Unlike most ‘griffs’ or newcomers Ruddy had the rare luxury of being able to ‘chum’ with his parents in provincial headquarters. But this was a mixed blessing, since it cushioned him from some of the realities of Indian life and meant that much of what he did see was viewed through the filter of his parents’ prejudices. Yet the advantages of living with his parents in a real home were considerable, not least because his duties as stunt-sahib or assistant editor of the CMG were onerous and unremitting. ‘I represented fifty per cent of the “editorial staff” of the one daily paper of the Punjab,’ he wrote half a century later, apparently forgetting the paper’s subeditor and local reporter, W. J. Wilson, one of several locally recruited Eurasians or working-class Britons who filled subordinate posts on the paper – ‘I never worked less than ten hours and seldom less than fifteen per diem; and as our paper came out in the evening did not see the midday sun except on Sundays. I had fever too, regular and persistent, to which I added for a while chronic dysentery. Yet I discovered that a man can work with a temperature of 104, even though next day he has to ask the office who wrote the article.’10
In reality, Ruddy’s office hours usually began at nine and ended at five, when the paper was ready to go to print. A more accurate account of his work was set out in a letter written in the CMG’s offices to USC’s chaplain, the Reverend George Willes, a month after Ruddy’s arrival. ‘I write, so to speak, between the horns of the gum pot and the scissors,’ it begins, then goes on to describe the scope of his duties:
Some thirty papers go through my hands daily – Hindu papers, scurrilous and abusive beyond anything, local scandal weeklies, philosophical and literary journals written by Babus in the style of Addison. Native Mohummedan, sleepy little publications, all extracts, indigo papers, tea and coffee journals, jute journals and official Gazettes all have to be disembowelled if they are worth it. Moreover I am responsible for every scrap of the paper except the first two pages. That is to say, I bear the blame of correspondents’ blunders – it is my duty to correct them – misprints and bad lettering – it is my business to find them out – vulgarities, bad grammar and indecency – we get that sometimes! – have to be looked to carefully and I have a large correspondence all over India with men of all sorts. All local notes come to me and have to be digested, and I must pick up information about approaching polo matches, garden parties, official dinners and dances, to insert in the local column.
For this work his initial monthly remuneration was 150 rupees – the equivalent of £150 per annum – rising to 200 after six months. This was a princely sum for a youth not yet seventeen, and one that was very welcome at Bikaner House. For his work at the Mayo School of Industrial Art Lockwood Kipling earned 800 rupees a month, with a further 100 rupees a month for his curatorship of the museum.
As the CMG’s assistant editor Ruddy claimed authority over some 170 proof-readers, clerks, compositors and print-workers whom he could ‘bully and hector as I please’.11 Although the rotary press had been introduced in England a decade earlier, the presses of the CMG and Pioneer still employed the old-fashioned flat-bed Wharfdale, which printed each double page sheet by sheet, after which the sheets were turned over by hand for printing on the other side. The galleys had first to be set letter by letter from cases of type by compositors who could neither speak nor read English, after which the galley proofs were corrected by Indian and Anglo-Indian proof-readers, often several times over, before being handed over to the European editorial staff for final corrections before being printed as page proofs. Laborious as the process was, it had the great virtue of familiarity, for it was precisely the system Ruddy had used to edit his United Services College Chronicle. However, then he had been his own master, whereas now he was very much under the thumb of the paper’s ‘tetchy and irritable’ editor, Stephen Wheeler, the professional journalist hired by George Allen to knock the CMG into shape as a modern newspaper.
