Jottings from the Editors Desk

We received several queries during the last three months, mainly from the website, but some addressed directly to Ian, Robyn and myself.

We had a query on the publication date on a set of Kipling books published in Australia, and the Secretaries librarian in England gave us the answer, almost overnight.

There was a typewritten copy of Lichtenstein, not signed, was it a proof copy, but since the original poem was written in 1901, and the typed copy had the words NSW contingent added in the 1920’s this was easy.

We have received queries regarding the valuation of various copies of RK’s works, not easy unless they are first editions, since I collect those it is easier to be au fait with their prices.

Gary Dalrymple, I refer to him as our SF delegate, usually comes up with some good ideas, which leads on to RK being honoured by the Libertarian Futurist Society as a finalist in the 2010 Promethus Hall of Fame for his science fiction short story “Easy as ABC”

We get requests for the location of some of RK’s books, and , more difficult, books with references to RK. These are increasing in number, probably due to the ever increasing awareness of RK as an excellent subject for theses, both master and doctorates. So much material yet to be mined, much readily available, many facets to choose, and not yet overdone.

Now that the major part of his works are out of copyright we are getting more and more reprints of his most popular works, I have been giving copies of The Jungle Book to some of my very junior relatives, and have been delighted to find that their mothers have been also enjoying them. In our time we may yet see some of RK’s works as required reading in schools, a lot better than some of the more Clockwork Orange type of reading being promulgated today.

With some of RK’s poetry it helps to know the accompanying story, one of my favourites, “Dinah in Heaven” accompanies “The Woman in his life”. Another, somewhat similar,” Four Feet”, does not accompany, although could be associated with “Thy Servant a Dog”.

I am a dog person, and three of RK’s most memorable dog poems are three of my favourites, which is why I have chosen “Four Feet” for our poem for this issue. If you have a favourite poem we have not yet printed, and there are still several hundred to go, please let me know.

Dr Alan Cowan’s talk on Kipling and the Antartic was a great success, and we were very appreciative of his travelling from Canberra to show us the linkage between RK and the Antarctic exploration. The talk aroused so much interest that I was able to liberate (a good army term) the good doctors notes on his talk, and have attached some to this newsletter.

Our next talk , on May 29th, is on Kipling’s attitudes to Japan, both in his life and writings. The talk is by Amelia Scholtz, a doctorial student with the English department at Rice University, Houston USA. Amelia is on her way back home after visiting Japan and we are fortunate to have her for our meeting. No small thanks are due to Susannah, whose fast foot work enabled us to have the pleasure of hearing Amelia before she leaves Australia to return to Houston.

I apologise for the lack of a microphone at the last meeting. Ian was away on a cruise and I had neglected to make arrangements with him before he left. Mea culpa.

One excellent suggestion was that at future meetings we take turns in reading, and discussing one of our favourite poems, and Jim Bryant has offered to start the ball rolling, giving the rest of us more time to prepare.

- D.W.

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Rudyard Kipling's Home In Mumbai

Rudyard Kipling’s birthplace is being converted into a museum. The timber and stone two-storey cottage was built before his birth in December 1865. It is located in the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay/Mumbai and has always been used as the official residence of the school's principal. The cottage is a typical colonial building, with high ceilings and sloping roofs and is surrounded by a lush garden. The cottage has been lying vacant for almost a decade and some parts need urgent repairs.

1865 was a significant year. Rudyard was born then but it was also the year his father, Lockwood Kipling, joined the Art School as principal. So this museum has been a possibility for a very long time. What took the Maharashtra state government so long to decide?

There are at least two problems associated with making this bungalow into a centre for honouring Kipling. Firstly, as History and Traditions of England blog noted, Kipling was only aged six when he left Mumbai. Although he often returned to other parts of India, especially Lahore, Simla and Allahabad, the Mumbai house cannot possibly represent his literary endeavours.

This is not an insurmountable problem. The Art School has a vast collection of paintings, dating from 1850, which will now be part of an art museum. Only one of the rooms will be called the Kipling Room and will be dedicated to Kipling material. In any case, Rudyard wasn’t the only Kipling to have made a huge contribution to Indian culture. Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father, had a real involvement to Mumbai's architectural development. Lockwood’s architectural designs for the notable Victoria Terminus railway station building and the municipal headquarters opposite it were particularly important.

