Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay on December 30th 1865, son of John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and teacher of architectural sculpture, and his wife Alice. When he was twelve he went to the United Services College at Westward Ho! near Bideford, where the Headmaster, Cormell Price, a friend of his father and uncles, fostered his literary ability

In 1882, aged sixteen, he returned to Lahore, where his parents now lived, to work on the Civil and Military Gazette, and later on its sister paper the Pioneer in Allahabad.  Returning to England in 1889, Kipling won instant success with Barrack-Room Ballads, which were followed by some more brilliant short stories. After the death of an American friend and literary collaborator, Wolcott Balestier, he married Wolcott’s sister Carrie in 1892.

After a world trip, he returned with Carrie to her family home in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA, with the aim of settling down there. It was in Brattleboro, deep in New England, that he wrote Captains Courageous and The Jungle Books. A quarrel with Rudyard’s brother-in-law drove the Kiplings back to England in 1896. Josephine died while the family were on a visit to the United States in early 1899.

By now Kipling had come to be regarded as the People’s Laureate and the poet of Empire, and he produced some of his most memorable poems and stories in Rottingdean, including Kim, Stalky & Co., and Just So Stories.  Kipling’s poem, “The Absent-Minded Beggar” had raised vast sums of money for the benefit of British soldiers in the Boer war.  Kipling foresaw the First World War, and tried to alert the nation to the need for preparedness. The Kiplings were to suffer a second bereavement with the death of their son John, at the age of 18, in the Battle of Loos in 1915.

He was also much involved in the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, and King George V became a personal friend. Kipling died in January 1936. He had declined most of the many honours that had been offered him, including a knighthood, the Poet Laureateship, and the Order of Merit, but in 1907 he had accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature.