Schooldays with Kipling

SCHOOL DAYS WITH KIPLING (1936) is about 4 1/2 early years in the life of 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936). From January 1878 to July 1882 Joseph Rudyard Kipling, aged 12 - 16, was a boarding student at recently created United Services College at Westward Ho! (sic!) near Bideford on the north Devonshire coast of England facing Wales across the Bristol Channel. *** In 1899, 17 years after leaving UCC (aka "the Coll.") Kipling issued STALKY & CO., a classic English schoolboy novel drawing heavily, very heavily, on his own days at Westward Ho! It is hard to imagine that anyone today would read G. C. Beresford's SCHOOL DAYS WITH KIPLING who had not already read STALKY & CO. and wanted to learn more about young Rudyard Kipling. That novel is about three great chums usually fictitiously named Beetle (based on Kipling), Stalky (future Major General L.C. Dunsterville) and M'Turk (future famed society photographer G. C. Beresford). Dunsterville devoted three chapters of his 1928 STALKY'S REMINISCENCES to his own schooldays with Kipling on the north Devon coast. He also wrote the Preface for his friend Beresford's 1936 recollections of days at the USC. *** Admirers of Rudyard Kipling know that STALKY & CO. is a novel = fiction, but often succumb notwithstanding to a widespread misconception that it is also minutely autobiographical. Both Dunsterville and Beresford demonstate that STALKY & CO. is not entirely factual, is not simply a diary or chronicle of the years 1878 - 1882. *** The point of much of Beresford's SCHOOL DAYS WITH KIPLING is to separate historical fact from Kipling's creative imagination. Thus, for instance, Kipling/Beetle was never "caned" by the headmaster. Nor was there such a thing at USC as involuntary "fagging," that is virtually indentured servitude of younger students to olders, to run errands, brew cocoa and such like. Bullying was something practiced by masters, not by students. The theme of pre-meditated ("let the punishment fit the crime") revenge running through STALKY & CO. was absent from the lives as actually lived of the three friends Beetle, Stalky and M'Turk. *** Their adventures were very tame and schoolboyish compared with those complex fictional stratagems masterminded by future military genius Dunsterville/Stalky. Pranks there were but very good natured and non-humiliating to recipients. One characteristic of Stalky/Dunsterville was however true both in life and in Kipling's novel: his pranks and alarums were so designed so that the perpetrator would not only never be caught but would never even be suspected. * * *Beresford is also invaluable in showing what characteristics of young (aged 12 to 16) Rudyard Kipling were already present or in early evolution and what others appeared only during his seven years as a journalist in British India. Kipling was a gifted 12-year old poet at least five years before he became a master of prose. *** Yet the seven issues of the defunct United Services College CHRONICLE (revived to be run by Kipling at Headmaster Price's command) that Rudyard edited were perfect preparation for his first job after leaving Westward Ho!: as assistant editor of a weekly English-language newspaper in Lahore, Punjab. It was Kipling's poems and short stories published in India that made him world famous by age 24 when he arrived in London in 1889. Rudyar was heavily influenced even at age 12 by the pre-Raphaelite circles in which his wealthy, artistic in-laws moved in London (and of which United Services Head Master and family friend Cormell Price was a fringe member). *** At USC Kipling, virtually blind without his thick stone glasses, lived his life to read everything of belles lettres he could get his hands on and to write verse. WIthout his knowledge his parents published his SCHOOLBOY LYRICS in 1881. These 20 some poems were not circulated at USC but Beresford talks about them and a famed poem to Queen Victoria, "Ave Imperatrix," published when Kipling was only 15 and allegedly admired by the Queen-Empress herself. Beresford's SCHOOLDAYS WITH KIPLING is must reading for people who crave to understand what made a genius tick. -OOO-