There is a more problematic issue to deal with: Rudyard’s colonialist reputation remains controversial for post-colonial writers in India and elsewhere. Orwell called Kipling as a "prophet of British imperialism", a man so devoted to duty, service and empire that his writing was bound to be full of prejudice, racism and an absolute belief in Britain’s military correctness. The White Man's Burden (1899) will suffice as an example:

Take up the White Man's burden Send forth the best ye breed Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait, in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child.

Image:
Kipling's home museum, Mumbai

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A Blog About History...

A Blog About History recognised the problems that the Mumbai museum faces. The municipal government officials with whom the Museum staff deal... refer to the building, not as the Kipling house, but the Dean’s house.

Worse, they believe that Kipling is officially still persona non grata, a situation that is rather slow to change. But he was certainly a man of his time and he wrote better than any other writer about British empire-building.

The new museum won’t whitewash Kipling’s pro-colonial stance but it will recognise his work as a product of his passionately-felt ideals. No English writer quite put India on the map as keenly as Rudyard Kipling.

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Kipling, The Jungle Book

And it is not a problem for today’s children. The Penguin India Blog said young students in her class adored the imaginative world that Kipling created and the fantastic pictures produced by the illustrators.

Blog de Monica noted that The Jungle Book was still totally enjoyable children. Even before reaching reading age, children have been able to understand the stories. breathedreamgo blog put Kim at the top of her list of loved books about India.

She said she had been reading for 43 years and had never read a book that was so in the moment.

I believe the Maharashtra state government is hoping every child, young or old, who visits Mumbai will feel the same way.

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Kipling and the Mummies

If the title sounds like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or indeed the Boys Own, relax, what I am relating is, as my very young relatives say, for real.

When Kipling stayed for his annual holiday at Burne-Jones house in North End Road, he helped make a tube of “Mummy Brown” probably one of the last of its kind.

An article in the Financial Times states “ Artists who want to use the distinctive Asphaltum brown favoured by the pre-Raphaelites have bad news. C.R.Roberson, the Camden Town colour maker , has run out of mummies.”

“We may have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere, but not enough to make any more Asphaltum, we sold our last complete mummy some years ago , Perhaps we shouldn’t have done since we certainly can’t get anymore,” said Mr Roberson-Park, the managing director.

These were no ordinary mummies, but remains of a minor order of Indian priests preserved in a rare type of bitumen. Chipped off and powdered, it made a paint superior to others containing bitumen: it did not distort the canvas by contracting.

Roberson-Park who has been with the family firm only 43 of its 160 years, is not sure when the mummies were bought. Probably in the 1870’s, when brown was popular. Robertson’s Asphaltum can be easily distinguished from other people’s in the works of such artists as Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt and Millais. It is the Asphaltum that hasn’t cracked.

We are indebted to Roger Lancelyn Green who ferreted out that interesting information nearly forty years ago.

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RUDYARD KIPLING AND THE ANTARCTIC
Alan N Cowan, Canberra Australia

This paper, which has been long in gestation, has as its parents two of my life’s major interests, as my title makes clear.

I have long been struck by how little evidence there is that Kipling paid any attention to the exploration of Antarctica. That seems surprising, given his patriotic and imperialist mindset: he would surely have been stirred by British and Empire achievements, and his special affection for the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy must surely have aroused his admiration for the heroic feats of men like Scott and Shackleton, and those self-effacing Petty Officers, Lashly and Crean.

The twenty years from 1898, called the Heroic Period of Antarctic expeditions, were crowded with triumphs, dramas and tragedies in the South. What I have tried to do in this paper is first to present a brief overview of these events, and to set them into the context of Kipling’s contemporaneous life and writings, and of events in the wider world. Following that, in my second main section, I shall look at some of the individual explorers, and at how Kipling’s works encouraged and inspired them.

