Leaving India behind, he remained bound to India, so that the best of what he imagined and wrote had its roots in the dark side of his head and what he had seen and heard in India. And the further he moved away from India in time as well as space, the stronger became that side of the head that was least Indian and most law-abiding and British. The balance was lost – only to be recovered when his love for his first-born and his grief at her loss took him back to ‘the life unaltered our childhood knew’. With his father’s guidance he learned to ‘undo what the North has done’ and so let back in all ‘the sights and the sounds and smells / That ran with our youth in the eye of the Sun’ – the flotsam and jetsam of twelve years of Indian living – just long enough to create and write the celebration of childhood that is The Jungle Book and the celebration of India that is Kim.
Rudyard Kipling lived on to celebrate his seventieth birthday quietly with Carrie at Bateman’s. He died on 18 January 1936, the forty-fourth anniversary of their marriage. After Kim he had continued to write poetry, fiction, and what he termed ‘verses of a national character’. Of the poetry, ‘If –’, ‘The Glory of the Garden’, ‘The Smugglers’, ‘The Way Through the Woods’, ‘My Son Jack’, and perhaps half a dozen more poems continue to be loved and valued. Of the fiction, if we exclude his writing for children there are plenty of well-crafted stories but very little that really holds the imagination except in fits and starts, and absolutely nothing of worth linked to India. With Kim he had said it all.
‘So clever, so fresh and so cynical that he must be young’; Ruddy a year after his return to England, painted in tropical whites by John Collier. He was then aged twenty-five and had suffered the first setback of his career with the publication of The Light that Failed, his first non-Indian work. (Bateman’s, National Trust)
A coloured postcard of the Apollo Bunder, the traditional landing place before the new docks were built, c. 1890. (Charles Allen)
A Mohurrum procession in the bazaar area near the Sir J. J. School of Art; a postcard from the 1890s. (Farooq Issa and Phillips Antiques)
Walkeshwar Temple and Tank, Bombay, 1884; an oil painting by the American artist Edwin Lord Weeks, who made several painting tours of India in the 1880s and 1890s. (Sotheby’s)
‘Christmas in India’; an idealised image of a British family in India before the children are removed from the servants’‘promiscuous tendency to worship at the shrine of the baba-log’, c. 1865. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Bikaner House in Lahore was home to Ruddy’s parents from 1875 to 1893, although he himself only lived there from October 1882 to October 1887. A watercolour painted by one of Lockwood Kipling’s pupils, Baga Ram. (Bateman’s, Burwash, National Trust)
Lahore from the Fort, showing Ranjit Singh’s Samadh, centre left, and the Badshahi Mosque beyond. In the foreground, part of the curved roof of the Naulakha pavilion. Miniature on ivory, painted by a local artist c. 1875. (V&A)
A street scene in Lahore by E. L. Weeks. Afghan vendors display their silks to a potential customer as prostitutes look on. According to Kipling many of the girls were young widows forced by custom to take up the profession. (Christie’s)
The front of Wazir Khan’s mosque with street vendors and beggars; another oil painting by Edwin Lord Weeks, who first visited northern India in 1882. Although contemporaries, there is no record to show that he and Kipling ever met. (Christie’s)
A watercolour of Simla by H. B.A. Poulton, drawn in about 1875, showing the church with Jakko Hill in the background. (APAC, BL)
‘The Play’s the Thing’; Lockwood Kipling’s watercolour was probably painted in the hill-station of Dalhousie. Although Ruddy was absent, Trix is shown turning round to speak to her bald-pated father. (University of Sussex Library Special Collections, courtesy of National Trust)
The Club – ‘the whole of my outside world’. A print from Lloyd’s Sketches of Indian Life, 1890. (Charles Allen)
‘The Last Voyage’; E. L. Weeks’s imaginative oil painting of the bathing and burning ghats at Benares. (Art Gallery of Hamilton, Canada)
Mowgli and Bagheera, a dramatic colour print by the twin prodigies Edward Julius and Charles Maurice Detmold; one of sixteen illustrations for The Jungle Book commissioned by Macmillans in 1903 when the brothers were aged twenty. (Courtesy of Simon Brandenburger of Indoislamica.com)
