16 July: Boreham on Rudyard Kipling

The Romance of a Poem
We mark today, the anniversary of the birth of one of the most famous songs in the language—The Recessional. In an extraordinary degree, the career of Rudyard Kipling was dominated by his relatives. When, as a youngster, he was brought from Bombay, his birthplace, to England, nothing impressed him more than the multiplicity and variety of these connections of his. They seemed to be of all sorts and sizes, and, on the whole, he was not at all sure that he liked the breed. The trouble began, some years earlier, with a picnic on the beautiful banks of Rudyard Lake, near Burslem. There, amidst the frolics of the day, Alice Macdonald, the witty and pretty daughter of a Methodist minister, met Jack Kipling, on leave from India. Jack took the lovely Alice back to India with him, and, when their boy was born, nothing would do but that he must be named after the scene of the fateful picnic.

Impatient to show their treasure to their friends, they seized the first opportunity of a trip to the Homeland. Unhappily, Rudyard met all his relatives at once, a nerve-racking ordeal for any boy. A family reunion was arranged at Bewdley, a charming spot in the Severn Valley. Tired of being displayed like a waxworks exhibit, Rudyard sauntered off to explore by himself the stately old English home. Pitying his loneliness, a housemaid took him in hand, explaining to him the character of the various apartments. The small boy listened in silence and then, the tour of inspection completed, he rushed to his mother in the drawing room, exclaiming in fierce indignation: "Mummy, what do you think? They've tooken the very best bedroom in the house for themselves!" Relatives, he angrily concluded, were like that.

Bane And Boon Of Domesticity
Among the kinsfolk of about his own age, there was one young scallywag who got poor Rudyard into tons of trouble. This was cousin Stanley, the son of Uncle Alf Baldwin. The boy was destined to become Prime Minister and to negotiate the abdication of an English king; but at that stage he seemed to be heading straight for a felon's cell and a hangman's rope. Kipling used to say that whenever, as a boy, he was in serious trouble, it was always Stanley who had landed him in the ugly quandary. In due course, Kipling married Carrie Balestier, a charming American girl, and settled in the United States; but his English misfortunes still pursued him; his new relatives were even more troublesome than his earlier ones. His union with Carrie was an ideally happy one; but Carrie had a younger brother, Beatty Balestier, who, during Kipling's residence in America, nearly drove him to distraction. Sick to death of the everlasting squabble, Rudyard and Carrie left America and settled in England.

If, however, Rudyard's relatives sometimes occasioned him sleepless nights, they more than once rendered him valuable service. It is to them that we owe the most familiar, most majestic and most cherished of all Kipling's poems. The incident occurred just after Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897. Kipling was living in his beautiful home at Rottingdean. Sallie Norton, an American girl, the daughter of C. E. Norton, the renowned Dante scholar, was staying with him. With an hour to spare one morning, Kipling was amusing himself clearing up the litter of papers on his desk. Most of them went into the wastepaper basket. Suddenly, he came upon the rough draft of a poem entitled "After." It consisted of seven stanzas of four lines each, beginning:

God of our fathers, known of old
Lord of our farflung battleline,
Beneath
Whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine.

Kipling's hand moved towards the basket. Sallie asked permission to see the poem. "You mustn't destroy this," she exclaimed, "it must be published!" Kipling shook his head negatively but Sallie insisted; and eventually they decided to submit the matter to arbitration.

A Treasure Presented To The Nation
Aunt Georgie, Lady Burne-Jones—the wife of the illustrious painter and the sister of Kipling's mother—was of that particular house party, and Kipling had implicit confidence in her literary judgment. Aunt Georgie was all for Sallie. Kipling insisted on deleting and destroying two of the seven verses, and, at Sallie's suggestion, added to all five verses the refrain:

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

On the manuscript, now in the British Museum, the addition is marked in Kipling's hand: "Written with Sallie's pen. R.K." and the entire poem is signed: "Done in council, July 16. Aunt Georgie, Sallie, Carrie, and me."

Kipling then wrote out a fresh copy, giving it the new title, "The Recessional," and posted it to the editor of "The Times." "Enclosed please find my sentiments on things, which I hope are yours," he wrote in the covering letter. "If you would like it; it is at your service. The sooner it is in print the better. Couldn't you run it tonight so as to end the week piously?" The letter was posted on the Friday morning and the poem appeared in "The Times" on the Saturday. Asked to name his own price for it, Kipling declined to accept any payment, and insisted that the verses should be subject to no copyright restrictions. He ordained that anybody who cared to do so should have the right to copy it. The original manuscript, thoughtfully returned to him by the proprietors of "The Times," he gave to Sallie, in recognition of her gallantry in saving it from destruction and insisting on its publication. She proudly kept the document for some years and then asked the Prime Minister, Lord Baldwin—the incorrigible Cousin Stanley of earlier days—to present it to the British Museum.

F W Boreham

Image: Rudyard Kipling