Ruddy came to hate Wheeler for his bad temper and his determination to keep him tied to ‘proof-reading, scissors-and-paste work, and the boiling down of government blue books into summaries for publication’.12 Right from the start Wheeler had made it clear that Ruddy was to give up all thoughts of creative writing: ‘One of the first things a sub editor has to learn is to altogether give up original writing,’ he reported to George Willis. ‘I have not written three words of original matter beyond reports and reviews since I have joined the staff.’ Despite these restrictions, Ruddy kept his temper and held his tongue to a degree which led his father to write admiringly that ‘the boy is training for heaven as well as for Editorship’.13
The Kiplings mocked Wheeler behind his back as ‘the Amber Toad’, but afterwards Ruddy had the grace to publicly acknowledge his debt to him: ‘My Chief took me in hand, and for three years or so I loathed him. He had to break me in, and I knew nothing … the little that I ever acquired of accuracy, the habit of trying at least to verify references, and some knack of sticking to desk-work, I owed wholly to Stephen Wheeler.’ Just as usefully, he learned to work at several levels – ‘to think out a notion in detail, pack it away in my head, and work on it by snatches in any surroundings’.14
Wheeler’s tight rein also provided a corrective to the ‘select Mutual Admiration Society’ of Bikaner House, with its ‘forcing-house atmosphere of warm domestic approval, liable to dangerously encourage eccentric growth in Kipling’s budding genius’. That, at least, was the opinion of Wheeler’s successor as editor of the CMG, Kay Robinson, one of the three literary-minded sons of the Reverend Julian Robinson of Allahabad and the first outside the Kipling family circle to recognise both Ruddy’s talents and his faults. Much as Robinson deplored Wheeler’s failure to give the young Kipling his head, he also believed that by doing so he had kept in check what Robinson considered his chief fault as a writer: ‘an excessive self-confidence, a cock-suredness, so to speak, about any phrase or sentiment he may fling to the public being accepted as the mintage of genius’.15
Shortly after Ruddy’s arrival the college founded through Dr Leitner’s endeavours was inaugurated by Lord Ripon as the University of the Punjab, with Leitner assuming an additional post as its Registrar. Although not yet allowed to report on the event for his paper, Ruddy attended as a member of the press and afterwards gave vent to views which mirrored those of his father. ‘Just imagine a brown legged son of the east in the red and black gown of an MA as I saw him,’ he wrote to Willis. ‘The effect is killing. I had an irreverent vision of the Common Room [at USC] in a Muhammaden get up. At the end of the proceeding an excited bard began some Urdu verses composed in Honour of the occasion. It was a tour de force of his own – but I am sorry to say he was suppressed, that is to say, they took him by the shoulders and sat him down again in his chair. Imagine that at Oxford!’16
A month later Wheeler’s pony jibbed and threw him, leaving him badly concussed and ‘quite daft when he tried to talk’. Ruddy had to take over the running of the paper for the next week and acquitted himself well enough to earn the thanks of the CMG’s local manager, David Masson. ‘He said that “he had the fullest confidence in me”,’ Ruddy wrote proudly to his old headmaster. ‘I have grown at least six inches since then.’ And when Wheeler returned to work he acknowledged his assistant’s hard work by allowing him to write reviews and editorial notes – ‘and this too I am extremely proud of in a small way’.
Ruddy could also report to Crom Price that his father had presented him with ‘a very handsome roan stallion’ named Joe, claiming for him a pedigree as late of the 19th Bengal Lancers, a cavalry regiment mounted on Walers imported from New South Wales.17 In fact, Joe was no more than a pony, which was just as well, for unlike most of his peers Ruddy had not grown up with horses and his poor physical co-ordination ensured that he was frequently unseated in the course of his early-morning rides. But he took his falls in good part, learning that it was no use chasing after Joe or attempting to catch him. ‘I wait till he has his back turned and then run away hom
e,’ he explained to his Aunt Edith some months after his arrival. ‘Presently there is a terrible clatter behind and Joe comes running up trotting his hardest with his reins dangling all anyhow between his feet. I pretend to cut him and turn into the Lawrence gardens to sit down … After I have been there a minute or so Joe comes and waits at the back of the seat trying to get me to notice him.’18 Fortunately for English letters, in May 1883 the Kiplings acquired a ‘toy like dog cart’, to which Joe was harnessed, giving the pony a ‘dissipated and rakish air’ and his master a much safer ride between home and work.