John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald; the engaged couple looking pensive, photographed in Wolverhamption in early 1865 shortly before their wedding. (University of Sussex Library Special Collections, courtesy of National Trust)
The chota sahib mounted; probably taken in a Bombay studio when Ruddy was aged three or four. One of the Indians is a Muslim, the other a Hindu Pathare Prabhu. (University of Sussex Library Special Collections, courtesy of National Trust)
‘A sturdy little boy not quite six’; Ruddy at about the time he entered ‘The House of Desolation’ at Southsea in 1871. (University of Sussex Library Special Collections, courtesy of National Trust)
The budding poet; Ruddy in the throes of puberty at fourteen at the United Services College, Westward Ho! (University of Sussex Library Special Collections, courtesy of National Trust)
‘Gigger knows his way about’; Stalky and Co at USC, Westward Ho! George Beresford’s drawing shows Beresford (‘M’Turk’), Kipling (‘Beatle’) and Dunsterville (‘Stalky’), with Pugh (‘Prout’), the headmaster Cormell Price (‘the Head’), and the English and Classics master Crofts (‘King’). (Kipling Society)
Ruddy and the Pater, Simla 1883; Ruddy at seventeen and enjoying his first leave in Simla before returning to the heat of the plains. (University of Sussex Library Special Collections, courtesy of National Trust)
‘Kipling will do’; Ruddy’s patron George Allen, chief proprietor of the Allahabad Pioneer and part-owner of the Civil and Military Gazette, painted in old age. (Col. Mike Allen)
The Civil and Military Gazette offices in 1885. A sketch based on a photograph, from the papers of ‘A Hustling American’ who wrote to the Kipling Journal in 1930: ‘Mr Kipling is leaning against the pillar on the left. A man named Wilson may be in the group.
He had been a corporal in the 9th Lancers – a very smart fellow who was employed in the office as a draughtsman for maps etc. He used to take Rudyard Kipling sometimes to a sergeants’ mess.’ (Kipling Society)
Kim’s gun zam-zammah outside the old museum, before it was moved to its present site outside the new Lahore Museum, postcard c. 1890. (Charles Allen)
Simla Ridge, with the Lower Bazaar and the newly completed Town Hall, seen from just above James Walker’s House ‘Kelvin Grove’ on the slopes of Jakko, c. 1888. (From the album of Lt. Col. C. L. Harvey, APAC, BL)
Trix at eighteen, mounted on ‘Yorick’, Lahore 1886. (Miss Helen Macdonald and Mrs Lorna Lee)
Trix in evening dress with fan, Simla 1888. (Carpenter Kipling Collection, Library of Congress)
Trix’s jilted suitor Kay Robinson, with his wife and children on the lawn of their house in Lahore. The photograph was taken in the early 1890s after Ruddy had left India. (Robinson Album, APAC, BL)
A rare copy of The Phantom ’Rickshaw, published in 1889 as the fifth in the Indian Railway Series. Although the Mayo School of Art is credited all the covers were the work of Lockwood Kipling. (BL)
The lat sahib off duty: Lord and Lady Dufferin, together with their five children and members of their staff at Peterhof, probably photographed in the summer of 1887.
Trix Kipling’s twice-jilted suitor Archie, Lord Clandeboye, is seated on the far right. Lord ‘Bill’ Beresford stands with arms folded nearby. (Courtesy of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava and the Dufferin and Ava Archive at Clandeboye)
Ruddy seated in his open carriage known as the ‘the pig and whistle’, outside Belvidere, Allahabad, 1889. (Carpenter Kipling Collection, Library of Congress)
Mrs Edmonia Hill seated on the aerial root of a banyan tree in the grounds of Belvidere, Allahabad, 1889. (Carpenter Kipling Collection,
Library of Congress)
Carrie Balestier, aged twenty-seven, a studio photograph taken in Brattleboro, Vermont, before she and her sister Josephine came to join their brother Wolcott in London in 1889. (University of Sussex Library Special Collections, courtesy of National Trust)
‘The Infant Buddha’: Lockwood Kipling’s pencil drawing of a stone figure in the Lahore Museum, which he passed on to his son. (University of Sussex Library Special Collections, courtesy of National Trust)
‘O best beloved’: Ruddy with Josephine in a pushchair, 1896. (University of Sussex Library Special Collections, courtesy of National Trust)
Notes
Book titles are given in shortened form, the full version being found in the Bibliography. The Kipling family are designated by their initials: RK: Rudyard Kipling; JLK: John Lockwood Kipling; AK: Alice Kipling; ATF: Alice ‘Trix’ Fleming.
