Empire: World History - 314. Rudyard Kipling: Villain or Visionary? (Part 3)

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Should we still read Kipling today? What family tragedy did Kipling face in the later half of his life? How did he fan the flames of jingoism during and after the First World War? William is reunited with Anita to discuss Rudyard Kipling’s later life and legacy and to debate whether we should revere or despise him... Make someone an Empire Club Member this Christmas – unlock the full Empire experience with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Just go to https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/gifts And of course, you can still join for yourself any time at empirepoduk.com or on apple podcasts. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Producer: Anouska Lewis Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnden. And me, William Drimple, who's very pleased not to be on my own anymore and able to talk to Anita about Kipling, which we've missed in the last two episodes. I'm sorry about that. I had a little break, an NHS spa retreat.

No, I was in hospital for a little while. But I'm all better now. Well done for carrying on without me. You're looking very perky. Oh, well, I'm glad. It was horrible. It was horrible not having you there, particularly for this episode,

which is actually an episode that we have talked about, since the very days we were planning this podcast three years ago. Having to do it on my own, felt very upset. Oh, well, I'm here now. Very irritatingly, you're back at the episode, which actually proves your point rather than mine. Oh, good. I feel better and better by the minute. Okay, good. Tell me what I missed. What did I miss? So in the first part, we talked about young Kipling. And that's the one you really should have been there for, because you would have fallen for the young Ruddy Kipling as he gets horribly abused by sort of imposed foster parents in a house in the southeast of England, where he sent back from his gorgeous childhood in India and is tortured by this horrible Edwardian couple.

and he writes one of the most moving stories of abused childhood, Baba Black Sheep. And that would have won my argument for me. Unfortunately, you're coming in now later in the story. We've moved through the period of him as a young journalist in India, learning his trade and writing his first satirical short stories about the British misbehaving in the hill stations in India. And we've done this odd period when he moves improbably to Vermont in the US. And it's there in America that he writes. his two, in a sense, most famous Indian books, Kim and the Jungle Book, both of which are quite

similar stories in that they both have these sort of Kipling-inspired figures who are outsiders in India, Maugli, the kid brought up in the jungle. And then we had the story of Kim, which is this gorgeous evocation of India and the Grand Trunk Road and all the different varieties of life of India, the great river of life, written in his great masterpiece, Kim. But sadly, you're coming back for the bit, which is the least defensible bit of Kippling's life. The least edifying chapter in his story. When Kippling returns to England from Vermont and gets sort of recruited as, in a sense,

the jingoistic pro-emper, pro-conquest, it's not too much to say why it's supremacist. He becomes the acolyte of Cecil Rhodes and all the most indefensible bits of. Kipling's life when he, for example, hates Mount Magandhi and supports General Dyer after Gillian Walla massacre, everything that would absolutely confirm every prejudice you've ever had against Kifling is to come in this episode. I'm not even going to attempt to defend him at all of this because this is the Kipling that future generations will abhor and dislike. But yet, even here, there is a moment of semi-redemption at the end, and we will come to the story of my boy, Jack. Well, we shall see how much redemption there is. Let's see. Let's see.

You don't seem to be in a very redeeming mood. And I totally, I mean, this part of his life is not identified, but it's interesting and important. And it shows Kipling as the laureate of empire, actually is no other way for it. This was Kipling in middle age and later in life when he becomes the great defender and bard of British imperialism. And it's an episode that is very, very foreign to us today, and we have to try and understand the world that created it while disliking everything, really, that it represents. There's many defences of Kipling as a writer one can make, but nothing much in this episode really is defensible other than my favourite of all, which is his just-so stories, which I grew up on and still love his stories about, particularly the cat that walked on its own

and will read that as the one nice moment in this rather dark part of the story. Anyway, the story begins with Kipling leaving Vermont. We saw in the last episode how he fell out. with his brother-in-law. He has an American wife, and he falls out with his brother-in-law, and things get a bit testy in Vermont. So he decides to move back. And of all places, improbably, Kipling moves to Torquay. Oh. Which, unsurprisingly... So for those people who don't know Britain, and we've got many listeners in the United States, and Australia. Explain Turkey, Anita. Well, I can explain it in two words, Basil and Faulty.