I grew up with Kipling. Among my books are Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling, a school prize from 1939 for Proficiency in English, and Captains Courageous, a present on my 13th birthday in 1942, inscribed “To Alan on his Measles”. My interest in Antarctica came much later, after I emigrated to Australia in 1966. Australia has long had an active presence in the Antarctic, and one of my other abiding passions, ornithology, gave me the idea of working at one of the Australian bases so that I could study the bird-life. In the event, I spent a year as a member of the wintering party at Casey Station in 1977. My job was medical officer but I was also able to carry out a biological research program. I took with me a number of Macmillan volumes containing most of the Kipling stories and I began a systematic exploration of this marvellous body of work, much of which was new to me. I read them in bed at night, strictly rationing myself to one story each night, so as not to exhaust them too quickly. I followed a similar self-imposed regime with my tapes of Haydn’s symphonies: two each Sunday afternoon.

Since my year at Casey, my interest in the Antarctic and Subantarctic has taken me on several tourist trips and also on a stint crewing on a very small yacht, the Totorore, round the bottom end of South America. The first party to spend a winter in the Antarctic was Gerlache’s Belgian expedition in the Belgica. They reached Antarctica in January 1898 just as Kipling, having written some of the “Stalky” stories, sailed for his first trip to South Africa. The mate on the Belgica was one Roald Amundsen. During this expedition The Day’s Work collection appeared, and then Kipling and his daughter Josephine became gravely ill with pneumonia on their arrival in New York. Tragically, Josephine died; she was “the daughter who was all to him”.

The next year, Borchgrevink’s ship, the Southern Cross, landed the first party to build a hut and winter on the Antarctic mainland. The Boer War began during their absence.

From then until 1917, no less than fourteen national expeditions were launched from Britain, France, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Australasia and, last but not least, Scotland.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott led his first expedition, in the Discovery, in 1901-04. This was really the first scientific expedition, and the first to explore new land on an ambitious scale, even though they never mastered or even understood the vital necessity of dog hauling. Scott, Wilson and Shackleton in their attempt on the South Pole reached 82 deg 16’ South, the furthest yet. But they barely managed to struggle back, man hauling a sledge carrying Shackleton who had collapsed, and all suffering from scurvy and snow blindness. Scott and Shackleton were at odds from this time onwards. During this expedition Kim was published, and the Kiplings moved into Bateman’s. A few months after Scott’s return, Traffics and Discoveries was published.

Ernest Shackleton led his own first expedition in the Nimrod from 1907-09. Their achievements included an attempt to reach the South Pole itself in which Shackleton and three companions with ponies for transport got to within 110 miles of the Pole at 88 deg 23’ South. This was the Furthest South to date and vindicated Shackleton as a successful leader, expunging any sense of failure clinging from the Discovery expedition when Scott had invalided him home. Relations between the two men were already beyond healing, as Scott had, quite unreasonably, extracted a promise from Shackleton not to make his base in the Ross Sea region, which vast area Scott regarded as “his”. In the event the promise had to be broken, and Shackleton’s heroic march so nearly to the Pole must have further rankled with Scott. And to rub salt into the wound, Shackleton was knighted. The year of Shackleton’s return saw Kipling’s publication in collected form of the stories in Actions and Reactions.

The lean and angular shadow of the great Roald Amundsen fell on the Antarctic in 1910, at the same time as Scott led his second, Terra Nova expedition back to the Ross Sea for another attempt on the Pole. Amundsen kept his plans secret until Scott, reaching Melbourne, received a terse cable: “Beg leave to inform you, Fram proceeding Antarctica. Amundsen.” Amundsen’s advantages were many: he started 60 miles nearer the Pole, his men were all expert skiers and dog sledge drivers, and above all he was determined to reach the Pole without allowing distractions. Scott, by contrast, dithered between motor tractors; ponies; dogs, which he never believed in, and man hauling which he regarded as the proper and noble way. His failure to take seriously the use of dog transport, and indeed proficiency in skiing, was fatal. He also firmly believed that the party had scientific work to do as well as reaching the Pole: even while struggling against the odds to get back to base the exhausted party dragged a gratuitous 35 pounds of rock specimens. Huntford writes that “half the weight in seal meat would have saved them” but that may be hyperbole: Scott was destroyed in the end by inexorable arithmetic: men could not drag the food and gear required for survival over those distances.

