Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Of the thousands of letters that passed between Ruddy and his parents, just two survive: one from father to son and one from son to father. ‘If Rud had been a criminal,’ wrote Trix of her brother’s behaviour, ‘he could not have been fonder of destroying any family papers that came his way.’ But it was not just the immediate family papers that were destroyed. After the earlier death of his uncle Ned Burne-Jones in 1898 Rudyard had taken the opportunity to destroy the considerable correspondence between the two of them – and, while he was about it, most of his letters to the beloved aunt, Georgie Burne-Jones (née Macdonald), who had nurtured him at her London home every Christmas during his darkest years.

  The setting up of a Kipling Society was vigorously opposed by Kipling for many years but in 1927 it was formed with the active support of his oldest friend, Lionel ‘Stalky’ Dunsterville, causing its subject to complain bitterly: ‘As to your damn Society, how would you like to be turned into an anatomical specimen, before you were dead, and shown up on a table once a quarter? … Seriously, old man, when a man has given all that he has to give to the public in his work, he is the keener to keep to himself the little (and it is very little) that remains.’6 In 1931 Kipling’s niece Angela Thirkell published Three Houses, reminiscences of her childhood days at the Burne-Jones’s family house at Rottingdean, East Sussex. She was the daughter of Margaret, youngest of the Burne-Jones cousins, and Ruddy’s confidante as the ‘Wop of Albion’. In Kipling’s eyes it was yet another betrayal and another breach of his privacy.

  Eventually Rudyard Kipling felt he had no option but to write about himself, which he did in the last months of his life in a disingenuous autobiography entitled Something of Myself, which might more accurately have been called As Little About Myself As I Can Get Away With. It said a lot about the craft of writing but gave away almost nothing about his private life beyond what was already known or touched on in his fiction. The manuscript was unfinished when Rudyard Kipling died on 18 January 1936. Carrie Kipling read it and declared that as it stood it was ‘too offensive’ for publication and would require the editing out of ‘anything that people can ride off and dispute about’. After extensive cutting and rewriting, first by Carrie and then by Kipling’s close friend H. A. Gwynne working to her instructions, a version was published in February 1937.

  Although Carrie donated a number of her late husband’s manuscripts to various libraries, these gifts were bound in some cases by stipulations that made it virtually impossible for scholars to publish any studies based on them; the manuscript of Kim, donated to the British Library, was a notorious case in point. Carrie also felt duty bound to continue the incineration of letters initiated by her husband, buying up his correspondence wherever and whenever the opportunity arose and setting matches to it. She also burned at least one notebook containing unpublished work and, according to their surviving daughter Elsie, also destroyed ‘a large canvas-covered case labelled “Notions”… containing unfinished stories and poems, notes and ideas, collected through the years’.7 Carrie’s last act of faith to her husband was to order in her will that the diaries which she had kept throughout their married life should be destroyed.

  By these concerted means a mass of Kipling material was lost to literature, most significantly Ruddy’s letters written between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five to those closest to him. From this period only one cache survived the flames: a bundle of letters mostly written between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three to Mrs Edmonia Hill, the most doted-on of several older married women to whom the young writer poured out his soul, and the most influential. When Edmonia Hill fell on hard times in her old age she put the letters on the open market and they were bought by an American collector. Carrie Kipling got to hear of it, bought the letters back and destroyed them – unaware that copies had been made.

  When Carrie Kipling died in 1937 the Kipling legacy passed to Mrs Elsie Bambridge. Fortunately for literature Elsie did not inherit her parents’ literary pyromania. Indeed, she went to some trouble to preserve and collate her father’s papers, tracking down the copies of her father’s letters to Edmonia Hill and adding other Kipling material to her collection. When in 1940 Trix learned that Elsie had located one of her father’s early notebooks, she wrote to congratulate her and to express delight at its survival: ‘How wonderful to see that black MS book again! I think Mother gave it to him when she went back to India in 1881 – he had it at U. S. Col [United Services College]. And it was known and loved by me when I was 13 or 14. I’m so glad it escaped the frenzy of burning any letters and papers connected with his youth (and mine too, alas) which possessed him directly after Mother’s death.’8 Sadly, Mrs Bambridge felt obliged to carry out her mother’s wishes by destroying the forty-five volumes of her diaries – although not before she had allowed Charles Carrington to read them through and make notes.

  As her father’s executor Elsie Bambridge was determined to preserve his good name, and in authorising a biography she demanded of its author, Lord Birkenhead, such stringent conditions that it should have come as no surprise to him when she rejected his first draft and paid him off. When the ‘suppressed’ Birkenhead biography was finally published in 1978 it contained no great revelations, but did show that Mrs Bambridge had been correct in believing that it did no justice to her father. Fortunately, after Birkenhead she turned to the historian Charles Carrington, who, despite the many obstacles, produced a biography that was a milestone of objective truth-gathering. When Elsie Bambridge died in 1976 what remained of the Kipling papers went to the National Trust – and thence to the University of Sussex.

  In the event, the purges and the bonfires were not enough. So prolific was ‘Gigadibs the literary man’ that enough survives in the way of manuscripts, lesser works published and long forgotten and, above all, letters and scraps of letters to allow the biographer to put solid flesh on bone – and more than enough to show that the Ruddy who grew prematurely into adulthood in the 1880s and achieved enormous fame in the 1890s was a far more complex, troubled and troubling individual than the man he presented himself to be in Something of Myself. However Kipling may have wished to be remembered, this is Ruddy humanised: his complications are the man; they are, to a great extent, what make him a writer of genius.

  1

  ‘Mother of cities’

  BOMBAY AND A BEGINNING, 1865–7

  Mother of cities to me

  For I was born at her gate,

  Between the palms and the sea

  Where the world-end steamers wait.

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘To the City of Bombay’, The Song of the Cities, 1894

  The ‘world-end steamers’ that carried generations of Anglo-Indians between Britain and India are long gone, but shipping still crowds the roads in Bombay Harbour, and passengers still disembark at the quay known as the Apollo Bunder, even if most of them are day-trippers returning from Elephanta Island. But apart from the Bunder little remains of the Bombay seafront as it was when its most famous British son was born. To find the Bombay of Rudyard Kipling you must strike inland to the open space in front of the Maharashtra State Police Headquarters, formerly the Royal Alfred Sailors’ Home. Six broad avenues converge here, requiring the traffic to circle a modest fountain erected in the year of Kipling’s birth, 1865. Given the stranglehold now exerted by Maharashtran political lobbies on the city, it is probably just as well that so few people know that the fountain celebrates General Arthur Wellesley’s victories over the Marathas.

  Walk on past the Indo-Saracenic domes of what was the Prince of Wales Museum and is now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, in honour of the Maratha warlord Shivaji. The museum was built after the city’s craze for Gothic and Romanesque Transitional had begun to subside, but on the opposite side of the road the arcades of Elphinstone College and the David Sassoon Mechanics’ Institute and Library give the first hint of architectural excesses to come. The avenue widens at a section known today as the Kala Ghoda, the Black Horse, after an eq
uestrian statue of another Prince of Wales that stood here before relegation to the Byculla Zoological Gardens, Bombay’s graveyard of the British Raj.

  Push on through the traffic along Mahatma Gandhi Road and follow the curve of the ghostly ramparts of Bombay Fort. Time was when no building was allowed within a thousand yards of the Fort’s walls, in order to provide a clear field of fire, so that this was all open land and coconut palms, a grassy crescent known to Bombay’s British residents as the Esplanade and to everyone else as the maidan. Most of the buildings here date from the building spree that followed the levelling of the ramparts in the early 1860s.1

  Now we are getting closer to Kipling country, but first another intersection, laid over the foundations of Bombay Fort’s Church Gate, and another fountain: the city’s much-loved Flora Fountain, which only the politicians call Hutatma Chowk. Who remembers today that it was paid for by public subscription to honour the departing Governor, Sir Bartle Frere, the man who more than any other individual created modern Bombay? But press on. From Flora Fountain continue to trace the curve of the old ramparts to the point where Bazaar Gate stood – and where suddenly and dramatically the Victoria Terminus explodes into view in all its High Gothic extravagance. What else could it be called today except the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, even if some stubborn citizens insist on sticking to ‘VT’?