Very neatly done. So Faulty towers are set in Torquay. It's a seaside town with, yes, lots of little hotels in it. It's picturesque. It's Little England. I mean, is that fair to say, Willie? It is the embodiment of Little England. And even Kipling, who you might have thought would have had some sympathy with the Basil Fultes of this world, or Basil Fulte would certainly have had sympathy for Kipling, thought the town was, quote, so smugly British that it made him want to, quote, dance naked through it with pink feathers. Pink feathers in his stern, sort of lodged firmly in his derrier. He was even ruder than that, didn't he say? He was a society that was filled with ponderous fat old ladies living in villas with clipped hedges and shaved lawns.

And although it was good to be back in the beautiful, fatted and washed English scenery, he wished that this place and these are his words wasn't quite so infernally respectable. So he's a grumpy kipling. Grumpy ruddy is back in the UK. Grumpy ruddy, exactly that. So 1896 he moves back. And in Torque, improbably, he writes two of his most famous. poems, which are two of the most famous poems in the English language, for better or worse, whether we like them or not.

And he begins them, I think, within a fortnight of each other. And he doesn't think either of them were any good initially. And he has both of them sitting unfinished on his desk at the same time. But they are the white man's burden and recessional. And both these poems, which, although they're written together, are released slightly apart and are published in the Times. And they completely change Kipling's profile. He'd been a famous figure in India, as he was.

young man talking to this very small limited audience of the British civil service and army in India. The Jungle Book now so famous because of Disney, and even Kim came and went without an enormous fanfare, but it says these two poems which somehow just capture the high imperial mood of the 1890s. And they're slightly different from each other. Although they're written initially at the same time, they have a very different mood. And recessional is him slightly saying we've overdone the empire, which is not a normal complete response. And it's him looking slightly, skeptically, is that the word? Well, I think, yeah, wistfully. Wistfully, yes, that's the better word. There's a sympathy and sadness to it. Shall I read a few lines of it? So, God of our

father's known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle line, beneath whose awful hand we hold dominion over palm and pine. Lord God of hosts, be with it. yet, lest we forget, lest we forget. Now, the background to this is Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and the poem recession, which is published very much as the poem of this moment in the times, seems to sort of grasp the fact that the great days of Britain as the sole power of the world, as viewed for Britain, of course, as far as the British were concerned, the great moment of imperial climax had been and gone. America is rising. Germany. many, more to the point, is rising as a rival European power. This is something new. Germany

had been, of course, a collection of little princes states. And now they're united under Bismarck. They've defeated the French at the Franco-Prussian wars. And suddenly they become a problem. And they're beginning to rearm and they're beginning to threaten Britain. It's the almost twilight of the empire, if you like, you know, sort of the sun's setting on this enormous empire. That's certainly the feeling you get from recessional. But also, it's a feeling that's in Britain itself, because 1897 is a really important date for Queen Victoria, for whom this poem is written, because it is almost towards the end of her life. And you remember how the nation convulsed at the death of Queen Elizabeth the second. The nation is braced again for a failing monarch

who has always been there, you know, has been as reliable as sunrise and sunset. So there is this sort of mood of change, you know, again, as you say, sort of, you know, the Irish nationalist, Indian nationalist, you know, this flux, but also that things are changing. This is not what we thought we had before. And that's when Recessional gets published in the Times. It's published in the Times. It's 1897. And the other poem that he'd written at the same time is not published until, I suppose, two years later, it's 1819. And this is the white man's burden. And now this is, of course, something we talked about very much with Daniel Imovar and when we were talking about Roosevelt invading the Philippines and the beginnings of American imperialism. And

the white man's burden is this poem full of lines that are, to our eyes, impossibly racist and in many ways utterly reprehensible. Doing this double thing of not only applauding the fact that America is taking on this job of imperialism, in other words, crushing, but in the eyes of Kipling leading and educating the other races of the world. And the second string of it, which is saying, you know, today we would mostly look at imperialism as the West, conquering, exploiting and looting other countries, taking them over for the benefit of the coloniser. But Kipling, of course, looks in it quite differently as the white man's burden, as this duty that the white man has to take over.

