CONTENTS NEWS AND NOTES .................. 2 KIPLING'S INDIA — Eric Linklater ............ 5 KIPLING'S VISIT TO AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND — J. B. Primrose ...... ... ... ...... 11 READERS' GUIDE TO ' MY GREAT AND ONLY ' — Roger Lancelyn Green ...... ... ... ... 17 'GENTLEMEN RANKERS' — R. E. Harbord ...... 21 REPORT ON DISCUSSION MEETING — P.W.I....... 23 (containing the complete paper on A Fleet in Being by Rear-Admiral P. W. Brock, C.B., D.S.O.) THE KIPLING SOCIETY THE Society was founded in 1927. Its first President was Major- General L. C. Dunsterville, C.B., C.S.I. (" Stalky'') (1927-1946), who was succeeded by Field-Marshal The Earl Wavell, G.C.B.. G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., C.M.G., M.C. (1946-1950). Lt.-Gen. Sir Frederick A. M. Browning, G.C.V.O., K.B.E., C.B., D.S.O. (1951-1960). Members are invited to propose those of their friends who are interested in Rudyard Kipling's works for election to membership. The Hon. Secretary would be glad to hear from members overseas as to prospects of forming a Branch of the Society in their district. The Subscription is : Home Members, 25/- ; Overseas Members, 15/-; Junior Members (under 18, anywhere), 10/-; U.S.A. Branch, $3.50 per annum. These include receipt of The Kipling Journal quarterly. Until further notice the Society's Office at 323 High Holborn. W.C.l, will be open once a week, from 11 a.m. to 4 pan. Please be sure to telephone before calling — HOLborn 7597 — as the day is not always the same. THE KIPLING SOCIETY Forthcoming Meetings COUNCIL MEETING The next Council Meeting will be held at 323 High Holborn on Wednesday, May 15th, at 2.30 p.m. DISCUSSION MEETINGS Wednesday, March 13th, 1963, at the Ulster Room, Overseas House, Park Place, at 5.30 for 6.0 p.m. Mr. J. H. McGivering will introduce a discussion on Kipling and the Sea. Wednesday, May 8th, 1963. Same time and place. A reading by Mr. Inwood of Tomlinson, The Rhyme of the Three Sealers. The Hills and the Sea and Eddi's Service followed by dis- cussion. VISIT TO BATEMAN'S Mr. and Mrs. de Candole have again kindly suggested that we visit Bateman's in May, this time on Tuesday, May 7th. Together with Mrs. Kathleen Newton, they will be the guests of the Society at lunch, at 1 p.m. at ' The Bear ', Burwash. A coach will leave Charing Cross Underground Station at 10.15 a.m. on May 7th, arriving back in London about 7 p.m. At least 12 seats in this coach must be taken to make the hiring worth while. The charge, including lunch, will be 25/- for those going by the coach, and 15/- for those going by private car (including guests). If you wish to come, be sure to notify the Hon. Sec., Beckett Lodge, Beckett Avenue, Kenley, Surrey, enclosing the appropriate fee, not later than first post Wednesday, April 24th. This will be the ONLY notice. N.B. You MUST book early, or we may not be able to fit you in. ANNUAL LUNCHEON The Annual Luncheon of the Kipling Society will take place on Friday, 25th October, 1963, at the Connaught Rooms, Great Queen Street, London, W.C.2. The Guest of Honour will be Professor Bonamy Dobrée, O.B.E., Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Leeds University ; Lec- turer, Writer and Broadcaster on Rudyard Kipling. Application forms will go out in September. THE KIPLING JOURNAL published quarterly by THE KIPLING SOCIETY Vol. XXX No. 145 MARCH, 1963 NEWS AND NOTES KIPLING AND M'ANDREW Mr. Godfrey Tandy sends an interesting recollection of an incident related many years ago in his presence by George Dunn Ritchie (1873- 1955). ' It ran ', he says, ' somewhat as follows :— ' I came home from the Cape in the same ship with the whole Kipling family. I was in my twenties then and had just finished a job as engineer of a ship trading on the east coast of South Africa. The ship I was coming home on carried only a few passengers and so I talked to Kipling quite a lot. When he found out I was a ship's engineer he fairly bombarded me with questions. It was a slowish ship and the weather was none too good, and by the time we got into the Bay I'd told him quite a lot about marine engineering. Eventually he came to me and said : ' I've just finished a poem and I'd like to read it to you. Tell me if you notice any mistakes.' And then he read me ' M'Andrew's Hymn '. He had a queer style of reading — a sort of high sing-song— almost a sort of parsonical voice : I didn't much care for it . . . ' Unfortunately Mr. Tandy does not remember whether Ritchie de- tected and corrected any mistakes in the poem. As with stories repeated and remembered, there is some inaccuracy in this one. ' M'Andrew's Hymn ' was first published in Scribner's Magazine, Dec : 1894. and collected in The Seven Seas ( 1896) : the Kipling family paid its first visit to South Africa at the beginning of 1898. Kipling himself had once visited the Cape on his way to Austra- lia and New Zealand in 1891 — but he did not return via the Cape or the Bay of Biscay. He came from Bombay : ' Travelling to Trieste and taking the overland route.' (Carrington, p. 190). Moreover he was writing ' M'Andrew's Hymn ' at Vermont in November 1893, and corrected the proofs there the following August. And he cannot have read even any early version to Ritchie going out to South Africa in 1891, because the trip on which the poem is based followed the visit to the Cape ... It must have been another poem — or another voyage. KIPLING AT THE ANTIPODES This number of the Journal contains a particularly interesting article on Kipling's visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1891 — an incident in his life which has never before been documented fully. The Rev. J. B. Primrose, now living in Geraldine, New Zealand, deserves our deepest gratitude for the careful researches he has made on the spot. March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 3 He promises a further instalment concerning Kipling's travels in Aus- tralia — but even he is not able to offer us a full solution to the ' Mrs. Bathurst ' mystery ! However Mr. Elliot L. Gilbert has just published a full critical study, " What Happens in ' Mrs. Bathurst '," in PLMA (Vol. LXXVII : No. 4, Part I September 1962), and he and the Editor, Professor George Winchester Stone, have very kindly given permission for it to be reprinted in The Kipling Journal. Mr. Primrose tells me that Kipling's sketch ' Our Lady at Wairakei ' is still popular in New Zealand. Kipling probably sent it back to New Zealand from Australia, as it appeared first on 30th January 1892 in The New Zealand Herald. It was reprinted in The Christchurch Weekly Press on 4th February, 1892, and The New Zealand Herald published it again on 20th January, 1936 just after Kipling's death. A very slightly abridged version was reprinted in the same paper as recently as 27th January, 1962. KIPLING AND MUSIC-HALL SONGS Another subject on which relatively little research has been done is the influence of the Music-Hails on Kipling's writings — or his on the Music-Halls. Some notes on ' My Great and Only ', Kipling's story about Gatti's-under-the-Arches, appear later in this number of the Journal, but they only explore the field tentatively. No biographer of Kipling has so far said anything about the song which, if the story is based on fact, he wrote for a ' Lion Comique ' at Gatti's : nor has any bibliographer been able to trace more of it than the few verses quoted. Yet the incident and the song are of outstanding importance. For the song is the first Barrack Room Ballad, or the first sketch for the series, and it was Kipling's experiences at Gatti's which gave him the idea for the whole series — themselves a new genre in literature. How well Kipling remembered the songs which he heard at Gatti's, and at the other Halls which he visited during his first few months in London, is shown indirectly by the echoes and metres in Barrack Room Ballads. It appears more directly in the numerous references and quota- tions scattered throughout his stories. These do not seem to have been traced systematically, even by Dr. Weygandt. There is a good haul of them in Stalky & Co. where several are quoted, notably ' Patrick, mind the Baby ' written by Edward Harrigan in 1878, ' Pretty lips, sweeter than cherry or plum ', by Arthur Lloyd at about the same time. ' Don't make a noise, Or else you'll wake the Baby ' by G. W. Hunt (c. 1870), and a rather altered version of 'A way we have in the Army ' (1863), by J. B. Geoghegan, with music by John J. Blockley. Others that spring readily to mind from various stories are ' Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road ' by Albert Chevalier, ' The Honey- suckle and the Bee ' by Albert H. Fitz. ' Ta-ra-ra-boom de-ay ' by Henry Sayers and B. M. Bachelor (1891) and ' Yip-i-addy-i-ay ' by George Grossmith, Jnr. And there are many more, such as ' Young Obadiah ', ' There's another jolly row downstairs ', ' Yes, we have no bananas ', which one has sung without knowing the author or its provenence. Professor Carrington remembers singing ' There's my youngest daughter ' (quoted in Sea Warfare) in the trenches during the First 4 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 War, but can remember no more than : ' That's my youngest daughter ! ' Take a look at her !) That's my pretty, little Cinderella, Sweet sixteen, and never kissed a fella . . .' And of course he never thought about the author, composer, or date of first publication or performance. KIPLING AND THE STAGE Although it was during his first year in London, from November 1889 onwards, that Kipling showed particular enthusiasm for the Lon- don theatres and Music-Hails, he seems to have kept up his interest in them. For ' The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat ', written in 1913, shows that his knowledge was not only unimpaired, but up to date. Doubtless by then he knew some of the great impresarios and drew his portrait of ' Bat Masquerier ' from them — but he had not forgotten Nellie Farren, who retired in 1891. The Barrack Room Ballads do not seem to have been sung actually in the Halls, though they had a very potent effect on the songs written after they became popular as concert-stage and drawing-room songs. Apparently the only song he wrote specially for the Music-Halls after he became famous was ' The Absent-Minded Beggar ' which was first sung by John Coats at the Alhambra Theatre, London, on 13th Novem- ber 1899—'whence its chorus floated to all the places where Music- Hall choruses were sung ', wrote Maurice Willson Disher in his Vic- torian Song (1955). It was probably joined in the Halls by ' Boots ' — which was still being sung in 1939. But the division between the old Music-Halls and the later Vaude- ville, Variety and Revue was almost ceasing to exist after 1900, and one would hesitate in which category to put ' Fringes of the Fleet ', set to music by Sir Edward Elgar and performed at the Coliseum, London in 1916. Meanwhile Kipling's stories were being dramatised and performed in the ' legitimate ' theatre with considerable success. The Naulahka was given a copyright performance at the Opera Comique on 26th October, 1891, but does not seem to have gone any further : who adapted it is not recorded. There was an abortive production of The Light that Failed in a one-act version by Courtney Thorpe at the Royalty, opening on 7th April, 1898; but the full-length dramatisation by 'George Fleming' (Constance Fletcher), with Forbes-Robertson as Dick Heldar which began its run at the Lyric on 7th February, 1903, was an out- standing success, and was revived at Drury Lane on 31st March 1913. Equally successful was F. Kinsey Peile's one-act adaptation of ' The Man Who Was ' at His Majesty's on 8th June, 1903 with Beerbohm Tree as Limmason, and it remained in Tree's repertoire for some years, though there has been no London revival since his death. Kipling's own one-act play, The Harbour Watch, was tried out at the Royalty on 22nd April, 1913, and found a place at the same theatre on 15th September, 1913 as a curtain-raiser to St. John Hankin's posthumous play Thompson. He is said to have written other plays that were never produced. R.L.G. March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 5 KIPLING'S INDIA by Enc Linklater Address delivered at the annual luncheon, 25th October, 1962 There is something recurrently astonishing in the thought that Kipling when he went out to work in India in the cold weather of 1882, was