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Rudyard Kipling's Sussex
Joseph
Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30th, 1865 and died on January
18th, 1936. He was an English author and poet, who was born in Bombay,
British India.
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Kipling and his family lived in Rottingdean, Sussex from 1897 to 1901.
After the death of Kipling's wife in 1939, his house, "Bateman's" in
Burwash, Sussex was bequeathed to the National Trust and is now a public
museum dedicated to the author.
 Elsie, the only one of his three
children to live past the age of eighteen, died childless in 1976, and
bequeathed his copyrights to the National Trust. There is a thriving
Kipling Society in the United Kingdom.
In September 1896, having been driven back from Vermont by a fierce
dispute with his American brother-in-law Beatty, Rudyard Kipling took
his wife Carrie and their small daughters Josephine and Ellie to live
near Torquay on the Devon coast. The location was Carrie's choice, and
Kipling soon became restless there; and though their house was large and
sunny and overlooked the sea, somehow its atmosphere proved uncongenial.
In the spring of 1897, therefore, they went up to London, taking a suite
in the Royal Palace Hotel, Kensington.
From there they moved to the pleasant little village of Rottingdean,
near Brighton, on the Sussex Coast. Here they were able to await the
birth of their third child at North End House, the holiday home of
Kipling's Aunt Georgiana and her husband, the artist Sir Edward
Burne-Jones. This, Kipling recalls in Something of Myself, was where he
had spent his "very last days before sailing for India fourteen years
back".
Thus it was that Kipling came to spend Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee
at Rottingdean, and to write "Recessional" at the Burne-Joneses' house.
The day of the Jubilee, 22 June, was dull and foggy. After looking at
the necklace of bonfires glowing along the downs that evening, Rudyard
sat down and summarised his thoughts. Since these were written on a
sheet of paper headed 'After' and later called 'Recessional', ... his
intention was clearly to lift his countrymen's sights, now that the
festivities were over. But once again he was not happy with the results
and cast them aside.... It was a mark of Rudyard's respect that, when
[his Aunt Georgie] suggested that the verses should indeed be published,
he sent them to [Charles Frederic Moberly] Bell at The Times, noting,
'We've been blowing up the Trumpets of the New Moon a little too much
for White Men, and it's about time we sobered down.'
In September 1897, just a few weeks after the birth of John, their third
and last child and only son, the Kiplings moved to The Elms, diagonally
opposite North End House on the village green. They rented the place
from its auspiciously named owner, a Mr Bliss, for the princely sum of
three guineas a week. "It was small, none too well built, but cheap,"
wrote Kipling.
It was also just over the road from St Margaret's Church, where
Burne-Jones had installed a set of beautiful windows to commemorate the
marriage of his daughter Margaret a few years before. Here the Kiplings
settled down as part of a loving extended family, which often included
his cousin Stanley Baldwin, the future prime minister, whose in-laws'
house (The Dene) faced the very same green: "the Baldwin marriage, then,
made us free of the joyous young brotherhood and sisterhood of the Dene,
and its friends," he wrote, adding that the cousins would pack their
young families into farm-carts and despatch them "into the safe clean
heart of the motherly Downs for jam-smeared picnics." As he says
himself, "Those were exceedingly good days, and one's work came easily
and fully".
Among the works which occupied Kipling in the early part of his stay at
Rottingdean were "The White Man's Burden" (published early in
1899), and Stalky & Co, which he had begun in Torquay, and
would publish later in 1899.
However, the "joyous" experience of Rottingdean, already interrupted by
a bout of gloom in 1897, and by Uncle "Ned" Burne-Jones's death in 1898,
was utterly blighted in the spring of the following year. The Kiplings
were great travellers, and their daughter Josephine succumbed to
pneumonia after a stormy winter voyage to New York. Kipling himself was
at death's door with the same illness. Returning to The Elms and its
lovely garden without their eldest child was almost more than either he
or Carrie could bear: "The village green is most beautiful. The streets
are empty, and we come quietly to The Elms to take on a sort of ghost
life. Aunt Georgie meets us at the garden gate," Carrie wrote flatly in
her diary that June.
Although Kipling continued to write, working for example on the Just So
Stories (so named because his little lost daughter had wanted the tales
repeated to her "just so"), and publishing the first part of Kim in the
December 1900 issue of McClure's Magazine, a fresh start was required.
As the young author's celebrity had now caught up with him in the form
of gawkers "on the double-decker horse-bus" from nearby Brighton, he
decided that the family's English base should henceforth be further from
the public gaze, in a more remote inland area of their adopted county.
The Kiplings at last bought their "very-own house," Bateman's, in
Burwash, Sussex, in 1902. It remained their home for the rest of
Kipling's life, and passed to the National Trust after Carrie's death in
December 1939.
The Rottingdean period in Kipling's life was quite short, then.
Nevertheless, it should not be overlooked. Here, for the first time, he
was struck by the "sure magic" (as he calls it in the poem "Sussex") of
affinity with the English soil: in other words, he fell in love with the
Sussex coast and the Sussex Downs. Staking his first claim on the
English countryside, he acquired several plots of land in the
neighbourhood, putting up a drill hall on one of them for the rifle club
which he sponsored.
Here in Rottingdean, too, his name entered the electoral role for the
first time. From this new feeling of connection would come some of his
most appealing and quintessentially English work. As one recent critic
has said, "For Kipling, enchantment is rooted in the land, in real
discoverable places and real local people whose past is deeply embedded
in the locality". And this was not something that started in Burwash,
Sussex. In a note to Something of Myself, Thomas Pinney says that
Kipling's "preparation for the Roman stories (that is, the stories about
ancient Britain in Puck of Pook's Hill) ... goes back at least as far as
1897.
1897 was also the year in which Kipling's stature was confirmed by an
invitation to join the Athenaeum, under the club's special provision for
distinguished figures. During his stay in Rottingdean, despite the
dreadful family tragedy which he endured in 1899, Kipling's popularity
reached new heights. By the time he left, he was well on his way to
earning the biggest accolade of all: the Nobel Prize for Literature,
which he was awarded in 1907.
Literary pilgrims will still find traces of Kipling in this largely
unspoilt village on the edge of the Downs. The Kipling Gardens beside
his old home have been saved from development and are open to the
public, and his study there has been recreated at The Grange, a house
also facing the village green, and once occupied by his younger friend,
the artist William Nicholson. This is now partly used as the Museum of
the Rottingdean Preservation Society, and has a Burne-Jones room as
well.
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