Civilize the world to civilise. An idea which does not fly very high today. And again, this sort of language is very difficult for us today. Take up the white man's burden, send forth the best ye breed. Go bind your sons to exile to serve your captives need. To wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild, your new court sullen peoples, half devil and half child. Now, whatever your defence of Kipling,

to regard the conquered peoples who have been conquered by America in this instance as half devil and half child is, of course, just straightforwardly racist to look on it as a benign duty rather than as something exploitative, just shows the distance in a sense between his period and ours. That's what makes him sort of out of all imperial writers, the most imperialist of all, if you like. And this is his most imperialist poem. Yes, this is the absolute zenith of his defence of empire. Is British public opinion changing at this time? Because it's interesting at the same time as he's writing this spirited defence.

And, you know, and also melancholy about the fact, you know, we don't want to do this. It's quite hard. But we have to do this. It's our duty. We have to civilise the savages. The mood is sort of on a shift in Britain, would you say? Because I know newspapers are certainly covering in Britain the other side, if you like, sort of Indian nationalists, people like Georgia Bernard Shaw are being won over to the argument.

Really prominent members of British society are questioning what are we doing over there? Why are we there? Who are we helping? So that is something as well that is new in these sort of newspapers that people are opening up and reading with their breakfast cereal every morning. This is what Kipling is in a sense voicing that there is this growing awareness among liberals that a lot of what has been done during the Queen Victoria's reign needs reform is how I think they'd put it. You need to educate and bring forward and prepare for the day when the British can step back. That's the attitude of the liberals. And Kipling is not a liberal. Kippling is, by any standards, the Bard who addresses in the times

those conservative Brits who still think the empire is the great achievement and Britain's gift to the world rather than how we would normally look at it in this podcast as looting the world to enrich Britain. And we have at the same time, Kipling's own life, he has his son, Jack, John, is born at this point the same year that he's writing these two poems, but he's also writing other poems, where he's sort of setting himself up is the sort of bard of progress and technology. Because for him, and again, this is something we have to sort of struggle to imagine because the Victorian Empire seems to us something impossibly dated. But for Kipling, it's the cutting edge. It's the AI of its day. And he sees it not only as a civilising force in the world, but as a sort of wonderfully professional, technical consultancy, building splendid bridges, laying wonderful roads and railway,

tracks. He is a great fan of trains and motorcars and locomotives and steamships. And he writes these odd poems like McAndrew's hymn, where the hero is sort of machinery. From coupler flange to spindle guide, I see thy hand, O God. Predestination in the stride of yon connecting rod. You're right. I mean, he's so enthralled to the technology of the time. He wrote a poem, which is called the Deep Sea Cables, which is an ode to deep sea cables. I love that. It's not great. No one else has written an ode to sea to deep sea cables ever.

No, I think he's on his own on that shelf. And, you know, he says, They have awakened the timeless things. They have killed their father time, joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun. Hush, hush, men talk are the waste of the ultimate slime, and a new word runs between,

whispering, let us be one. It's like, it's a cable. Under the water. This is not the sort of thing which many other poets have sung. No, but I love that he loves it so much. I just want to flag up another thing, which you've sort of said in passing, but it's going to be really important in this episode, and it is the birth of his third child, John Jack Kipling.

Does he ever write an ode to my newborn son that is even vaguely as lyrical as his ode to the deep sea cables? Well, he does write eventually an ode to Jack, but that is at a different phase of his life. Oh, no, that's a sad one. That's my boy Jack. Oh, that is very, very sad. If there's one thing that's moved my dial on Kipling, it is that terrible tragedy.

But we'll come to that. Let's not blow that now. It's getting worse at the moment, because what he's actually about to do, having written these two great patriotic odes to empire, he now is falling in love with another figure that we struggle to understand today, and many people are revolted by, which is Cecil Rhodes, the father of British imperialism in Africa, the man who believes that British commerce and drilling into diamond mines and taking the raw materials of Africa will do good to Africa, will bring it forward. And these two become great allies.