not quite seventeen ; and there is matter for something more than astonishment in the discovery that he set about preparing himself for his major task in life — for what I think was his prime and justifying purpose — with dexterity, and self-confidence, and instinctive wisdom. But it is, perhaps, a quality of genius that, from a very early age, it not only knows what it wants, but how to look after itself. Now India is a land of great distances peopled by enormous multi- tudes. It is a land of great age and vast complexity : a land that should fill even a commonplace mind with awe and wonder. And in 1882 its antiquity had bloomed afresh into a brand-new Empire : Victoria had been its Empress for just five years — and already its north-west frontier was threatened by the impending and ponderous might of Russia. We had been compelled to break into Afghanistan and dislodge its ruler. We had been defeated at Maiwand, and little General Roberts had ridden the marches from Kabul to Kandahar. In these circumstances one might have expected an imaginative and intelligent boy to contemplate his duty in India with solemn appre- hension, and regard its rulers with reverence. But the servants of Empire who first attracted Kipling's interest — or were the first to be re-created by him — were Ahasuerus Jenkins who rose in the military hierarchy by virtue only of a good singing voice ; and Potiphar Gubbins, whose incompetence as a civil engineer was happily obscured by the beauty of his wife. There was also Delilah Aberystwyth, who learnt the secrets of the Viceroy's Council, but couldn't keep them. Kipling announces his presence in India not with awe, not with a romantic salute to the imperilled frontier, but with a display of fire- works : with a golden rain of sheer impudence, with cynical squibs and crackers. He is quick to recognise that death will be a constant neigh- bour, and, to begin with, he is cynical even about death. Jack Barrett died in Quetta because someone senior to him wanted the undivided attention of Mrs. Barrett in Simla; and on the Afghan border, where ' the odds are on the cheaper man,' ' Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezzil.' With all the brisk assurance of youth he is wonderfully cynical about women and the institution of marriage. He weighs the demands of a woman against the benevolence of a cigar : cigars that have ' only a Suttee's passion, to do their duty and burn.' He advises young men less prudent than himself, and tells them : ' Pleasant the snaffle of courtship, improving the manners and carriage, But the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible thorn-bit of marriage.' 6 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 In these early exercises Kipling was not introducing novelty to India. He was not, in this matter, an innovator. The writing of light verse was a habit, if not a tradition, of English residents ; and Indian Civil Servants, when they had nothing better to do, were usually to be found translating Horace. But there's reason for thinking that young Kipling was aware of another purpose in writing jog-trot satire and galloping lampoons ; for in one of his fairly early tales we find the assertion, set forth with typical dogmatism, that ' India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously — the midday sun always excepted.' That comes from a story called ' Thrown Away,' about a boy who did take things too seriously, and for reasons ridicu- lously trivial — except to a self-tormented boy — went out and shot himself. It was written towards the end of Kipling's six and a half years in India, and not only is it coloured by the hue of tragedy, but distasted, as it seems, by the sourness of utter pessimism. ' Good work does not matter,' he writes, ' because a man is judged by his worst out- put, and another man takes all the credit for his best as a rule. Bad work does not matter, because other men do worse, and incompetents hang on longer in India than anywhere else. . . Sickness does not matter, because it's all in the day's work, and if you die, another man takes over your place and your office in the eight hours between death and burial '. In ' Plain Tales ' there is plenty of proof that the jocular rhythms of 'Departmental Ditties' did not always reflect a jocular temper — sometimes, perhaps, he was deliberately abstaining from taking things too seriously — and European characters and institutions do not always show well in those stories. In the final collection of forty there are four about Mulvaney and his friends, but elsewhere there are few male characters who can be admired, or even liked. There is Strickland of the Police, there is the curiously sentimental banker, Reggie Burke, who out of sheer compassion tolerates a quite intolerable Yorkshire accountant, and there is Mclntosh Jellaludin who, in spite of being a drunken loafer, is independent and a scholar who knows India as well as he knows his Swinburne. But otherwise the male chorus-line is filled with inefficient young men, or remarkably unattractive old men, all of whom are capable of being ruined or rescued — as occasion may require — by designing women who have nothing else to do. In this recurrent drama the female lead is played by Mrs. Hauksbee, in whom one really cannot believe. If one could believe in her, one might be worried by the thought of Mr. Hauksbee : who was he, and what did he do? We are not told, and that for a good reason. Mrs. Hauksbee, so kind and mischievous, was a virtuous Platonic flirt who had no sub- stance ; and a woman without substance has no need of a working husband. Far more credible are Lispeth the hill-girl who goes back to the ways of her own people ; and poor Miss d'Castries who was deserted because she had a little country-blood in her veins. It's remarkable, indeed, that so much of Kipling's sympathy goes to the Indian charac- ters in his early stories. One of the most moving of them is the very simple tale of the khitmatgar's child Muhammad Din, a solitary little boy who plays in a garden, and who dies for no particular reason except that he has not strength enough to live. March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 7 You will not find, in that gallery of portraits, a more sensible woman — and she was beautiful too — than Janoo the Kashmiri girl who was a harlot in Lahore, and lived in the house of Suddhoo ; nor is there a better picture of bravery — again excepting the Mulvaney stories — than that of the little frightened man Michele d'Cruze, who was very nearly black but behaved, in a time of crisis, like the most pukka of pukka sahibs, and was rewarded by marriage to Miss Vezzis, a nurse- maid, and a new job with the fine salary of 66 rupees a month. The young Kipling — or so it seems — was already making tenta- tive sketches for a major work, and its subject is suggested by the romantic brush-work that distinguishes those of the English stories that hover about the surface of Indian life. In ' Plain Tales ' there are two characters — whom I've already mentioned — who are treated with more respect than the majority, and they are Strickland of the Police and Mclntosh Jellaludin : respect is due to them because they have a deep and patiently acquired knowledge of India, and for this reason they are made larger than life. They are romanticised, that is. Strickland is said to know the thieves' patter of the changars, and to have spent eleven days as a faqir in the gardens of Baba Atal at Amritsar ; while Mc- lntosh is supposed to have written, in the book of Mother Maturin, a complete exposure of the heart and mind of India. In comparison with them, the ordinary way of English life — life in a hill station, in clubs or cantonments — is a matter for social comedy, though comedy may be marred by the intrusion of death. The European scenes are typically small and domestic. Sometimes, as in the story called ' The Education of Otis Yeere,' they have the confined and stuffy air of a zenana. In that story Mrs. Hauksbee and Mrs. Mallowe chatter in- terminably about life in Simla, and leave the impression that the seat of Government was habitually drawn-in to a provincial tea-table. There is also that little novel-in-dialogue called ' The Story of the Gadsbys ' : its tone, that was once thought ' daring ', now seems embarrassingly coy >— and even more embarrassing is the admission that it may well be a realistic projection of Victorian sentimentality. But before his six and a half years in India had come to an end, Kipling — and his English characters — were reaching out to far from domestic themes. In his barrack-room stories he had told that rollicking tale of the taking of Lungtungpen by Lieutenant Brazenose and Private Mulvaney, both of them stark naked ; and that tale of cholera in camp, called ' The Daughter of the Regiment,' in which a tough but touching little comedy is played — and played with perfect felicity — to an old tune of tragedy and simple heroism. He had written, in ' Only a Subal- tern,' the story of Bobby Wick, by whose example — as Charles Car- rington so finely says — he - moulded a whole generation of young Englishmen into that type ' ; and when his genius first ran with the strength and fullness of a spring tide he wrote ' The Man who would be King,' in which he creates an atmosphere of intolerable confinement — there's a sensation of claustrophobia; the heat of a dreadful night just before the rains is almost palpable — but then, as if the darkness has broken, there emerges a legend of wild adventure among the improbable heights of Kafiristan. It begins in the Kumharsen Serai — ' the great 8 THE KIPLING JOURNAL Mardi 1963 four-square sink of humanity where the strings of camels and horses from the North load and unload. All the nationalities of Central Asia may be found there, and most of the folk of India proper. Balkh and Bokhara there meet Bengal and Bombay, and try to draw eye-teeth. You can buy ponies, turquoises, Persian pussy-cats, saddle-bags, fat-tailed sheep and musk in the Kumharsen Serai, and get many strange things for nothing ' — it begins there, and two years later comes to an end, on another hot night, in the newspaper office where nothing much had happened except the punctual recording of life and death in the outer world. But in Kafiristan the two adventurers had found a land where gold lay in the rocks like suet in mutton,' and the women were white as English women, and prettier too — ' Boil them once or twice in hot water and they'll come out like chicken and ham ' — a land where the rules and ritual of Freemasonry had strangely survived from some re- mote and long forgotten inauguration. They had fought for a kingdom and almost established a kingdom — they had raised an army and drilled it — and they had invited disaster. One of them decided that he could not face winter without the comfort of a wife, and that decision led to death, and torment, and defeat : the solution is too facile for the story, but it's a typical Kipling solution. Now in this, the first of the major stories, there is the combination, brilliantly conceived and perfectly contrived, of the ordinary, dull, deeply uncomfortable workaday life of the Englishman in India, with a magnificent realisation of its romantic larger-than-life periphery. Tor- tured by heat and tied to his office, the journalist sits at his table, and through the shadows above the punkah shines a vision : " We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town ; We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down. Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need, Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead.' It led him, in due course, to another great divided story, ' The Bridge Builders.' This, I think, is a better story than ' The Man who would be King,' though it is not so well made. It begins, you may re- member, with a prosaic statement : ' The least that Findlayson of the Public Works Department expected was a C.I.E. ; he dreamed of a C.S.I.' This is realistic, for an officer of the P.W.D., who had no ex- pectation of making a fortune, could hope that his work might be re- warded with the distinction of an order. More good men have worked for honour than for riches, but even very good men are human, and want some recognition. Findlayson had been working for three years, in conditions of appalling difficulty, to put a bridge across the Ganges ; and if all went well, the bridge might be finished in three months. It was a bridge of imposing size, and for three years 5,000 workmen had laboured on it, under the direction of two Englishmen and their warrant officer, the Lascar Peroo. Kipling begins his story with a brilliant sermon on his favourite text, Labor omnia vincit. The inescapable imperative is to work, and work can overcome all difficulties. But Peroo gives warning of a danger against which there is no calculable defence : Mother Gunga may rebel against their work. March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 9 Mother Gunga does rebel. Floods are reported on a tributary, heavy rains elsewhere. The river rises, and Kipling's genius rises with it. Nowhere, in all his writings, does he more brilliantly and compul- sively establish a mood and awareness of mounting crisis — by means of an expert knowledge of the mechanics of disaster and the material chances of survival — than in his description of the desperate measures taken to preserve that almost completed bridge against the surging, swelling, ever louder fury of the Ganges in flood. For sheer sensation, it's a story of unrivalled excitement : excite- ment substantiated by technical detail. And then there's a sudden change. The bridge endures, and Findlayson endures with the help of a little opium that Peroo has given him. But in the last struggle for survival they are carried below the bridge and cast ashore on the island where, in the darkness of the storm, they are joined by a Bull and a monstrous Ape, by a Crocodile and a Tigress and a lordly Black-buck : who are the gods, indeed, of the Hindu pantheon. To them, later in the night, comes also Krishna, to speak for the common people and the love of life that keeps them living. The gods engage in argument, and Krishna admits that they may belong to a pantheon that is out of date, and dying for lack of belief. But the last word is given to the Black-buck, who is Indra, the violent but benevolent god who fights against darkness and drought ; and against, or beyond the dream that Findlayson is dreaming — a dream induced by opium and exhaustion — Indra declares that Brahm, the god before all gods, is also dreaming ; and Earth and Heaven and Hell live only on the strength of his dreams. ' The dreams come and go, and the nature of the dreams changes, but still Brahm dreams — and till he wakes the gods die not.' This is a profound and humbling thought —that the works of men have no more substance than a dream — and the colloquy of the gods is dramatically and admirably phrased. But there are two objections to it — or to its being embedded in this story — and the first, a light-weight objection, is that hard-headed Findlayson, with his hope set on a C.S.I., or at least a C.I.E., does not seem the sort of man who is likely to dream such a dream, even after swallowing three opium pills. Secondly, and more seriously, the impermanence and insubstantiability of things, that's emphasised in the conversation of the gods, is too flatly opposed to the practice and idealism of a civil engineer — which is the inspiration of the greater part of the story — and either view disables and makes non- sense of the other. ' The Bridge Builders ' is flawed masterpiece — a bridge whose two ends do not meet and substantiate each other, as do the two parts of ' The Man who would be King.' But the conception is superb, though the execution may be faulty, and Kipling, that story-teller of infinite resource and sagacity, does what he can to mend its broken parts with a conclusion of charming and dis- arming irony. In the morning the bridge is still standing, and down- stream comes a steam launch belonging to the Rao Sahib, a neighbour- ing prince. The Rao Sahib is in a hurry : he has an engagement at the State temple where a new idol is to be sanctified ; and to Findlayson who, if we can believe the story, has so lately been involved with the 10 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 headwaters of religion, with the spokesmen and authors of religious be- lief — to Findlayson the impatient Rao Sahib complains, ' They are dam-bore, these religious ceremonies, Finlinson, eh ? ' The notion of a dream — a dream or a dominating vision —remains with Kipling, and a few years later finds perfect expression in his great- est literary exercise, the story of Kim, the Little Friend of all the World. This is a picaresque novel which, though it has no plot, has a pattern and a theme which are dramatically sufficient and aesthetically satisfy- ing. The theme is service — service to India — and the pattern is com- posed of a twofold, intercepting search : Kim's practical search for the means and discipline by which he may enter that service, and the Lama's search for the river of healing, the river of meaning. Here there is no disagreement between vision and reality; there's no failure, in the management of the story, to fit with smooth and mutual acceptance the dream and the dusty daily-ness of life. Kipling and Kim have their feet firmly on the plain, and Kipling and the Lama have their eyes set clearly on the hills, and the mystery of life that their shadows may conceal. Written at the very end of the nineteenth century — the century of great novels — ' Kim ', as I believe, can hold its place, and will, among the best of them. But when I said that Kipling — the boy Kipling — seems from the very beginning to be training himself for his major task, for his prime and justifying purpose, I meant something more than a literary purpose. I meant an historical purpose. I shall not engage the literary critics with a challenge that service to history is a greater service than service to literature; but it is 'something more.' And the British achievement in India was an achievement that deserved something more than a re- corder : it deserved an artist — and it found one in Kipling — who could re-create it with all its faults and splendours, the triumph of its progress and the humble smell of those who limped in the dust of the Great Trunk Road. Nowadays we are almost at liberty — not quite, but almost — to appraise what we did in that vast land which is roofed by the Himalayas and at Cape Comorin opens a sea-side window to the warmth of the Indian Ocean. Much of what we did, in the beginning, was morally wrong, and some of the things we did later were vulgar and trivial ; but the best of what we did was good — good by the highest standards in history — and for a hundred years our motives were mostly good, even if practice did not always maintain their level. In Victorian times our Imperialism had an evangelical accent. Even such gallopers as Hodson and Skinner had a sense of mission; while Outram and the Lawrences were dominated by a concept of duty that was transmitted, as a foundation stone, to the Indian Civil Service and those officers of the Indian Army — there were many of them — who immersed themselves in the traditions of the men they commanded : Punjabis, Mahrattas and Gurkhas. But there were, of course, faults and weaknesses in our adminis- tration— because the agents of our administration were human— and Kipling did not obscure that uncomfortable fact. On the ground floor of the great structure he raised, he installed weaklings and frauds and March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 11 idle women, he domesticated fools and misfits, and on that solid base of realism he built an image of our work in India that was capacious and understanding. It included the romanticism of ' The Man who would be King ' ; and to a realistic view romanticism is always necessary. It in- cluded the slogging, day-to-day, hardly rewarded work of the P.W.D. It was enlarged to enclose that superb and imaginative panorama of northern India — that lordly view which encompasses the servants of India and the servitors of the Lord Buddha — and with a monosyllabic, simple assurance is called ' Kim.' And from his earliest days as a writer it retained the tentative and sometimes difficult expression of his in- stinctive affection for the people of India, which was later to find its culmination in those stories — 'A Sahibs' War ' and ' In the Presence ' — which, with an almost Biblical certainty, proclaim the intrinsic chivalry of India. What we did there was, with all its misdemeanours, a great thing in history; and Rudyard Kipling, a poet of extraordinary strength and ingenuity, a story-teller of singular genius, may have served an even larger purpose by preserving in his art — without suppression of their many weaknesses — the moods and manners and the sort of men who created an Empire. If it was, in fact, no more than a dream of the gods, the gods were so benign as to create a scribe who was able to immortal- ise, with all its warts and splendours, the best of their dreams ; and the India that well be known to the future is Kipling's India. KIPLING'S VISIT TO AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND by J. B. Primrose The Editor of the Journal has invited me to give a summary of the information recently uncovered from newspapers in New Zealand and Australia regarding the journey of Rudyard Kipling between his departure from Southampton on August 22nd and his sailing from Adelaide on November 25th, 1891. A fuller account of this journey and of Kipling's opinions and reflections on New Zealand and Australia, and also of his rather unflattering estimate of literary life in London and on The White Man at Home and other topics is being prepared for publication elsewhere. The information given in Something of Myself (pp. 95-104) re- lating to this journey is fragmentary and often incorrect. It should be remembered that these reminiscences were published after the author's death, and that they were unrevised. Consequently the pages in Carring- ton's Life (pp. 184-189) are also inadequate. Kipling apparently kept no diary of this journey, and no attempt seems to have been made to preserve any records of it. I had read Something of Myself several times, but the vagueness of Kipling's references made me feel that it might be profitable to see what the New Zealand papers made of his visit. This idea came to me 12 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 after I had reached New Zealand, and after again re-reading Something of Myself I felt more than ever the inadequacy of the story. Kipling's visit caused quite a stir in literary circles, but it was the Christchurch papers which on the whole gave the fullest accounts of his doings and sayings when he visited Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch before he sailed for Australia. We are now able to give a full itinerary, and to correct various mis-statements that appeared in Something of Myself. To begin with, Kipling visited New Zealand before he went to Australia, and not after, as is said in Something of Myself. He sailed from Southampton (not from London) in the S.S. Mexican of the Union Steamship Company (not in the S.S. Moor). The S.S. Moor had sailed on August 8th, 1891, for Madeira, the Cape and Natal, and arrived at Cape Town on August 28th, and the Mexican sailed on August 22nd, reaching Cape Town on September 10th, and proceeded on to East African ports. The dates of his sailing and arrival were published in the Cape Argus. In the issue of August 20th it is stated that Mr. R. Kipling, the well known author, proceeds by the Mexican to South Africa, sailing from Southampton, August 22nd.' The issue for Thursday, September 10th, mentioned him among the passengers who ' arrived this morning at ten minutes past one.' In an interview he had with a reporter after his arrival in Welling- ton, New Zealand, Kipling himself says that he came in the Mexican, and that he was able only to stay a fortnight in South Africa. In fact he was there from September 10th till September 25th when he left for New Zealand in the S.S. Doric of the Shaw Savill Line. He was greatly impressed by South Africa. ' There is an empire behind Cape Town ', he said. For part of the time he was in South Africa he stayed at Wyn- berg. The Cape Argus for Friday, September 18th, says that Kipling's original intention was to visit Kimberley, but that this project had been abandoned as he had decided to proceed to New Zealand by the next mail steamer. When did he meet Rhodes? 