-bred’ – meaning that he was both born and educated in India. After some years in government employ Rattigan had saved up enough money to go to Europe to study law, eventually returning to India to practise in Lahore as a barrister. Walker, too, was, country-born, with a father in the Punjab Police, and had made his money by establishing a dak or post-relay system conveying passengers and mail between the railhead at Kalka and Simla. By 1874 he was sufficiently well established to set up the Alliance Bank of Simla, and a year later he and Rattigan formed a partnership to take over the local paper, the Civil and Military Gazette.

  In 1877, the year in which Lockwood Kipling’s dispute with Dr Leitner came to a head, Rattigan and Walker joined with a third partner to buy up two more provincial papers: the Mofussilite of Agra and the Indian Public Opinion of Lahore. Their new partner was George Allen of the Pioneer, whose business interests now included a woollen mill and a tannery in Cawnpore. With the additional funding Allen provided, the three partners closed down the Mofussilite and the Indian Public Opinion and moved the Civil and Military Gazette from Simla into the premises in Lahore previously occupied by the Indian Public Opinion. Under Allen’s direction they then set about transforming the CMG, as it became known, into ‘the chief organ of Northern India European opinion’,44 a newspaper that would eschew the dangerous liberalism of Dr Leitner and toe the line taken by its ‘big sister’ the Pioneer.

  In pursuance of this policy the CMG was first edited by two military men: Major Fenwick, the previous owner, and Colonel Arthur Cory, an Indian Army officer attached to the Adjutant-General’s office who had a number of publications to his name, including Shadows of Coming Events: or The Eastern Menace. After Cory retired from the Indian Army in late 1877 he became the paper’s chief editor and oversaw the relocation of its offices and printing presses from the Mall to two large, thatched bungalows set side by side on the southern side of the Upper Mall, close to the Punjab Club, and little more than a quarter of a mile from Bikaner House in the Mozung Road. Colonel Cory became a friend of the Kiplings and in Simla in the summer of 1881 he, Alice Kipling and George Allen’s second wife, Maud, performed together in a series of tableaux vivants.

  At about this time Cory relinquished the post of editor to a Mr Macdonald, who soon proved to be unsatisfactory. The paper’s proprietors concluded that a more experienced journalist was required. Macdonald was offered a subordinate post as sub-editor and refused, moving to Simla to become a special correspondent for the Times of India and the Indian Daily News – and using their columns to vent his spleen on his former employers and their friends. ‘He abuses many people but chiefly me,’ Lockwood Kipling complained in a letter to Edith Plowden. ‘The sole reason we can think of is that we befriended him and his cleversilly wife as much as we could. His last feat is to describe me as the laziest and most conceited bore he ever knew and Mrs Kipling as the sourest and vainest lady this side Suez! Week after week Calcutta & Bombay are regaled with this kind of thing.’45

  Macdonald’s departure from the CMG created vacancies for an editor and an assistant editor. The first post went to twenty-eight-year-old Stephen Wheeler, a dry, humourless professional journalist recruited in England by George Allen, and it was Wheeler who then interviewed sixteen-year
-old Rudyard Kipling, apparently without revealing that he had been charged with establishing the boy’s suitability as an assistant editor. Wheeler reported back to Allen, now in residence at a grand mansion in London’s Prince’s Gardens, and Allen then telegraphed out to his partners in Lahore and Simla a message that was brief and to the point: ‘Kipling will do.’46

  Why Allen chose to overlook a sixteen-year-old schoolboy’s lack of professional experience is a mystery, but the presumption must be that he thought him worth the risk. Both in Stalky & Co. and in Something of Myself Kipling asserts that the appointment was made entirely without his knowledge. ‘There came a day,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘when he [Cormell Price] told me that a fortnight after the close of the summer holidays of ’82, I would go to India to work on a paper in Lahore.’ What he omitted to say was that at this time he considered himself engaged to Flo Garrard. He had also discovered the pleasures of London’s nightlife beyond the confines of The Grange and Warwick Gardens and had set his mind on studying or tutoring for a year in Germany before settling down to learn his trade on a London newspaper. According to his chum George Beresford, he took the news of his imminent departure to India very badly: ‘He had been so completely metropolised, and the faint cobwebs that the distant East had spun about his infantile mind had been so completely swept away, that he looked upon this expedition as rather a wild adventure … London, he considered, would be his natural socket, where he thought he fitted in.’47

  Ruddy wrote to his father hinting that a marriage was in the offing – and received a very sharp reply, pointing out among other things that ‘there was a billet all ready and waiting for him with a certain amount of pay attached – a thing not easy to get when one is only sixteen and a half’.48 But what may have finally settled the business in Ruddy’s mind was Flo’s ending of their engagement in late May. From this point onwards he accepted his fate and made the best of it. His passionate feelings for Flo gave way to a calmer attachment, one in which his sense of loss and love unrequited could be exploited for his poetry’s sake. Five years on he could write in Wildean terms in one of his Plain Tales from the Hills that ‘one of the most convenient things that a young man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career is an unrequited attachment. It makes him feel important and business-like; and blasé and cynical; and whenever he has a touch of liver, or suffers from want of exercise, he can mourn over his lost love, and be very happy in a tender, twilight fashion.’49

  In July 1882 he wrote ‘A Voyage’, clearly intended to be read as a severing of ties. It ends:

  Our galley lamps are bright with hope,

  Our voices ring across the sea –

  In other lands is wider scope

  For all our virile energy.