Allies and friends. I mean, they're actually personal friends, aren't they? They sort of eat together. They go out together. They mock around together, don't they? So much so that Rhodes actually gives Kipling a winter house called the Woolsack in Cape Town, I think. He goes out every winter and spends the winter there at this point. So much so that he spurns the offers of Lord Curzon, who at this point is the viceroy.

in India and who was trying to get him to the Delhi Derbar and he says, no, no, I'm cozing down with my friend Cecil in the woolsack in Cape Town. And the two, well, I mean, so Kipling falls in love with him. I think they meet in 1891 at a sort of jolly in the Atheneum club in Palmael in London. And Kipling lunches with Rhodes the day after he accepts the invitation from Rhodes to go for the first time to South Africa. And the two fall into each other's arms because they both have very similar ideas about empire and imperialism. and both have incredibly positive views of white rule in Africa. There's no other two ways of putting it. And what is your dream, Rhodes asks him, provoking the response that the questioner was part of it? Oh, so Rhodes, you are part of my dream. You are my dream. It's quite flirty.

Does Rhodes ever offer up this idea that, you know, actually there will be a place called Rhodesia, which will carry my name. How far are they going in their conversations about reforming Africa? Well, Rhodesia has just been formed at this point in 18. And I think Kipling's first visit to South Africa is 1891 or something like that. So yes, this is very much in the air. Anyway, these two are having a very cozy time. And then Kipling decides he wants to go and revisit America. Now this is a family trip. He and his wife have patched up with his brother and nor. They haven't been to see the family for a bit since they left a decade earlier. But the trip proves a complete, an utter disaster. And it's an important moment in Kipling's emotional. and family life because all three of his children become ill on this voyage. They go out in January, it's very cold, and the seas are heavy, and Kipling catches pneumonia. He's delirious for days

and nearly dies, but Josephine, his daughter, dies aged six on arrival. And Kippling is broken by this. He himself is very slow and weak. They don't tell him, do they? Because he's so weak for such a long time that they can't even break the news about Josephine. Who he refers to is his loveliest and favourite child. So it takes a while even further news to reach in. He must have thought of, you know, delirium, I can't be real, because it is such a blow to lose that six-year-old child that you love and adore so much. How does he bounce back?

I mean, does he ever bounce back to his former cell? He doesn't entirely bounce back ever, and we will see there are further family tragedies to come, which also not. lock him four six. Recently, a first edition of the Jungle Book, complete with the handwritten inscription by Kipling to his youngest daughter, was discovered in a National Trust property in Cambridgeshire. And it's described, this book belongs to Josephine Kipling, for whom it was written by her father, May 1894. And this is one of the great sort of sad moments of Kipling's life. And he returns to England, as we'll see in the next half after the break, very much less

triumphant than his mood had been in the decade between arriving back from America after the Jungle Book and this disastrous trip when he loses his daughter. Welcome back. Now, before we go back to this final chapter of Kipling's life, it's a good time to tell you very quickly that we're doing a live show, live show. Saturday, 5th of September is the date, 26. We're going to be at the South Bank Centre in London as part of a huge goalhanger takeover weekend from the 4th to the 6th of September. We're even taking over a pub. It's going to become the reach of this place is fabulous. The

Gollhanger Arms. No less. And we're welcoming you to come and pull up a seat at the bar because we'd love to see you. General sale for tickets goes live on December the 11th at the Southbank Centre.com.com.com. Yeah, so head over to southbank centre.comco.com.uk to buy your tickets. That's southbank centre.comco.com.

Anyway, let's go back to Kipling because we left a very sad Kipling in part one who has just lost his loveliest child in his own words, which is not very lovely for his other two children to grow up with, but there you are. First rule of any parent, never utter those words. Do not declare your favourite? Don't have a favourite. But also he's sort of physically depleted. He comes back to England, does he? He comes back and at this moment, he then discovers his dream house, which is Batemans, which is still there in Sussex and you can go and see it's owned by the National Trust now. And it is an absolutely gorgeous, perfect.