'A day or so before my de- parture for Australia,' he says in Something of Myself, ' I lunched at an Adderly Street restaurant next to three men. One of them, I was told, was Cecil Rhodes '. Carrington (p. 186) says, ' In a city club he found himself one day at a lunch party with Cecil Rhodes . . . ' According to the Wynberg Times, September 12th, Rhodes was to leave Cape Town by train on Sunday evening, September 13th, for Port Elizabeth, where he was to embark in the Mexican for Natal en route for Mashonaland. But no mention of any meeting between Kipling and Rhodes has been traced in any of the local papers. If they met at all, or even if Kipling only saw Rhodes, it must have been between September 10th and September 13th, more than a week before Kipling sailed. Carrington's remark (p. 186) that 'Rudyard spent the greater part of September and October in Cape Town ' must be based on some mis- understanding. Kipling was in Wellington from the morning of October 18th till the morning of October 22nd. He stayed at the Occidental Hotel, and called at the Club, for he was a convinced upholder of the Anglo-Indian custom of 'leaving a card at the Club', and thus, symbolically 'calling on the Station '. On the same day, probably, he had a long talk with the Wellington correspondent of the Press. Part of it is worth quoting be- March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 13 cause it lets us know what plans he had made before his visit to Cook's office where he was compelled to rearrange his tour. ' Mr. Kipling said he wanted to see all he possibly could of the Maoris, their habitations and manners and customs. He had thought first of going to Otaki, and then overland to Napier, thence by way of Taupo to Auckland. I asked him if he did not intend to visit the South Island. He did not. ' It is too cold down there,' he said. ' Besides, I have come only for a loaf, and to see pretty things ... I don't want to see buildings and products. I need not have come twelve thousand miles for that. I want to see natives and wonders, and to keep myself warm and quiet. I expect to leave Wellington in a few days for Napier overland, thence I shall go on to Auckland. I have a great wish to see the South Sea Islands, and to meet R.L.S., to whom I shall gladly take off my hat, for I have a hearty admiration for him. I shall stay a short time in Samoa, and then make for my real home, India. I may touch at the Australian colonies on the way, but my great desire after visiting Samoa is to do Africa thoroughly. I must be back in England, if possible, by next February, or March.' These were the plans for the next three or four months, but when he visited Cook's office on October 19th, he found that steamer connec- tions made them impossible, and as other circumstances intervened, he actually returned to London about two months earlier than he had in- tended, on January 19th, 1892. In Cook's office he met Robert Angus, a young man who later, for 25 years, was Cook's New Zealand Man- ager. His son, Mr. Neil Angus, now in Auckland, has kindly told me much about his father's association with Kipling and about Kipling's travels in the North Island. Angus had to explain to him that it was impossible for him to do all he wished in the time available. The fixed dates were the sailing of the S.S. Talune from Bluff to Melbourne on November 6th, and the sailing of the P. & O. S.S. Valetta from Sydney on November 14th. The first date involved the cutting out of the visit to Samoa and R.L.S., and the second reduced his visit to Australia to calls at the ports of Melbourne and Adelaide, and about one day in Sydney. Kipling, who seems to have a marked dislike of making his plans known, kept on talking about his projected visit to R.L.S. Re- porters liked this — the rising star worshipping an established luminary — even though they described R.L.S. as Robert Stephenson. Kipling is quoted as saying in Melbourne on November 18th when he was defi- nitely on his way to India : ' Mr. Kipling is on a purely holiday trip, and his movements, to use his own expression, are ' pretty much mixed '. He may go on by the Valetta on Saturday or he may not. He may stop a few days in Melbourne, or he may at a few hours notice set off for some other corner of the globe. In any case he intends to visit Samoa, but he has not made up his mind whether the visit will be a prolongation of his Australasian trip, or whether he will make a run 'home' first, and visit Samoa on some other occasion ". The short stay in Wellington, a city which, he said reminded him of Portland, Oregon, ended rather abruptly. He had told his ' Press ' friend that he had been forced to change his plans, and that he would after all have to visit the South Island on his way to Bluff (then called ' the Bluff '). They arranged a meeting for Tuesday evening, but it was cold and wet, and no Kipling arrived. The chill he had got while at a 14 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 boating picnic on Monday night on Wellington Harbour, had brought on a recurrence of his malaria, so when Mr. Angus had spent a day telegraphing to Napier, Taupo, Wairakei, Rotorua and Cambridge, and all bookings and transport had been arranged, Kipling left early on Thursday by the morning express to Napier to get into a warmer climate. Mr. Angus used to relate that when Kipling left his office after all the plans had been made, he turned to him, cocked his fingers pistol- wise, and said, ' If I miss that boat (the Talune) Angus, you're a dead man '. It was fortunate for Kipling that he had not thought of a tour through New Zealand before 1891 for it was only in that year that the previously chaotic conditions of travel in the thermal districts had been reduced to order. Messrs. Cook's New Zealand Superintendent, Mr. J. F. Beckett, has informed me that in 1891 Cook's had induced a Cam- bridge (N.Z.) coach hirer, running coaches between Oxford (now Tirau) and Rotorua to co-operate with other coach hirers in Rotorua, Taupo and Napier to arrange a co-ordinated service for through passen- gers. Prior to that the coach operators would descend upon intending passengers and seize their luggage, thereby compelling the passenger to travel on their coach in order not to be separated from their belongings. Sometimes even parties were separated. Kipling spent the night of October 22nd at Napier, and next day in a ' special buggy' at £1 a day set of for Taupo. The first day's drive took him up the Eak, which had to be crossed over twenty times, to Tarawera, 45 miles away. He gives very little detail about his journey, but from guide-books of those days his route and mileage can be given. The second day's drive was from Tarawera to Taupo, on the shores of Lake Taupo, also forty-five miles. There he probably spent a day, visit- ing as well Wairakei with its pools, hot springs and geysers. On the first two days he crossed plains and ranges, and saw wild horses and ate a roast kiwi. Opinion in New Zealand is divided on this point. Some think that the locals were ' pulling his leg ' about the kiwi. Others main- tain that the kiwi, though its flesh is coarse in texture and tough, can be eaten. From Taupo to Rotorua (53 miles) Kipling was in the famous thermal district and there saw many Maoris. The scenery is striking and the sights remarkable. From Taupo via Wairakei to Rotorua is fifty-five miles. He probably spent October 27th there seeing the sights. He was himself one of the sights. The bath-keeper of Brants Blue House said to Mr. Brant one day, ' Come and look here. I'll show you something. I went with him and saw half a dozen men sitting in the bath, and one little man, seated somewhat away from the others, and he was wearing spectacles. You can't think how odd it was to see him in the bath with glasses on. ' Who is he ? ' I asked. ' He is a writer, and his name is Rudyard Kipling ', he said* There is a somewhat vaguer story that Kipling said once he had done some shooting in the ' Oxford bush'. On October 28th he probably passed through Oxford (now Tirau), and ' the bush ' was an area which sportsmen visited, but he was * Brant's pioneer tales, Our Fathers have told us, collected by E M Story, 1915-20 (unpublished). March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 15 on his way to Cambridge to catch the train for Auckland, and as the distance between Rotorua and Cambridge was about 57 miles, he cannot have had much time for sport. At any rate he arrived back in Auckland on October 28th, and spent the night in the Northern Club. Next day he met Sir George Grey, probably in St. Stephen's Avenue, the home of Mrs. Thorne, a married niece with whom he stayed when in Auck- land. Another report says they met at the Club. There may have been two meetings. On October 29th Kipling, in a short interview, said ' I think Auck- land is a most beautiful city — perhaps the most beautiful I have ever seen.' Aucklanders still quote this, and also the tribute in ' Song of the Cities ', hoping that these flattering opinions may still be true — ' Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart — ' In Something of Myself (pp. 100-101) Kipling, though under the compulsions of Cook's inexorable time-table, still speaks as if he were fancy-free, and perhaps he was still under the charm of 'the face and voice of a woman ' who sold him beer there (at Auckland) — the ' Mrs. Bathurst ' of later days. Someone, usually described as ' a Mr. Hugh Campbell ', showed him the sights of Auckland and perhaps even saw him on board the S.S. Mahinapua (423 tons) on the evening of the 29th October at the Onehunga wharf. The S.S. Talune also sailed on the same day for Wellington, calling at Gisborne and Napier, but Kipling took what was known as the ' express route ' by the west coast. This meant the often rough overnight journey from Onehunga to New Plymouth, which was reached in the early morning, a quick transfer to the waiting train, and arrival at Wellington about 14 hours later. Kipling's route is established by the presence of his name in the passenger list of the S.S. Mahinapua, and by a report in The Taranaki Herald dated October 30th of his brief visit to New Plymouth. He was there long enough, however, to see and comment on the efforts being made by the port authorities to create a good harbour, and the losing struggle against the continued silting up of their efforts. Wellington was reached on the evening of October 30th. I have not yet found any references to what he did between then and Monday, 2nd November, when at 3.50 p.m. the S.S. Talune sailed for Port Lyttleton, Port Chalmers, Bluff and Melbourne. The Talune (2,087 tons) was a smallish liner of the Union Steamship Company with a long thin funnel which spent most of the thirty-five years of her life with the Union Line crossing and re-crossing the stormy Tasman Sea and coasting the rock-bound shores of New Zealand. Her life ended in 1924 when she was sunk to form part of a breakwater near Gisborne. On this voyage she had a stormy passage with Kipling aboard, and arrived at Port Lyttleton for Christchurch at 6.15 a.m. on Tuesday, 3rd November. Kipling's departure for Christchurch had been notified to the papers, and a reporter from the Lyttleton Times met him at the station near the Lyttleton pier shortly before 9 a.m. The reporter was graciously received and was pleased when Kipling accepted his prof- ferred services as a guide for his visit to the city. The short journey to Christchurch was soon over, and Kipling remarked that he only knew 16 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 one other country where trains were slower than in New Zealand. On arrival at Christchurch he said he chiefly wanted a cigar and a shave. At Coker's Hotel he was provided with a cigar. The enterprising re- porter having previously made his arrangements, a photographer was present and took a picture of Kipling for the Weekly Press with the cigar in one hand and a pen in the other. He had meant to write a letter, but he never got it begun. He then had a shave in a barber's shop near Cathedral Square, but he made no comment either on the Cathedral or on the General Post Office. He thought that the Square had a future, and added that he had been misinformed about Christchurch. It was not like an English city, as he had been told, it was more like an American town. The reporter said that the outskirts of the city had an English look, but they had no time to see them. They crossed the Avon where Kipling was pleased to see swans and fluffy cygnets, and after a look at the Courts and Museum, visited Canterbury College