  But ignore VT and ignore, if you must, on the other side of the street, F. W. Stevens’ other architectural glory: the Bombay Municipality Building with its absurdly elongated central dome. Carry on up what was formerly Esplanade Road, past the Times of India Building on the left, and past the Anjuman-i-Islam Muslim School next to it – which might not be so easy if it’s break time and the children are out. Once safely past, cast your eyes over the generous acreage of land to your left, with its abundance of mature trees and shrubs: banyan, mango, jacaranda, bougainvillaea, frangipani and palms of every order. Young men and women throng the paths that criss-cross the site, mostly in jeans but a number wearing brightly coloured saris or salwar-kameez, with shawls over the shoulders. A notice at the entrance identifies them as students of the Sir Jamsetji Jijibhoy School of Applied Art.

  Enter the grounds. Best to make an appointment, but no one will really mind if you do not. Set well back from the traffic you will find an oasis hidden among the trees, where the loudest sounds are of mynahs, parakeets, crows and fruit-bats, and at its heart, in what is still ‘a garden full of sunshine and birds’,2 a two-storey bungalow with a tiled roof, upstairs verandah and faded, green-painted gables. In the back porch is a head cast in bronze which bears a startling resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi. A plaque on the wall declares this to be the birthplace of Rudyard Kipling – which, strictly speaking, it is not.

  Neither the bungalow with the faded green gables nor any of the present buildings in the grounds of the Sir Jamsetji Jijibhoy School of Art had been built when the Kiplings first arrived in Bombay. The city then stood poised on the cusp. An island of plans, marked-out plots, new-laid avenues and railway lines – and new acres fast being reclaimed from the sea. A city of dreams and great expectations.

  In the early hours of 11 May 1865 the P&O mail steamer Rangoon was piloted through the crowded shipping lanes to anchor some distance off the stone pier of the Apollo Bunder. Later that morning relays of gallibats and dhangis – already corrupted by British mariners into jolly-boats’ and ‘dinghies’ – ferried the passengers and their baggage ashore, among them a European couple both of that indeterminate age when youth shades into maturity. A shrewd observer might have hazarded a number of guesses: that they were newcomers to India, not particularly well off, quite possibly newly-wed. A prematurely greying beard combined with a bald pate made the man appear the older by some years, but in reality both he and his wife had been born in the same year, 1837, and it was she who was the older by three months – a seniority she afterwards concealed to the extent of requiring her husband to add an extra year to his age.

  Of the two, it was the woman who would have made an immediate impression, even though we may picture her sporting a ‘desert hat of the foulest appearance’ that was part of the tropical trousseau selected before they had set sail from Southampton a month earlier. According to the youngest of her four sisters, she was of ‘pale complexion, dark brown hair and grey eyes with black lashes, and delicately pencilled eyebrows. In those eyes lay the chief fascination of her face, so expressive were they that they seemed to deepen or pale in colour according to passing emotion.’ No less striking, but tactfully overlooked, was the firm mouth and set jaw that marked Alice as the most determined of the five Macdonald sisters.

  As well as being the eldest and tallest, Alice was held to be the most ‘Irish’ in temperament: ‘She had the ready wit and power of repartee, the sentiment, and I may say the unexpectedness which one associates with that race. It was impossible to predict how she would act at any given point. There was a certain fascination in this, and fascinating she certainly was. Needless to say she had many admirers, and it must be confessed was a flirt.’3 Alice’s younger brother took the same view, believing his sister to possess ‘the nimblest mind’ he had ever known, together with ‘the kind of vision that is afforded by flashes of lightning. She saw things in a moment and did not so much reason as pounce on her conclusions … Her power of speech was unsurpassed – her chief difficulty being that she found language a slow-moving medium of expression that failed to keep up with her thought.’ But Alice’s wit was also sharp-edged – ‘a weapon of whose keenness of point there could be no doubt, and foolish or mischievous people were made to feel it’.4 This ‘sprightly, if occasionally caustic, wit’ made her very good company – ‘except, perhaps, to those who had cause to fear the lash of her epigrams’.5 Perhaps not surprisingly, Alice’s favourite character in fiction was Thackeray’s mercurial, ambitious Becky Sharp.

