Jottings from the Editors Desk

Our August meeting in the rebuilt church hall featured an excellent talk by Naren Menon, reported on later in this newsletter. We are indeed fortunate in the calibre of our speakers. Naren was accompanied by his wife, and we hope to see her as well at our future meetings.

I am indebted to our indefatigable supporter, Dr Philip Holberton for this little snippet from Agatha Christie’s “A pocketful of Rye”, 1952, where old Mrs Mackenzie says ‘ No question is ever settled until it is settled right. Nobody reads Kipling nowadays but he was a great man’ But—Agatha Christie did not verify her quotations, no Google in those days, the quote is actually the refrain of a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox!

Ian, our hardworking Treasurer, has organised our Christmas lunch for Sunday December 6th at Roseville Memorial Club. Keep that date firmly in mind, and organise reluctant spouses, and any friends you feel would enjoy our company and some of RK’s works, plus festive fare.

We have organised a microphone for our next meeting, Robyn Scott, our secretary has offered to see how it works and be our microphone expert, having had some previous experience in the electrical field. I hasten to add that Professor Peter Alexander, our speaker at our next meeting, certainly does not need a microphone, but, and it is a big but, your ageing president does!

Bringing a few books at our last meeting for members to borrow seems to have met with general approval, and I will continue the practice, and encourage any other members who may have books about RK they are willing to lend to do likewise.

If we could arrange an association with the English Literature departments with some of the NSW Universities, as our parent Society does in the UK and USA, it will help in attracting more people to our meetings and in expanding the content of our newsletter. We need to increase our membership, not only as a compliment to our speakers, but also to give us access to a wider range of opinions and views on Kipling.

Afternoon tea should be a little easier to organise with one person taking charge, please remember if it is your turn, give Ian the dockets so that your expenses can be reimbursed.

An interesting sidelight from the UK Journal, the librarian reports that enquiries by Ph D candidates now outnumber those of MA students and TV and radio researchers.

In this newsletter is a plea by a young lady from UK for information about RK’s views on race. It came from our website because ours, the Australian one, is above the UK one, A being ahead of U in the alphabet, I will not quote about the last being first?

Look forward to seeing you all for Professor Alexander’s talk on Saturday October 24th.

- D.W.

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Corespondence from The Kipling Society Australia website

Hi Kirsty,

You bear a famous name, and have every reason to be proud of it. Unfortunately many people offer opinions before checking on the facts, I am an ex teacher and it happens a lot in my old profession!

Rudyard was the very opposite of racist, in his day he was regarded as reactionary and somewhat left wing. He noted that when he was inducted into the Masons he was attended by a Jew, a Moslem and a Hindu. He had friends amongst all people of many races.

Today we live in an era of political correctness and many words and phrases in common use in Kiplings day would be frowned upon today. Two items are quoted by his critics, his poem “The white mans burden”., this was aimed at the United States, who had just annexed the Philippines, and referred to the better off countries, in those days the countries inhabited by white men, had a duty to help the poorer countries. The other item is the verse in the Recessional, “lesser breeds without the Law” which refers not to people but to regimes and countries which did not follow the rule of law, and was aimed at the time at Germany.

You must remember that Rudyard, who in his day was the most popular author the English speaking world had ever known, he was the first English author to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature, was also highly disliked by the academic intelligentsia and literary critics of his day. Nowadays RK is again growing in popularity, I was in Russia recently, and Russian translations of his work were selling fast! A print of the Just So stories was selling out in a few days in Canada, I was fortunate enough to snag a couple of copies, they were really cheap and well illustrated, Kirsty, for my grandchildren.

Do not worry about other peoples reactions , just enjoy the Just So stories, the Jungle Books and the Puck stories, I do, and if you feel a bit superior because of your name, good luck to you!

With kind regards,
David Watts, President, Kipling Society of Australia.

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Westward Ho!

Westward Ho! where Kipling went to school was called after Charles Kingsley’s novel. Some developers decided to create a new resort which would cash in on the fame of the book, but it wasn’t a success (it was on the wrong, north, coast of Devon, exposed to all the Atlantic weather). Which is why in 1874 there was a row of “twelve bleak houses by the shore” standing empty and just ready to be turned into a school.

Kipling himself describes the connection in his introduction to the essay An English School, published in a magazine in 1893 but only collected in Land and Sea Tales in 1923: “(The school) stood within two miles of Amyas Leigh's house at Northam, overlooking the Burroughs and the Pebble-ridge, and the mouth of the Torridge whence the Rose sailed in search of Don Guzman. From the front dormitory windows, across the long rollers of the Atlantic, you could see Lundy Island and the Shutter Rock, where the Santa Catherina galleon cheated Amyas out of his vengeance by going ashore. If you have ever read Kingsley's Westward Ho! you will remember how all these things happened.”