Describe why? Tell me. Oh, it's sitting amid perfect unspoiled Sussex countryside and it's got a wall garden and it's got these lovely collection of 17th century or 18th century buildings. And it's a heavenly spot and it's very well worth going to see.

Inside is beautiful panelling and all his books are still there. So I highly recommend a trip to Batemans. And it's here that he really, for the first time falls in love with England. Remember his great love of his youth had been India and the colours and the warmth of India. He has this brief crush on Vermont and the American wilderness. And he's become the great bard of the British Empire without ever really knowing England or Britain at all well. But Bateman's, he loves, and he loves the countryside around it, and he discovers the motor car. He gets into motoring. We said how he likes underground cables and pistons, this sort

of thing and steamships. Now he discovers motoring and he motors around England. And this is the period that he starts writing Puck of Pooks Hill. I don't know whether you ever had that read to you as a child. No, I don't. Tell me about Puck of Pooks Hill. What is that? Is it a children's story? It sounds like it should be. Oh, it's rather gorgeous. It's all about sort of English history and the Romans and the Normans and the Normans and the Barents War and the Regency and all this sort of stuff, all laird. And then he also writes, and this is still, I think, my favorite bit of Kipling and something I read to my kids, which is the just so stories, and of the just so stories, my favorite is the cat that walked by himself. Oh, yes. Here and attend and listen, for this befell and

happened and became and was, oh my best beloved, when the tame animals were wild. The dog was wild, and the horse was wild, and the cow was wild, and the sheep was wild, and the pig was wild as wild as wild could be and they walked in the wet wild woods by their wild loans. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the cat. He walked by himself and all places were alike to him. It's an absolutely wonderful poem. It was strange with his own pictures. Well, his father, he's sort of this great draftsman, wasn't he? But they did like to take to their sketchbooks, the Kipling family. Tell me one thing, though. I mean, there's sort of a roundabout this time, though. He's writing these sort of charming stories. But also he's spending a lot of the time in a bit of a rage, isn't he? Because

you know, this is also, let's not forget, this is the time Irish nationalism is growing. And you've got the ferment of orange men against nationalists. You've also got Germany rearming itself. You've got sort of dreadnoughts and battle cruises. This is that time as well. So it is a time a great insecurity and he lets his rage out about this because he declares sides quite early on, doesn't he, William? And they won't surprise anybody. So Kipling genuinely thinks to the core of his being that the British Empire is a major force for good in the world. He's convinced himself that this is what is keeping the world going, the world spinning on its axis. And by 1902, which is the year that he writes the just so stories or publishes the just so stories,

Britain is clearly no longer the unrivaled top dog. America is now its equal in economic terms and is soon going to bypass it if it hasn't already by the 1902. And Germany is rising and growing much faster than Britain, and that is now clearly a threat to. Germany, it's important to remember, has also showed its sympathy with the Boers and the Boer War, which is something that with his love of South Africa and Rhodes that he's suspicious of

and he thinks that the Kaiser is a very bad thing, although the Kaiser apparently sent him a get-well telegram when he was apparently dying in New York. That still doesn't stop him coming up with lots of anti-German verse in the years ahead. And as you say, he sees the end of the British Empire. One of the things he sees is Ireland. Ireland is in the process of beginning its struggle. for independence. The Easter Rising that we dealt with in our Irish series is on the horizon. Ulsterman are re-arming, defending as they see it, their place and defending themselves against

the Fenians as they see it. Everything that he loves is cracking. And he is seen widely at this period. Remember, this is 1902. Kipling is now seen as a figure that represents the Victorian period, which is receding into the past, he's now become a bit of a fossil. So in the Struel Peter Alphabet, which is a political satire published at this period in 1900, it has a drawing under the letter K of the alphabet, K for Rudyard, Kipling and Lord Kitchener, at that time the commander-in-chief in India. So, I mean, you've got sort of this alphabet book for kids and K, K, you know, not for kangaroo, but for Kipling and Kitchener.