where he met one of his former schoolmasters, Professor Haslam, who taught Classics there. He had taught Kipling some Latin at Westward Ho ! ten years previously. He and Kipling had a talk and then with the Professor resumed the tour. They were inspecting the hanging pictures in a nearby Art Gallery when the cry of ' Fire ' was raised. Like a true reporter, as his companion said, Kipling dashed out of the Gallery, urging his friends to ' double '. and reached the scene of the fire not far away. It was an old wooden stable, and having seen the Fire Brigade at work and the fire extinguished, they found that it was time to return to the Station. They called briefly at the Christchurch Club on the way, caught the boat train and by 1 p.m. Kipling was waving farewell to his friends as the Talune steamed away. Port Chalmers, for Dunedin, was reached at 5.15 a.m. on Novem- ber 4th and on November 5th at 4.45 p.m. the Talune sailed for Bluff. The Dunedin papers merely state that Kipling had been in the city. As we learn from some remarks he made in Australia, he had some severe comments on the way public funds were being wasted in doles of 9s. per diem to the unemployed when they should have been set to work to clear tussock and scrub for farming. Another reason probably was that Dunedin was too busy welcoming ' General ' Booth of the Salvation Army to bother about Kipling. The ' General ' had been in Christchurch just before Kipling was there and vast crowds met to see and hear him. On November 6th the Talune reached Bluff at 6 a.m. and sailed for Hobart and Melbourne that same evening at 6.30 p.m. Is not the scene well described in Something of Myself, pp. 101-2? But perhaps ' Bluff ' should be read for ' Invercargill ' as the last lamp-post of the world, and ' Tasman Sea ' for ' South Atlantic '. NEW MEMBERS recently enrolled are :—Home: Mmes M E. Clay, F. Nicholson, T. Sutcliffe; Misses M. W. Kelly, A. M. Peake; Cmdr. J. H. Owen, Sr. Eng. D. Rosario, Lt.-Col. J. E. B Finlay ; Dr. J. D. Holme ; Messrs. E. C. Flavell, N. G. Phillips, A. Shallcross, R. G. Tubb, J. Tydeman, J. J. Walker. Kenya: J. Falconer Scott. Lahore: British Council Library. New Zealand: J. G. Mitchell, U.S.A.: Grinnell College Library. \ March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 17 READERS' GUIDE TO 'MY GREAT AND ONLY' This sketch was first published in The Civil and Military Gazette, 11th and 15th January, 1890. There was an ' off-print ' pamphlet made from the above, 1890. Collected in Abaft the Funnel (Pirated and Authorised Editions, 1909). Reprinted in Sussex and Burwash Editions. (References here are to 1909 Authorised Edition.) Page 262. Line 1. Macdougal or Macdoodle : Sir John M'Dougall, (1844-1917), Chairman of the London County Council, who was working to bring all songs and ' turns ' at the Music Halls under a strict censorship, with a licence for each item (no ' ad. lib.' allowed) as now issued by the Lord Chamberlain though only inforced in the more flagrant cases of infringement. M'Dougall's ' crusade ' was very much in the news at the time of Kipling's return to London, and F. Anstey was making brilliant play with its absurder aspects in his Model Music Hall Songs and Dramas which appeared in Punch at intervals during 1889 and 1890—and were issued in volume form in 1892. Page 262. Lines 2-3. The principle remains the same : Quotation from Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) by Charles Dickens, Chapter XXXVII : ' The Prince Regent was proud of his legs ... So was Miss Biffin ; she was — no,' added Mrs. Nickleby, correcting herself, ' I think she had only toes, but the principle is the same.' Page 263. Line 9. Barnum : Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-91), American showman who ' gulled the public ' with fake freaks, etc., but was also responsible for magnificent circus entertainments and spectacles. Kipling does not say that he visited ' Barnum's ' during his theatre pilgrimage in November 1889, but had he done so, he would have found at Olympia Barnum's ' The Greatest Show on Earth ', its high-light - being Imre Kiralfy's ' Nero ', for ' A Short Season in London Only '. Page 263. Line 10. At one place . . . This was Terry's Theatre, where the play was Sweet Lavender by Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934): 'Ruth Rolf, the House- keeper, was played by Carlotta Addison, and her daughter ' Laven- der ' by Miss Norreys. Page 263. Line 11. At a second . . . This was the Lyceum, and the play was The Dead Heart by Watts Phillips, first produced in 1859. This revival began on 28th September, 1889, and the star parts were played by Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Page 263. Line 12. Sounded the loud timbrel : A quotation from ' Miriam's Song ' by Thomas Moore in his Sacred Songs (1816). The line actually runs: 'Sound the loud 18 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea '. Possibly a pun is intended by Kipling, as the play in question, The Dead Heart, was about the French Revolution, and ' tumbrils ' were much in evidence. Page 263. Line 14. At a third . . . This was the Princess's Theatre where he saw The Gold Craze by Brandon Thomas (author of Charley's Aunt) with Amy Roselle, Fanny Brough and J. H. Barnes in the cast. Page 263. Line 17. At a fourth . . . This was the Shaftesbury, and the play was The Middleman by Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929), which had been running since 27th August. Page 263. Line 20. At a fifth . . . Among the several farces running in November 1889 it has not been possible to identify which Kipling visited. He may well have gone to the Strand Theatre and seen Our Flat Tonight by Mrs. Musgrave and Boys Will Be Boys by Joseph Mackay, both of which had been running since the middle of the summer (they had recently transferred from the Opera Comique). Page 264. Line 8. I went to the music-halls : There were so many of these, and the subjects of the songs are so general, that it is impossible to follow Kipling on his pilgrim- age. He was living in Villiers Street, exactly opposite ' Gatti's- under-the-Arches ' ; ' Gatti's-in-the-Road ' (Westminster Bridge Road) was within walking distance, and even nearer were ' The Strand ', ' The Middlesex ', and ' The Pavilion ', while ' The Tivoli ' was in process of building in the Strand. But doubtless he went also to such well-known Halls as the ' The Metropolitan ', ' The Oxford ' ' The Cambridge ', ' The Canterbury 'and ' The Surrey '. One of the best impressions of the Music Hall at exactly the period Kipling describes is given by F. Anstey in his full-length dialogue story Under the Rose, 1894. Page 265. Line 2. ' Love's Young Dream ' : From the chorus of the song with this title by Thomas Moore in his Irish Melodies (1821, etc.) which runs : ' But there's nothing half so sweet in life As love's young dream : No, there's nothing half so sweet in life As love's young dream.' Page 265. Line 4. They saw that it was good : A Biblical echo : see Genesis i, 10, etc. ' And God saw that it was good.' Page 265. Line 8. ' Stagger home tight about two . . . ' Popular Music-Hall song : readers please identify ! (Is it from ' There's another jolly row downstairs ! ' 1881, words by W.B. and W. H. Phillips, music by William Bint ? I can find no copy for reference.) Page 265. Lines 23-4. . . . sixpence—ticket good for four pen'orth of refreshments : Compare Something of Myself, p. 80 : ' fourpence, which in- cluded a pewter of beer or porter, was the price of admission to Gatti's.' March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 19 Page 266. Lines 16-17. I chose one hall : It was ' Gatti's-under-the-Arches ' in Villiers Street straight across from Kipling's rooms. The Music-hall songs of the Victorian period are still being sung there, and the audience take their refreshments and join in the choruses as in Kipling's day — for it is now The Players' Theatre Club. See Something of Myself, pp. 80-82 for Kipling at Gatti's, and the birth there of Barrack-Room Ballads. Page 267. Lines 10-11. Great and Only : A music hall singer was usually introduced : ' Ladies and Gentlemen ! The One Great and Only — Champagne Charlie ' — or whoever it might be. Who Kipling's singer was in actual fact has not been decided : the leading ' character comic vocalist ' at Gatti's in December 1889 was Allan Malvern. But the music hall artistes performed at a bewildering number of halls even on the same night, dashing by cab from one to another. The only ' turn ' mentioned in The Stage of the period which might be Kipling's contribution is described on 22nd November, 1889 as being per- formed at the Cambridge (different halls had notices in turn) : ' Mr. James Fawn has three new songs ; his latest ' A Soldier ' is very funny and finds great favour '. The song might not have been printed, since it became the ' Great and Only's ' personal property and part of his stock in trade. ' Among my guests in chambers was a Lion Comique from Gatti's,' says Kipling in Something of Myself (p. 87) — but gives no hint of his identity. Page 268. Line 1. ' We was shopmates' : This was probably a parody or burlesque of the popular song ' Shipmates ' — words by W. T. Lytton, music by George Le Brun — Parodies of famous songs were common at the time, but seldom published : ' Shopmates ' was probably one. Page 268. Line 2. As Rachel feared Ristori : Elisa Felix Rachel (1820-58), the greatest of all French actresses, began as a child and achieved the leading tragic rôles at the Comédie-Française, and in all the capitals of Europe. Adelaide Ristori (1822-1906), also began as a child, and went to Paris in 1855 ' where, after a somewhat quiet debut, she soon became an outstanding figure and a serious rival to Rachel ' (Oxford Com- panion to the Theatre). She played Lady Macbeth in London in 1882, retired in 1885, and her Studies and Memoirs, published in 1888, was very widely read : hence Kipling could assume that his readers in 1889 would ' take ' the reference. Page 270. Lines 1-2. Mashing a tart : A slang phrase very common at the time : ' to mash ' meant to flirt, or excite interest in one of the opposite sex ; a ' tart ' had no pejorative connotation at that date : it was a shortened form of ' sweetheart ', and meant no more. Page 270. Line 23. Softer Lydian strains: ' Lydian airs ' were proverbially soft and effeminate, from the music of the Lydians (Orientals) in classical Greek times. Kipling is probably thinking of Milton's L'Allegro : ' Lap me in soft Lydian airs '. 20 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 Page 271. Line 14. I had builded better than I knew : A quotation from ' The Problem ' by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the American poet and essayist. The couplet runs : ' He builded better than he knew ; The conscious stone to beauty grew.' Page 272. Lines 19-20. I never can recapture that first fine rapture: A recollection of Robert Browning's ' Home-thoughts from Abroad ' : ' That's the wise thrush ; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture ! ' " It needs a more mighty intellect to write the Songs of the People," was Kipling's comment after the success of the song in ' My Great and Only ' : but his experiences at Gatti's-under-the-Arches led directly to Barrack-Room Ballads. ' 'The smoke, the roar, and the good-fellowship of relaxed humanity at Gatti's ' set ' the scheme for a certain sort of song,' he wrote in Something of Myself (p.81). ' The Private Soldier in India I thought I knew fairly well. His English brother (in the Guards mostly) sat and sang at my elbow any night I chose. . . The outcome was the first of some verses called Barrack-Room Ballads which I showed to Henley of the Scots, later National Observer, who wanted more.' The first to appear in The Scots Observer, on 22 Feb. 1890, was ' Danny Deever ' followed by ' Tommy ' on 1 March. The Courting of Dinah Shadd, which contains a similar ballad, was also published on 1 March. As it appeared in The Civil and Military Gazette in India in mid- January 1890, it may be presumed that ' My Great and Only ' was writ- ten in December 1889. If, as has generally been assumed, it is genuinely autobiographical, the Song may have been sung at Gatti's in November 1889. The words of the Song were not included by Kipling in any of his books of verse, nor is the complete version extant, so far as is known. It is, of course, possible that the whole story is pure