  At first sight her companion did not impress, standing no more than five foot three inches in his boots; one contemporary in India described him as ‘a little man with a big head, and eyes for everything’.6 But John Lockwood Kipling was someone who improved enormously on acquaintance. His new brother-in-law had very soon warmed to ‘his gentleness of spirit, his unselfish affection and general lovableness’, and had been equally impressed by his mental powers: ‘His power of acquiring and retaining knowledge was extraordinary. His curiosity, in the nobler sense of the term, was alive and active in almost every field of knowledge. All things interested him … He was widely read, and what he read he remembered and had at his disposal.’7 These characteristics were to stand John Lockwood Kipling in good stead in India, where he would become known as a gentle, easy-going, even-tempered man with an encyclopaedic knowledge. ‘One of the sweetest characters I have ever known’ was how one of his friends was later to sum him up,8 while one of his son’s fellow journalists would remember him as ‘a rare, genial soul, with happy artistic instincts … and a generous, cynical sense of humour’.9

  Alice Macdonald and John Lockwood Kipling had met two years earlier at a picnic beside a small reservoir named Lake Rudyard, outside Burslem in the Staffordshire Potteries; he of solid Yorkshire stock, she part Scot and part Welsh – ‘all Celt and three parts fire’, as her son later put it.10 He was the eldest of six children, she the eldest of five daughters in a family of seven children. A common nonconformist background, with two generations of Methodist ministers or lay-preachers in both families, had given them very similar upbringings of austere gentility, where reading, self-improvement and fireside entertainment were the order of the day. Both had experienced a ‘highly developed family life’ which had encouraged them to think well of themselves – perhaps too much so. In the opinion of Alice’s younger brother Fred, it had led his sisters to think ‘more highly of their common gifts and qualities than is altogether good for them, and to undervalue other qualities’.11 In Alice Macdonald and John Lockwood their close family circles had also developed a common love of music and literature, a shared dislike of chapel
cant and a cheerful cynicism. In Alice’s case, it had also led to an abiding fascination with table-rapping, spiritualism and the occult.

  With her agile mind, Alice was yet clumsy on her feet; the very opposite, in fact, of John Lockwood Kipling, who was nimble on the dance floor but had a mind that ‘moved more slowly, and was patient and meditative’. ‘The result’, according to Fred Macdonald, ‘was a kinship of thought and feeling that soon ripened into something more.’12 It was John Lockwood Kipling who provided the solid foundation upon which their marriage was built. Although he was as keen on poetry and literature as Alice, his creativity found its best expression in drawing and modelling. In the summer of 1851, when John Lockwood was fourteen, he had visited London on a Cook’s Excursion to see the Great Exhibition and was so inspired that he had decided there and then to make a career as a modeller in pottery. He left school and through a friend of his father’s was taken on by a local firm in Burslem, while at the same time going to evening classes at Stoke School of Art.

  A seven-year apprenticeship turned John Lockwood into a thoroughly capable draughtsman and modeller in clay. The Stoke School of Art became linked to the South Kensington Museum when it opened in 1857, which led to John spending two years in London as a junior assistant to the sculptor J. Birnie Philip as he worked on the frieze on the podium of the Albert Memorial and other designs. The South Kensington Museum then became the headquarters of the School of Ornamental Art (later the Royal College of Art), set up to establish a national standard and curriculum for art teaching based on solid craftsmanship and classical draughtsmanship. After developing the skills in modelling and carving bas-reliefs which became his speciality, John worked as an assistant in the Department of Science and Art, where he further refined his techniques as a modeller in terracotta.