A number of Rudyard Kipling’s collected works have been similarly abbreviated: SM: Something of Myself; DD: Departmental Ditties; PTH: Plain Tales from the Hills; BRB: Barrack-Room Ballads.
Of other main works or archives frequently cited: CMG: Civil and Military Gazette; KJ: Kipling Journal; Pinney, Letters, Vol. I/Vol. II/Vol. IV: Thomas Pinney, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vols. I, II and IV; Rutherford, Early Verse: Andrew Rutherford, Early Verse of Rudyard Kipling; Carrington, RK: Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling; Lycett, RK: Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling; Birkenhead, RK: Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling; APAC, BL: Asia, Pacific and Africa Collection at the British Library; Sussex: University of Sussex Library Special Collections.
Preface: Blowing the Family Trumpet
1 RK to Mrs Edmonia Hill, Lahore 14 May 1888, from a copy, RK Papers, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. I.
Introduction: ‘Seek not to question’
1 W. J. Clarke (‘G. F. Monkshead’), Rudyard Kipling.
2 K. M. Wilson, ‘The Manuscript of “The English Flag”’, KJ, March 1986.
3 Angela Thirkell, Three Houses.
4 Kipling’s act of kindness failed to prevent this same deranged individual from taking a half-hearted pot-shot at him as he emerged from the Athenaeum some years later.
5 ATF, Edinburgh 14 May 1939, to her cousin Florence Macdonald, quoted in Lorna Lee, Trix.
6 RK to Lionel Dunsterville, Bateman’s 20 November 1927, KP, Sussex, collected in Pinney, Letters, Vol. IV, quoted in Lycett, RK.
7 Mrs Elsie Bambridge in a memoir written for Charles Carrington, published as the ‘Epilogue’ in Carrington, RK.
8 ATF, June 1940, to her niece Mrs Elsie Bambridge, quoted in Lorna Lee, Trix.
1: ‘Mother of cities’: Bombay and a Beginning, 1865–7
1 Among them Watson’s cast-iron frame ‘birdcage’, imported from England to become Bombay’s first modern hotel. In 1896 it screened the Lumière Brothers’ cinematograph, laying the foundation stone of Bollywood and the world’s largest film industry.
2 ATF, ‘My Brother, Rudyard Kipling’, KJ, December 1947.
3 Edith Macdonald, Annals.
4 Frederick M. Macdonald, As a Tale that is Told.
5 Kay Robinson, ‘Rudyard Kipling in India’, Pearson’s Magazine, June 1896.
6 Sir John Maynard, ‘Now Let Us Praise Famous Men’, KJ, September 1961.
7 Frederick M. Macdonald, op. cit.
8 Sir Walter Lawrence, The India We Served.
9 Kay Robinson, ‘Kipling in India’, McClure’s Magazine, July 1896.
10 Trix’s view of this can be found on p. 44.
11 Frederick M. Macdonald, op. cit.
12 Ibid.
13 Edward Burne-Jones to Cormell Price, Tate Gallery Archive, quoted in Judith Flanders, A Circle of Sisters.
14 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Vol. I.
15 Edith Plowden, ‘Fond Memory, 1875–1910’, unpublished MS, Baldwin Papers, Sussex.
16 Edith Plowden, ‘Rudyard Kipling’s Parents in India’, KJ, July 1938.
17 John Craig, ‘John Lockwood Kipling: the formative years’, KJ, December 1974 and March 1975; also Bryan Diamond, ‘John Lockwood Kipling and the Victoria and Albert Museum’, KJ, December 2003.
18 Govt. of Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay Education Department, Vol. 2 1865 Comp. No. 49.
19 Sir John Kaye, A History of the Great Revolt.
20 H. G. Keene, ‘Anglo-Indians’, Sketches in Indian Ink.
21 Sir Bartle Frere, 1868, quoted in Ladies in the Sun, ed. J. K. Stanford.
22 From a letter written by Charlotte Roberts, wife of an ICS officer, in September 1862, quoted in Zoe Yalland, Boxwallahs.
23 Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, Vol. I, 1909.