fiction, and Kipling simply made up the fragments quoted in it only as far as he needed them. However, he quotes from the song in ' Love-o-Women ' (Many Inventions, 1893 ; p.294) where Ortheris sings what is either a chorus from one of the missing stanzas, or a revised version of the chorus on p.270 of Abaft the Funnel. His version runs :— ' Oh, do not despise the advice of the wise, Learn wisdom from those that are older, And don't try for things that are out of your reach — An' that's what the Girl told the Soldier ! Soldier ! soldier ! Oh. that's what the Girl told the Soldier ! ' R.L.G. March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 21 GENTLEMEN RANKERS Kipling's verses : Gentlemen-Rankers later Gentlemen—Songsters or The Whiffenpoof Song Mr. Harold Adshead of London N.14 has sent us new information about this song. Let us first summarise our information. To start with we are not certain whether its first appearance was in :— (a) Macmillan's Magazine of December 1889. (b) National Observer of 29th November 1890, or (c) BARRACK ROOM BALLADS and OTHER VERSES in 1892. These verses were written as a poem of tragedy : they have ap- peared (as GENTLEMEN-RANKERS) in all the collections of Kip- ling's verse from 1892 to the present time. Recently Mr. Adshead visited the Library of the American Em- bassy in Grosvenor Square, London W.1, and studied various books including :— YALE COLLEGE — an EDUCATIONAL HISTORY, 1871-1921, by George Wilson Pierson, New Haven. Yale University Press 1952, and A HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC IN AMERICA, by Sigmund Spaeth, Random House, New York, 1948. From the above two books the following information has been extracted :— In 1936 the Miller Music Corporation of 799 7th Avenue, New York, published under the heading ' Secular Choral Music ' ' The Whif- fenpoof ' Song by Meade Minnigerode, George S. Pomeroy and Tod B. Galloway, Revised by Rudy Vallee. It is now established that the tune was probably composed by Guy H. Scull of Harvard although Galloway is still given credit. It would appear that at convivial Mory's a group of singers of the University Quartet at Yale George Pomeroy, 1909 James M. Howard, 1909 Meade Minnigerode, 1910 Carl Lehmann, 1910 Denton Fowler, 1909 gave birth to the Whiffenpoof with their official anthem, The Whiffen poof Song. This was an adaptation of ' Gentlemen-Rankers ' set to a tune of doubtful authorship with credit being disputed between the partisans of Tod Galloway and George H. Scull ( ? Guy). Tod Galloway was later Judge of the Probate Court of Franklin County, Ohio. The Yale students had met him after a concert in Columbus which he attended because one of his compositions was in the Glee Club's programme. Afterwards he entertained them by singing a setting of Kipling's Gentlemen-Rankers. 22 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 They remembered it with pleasure and in casting about later for an anthem, they found it admirably suited their purpose. The title of the song was taken from a fish story told on the stage by a comedian, Joe Cawthorn. In a musical show, ' Little Nemo ', he described the Whiffenpoof as a fabulous creature which he had caught by boring a hole in the lake and putting cheese round the hole. The Whiffenpoof, led up by the cheese, came up the hole and was caught. In whimsical mood the song was given this name as being a catch- phrase of the time. Later, in 1947, there were some interesting revivals which achieved wider popularity through a recording by Robert Merrill. (End of Mr. Adshead's notes) The only change in Kipling's words made at Yale was ' Gentlemen- Songsters ' for ' Gentlemen-Rankers '. We now appeal to readers to carry our information further : i.e. after 1947 when we know Bing Crosby (still with us) sang and recorded a version. Was his version anything to do with that recorded by Mr. Merrill? Who composed this music? One of the tunes (probably the original Yale one) was described as ' between a dirge and a bleat '. We do not know if permission was granted to the Yale Group in 1936 by Mr. Kipling's executors, and was permission obtained by Mr. Merrill in 1947? The words sung by Bing Crosby are fairly clear on the records — almost certainly as follows :— From the tables down at Morry's, To the place where Louie dwelled, To the dear old Temple Bars we loved so well, Here the Whiffenpoofs assemble with their glasses raised on high, And the magic of their singing casts its spell. Yes the magic of their singing, of the songs that Louie loved, Will lie wasting, and Mavoureen and the rest, We will serenade our Louie while life and voice doth last, Then we'll pass and be forgotten like the rest. Chorus: We are poor little lambs who have lost their way, Baa, baa, baa. We are little black sheep who have gone astray, Baa, baa, baa. Gentlemen songsters off on a spree, Doomed from here to eternity, Lord have mercy on such as we, Baa, baa, baa. R.E.H. March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 23 REPORT ON DISCUSSION MEETING Wednesday, November 14th On this Naval Occasion the promoter of the discussion was Rear- Admiral P. W. Brock, c.b., d.s.o., who was supported by Commander J. H. Owen, a former submariner. Admiral Brock has had a distin- guished career and, besides the honours indicated by the letters suffixed to his name, he has twice been mentioned in dispatches and was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the United States Bronze Medal. One of his chief interests is Naval History, and we were not disappointed in our expectation that his knowledge and researches would provide an instruc- tive and entertaining discourse on A Fleet in Being (1898) and Sea Warfare (1916), which is here reported in his own words. * * * For many years I have put so much stress on the importance of seeing the form on the ground for oneself that I now feel morally bound to confess that I have no personal experience of the Navy before the Kaiser's war, nor even during it. I was still a junior naval cadet in November 1918. The next best thing is a good witness and I have been lucky enough to be able to consult Commander J. H. Owen. His experience goes back rather farther than mine, he has a fund of naval knowledge, he is, like the Rector of Huckley, a lover of accuracy, and he commanded a sub- marine in 1916. I am grateful for his past help and for being here this evening to continue it if necessary. The two books we are considering, ' A Fleet in Being ' and ' Sea Warfare ', contrast strongly, yet they may be regarded as being to some extent complementary. The former, which appeared in 1898, arose from Kipling's direct impressions of the Navy in its proper element, recorded with the freshness of first love, full of enjoyment and radiating his enthusiasm for seeing men engaged in a worthwhile occupation. ' Sea Warfare ', on the other hand, was virtually commissioned pro- paganda (' public relations ' had not been invented then) undertaken mainly from a sense of duty in 1915-16. It depended heavily on written reports and was overshadowed by the grimness of the war in general and his own loss in particular. You will remember that Professor Carrington records that it was after one of his visits to naval bases that Kipling learned that his only son John, in the Irish Guards, was ' wounded and missing ' at Loos. The two volumes are thus very different in outlook and treatment ; but ' Sea Warfare ' does show how some of the crystal-gazing forecasts of 1898 worked out in practice, after many new factors had crept into naval warfare. The actual picture was more drab generally than had been expected, yet it was brilliantly relieved by courage and heroism that can move us even now, with another World War intervening. How ' A Fleet in Being ' came about is sketchily indicated in ' Something of Myself ' in which Kipling tells us how in 1891, on his way to Capetown ' in a gigantic 3,000 ton liner called The Moor ', he 24 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 met ' a Navy Captain ' going to a new command at Simonstown and ' laid the foundations of a lifelong friendship.' The Navy Captain was in fact Commander E. H. Bayly, appointed to the 3rd-class cruiser Mohawk. (In those days and for some years to come, a Commander was addressed and referred to as ' Captain X ...'). Bayly, known to his intimates as ' Chawbags ', was evidently a notable character in a day when characters were more numerous than they are now, but as I am writing an account of him for the Journal, I shall merely recall here that he parted from Kipling at Simonstown with the words ' If ever you want a cruise, let me know '. Some fifty pages and six years later, Kip- ling says he ' went off on navy manœuvres with my friend Captain Bagley. In parenthesis, I'd be obliged if anyone can tell me why Kipling was impelled to introduce this thin disguise for a friend who had died in the odour of sanctity, after an honourable career, thirty years before. When Kipling joined H.M.S. Pelorus off Portsmouth, ' one won- derful summer evening in '97, the Naval Review to mark Queen Vic- toria's Diamond Jubilee had just taken place. At the Golden Jubilee Review, ten years before, the state of the Fleet had alarmed those in a good position to judge. There had been a lot of cardboard in the house, so to speak, and too many floating museum pieces, representing ill- advised or inadequately-financed dubious experiments. By '97, however, Sir William White, Director of Naval Construction, was producing battleships that for ten years or more were models for most of the world. The cover of 'A Fleet in Being ' shows a flagship of what Ad- miral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield, forty years later, called ' the great Majestic class '. This is probably the Majestic herself. The artist, by way, was a young man named Norman Wilkinson. He is still with us and a number of fine paintings of two World Wars which he presented to the nation may be seen at the Imperial War Museum at Lambeth, and the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Harking back to the Jubilee Review, the Queen, who was represen- ted by the Prince of Wales, was not well equipped to remark directly, but the Admiralty, Sir William White and the British public were pleased with the Fleet presented at Spithead and, I submit, with some reason. An American professor called Marder who, from a base in Hono- lulu, has performed the remarkable feat of establishing squatter's rights on British naval history from about 1880 to 1920, tells us that in some ways the Royal Navy at the turn of the century was ' a moth-eaten, drowsy organization ', sustained by harsh, even brutal, discipline based on fear. With great respect to Professor Marder, I find Kipling's first- hand impression more convincing than the Professor's digest of his sources, however lofty they may sound. We shall see later on, in ' Sea Warfare ', how what looks like corroboration may in fact be no more than historians repeating each other, and I believe much of Marder's evidence is in this category. To sketch a rough technical and historical background : At the '97 Review, Charles Parsons had produced the first turbine- driven craft, the Turbinia, which did advertising tours through the lines at nearly 30 knots, defying the patrolling vessels' efforts to control her. H.M.S. PELORUS 26 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 Signor Marconi and Captain Henry Jackson, R.N., were both reaching practical success with wireless. Captain Percy Scott of H.M.S. Scylla was preparing to give the Fleet some gunnery lessons. A German rear- admiral named Alfred Tirpitz was being brought home from China to become Secretary of State for the Navy — and with the backing of the Kaiser to make it our chief rival. A British vice-admiral, Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher, later to match himself against Tirpitz, was leaving the Admiralty for a spell in the West Indies. For the time being, the French Fleet continued to be considered our most formidable and likely opponent. Because of the Jubilee Review, no doubt, the manœuvres of '97 were on a smaller scale than usual, and Kipling's ' thirty keels . . . threading their way in and out between a hundred and twenty vessels not so fortunate ' mostly belonged either permanently or temporarily to the Channel Squadron. Here ' Squadron ' did not have its present im- plication of homogeneity ; the Channel