In northern India the winter months from late October through to mid-February constituted the Cold Weather, a temperate season of sparkling mornings and warm afternoons during which Anglo-Indians gathered in the large Stations to entertain and be entertained, with garden-parties, burra khanas, pagal khanas or picnics, pagal nautches or fancy-dress parties, balls, theatricals and every form of sports activity from shooting competitions and tennis tournaments to gymkhanas and polo weeks – although in Lahore the newest craze was for roller-skating on a wooden rink laid in the Montgomery Hall. However, Ruddy was too preoccupied with his work to make much of his first Lahore Cold Weather, which was how his parents wished it to be. After the upsets over Flo Garrard they remained fearful that there was an unbridled side to their son’s character associated with his discovery of sex that needed little encouragement to reassert itself. ‘I am sure he is better here than anywhere else,’ Lockwood Kipling wrote to their confidante Edith Plowden, ‘where there are no music-hall ditties to pick up, no young persons to philander about with, and a great many other negatives of the most [un]wholesome description. All that makes Lahore profoundly dull makes it safe for young people.’19
The single institution with which Ruddy did become involved was the Punjab Club. One of his father’s first actions to help him settle into the Station was to put him up for election as a member, and it is evident that Ruddy savoured the Club’s masculine and exclusive air, made all the more precious by his claim to membership being so tenuous. It was, as he wrote in his autobiography, ‘the whole of my outside world’, and since it was just over the road from the offices of the CMG he took to dropping in after the paper had been put to bed, for a drink and a cheroot and perhaps a game of billiards before going home.
As the Club’s most junior member he was expected to defer to his elders and no doubt he did so – to begin with. But before very long Ruddy began to gain a reputation for boorish behaviour which continued to be held against him long after his departure from India. Deference never came easily to him and he was, after all, an adolescent with no one of his own age for company, but it is clear that there were times when his behaviour went beyond the bounds. He is said on one occasion to have made disparaging remarks about the Indian Civil Service, on another to have spoken rudely to a visiting colonel, who had to be dissuaded from thrashing him, and on a third occasion to have so irritated a pair of lawyers by repeatedly butting into their conversation that they kicked him down the Club’s front steps; he was also said to have a ‘caddishly dirty tongue’ – all of which suggests that his schooling had failed to dent his capacity for bumptiousness.
However, there may have been good reasons for this insolence, for what Ruddy also discovered at the Club was that he was answerable for whatever appeared in the paper: ‘I was almost nightly responsible for my output to visible and often brutally voluble critics at the Club … They wanted accuracy and interest, but first of all accuracy.’ Before the year was out Ruddy had discovered just how answerable he was.
Shortly before Ruddy’s arrival in India Lord Ripon had revoked Lord Lytton’s Vernacular Press Act, which had laid the editors of the Indian vernacular papers open to prosecution if they published inflammatory or seditious statements in their pages. This was viewed as pandering to Indian extremism by a large section of the British community, which also opposed Lord Ripon’s moves to bring about more self-government at a municipal level. Lockwood Kipling had accurately reflected the resentment felt by many Anglo-Indians towards this well-meaning liberal when he described the advent of Ripon as ‘a more terrible calamity than might be thought. We are delivered over into the hands of the Philistines.’20 He had heard Ripon speak at a public meeting and had come away disgusted at the way he had ‘gushed and drivelled’ about his ‘discovery of India’.21
The Anglo-Indian community was spoiling for a grievance and found it when in early February 1883 Sir Courteney Ilbert, the Legal Member on the Viceroy’s Council, presented a bill intended to correct an anomaly in the Indian Judicial Code whereby an Indian district magistrate sitting in a court outside the three Presidency cities of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay was disallowed from trying a European brought before him. There were very few Indian covenanted civil servants at this time, but a number of divisions in the Indian mofussil had one or two Indian serving magistrates, usually appointed because of their high standing in the local community. Lahore had just one such magistrate in 1883, the much-respected Muhammad Hayat Khan, CSI, who as a young man had served as aide and bodyguard to the great John Nicholson of Delhi fame.22
The proposed ‘Ilbert Bill’ would give power to these few Indian magistrates to sentence Europeans to imprisonment, and for a large section of the British community that was a step too far.23 In Calcutta the Englishman published an anonymous letter which declared: ‘What would please our Indian fellow-subjects more than to bully and disgrace a wretched Englishwoman? The higher her husband’s station and the greater his responsibility, the greater the delight of his torturer.’ The other leading newspapers took their lead from the Englishman, among them the Pi and the CMG. Protest meetings were held and more inflammatory letters were published. In regimental messes there was wild talk of white mutiny, even of secession on American lines, and a tea-planters’ plot to kidnap the Viceroy on his way to a tiger shoot was only foiled because his son took his place at the last moment.