And the picture that accompanies it is Kitchener sort of ramrod strayed with his huge handlebar mustache all waxed at the tips carrying a saber at his side standing to attention. And then sort of a much smaller little Kipling with his thick bottle glasses and droopy mustache with ink dripping out of his backpack and spilling across the floor. But it does, I mean, does tell you, you know, how mega famous Kipling is if he's being put on the same pedestal as Kitchener. And it says underneath the picture, should I read you what it says? It says, men of different trades and sizes, here you have before your eyes is, lanky sword and stumpy pen, doing useful things for men. When the empire wants to stitch in her, send for Kipling and for Kittner. So he is, as this indicates, slightly a sort of figure of fun by this stage, and that he is, he represents this high noon of Victorian Empire, which is something that's clearly passing. all this culminates in the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.

Britain goes to war and no one, of course, is more keen to whip up everybody for war than Kipling, who writes one of his jingoistic poems in The Times, and this is what he writes. For all we have an hour, for all our children's fate, stand up and take the war. The Hun is at the gate. Our world has passed away in wantonness overthrown. There is nothing left today but steel and fire and stone. So this is Kipling absolutely beating the drums of war. The ratat-tat of the marching drum is very much sounding out from Batemans.

The person who embodies this in the real sense in the Kipling household is his son John. Who's known as Jack. And he is initially rejected from the army for having poor Isles. sight. He fails his test. And Kipling Senior, Ruddy, pulls strings in high places to get him into the Irish Guards, which is not at all the regiment, I think, that Kipling would have wanted him to go into, as it was considered the Irish Guards would not have been Kipling's idea of a gentleman's regiment. And so he takes whatever is available, the Irish Guards, his 17th birthday. It's just before, he's not even 17. Yeah, just he's a 16-year-old, callow youth.

Have you ever seen the movie? My boy Jack. Have you seen it? With Daniel Rattler. I haven't seen it now. It's really very, very moving. It's utterly touching and delightful. And the way they portray Jack is that he is practically blind.

And, you know, when he loses his glasses, he is entirely blind. I can't see anything but this sort of blurred mess. But that he is entirely trying to fulfil the ambitions of his father. You know, his mother doesn't want him to go. He's scared. He's only little. He's scared. But he, you know, because of his father, he wants to make his daddy proud.

He's not fit for the front. But he sent in September 1915 to the Battle of Luce. And that is a horrific bloody churning of human life. And it turns out to be Jack Kipling's first and only battle, doesn't it? Yep. He goes straight into battle and is killed almost immediately. But it isn't clear immediately that he is dead. There's this terrible period when they hit, no, he's gone or he's disappeared.

and they're hoping that he might have been captured or is missing and will turn up. But no such luck. He's been wounded and died slowly in chalk pit wood. The building which he crawled into subsequently occupied by German soldiers and the presumption that the soldiers found this dying man and finished him off. Kipling is completely broken by this. This is a moment of sort of terrible loss and guilt because he'd more or less drummed the poor boy off, blind as he was to the front. when he would have been safe at home because of his near blindness, he's drummed out and is killed

almost immediately. The portrayal on the screen shows that absolute heartbreak of Kipling Senior. But what it doesn't seem to convey is how actually the pair of them, you know, Carrie Ann Rudyard, send their child off to war, kind of knowing he's going to be killed, because there is this one quote, which I find really kind of scary. You know, she's asked, why did you send Jack? Why? And she says, you know, one can't let one's friends and neighbor's sons be killed in order to save us and our son.

There is no chance John will survive unless he is so maimed from a wound as to be unfit to fight. We know it and he does. We all know it. But we all must give and do what we can and live on the shadow of a hope that our boy will be the one to escape. I mean, bloody hell. That sounds cold. Doesn't it? What we're up against is that Kipling, the human being, who loves his children, who's broken

by his daughter's death, feels this very, very strongly, but also is the epitome of Dulce de Coromest, which the war poets write against, this idea that it's good and great to die for your country. These are the notions that Kipling has helped inculcate into an entire generation, which are being shown up for their madness, in a sense, in the sense, in the sense. the slaughter in the trenches. The kind of poems that Wilfred Owen and Siegerton Ssoon are writing, in response to this massacre of millions of young men, shows up the hollowness of the jingoism represented by Kipling. Kippling feels it and knows that he's partly irresponsible in a sense. Which must be unbearable because he wasn't meant to go. He wasn't fit to go. He does write this

poem, actually, which is heartbreaking. I actually get a bit tearful when I do read a nativity. And it's a really interesting poem. I think it's one of the most interesting poems by Kipling. It's a weaving together of his own family story, but also with the death of Christ and, you know, Mary despairing about, you know, what's happened to her son and where is her son's body? And the verse, I'll read to you. My child died in the dark. Is it well with the child?