Squadron included cruisers and torpedo gunboats as well as battleships. The cruisers were enjoying their last taste of something like the romantic independence of their ' mother the Frigate, bepainted and fine ', for they were still responsible direct to the Admiral Commanding, and his control could extend only to visibility distance. Two years later, wireless was imposing new fetters and soon after that cruiser admirals were administering and directing cruiser squadrons. The ' new Admiral ' of the Channel Squadron was Vice-Admiral Sir Harry Stevenson. While it is generally dangerous, if not impossible, to try to establish absolute identity between Kipling's fictional characters and real live ones, we may suspect that Sir Harry was perhaps a start- ing point for ' the Right Honourable Lord God Almighty Admiral Master Frankie Frobisher, k.c.b.', somewhat unkindly described by Moorshed and Pyecroft in ' Their Lawful Occasions ', just as we may guess that the Captain of the Archimandrite in 'The Bonds of Discipline' owes something to Captain Bayly of H.M.S. Pelorus. In support of the former theory, we know that Prince Louis of Battenburg (who was, of course, Kipling's ' Prince who was also a Flag Captain ') sometimes had reason to feel that Sir Harry's ' groovin' was badly eroded by age and lack of attention '. It is on record that the Admiral loved to have all boats pull round the Fleet at all hours and had a passion for doing things by hand : the Lower Deck always expected him to produce a scheme for working main engines by hand. His Second-in-Command, who found the loophole in the manœuvre rules that the Lower Deck predicted he would, was Rear-Admiral John Fellowes, known as 'Jumbo ' and described as ' a small-sized man who wore an extra-large-sized collar, and into this collar he tucked his chin whenever he was lost in thought '. Although he scraped a win on points in the manœuvres, he did not get a very good press, and after his custo- mary year as second in command, he was not given a chance to hoist his flag again. In the Society's Journal, I have argued that although it can never have been logical or correct to talk about ' knots per hour ', in Kipling's day this was not the crass error it seems now. In the '90s it was within March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 27 a measurable distance of being generally accepted. The best evidence of this is that it appears in the Admiralty's instruction to the two Admirals concerned in these manœuvres, so Kipling went astray in excellent com- pany. Much more painful to me in his inability to understand that the status of a naval warrant officer differed radically from that of a warrant officer in the Army. I doubt whether he ever realised this so do not suppose that this was his ' worst slip ' which he says was underided because the men of the seas and the engine-room do not write to the press. Coming now to the ship in which Kipling embarked, the Pelorus was the first and name ship of a class of 11 third-class protected cruisers. The saying ' Once aboard a ship, you know the Captain ' implies that the whole tone is set by him. We can deduce that the Pelorus was a happy ship, with little of Professor Marder's ' drowsiness ' and ' brutal- ity '. Another myth of a different sort is that Kipling's original articles in the Morning Post were revised and edited before being collected as 'A Fleet in Being '. The alterations were few and the only ones of any importance were two printer's errors. One of these was the substitu- tion of a hyphen for a dash after ' twenty ', which results in the sugges- tion that there were ' twenty-six or seven clear-cut, clean-shaved young faces ' in the wardroom of a small cruiser, which is absurd. On the other hand, six or seven officers as implied in the original, are on the low side. Apparently Kipling's interest centred on what were then the executive and engineering branches, now ' Seamen ' and ' Engineering Specialists ', and he did not count the others. The first lieutenant whom Kipling describes, during ' coal ship ', as being ' carved in pure jet ' and ' saying precisely what occurred to him ', was H. B. Pelly who later commanded the battle cruiser Tiger at the Dogger Bank and Jutland. As an Admiral he wrote his memoirs and recalled Kipling's two visits as the highlights of the commission. I quote : ' The evenings when he was on board were thrilling and no one wanted to turn in, for both Kipling and the Captain were wonderful storytellers. They kept us entertained nightly for hours '. Another lieutenant of the Pelorus reached flag rank and nearly all became captains. As will be gathered from Kipling's descriptions, H.M. Ships in '98 still had black hulls, red or coppered bottoms, white upperworks and buff or ochre funnels, masts and yards. The Pelorus had a ram bow, and two raking funnels and masts, the latter bare alike of the yards and sails of a few years earlier, the fighting tops of contemporary big ships, and the gunnery control positions which the advance stimulated by Scott and Fisher was soon to demand. She was credited with a speed of 20 knots and had eight 4-inch and some smaller quickfirers, as well as two 14-inch above-water torpedo tubes under the poop. These provide one illustration of how 'A Fleet in Being ' merits consideration of naval historians as well as those interested in Kipling's mastery of words. There was obviously considerable distrust of the torpedoes carried there. (Three years before, this fear of an enemy shell prematurely touching off a torpedo had caused the Chinese Fleet to fire most of their torpedoes at the battle of the Yalu long before they 28 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 could endanger anyone.) It would be interesting to know whether it was a recollection of 'A Fleet in Being ' that made Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty about 1912, demand that light cruisers' torpedo tubes should be under water. The Director of Naval Construc- tion found it difficult to make room for a submerged flat in a small cruiser and when he did manage it, it was not a great success. That's life. Experience in two wars showed that the Admiralty's safety devices had reduced the risk from above-water tubes well within acceptable limits. Kipling's interest in men at work and the stimulus they gave him in his own craft have seldom been more evident than in 'A Fleet in Being '. Vice-Admiral C. G. Brodie, in a little book called ' Forlorn Hope, 1915 ' published a few years ago remarks that 'A Fleet in Being ' shows how much Kipling ' could absorb of both the technique and spirit of the Navy '. In ' Sea Warfare ', however, Admiral Brodie unfortunately finds ' only a rather shrill echo ' of the Master's earlier voice ; but as I men- tioned at the beginning, comparisons here are unfair if not odious. ' Sea Warfare ' was bespoke publicity, not spontaneous, and though Kipling drew his background from personal visits, he had to depend on written reports for much of his material. Besides his private sorrow and the atmosphere of a war of attrition, he was handicapped by a censorship much more rigid than in the Second War and most of his witnesses were not very helpful, because of an inability to see anything very note- worthy in their own activities. In war, as Marshal Foch observed, you must do the best you can with what you have. Kipling did just that. The results were published, a chapter at a time, in British and American journals in 1915 and 1916, and were subsequently collected, first in three separate parts, and then as a whole, in ' Sea Warfare ' in 1916. Part I, ' The Fringes of the Fleet ', you will remember, is itself divided into three sections of two chapters each. The first section, en- titled ' The Auxiliaries ', seems on internal evidence to have come from visits to Dover and East Anglian bases. What Kipling said was called ' indifferently the Trawler and Auxiliary Fleet ' was just about to be known as the 'Auxiliary Patrol '. This grew from a handful of ear- marked trawlers and donated yachts and motorboats at the beginning of of the war to over 2,000 craft when Kipling wrote, and rose to more than 3,700 at the end, despite severe losses and fair wear and tear. If the damage they inflicted on German U-boats was over-estimated at the time, it must be borne in mind that they were poorly equipped and armed through no fault of their own. ' Submarines ', the second section of ' The Fringes of the Fleet ', was largely derived from visits to Harwich, where Kipling had a close liaison with the 8th Submarine Flotilla and their depot ship, H.M.S. Maidstone. According to Professor Carrington, his own outing in a submarine must have been one of the things he did for England, since he suffered from claustrophobia, but that would no doubt have height- ened his admiration for the submariners. In our Journal (No. 79, October 1946), the late Admiral George Ballard gave an account of Kipling's visit to his flagship, H.M.S. St. March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 29 George, in the Humber, which provided the material for ' Patrols ', the third and last section of ' Fringes of the Fleet '. A friend of mine claimed to have witnessed the scene described by Kipling, in which a lieutenant's order to throw empty brass cartridges over the side to get them out of the way, in a hot action with the enemy, was disputed by the Gunner who had the cartridge cases on his charge*. But perhaps there was more than one such incident ; certainly it was not only one Gunner who had a little difficulty in switching over from peace to war procedures and outlook. Two minor slips in this section may be noted in passing. Kipling's anonymous naval officer was in error if he supposed that a ' stiff ' ship and a ' steady ' ship are necessarily synonymous. Paradoxically, a ' stiff ' ship is liable to have a violent motion, the last thing wanted in a gun- platform. Kipling himself erred in referring to a ' destroyer signaller '. ' Signaller ' is a military term ; the naval equivalent was ' signalman ', up to three years ago, when the March of Progress converted him to a ' Tactical Communications Operator '. In this age of speed, we have to be brief. ' Tales of the Trade ', which forms Part II of ' Sea Warfare ', appeared in 1916. Kipling's suggestion that ' The Trade ', as an ex- pression for the Submarine Service, may have been invented by the Lower Deck seems unlikely. It appears to have come in with the early submarine captains (Admiral Brodie amongst them) and to have gone out of common use as they left submarines. In this Part, everything except some background is drawn from the reports of the submarine commanding officers concerned. The first chapter deals with the operations in the Baltic in 1915 by two of the great submarine pioneers who survived to reach flag rank— Max Kennedy Horton and N. F. Laurence (Kipling got his initials reversed). Their successes gave Horton — as the more colourful of the two, he attracted more publicity — the distinction of causing some of the enemy to rename the Baltic ' Horton's Sea ' and to put a price on his head; but they rather spoilt the market for later comers. They most certainly did this for a third great figure, Nasmith, who, Commander Owen tells me, was thought by many contemporary judges to be the finest submarine captain of all. Trying to enter the Baltic, Nasmith found the Germans thoroughly alerted by his two predecessors and the shallow, narrow waters of The Sound were closely patrolled. After a sustained and determined effort that won the approval of Roger Keyes — not a man easily satisfied with anything short of Nelsonic success — Nasmith recognised that the object in war is not to die for your country but to make the other chap die for his, and reluctantly withdrew to await better conditions. As things turned out, he did not get another crack at the Baltic, but in the Dardanelles he earned the Victoria Cross and two promotions. Some of his exploits figure in the next chapters. Much the best account of the first submarine passages through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara is given by Admiral Brodie in his book already mentioned. From him we learn that Roger Keyes, who as * My friend was in H.M.S. Highflyer when she sank the German armed merchant cruiser Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse on August 26th, 1914. 