There is another connection between Kipling and the novel. In chapter 2 “Sir Richard swore a great and holy oath, like Glasgerion’s, by oak and ash and thorn.” When Kipling came to write “Puck of Pook’s Hill”, his retentive memory produced the phrase as being perfect for Puck’s favourite oath, and the charm by which he magicked away Dan and Una’s memories, and the refrain of “A Tree Song.”

By mentioning Glasgerion, Kingsley admits that he himself borrowed the phrase from the old English ballad of which Glasgerion is the eponymous hero.

Regards - Philip Holberton

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Son of Empire

Written by Nella Braddy, illustrated by Heade. Printed in 1945 by Wm Collins Sons London.

This is one of the earliest Kipling biographies, written for the teenage market, but although simplistic, it is surprisingly readable. Nella’s writing is imaginative, and amusing, and very relevant. When she is comparing Kipling’s soldiers, Mulvaney, Learoyd etc with the Pre-Raphaelite soldiers, saying the PR ones looked sadly in need of vitamin tablets and fresh air!

This is a book which should have been required reading for every secondary school pupil doing English literature when it was published. Even today it forms a very useful introduction to Kipling, to his life and times, for a young person who is ignorant of Kipling, and there are a lot of them!

If you find a copy in a second hand bookshop, buy it and pass iot on to a young relative, or donate it to the library of a local school. I wish I could have read my copy in 1945, it would have given me a much greater understanding of Kiplings life. For anyone that wants a short, very readable biography of Rudyard Kipling, it is highly recommended.

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Kipling and India:
Naren Menon

Naren Menon’s talk on India and RK was memorable, not only in his delivery, he mixed humour with hard facts, and with many quotations, but also in its scope, and his use of unfamiliar sources.

Naren quoted from a blog by Ms Atoorva Sinha-a blue dot for thoughts, an article in the Times of India by Nina Martyris, Mrs Edmonia (Ted) Hills letters to her parents in the US, V.S. Napaul and George Orwell in praise of RK, Kenneth Champeon, Ramachandra Guha expounding on Thomas Macauley’s Minute of February 1835 and the subsequent use of English, Naren showed us the languages and script in use prior to 1835, he quoted an article by John Palmer in 1915, and from F.L.Knowles, A Kipling Primer of 1899.

Besides all this , Naren covered the different religions, races and languages in India, helped by some excellent and easily understood transparencies which he screened for us.

In the discussion at the end of the meeting we pressed Neron for a return engagement next year, to which he assented, stating that with a canvas so vast as India he needed more than one meeting to do it justice! We did not agree, saying he had already done justice to the subject! Naren also left us some 12 pages of typed notes, which serve as a lasting memento to his talk.

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My Boy Jack?

The Search for Kipling's Onlu Son

By Tonie & Valmai Holt. Reviewed by John Faulkner

This review is written on the assumption that its readers will have some knowledge of Kipling’s life and career; so on that basis...

This is not an easy book to review and read as it consists of three, perhaps four parts, some of which overlap.

There is a short biography of Kipling himself and then a great deal of detail of the times spent with Jack (real name John) his only son. Jack is killed in the First World War but his body is missing and Kipling searches in vain for his son’s grave. The fourth part provides an up to date description of another, more modern, search for his grave and appears as an Epilogue. The Epilogue itself has some additions in the form of a Postscript to the 2001 Edition and then finally an Appendix to the 2007 Edition. The combination of all these parts leads to a somewhat disjointed narrative.

The book is marred by poor or in some cases inexplicable editing. Every so often a word is underlined for no apparent reason and there is some puzzling use of words in the text. An example of this is the period in 1919 when young Guards officers visited Batemans. Two of them, well known to the family, went off to spend an “intimate month in Algeria” This statement is not elaborated, but to the reader it may suggest some form of “beastliness” as featured in Kipling’s strictures to Jack at school. Nothing is clear.

Given the horrendous statistic that around fifty percent of those killed in this war were never identified, the quest for Jack was almost inevitably doomed to failure. It is completely understandable that Kipling pursued this and with his connections, he had as much chance as anyone. It seems to this reviewer that the modern search was and is an exercise in futility.

It is a curious afterthought that modern DNA testing could still be used for identification by comparing the DNA of Jack’s sister Elsie with any possible subject. The authors dismiss this with the words ...”This is, however, an action which we would never dream of seriously suggesting as they both deserve to rest undisturbed” In other words the search is a really important issue but not that important.

To sum up, this book is not for the general reader but may be enjoyed by a Kipling enthusiast and collector of minutiae.

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A Kipling Poem

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