Is it well? There was none to tend him or mark. And I know not how he fell. And that is a lot, isn't it? Isn't that just awful? And then there's another one. There's my boy Jack. Have you any news of my boy Jack, not this tide?

When do you think that he'll come back? Not with this wind blowing and this tide. Oh dear, what comfort can I find? None this tide, nor any tide. Except that he did not shame his kind, not even with that wind blowing and that tide. Now this is a defiant, jinguistic response that he didn't shame his kind,

that he died. defending the Union Jack and the Empire, but by the end of this year, Carrie records that Kipling looks exhausted, yellow and shrunken. Can I ask you a question? Because I mean, you know this life so well. During the war and after the war, there are a lot of people who questioned the terrible actions of those in command. Lions led by donkeys and, you know, the horrific sacrifices that people like Earl Haig were willing to make by just sending these young lives. over the top, over these trenches that had been dug into certain death, this kind of mowing down that would grant them only two inches more of land. Did he ever look at all of that and think,

actually, wasn't worth it? Was it worth it? I mean, were they the right people in charge? Someone who's had such unshakable faith in those who run empire. Did it shake at all at this time? So how he explains it to himself is that, no, he doesn't think that it's all stuff and nonsense. He still believes in patriotism. He still believes in the kind of jingoistic pro-emperor beliefs that had propelled him to this point. But also, yes, he believes that the generals are idiots. And he's very much the kind of man who does indeed harbor deep distrust and anger towards all the British military elite. particularly Haig, he blames Haig for the disastrous planning at Luz. It isn't that he's rejected

the empire and the military might that he's dedicated his life to. He's always been singing the song of the common soldier, and he still has that very much with him. But he has personal grief and guilt, self-acrimination. He knows that he sent his son to slaughter. He deeply distrusts the generals. But he supports the war. He continues pro-war work. He uses his talents to write propaganda and writes his dullest of all his books and the least read of all Kipling's enormous bibliography is his two-volume regimental history of the Irish Guards, which characteristically mentions his son's death only very briefly. It's a footnote amid all the rest of the slaughter.

And he gets involved in the, you know, the Imperial War Graves Commission after the war. And he writes the famous epitaph known unto God. So just for those who don't know, can I explain the Imperial Wargraves Commission? I mean, just enormously important work for grieving families who needed some kind of closure. It's now, I mean, it still exists, but its name is now the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission. The point of it was to ensure that every fallen soldier was commemorated with dignity because so many bodies did not come back. I mean, you can just see why he would throw himself body and soul into supporting that and raising money for that particular organisation.

because they don't ever get Jack's body back, do they? They don't ever, they just have to come to terms of the fact that he's not coming back. So this idea of the unknown soldier, the soldier known only unto God is his phrase. And it's one of these many phrases that he gives to the English language. So his position is that he kind of loses this romantic love of war. You know, he's been writing all this stuff about scrimmages on the Northwest Frontier all his life since his teens. That goes. He doesn't have a romantic view of warfare, but it doesn't this death convert him into an opponent of empire or questioning the strategic necessity as he sees it of the First World War.

And so he then has this final period of his life of another 19 years before he dies when he's increasingly a fossil. He's still Kipling, knocking out these jingoistic poems. You know, the real action. in poetry is Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. And he says at one point, I hate your generation. Does he's introduced to the other? That's funny. I tell you what else he hates, because it's sort of at the end of the war, by the way, let's not forget how many Indian troops were fighting on the front in France as well,

not very far from where Jack fell, in fact. And he absolutely despises the, as Churchill called him, the half-naked Indian fakir, Mahat Maghāndi, who and the Indian National Congress, really low-turned, would write, and you know, sort of like his little tuppenceworth about what was going on in India. And after the Jaliyama al-Bagh massacre, there is this very controversial, but huge fundraising effort for General Dyer. He was the man who orders the troops in and orders them to fire on this group, 1,600 bullets.