30 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 Commodore, Submarines, at Harwich in 1914 had been known as ' The Arch-Instigator ', had continued to play the part when he became Chief of Staff in the Eastern Mediterranean. (Incidentally, Keyes had a copy of ' If ' above his shaving mirror, and made a point of reading it daily.) Keyes was determined to get submarines into the Marmara if it could be done. It was clear that the enemy defences made it necessary, in spite of the navigational difficulties, to cover something like thirty-five miles of the Straits under water, against a current of uncertain strength at that depth. The question was : would the battery capacity of an ' E ' class submarine run to this? Four experienced submariners, including Brodie himself, reluctantly gave their opinion that it would not. Brodie's twin brother, commanding E 15, disagreed and was given the honour of making the first attempt. Unhappily, he stranded on Kephez Point, short of the Narrows, and lost his life, but he was followed by Lieut.- Commander H. G. Stoker in the Australian submarine AE 2 and Boyle in E 14 and both were more fortunate. Kipling's account of E 14's first passage is either unusually am- biguous for the Maestro, or else a misinterpretation of Boyle's report. It leaves the impression that Boyle took his submarine through the Narrows on the surface, and this version appears in the Official History and a number of lesser works. What looks like corroboration, however, is in fact historians repeating each other. Boyle's report states plainly that after diving to 90 feet under a minefield, he came up to 22 feet, i.e. periscope depth, and he made the awkward turn at the Narrows sub- merged, with his periscope up when necessary (and when the gallant Turk was not trying to lift the submarine by hauling on it). Possibly one of the best tributes to the British submarines in the Marmara was paid by the German C-in-C, Liman von Sanders, who says in his memoirs, ' Fünf Jahre Turkei', that not even four or five submarines operating simultaneously in the Marmara were able to cut his sea communications completely. In fact, the number available in the Eastern Mediterranean never allowed us to maintain more than two there. ' Destroyers at Jutland ', the third and last part of ' Sea Warfare ', was largely, but not entirely, derived from official reports. Its value is limited by the fact that when Kipling wrote in 1916 much of the battle was obscure. (For that matter, Sir Julian Corbett's official history of 1923 had to be considerably amended and might have been re-written if it had not been decided to stick to bare factual corrections.) No reliable information was available from the enemy's side of the hill, and some over-optimistic estimates on our side could not be verified. We must not let hindsight make us too harsh. As warfare got more com- plex, it would be as unreasonable to complain that we were not ahead of the enemy in every department all the time as it would be to attack the Minister of Health if we do not win every event in the Olympic Games. (Much more unreasonable, really.) But without asking for miracles, only a bit more forethought and training, Jutland might have been a notably more satisfactory battle. As it was, by day, one flotilla with the Battle Cruisers was allowed to make an attack, described by Kipling, and came off rather better than their opponents. There were March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 31 one or two individual opportunities as the Grand Fleet joined the battle, including one seized by the future Admiral of the Fleet Lord Tovey, then commanding the Onslow, here renamed the Paralytic, Otherwise, our destroyers were given no scope in daylight. But at night the Ger- man High Seas Fleet, making for home under the order ' Durchhalten ' — ' Press on regardless ' — blundered into one British flotilla after another. It was a chance — offered up on a salver — that no destroyers ever had before or since, two dozen capital ships in line with only a meagre cruiser screen. In the circumstances, a total of one old battle- ship, two light cruisers and a destroyer was a poor bag. Sir Julian Cor- bett says this was due to the limitations of the weapon. As a torpedo- man, I cannot accept this. Most of the torpedoes fired — or more often not fired — that night disregarded not only elementary laws of chance and probability, but easily observable facts. Still, my instructors started knowing all about Jutland and then I had ten years to sort these prob- lems out, both on paper and with the aid of real ships. The Jutland destroyers did not, and most of their shortcomings arose from factors outside their own control. As the Bellman said of the Baker in ' The Hunting of the Snark ', their ' courage was perfect ' their performance compared very favourably with that of their much-advertised German opposite numbers, Tirpitz's hope and pride, and the lessons learned there were invaluable in Hitler's war. So none died in vain. * * * Limitations of space will not permit a full report of the animated discussion which followed and clearly showed the Englishman's proper interest in the traditions and customs of the Silent Service, his Sure Shield. The anomaly of Warrant Rank in the Navy, never properly understood by Kipling, commanded a prominent place. It was explained that these officers were, in the days of Kipling's early sea-going, the Gunner, Torpedo Gunner, Boatswain and Carpenter. Besides their specialist duties, they, with the Engineer Officer of the ship, were the custodians and accountants for the naval stores on a ship's charge, and were responsible to the Captain therefor. For promotion to warrant rank they had had to qualify both educationally and professionally be- fore the age of 35; they then served until 50, ten years longer than a rating. Since they ranked 'with but before ' a second lieutenant, their status was well above that of an Army Warrant Officer, whose naval equivalent was a Chief Petty Officer. For many years naval Warrant Officers messed in their own cabins, but by the turn of the century separate Warrant Officers' Messes were being provided in cruisers and above. In torpedo craft and gunboats they messed in the wardroom with the other officers, receiving an allowance to offset the higher cost of messing. Their status undoubtedly confused many others besides Kipling. A warrant officer was not then allowed a stripe on his sleeve until still further service had raised him to the higher grade of Chief Gunner, or Chief Shipwright, etc., and a layman could hardly be expected to under- stand that an Artificer Engineer (a warrant rank introduced in May, 1897 just before Kipling's first cruise in the Pelorus) was of greater consequence than a Chief Engineroom Artificer who, though a man of weight and experience, was still a rating and not an officer. In later 32 THE KIPLING JOURNAL March 1963 years attempts were made to clarify matters by changes in uniform and title. At the present time (1962) the modern equivalent of the old-time Warrant Officer is a Sub-Lieutenant, Lieutenant or Lieutenant-Com- mander on the Special Duties List. As a Petty Officer, Pyecroft would have been of a status similar to that of a Sergeant and his association with a Warrant Officer like Mr. Vickery in ' Mrs. Bathurst ', even ashore, would have been coldly re- garded not only by higher authority but by their own contemporaries. To show that anomalies can, and do, occur, however, a case was men- tioned of a small ship in the First World War whose Chief Engineer was a Chief Engine Room Artificer, of neither Commissioned nor War- rant rank but a rating, who nevertheless messed in the Wardroom. The origin of the immortal Pyecroft it was suggested might very well be found in the twice-quoted phrase, ' on the 'igh and lofty bridge persecutin' 'is vocation ' which appears in 'A Fleet in Being '. If this was actually spoken in Kipling's hearing we can imagine him seizing on it with avidity, but there is just the chance that it was his own invention. In association with this phrase he uses the term ' Signalman ' correctly, and had probably forgotten it by the time he wrote ' Sea Warfare ' nearly twenty years after. Another slip, however, was detected in Note II, on Coxwains and Galleys, when with reference to ' eight pairs of shoulders rising and falling ', Admiral Brock, being asked to confirm that a galley's crew is, and was, six rowers, said that after research, he could find no evidence that the normal crew of a galley (also called a gig, when not allocated for the use of a senior officer) had ever exceeded six men in the steam Navy. A century earlier, however, some captains had had eight-oared boats and perhaps that had misled Kipling. The Chairman (professedly no tactician) with regard to page 151 of Destroyers at Jutland, expressed himself unable to understand how, ' the enemy having up to now lain to the eastward of us ', Beatty's force could have ' steered a little to the northwest, bearing him off towards the east ', and received Admiral Brock's smiling reply : ' for northwest read northeast.' Another undetected mistake? Even those of us who have lived in, with and alongside the Navy for the greater part of a lifetime would hesitate to claim that we have learned more of its lore, traditions, customs, speech and practice than Kipling did in his infrequent and all too brief contacts with the Fleet. But that need not prevent us from taking a puckish delight in detecting his, in the circumstances, extremely few errors. Before the conclusion of the proceedings the Chairman asked leave to quote from Note V of ' A Fleet in Being ', on Boat-racing, which seemed to him to be strangely prophetic. The author describes the finish of a rowing match between two ships, the crews ' digging out for the dear life, to be welcomed by hoarse roars from the crowded fo'c'sles of the battleships. This deep booming surge of voices is most moving to hear. Some day a waiting fleet will thus cheer a bruised and battered sister staggering in ... a plugged and splintered wreck of an iron box, her planking brown with what has dried there and the bright water cascading down her sides.' Then, from another publication written nearly half a century later, the following.' . . . the battle for Crete was March 1963 THE KIPLING JOURNAL 33 abandoned and the Fleet returned to Alexandria. The last message from ' Kipling ' was that she was returning under heavy air attack after which no more was heard from her.' Until ' Imagine the delight and astonish- ment when next morning ' Kipling ' was seen making her way into harbour. She got a terrific reception. The whole Mediterranean Fleet lined decks and bellowed themselves hoarse as the hero of the hour, crammed with survivors, nosed her way in.' How proud our' Author would have been of his namesake, which had been the instrument of the fulfilment of his prophecy. After this an enthusiastic meeting loudly acclaimed Admiral Brock for his most stimulating dissertation, and for the enlightenment which many of his audience had received on the lives of '.... the sailor-men that sail upon the seas . . . ', but who no longer ' live on yellow peas.' P.W.I. LETTER BAG So as not to interrupt Admiral Brock's discourse on the Naval Occasion described above, all Letters have been held over until the next number of the Journal. Meanwhile Mr. A. G. Sandison wishes the following correction to be made in the last Journal (144), page 24 : ' The remark that " Mul- vaney was like Micawber . . . etc.'' attributed to me, did not, in fact, come into what I had to say. I admit, however to being the anonymous defender—quoted later in your report — of " The Three " as being, in Kipling's hands, " effective portrayals of human suffering".' OBITUARY We deeply regret to report the sudden death early in October, 1962, of Mr. Tom P. Jones, o.b.e. He was 73 and had been a member of the Society from the beginning ; being in fact one of the considerable group who applied to join the earlier society. His autobiography, ' Patagonian Panorama ', which was published in 1961, is a very interesting book. He spent nearly all his working life in Patagonia, mostly at Punta Arenas where he served for a number of years as Honorary British Consul. Tom Jones was a most loyal and generous member of the Society. He took great pride in the fact that he and his wife, his children and his grandchildren were all members of it. We send them our deepest sympathy