  Let be the past, leave we the quay

  With firm hands on the tiller rope.50

  On 20 September 1882 Ruddy boarded the P&O steamer Brindisi bound for Bombay by way of the Suez Canal. ‘He went thus,’ wrote Beresford, ‘to the one place in a thousand that provided the stage and the actors that his genius required.’51

  5

  ‘As a prince entering his kingdom’

  LAHORE AND SIMLA, 1882–3

  ‘Come back, Punch-baba,’ said the ayah.

  ‘Come back,’ said Meeta, ‘and be a Burra Sahib.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Punch, lifted up in his father’s arms to wave good-bye.

  ‘Yes, I will come back, and I will be a Burra Sahib Bahadur (a very big man indeed)!’

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’, 1888

  When on 18 October 1882 Rudyard Kipling returned to the city of his birth it was, to use his own expression, ‘as a prince entering his Kingdom’.1 He was aged sixteen years and ten months, but onlookers would have judged the compact figure with the pugnacious jaw and thick-lensed spectacles to be at least in his mid-twenties, particularly since the dark moustache he had been allowed to cultivate at school had been joined during the voyage by whiskers. He was also uncommonly sallow-skinned for an Englishman, so much so that it was afterwards put about that he was, in the argot of the time, ‘quite eight annas in the rupee’ – in other words, half Indian, there being sixteen annas to a rupee.

  When Ruddy came ashore he found himself ‘moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not’.2 However, the shoreline and skyline of the Bombay of his childhood had altered beyond recognition. On reclaimed land all along the foreshore the Bombay Port Trust had constructed docks, wharfs and jetties capable of moving huge tonnages of goods and passengers between rail and ship. On 1 January 1880 Princes Dock had been declared open for shipping, which meant steamers now cast anchor alongside a stone jetty and discharged their passengers directly on to dry land. Across the salt marshes beyond the Native Town, factory chimneys had sprouted like mushrooms: the spinning and weaving mills that were about to take on the industrial might of Lancashire. ‘Bombay has long been the Liverpool of the East,’ went the popular catchphrase of the time. ‘Now she is becoming the Manchester also.’

  Since the golden years of the American Civil War all sections of the island’s population had declined except for its European element, now numbering ten and a half thousand. To cater for the leisure activities of this expanding commercial class a new sort of club had come into being: the Bombay Gymkhana,3 which in 1875 appropriated a prime section of the Esplanade so that its exclusively white membership could gather to play cricket, hockey, badminton and tennis before adjourning to drink brandypawnees on the club’s extended verandah. Of more immediate relevance to Ruddy, however, was the fact that the mud-and-lathe shacks of the Sir J. J. School of Art of his childhood had at last been replaced by modern buildings. The ‘wigwam’ in which he had been born was now a two-storey bungalow with a green-tiled roof and an upstairs verandah. Superintendent Terry had gone and the school was now the domain of his godfather and his father’s former colleague, John Griffiths, whose painstaking oil canvases of Indian scenes in the manner of Poynter and Alma-Tadema had failed to win him popular recognition.

  There was little to keep the adolescent Ruddy in Bombay so it is highly probable that his next destination was the nearby Victoria Terminus, still incomplete, in time to board the Frontier Mail before its evening departure. As Ruddy journeyed northwards into the Indian mofussil or interior, the homeland from which he had been exiled for eleven and a half years began to reclaim him: ‘My English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength.’4

  After a journey of two nights and two days Ruddy arrived in Lahore to what he afterwards claimed was a joyous homecoming’, but one marred by the discovery that his mother – ‘more delightful than all my imaginings and memories’ – had published a volume of his love poetry behind his back and was insisting that he shave off his whiskers. He was allotted his own corner of Bikaner House and was given, ‘with the solemnity of a marriage-contract’, the son of his father’s bearer as his personal servant. This was Kadir Baksh, fated to achieve his own immortality by featuring in a number of stories as a faithful but none too bright minion.

  A Muslim servant, possibly Kadir Baksh, J. L. Kipling (National Trust)

  By the adult Kipling’s account, his return to the bosom of his family came as close to perfect bliss as he or they could have wished for: ‘We delighted more in each other’s society than in that of strangers.’5 This unequivocal statement glosses over the fact that it took Ruddy months to come to terms with his new life, Alice Kipling confiding to Edith Plowden in a letter written in February 1883 that her son was ‘if possible, less than ever inclined to Lahore itself’ and ‘at times very trying in his moods – being subject to sudden fits of the blues’.6

  It was another fourteen months before Trix joined the rest of her family in Lahore and for her, too, Bikaner House became the first real home she had known since her infancy, where she and her brother experienced ‘the happiest time of his life – and mine’.7 Ruddy, she wrote, w
as initially given a room at the front of the house reached through the dining room, but ‘as his work deepened, part of the next room (an entrance hall) was partitioned off to make a writing room for him; he called it his duftur [office] in emulation of my Father’s big room – and was delighted with it. On the partition above the big Indian dado, with which my Mother beautified it, he inscribed in twisted ornate black and yellow characters, “obviously Chinese to the meanest capacity,” as he told me, “RESPECT THE APARTMENTS OF THE GREAT.”’8

  Despite his dislocation and the conflicting emotions that it brought about, Ruddy continued with his verse-writing. The first of his poems which can confidently be ascribed to India is ‘A Morning Ride’, three galloping stanzas already full of Anglo-Indian argot reflecting the delights of an early morning ride along the banks of the River Ravi. It begins:

  In the hush of the cool, dim dawn when the shades begin to retreat;

  And the jackal bolts to his lair at the sound of your horse’s feet;

  When the great kite preens his wings and calls to his mate in the tree

  And the lilac opens her buds ere the sun shall be up to see;

  When the trailing rosebush thrills with the sparrow’s pent up strife,

  Oh! a ride in an Indian dawn, there’s no such pleasure in life.9