24 Minute of the EICo Court of Directors, 1755.
25 Pioneer, 18 July 1870.
26 From which the rough cotton overalls worn by British jack tars took their name.
27 J. M. Maclean, Maclean’s Guide to Bombay.
28 Dr Hewlett’s 1864 Census Report, 1872.
29 J. M. Maclean, op. cit.
30 Pioneer, 8 March 1865.
31 Pioneer, 8 February 1865.
32 J. H. Rivett-Carnac, Many Memories.
33 Quoted without source by Mildred Archer, ‘Lockwood Kipling and Indian Decorative Arts’, Apollo, April 1986.
34 Capt. W. E. Gladstone Solomon, ‘Lockwood Kipling and the Bombay School of Art’, KJ, October 1927.
35 Letter from G. Terry to the Director of Public Instruction, 19 May 1875. Public Works Dept., Bombay No. 111 of 1875.
36 See her letter to Mrs Rivett-Carnac of 28 August 1870 in which she blames the fever suffered by her husband and son as ‘due to the swamp in which we live’, JLK Papers, Sussex.
37 Pioneer Mail, 20 June 1870.
38 Quoted without source by Arthur R. Ankers, The Pater.
39 JLK to Edith Macdonald, 12 December 1866, JLK Papers, Sussex.
40 RK, ‘To the City of Bombay’, The Song of the Cities, 1894.
41 Capt. W. E. Gladstone Solomon at a meeting of the Kipling Society, reported in KJ, March 1933.
42 Edith Plowden, ‘Fond Memory, 1875–1910’, unpublished MS, Baldwin Papers, Sussex.
43 RK, ‘The Son of His Father’, Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, 1923.
44 Lyall Papers, APOC, BL, MSS. Eur. F132, quoted in E. M. Collingwood, Imperial Bodies.
45 Edith Macdonald, ‘Some Memories of my Cousin’, KJ, July 1938.
46 JLK to Edith Macdonald, 12 December 1866, JLK Papers, Sussex.
47 ATF, ‘My Brother Rudyard Kipling’, KJ, December 1947.
48. Charles Eliot Norton, in a biographical note to a 1900 edition of PTH. This American scholar was a friend of Alice and Lockwood Kipling.
2: ‘Youth in the eye of the sun’: Bombay and Expulsion from Eden, 1867–71
1 RK, SM.
2 ATF, ‘Through Judy’s Eyes’, unpublished MS, ATF Papers, Sussex.
3 RK, ‘Song of the wise children’, 1899.
4 J. R. B. Jeejeebhoy, in a letter to the Times of India, 21 January 1936.
5 Capt. W. E. Gladstone Solomon, ‘Lockwood Kipling and the Bombay School of Art’, KJ, October 1927.
6 JLK to Edith Macdonald, 12 December 1866, JLK Papers, Sussex.
7 Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay: the City Within. See also the same authors’ Fort Walks.
8 Capt. W. E. Gladstone Solomon, op. cit.
9 The details are given in Ankers, The Pater, giving JLK Papers, Sussex, as its source. The letter referred to has a page missing, apparently mislaid or stolen since consulted by Ankers.
10 J. H. Rivett-Carnac, Many Memories of Life in India.
11 RK, SM.
12 The story is best told in Judith Flanders, A Circle of Sisters.
13 Edith Plowden, ‘Fond Memory, 1875–1910’, unpublished MS, Baldwin Papers, Sussex.
14 Hannah Macdonald, Diaries, Baldwin Papers, Sussex, quoted in Pinney, ‘Rudyard Kipling’s First English Residence’, KJ, December 1985.
15 Loui
sa Baldwin to Agnes Poynter, 9 November 1868, Baldwin Papers, quoted in Pinney, ‘Rudyard Kipling’s First English Residence’, KJ, December 1985.
16 Frederick M. Macdonald, As a Tale that is Told.
17 Edith Macdonald, ‘Some Memories of my Cousin’, in KJ, July 1938.
18 ATF, ‘My Brother Rudyard Kipling’, KJ, December 1947.
19 ATF, in a letter, KJ, October 1945.
20 According to a Bombay informant, this ayah was named Mary and was from Mangalore on the Malabar coast south of Bombay. She subsequently served as ayah to other European families, as did her daughter after her.
21 RK, SM.
22 RK, ibid.
23 RK, ‘Tods’ Amendment’, PTH, 1888.
24 ATF, ‘Through Judy’s Eyes’, unpublished MS, ATF Papers, Sussex.
25 ATF, ‘My Brother Rudyard Kipling’, KJ, December 1947.
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