In Lahore the Civil Station was as much caught up in the anti-Ilbert hysteria as anywhere else. On 29 March 1883 some unsigned verses appeared in the CMG under the title ‘A New Departure’, reprinted from the Englishman. They called Lord Ripon an ass and a ‘Brahminee boy’ who listened only to the Calcutta babus, and whose response when ‘India objected’ was to flee to Simla. They ended:
With the tact that belonged to his station,
With a suavity solely his own,
He had set by the ears half a nation
And left it – to simmer alone.
With his maudlin ma-bap [‘father-mother’; the traditional term for a protector of the poor] legislation,
He had played merry Hades and – flown.24
Although Kipling never publicly acknowledged authorship, he included these verses – the first to be published in India and the first of his political squibs – in a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of his work published in the CMG. They could well have been written jointly by Ruddy and his father, although the seventeen-year-old felt strongly enough over the issue to set out the Anglo-Indian case to Crom Price and declared himself unable to write calmly about the Ilbert Bill: ‘Old stagers say that race feeling has never run so high since the Mutiny. If there is a rising, the present Government are directly responsible [–] at least so everyone says.’25
Five months later, on 19 November 1883, as the now watered-down Ilbert Bill came up for a Second Reading in Council, the CMG carried an editorial calling for it to be passed and declaring further opposition to be ‘unreasonable’. Ruddy played no part in the writing of this editorial, but the afternoon before its publication he read it and went directly to Wheeler’s office to ask for an explanation for what amounted to a complete change of editorial policy, only to be told that it was ‘“None of your dam’ business”.’ The following day Ruddy went to the Club as usual and as he entered the dining-room was met by a barrage of hisses: ‘I was innocent enough to ask, “What’s the joke? Who are they hissing?” “You,” said the man at my side. “You
r dam’ rag has ratted over the Bill.”’26
As Kipling relates in Something of Myself, he was mortified to find himself the object of this abuse, which ended only when the adjutant of their local Volunteer Corps got up and declared that ‘the boy’s only doing what he’s paid to do’. But this remark Ruddy found almost as humiliating as the hissing, because of the truth it contained. ‘The adjutant was entirely correct,’ he wrote. ‘I was a hireling, paid to do what I was paid to do, and – I didn’t relish the idea. Someone said kindly: “You damned young ass. Don’t you know that your paper has the Government printing-contract?” I did know it, but I had never before put two and two together.’
Ruddy had discovered the first of ‘many pretty ways by which a Government can put veiled pressure on its employees in a land where every circumstance and relation of a man’s life is public property’. The CMG’s principal proprietor, George Allen, had too much to lose. Two years earlier he and his main business partner in Cawnpore had won a lucrative government contract to supply boots to the Indian Army and had great hopes of securing further contracts. Furthermore, a significant part of the profits made by his presses in Allahabad and Lahore came from the printing of official government papers, and any direct challenge to the Government could damage the network of high-placed officials he had so carefully built up in Simla. Allen, in sum, put profit before his principles, and in the eyes of his young protégé he became ‘the sinner-who-faces-both-ways’.
This revelation of the political realities of the day, combined with the brutal way his fellow members had turned on him at the Club, led Ruddy to think long and hard about the values of his elders. Hitherto he had been too wrapped up in his own cosy world of family and letters to pay much attention to the wider issues of Anglo-Indian life. But with his little world turned upside down he found himself viewing with ever-mounting scepticism the workings of the Government of India and the motives of men he had hitherto held in high regard.
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