Douglas Mawson, a young Australian geologist who had sailed in the Nimrod with Shackleton and who had been one of the party to reach the South Magnetic Pole, led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1911-14 in the Aurora. Mawson was the first to use radio in the Antarctic and another relay transmitter was set up on Macquarie Island. Mawson planned several journeys for the following season. The most famous of these is the “far-east” exploration by three men: Mawson himself, the young Lieutenant Ninnis and Xavier Mertz, a Swiss ski champion. At 315 miles out, Ninnis, his sledge and dogs, the main tent and most of their food disappeared down an enormous crevasse. Mawson and Mertz headed for home, but half way there Mertz became ill, and died after a week. The soles of Mawson’s feet came away and he bandaged them back on. He cut down a sledge with a pocket knife to make it easier to haul. Finally, at the very end of his strength, he heaved himself out of a crevasse after falling down it not once but twice. He finally got back to base just as the relief ship disappeared over the horizon, and he with the six men who had stayed behind to search for him had to sit out another winter before finally being relieved.

During these years 1910-14, Kipling published Rewards and Fairies, and A History of England, by Kipling and C R L Fletcher, also appeared. Kipling was much occupied with politics. A Liberal government had been elected under Lloyd George and wished to reduce the power of the House of Lords. The question of Irish Home Rule aroused stronger and stronger passions and the threat of war with Germany loomed larger. The story “The Edge of the Evening”, with its subtext of a threatening war, came out in 1913. Kipling’s mother had died in 1910 and his father soon after. His sister’s mental illness was worsening.

Ernest Shackleton, now Sir Ernest, planned his Imperial Trans -Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 with a grand sweep fitting to his nature. It was to be the most ambitious attempt yet on the Antarctic: no less than the crossing of the entire Continent from the Weddell Sea in the north to the Ross Sea in the south. A southern party would be landed in the Ross Sea region and would lay depots towards the Pole for the northern party as they passed the Pole and marched south. But disaster struck when the Endurance with the Weddell Sea party became crushed in the sea ice and sank. They launched the boats and managed to reach Elephant Island.

Then, Shackleton with five companions set out for South Georgia, 800 miles away, in their tiny boat, the James Caird. Threatened by huge seas, frozen by perpetual spray, chipping ice off the deck to prevent capsizing, with hardly any water, no warm clothes, and only an occasional sunsight to navigate by, it beggars belief that they reached South Georgia. Reach it they did, but on the wrong side of the island: to get help they must cross the mountains, never before attempted, to reach the whaling station at Stromness Bay. Shackleton, Worsley and Crean set out on what must have seemed a hopeless attempt. They had no proper boots or warm clothes, and could not stop to rest or sleep for fear of freezing to death. Somehow, they made it, after a non-stop forced march of 36 hours.

In later years, each of the three men would recall their firm feeling that there was a fourth presence with them on that journey.

Meanwhile, the men on Elephant Island were living under the two upturned boats. Shackleton led no less than three unsuccessful attempts to rescue them. Finally, desperate now, he persuaded the Chilean Navy to make available the little steamer Yelcho. Old and battered, her engine and boiler suspect, she was manned by a volunteer crew under the command of Lieutenant Luis Pardo, and they got them off, even as the ice and fog closed in. I have visited Puerto Williams, the southernmost outpost of the Chilean Navy on the Beagle Channel, where the bows of the Yelcho have been made into a memorial.

On the opposite side of the continent, the Ross Sea party was also in terrible difficulties. Their ship, imprisoned in a floe, was swept away and was unable to return and they were left with totally inadequate equipment to carry out a huge depot-laying endeavour. Despite illness and exhaustion they achieved near-miracles, not knowing of course that the whole exercise was futile.

Shackleton’s men were absent for the first three years of the Great War and on reaching civilisation at Stromness they were amazed to hear that the war was still going on and that millions were dying. During this time, Kipling’s energies were largely taken up with working for the war effort. In 1915, his only son John was killed in action. A Diversity of Creatures appeared in collected form in 1917, but most of his writings were war propaganda, including poetry and various speeches and appeals. The Irish Guards appeared in 1918.

Ending this brief survey of the Heroic Period, we should note that there were also numerous commercial whaling and sealing expeditions from Norway, Britain and other countries. Several of the Norwegian ships, then and later, mapped new coasts and islands, and beginning in 1904 the modern whaling industry was established.

** Continued next issue**

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A Kipling Poem

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