I still remember how many fired into the depths of the crowd. Including friends of your grandfather. Exactly. He is one of those most famous donors to the fund to reward Dyer. And they call themselves the diehards who say, you know, we are treating him. We put it through a court martial. How he's a hero, he should be lifted on high on a palanquin. But as your wonderful book shows, this world is changing.

Not only are the days of the Raj now clearly numbered as Congress and Gandhi are seizing the moment and rising to enormous popularity. and gaining massive followings across India. Even among the British who have been to India and grown up there, none other than George Orwell, who we started this theory with. So we're coming a full circle. Orwell, at this period, writes a kind of bitter attack on Kipling's writing. He says his work is that of a jingo imperialist who sold out to the British governing class, crude, vulgar, a patriotic music. call turn morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. Kipling has this unfortunate last 15 years when he's not just a fossil, he's reviled as

everything that the new generation dislikes about the old generation, all that flag waving, all that barrack room ballads, all that stuff that Kipling represents. He's now massively out of fashion. It's a joke, but even worse than a joke, it's morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. So Kipling lives to see his world disintegrate and his values questioned and everything that he believe in falls apart as he's watching. And I mean, he has a perfectly comfortable old age in this lovely house Bateman's. He continues to write and he's considered to be, you know, one of the great pillars of the nation. He wins the Nobel Prize at this point. But he is aware that

he is a fossil and his end comes as late as 1936, 12th of January. He has an ulcer. He has lunch with his son-in-law, then that evening his ulcer bursts. And he's rushed from his Piccadilly Hotel to the Middlesex Hospital. In the small hours of the 13th, he tells the surgeon that something has come adrift inside. He deteriorates, he loses consciousness. And the following day at midnight, he dies. It's his 44th wedding anniversary. In 1936, I guess, you know, his opinions are being challenged and he's pretty despondent about Britain's hold on the world. Britain still respects, stroke, reveres him even at the end because he gets his burial place in Westminster Abbey, Poets Corner. So there he rests, anyone who does, you know, covers a tourist in London in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.

And he's surrounded by the most illustrious writers that Britain has ever created. what should we think about him now? And this is a conversation we've had in pubs over the years. Okay, I mean, do you want to go first? I've changed my views on him. You have. Oh, gosh. Okay.

All right. Tell me. I've changed my views on him in that. I agreed with you all during my 20s and regarded him as this fuddy-duddy bearer of Victoriana. But as so often in this podcast, two things are true simultaneously. And the two things which are true, is that he is a white supremacist. He believes in the conquering of what he regards as lesser races. He is the

embodiment of racism. He is the embodiment of imperialism. He's the embodiment of jingoism. He is also a great writer. And some of his short stories, his novel Kim, his poems, and the poem that is still voted the nation's most popular poem, if remain great. great works of literature. There are the most extraordinary list of Kipling fans out there, the oddest and most improbable of all being Edward Saeed, the father of Orientalism, who you might have imagined to be the man leading the charge. And he writes, which is correct, that Kipling would know more of question the right of the white European to rule that he would have argued with the Himalayas. Yet he says, Kipling is a major artist and his masterpiece Kim

is a remarkable complex novel belonging to the world's very greatest literature. And there are so many people like that, Craig Raine, the modernist poet, thinks he's our greatest short story writer. He's our Chekhov. He's our Toggenyev. Rushdie, who we started the first episode with when you were, very sadly, in hospital, has this wonderful line. And he says, Kipling is such a complicated writer because he's a writer at war with himself, just to return to the words we open this with. Kippling is a writer. with a storm inside him and he creates a mirror storm

of contradictory responses in the reader. I've never been able to re Kippling calmly. Anger and delight are incompatible emotions yet his stories do indeed have the power simultaneously to infuriate and to entrance. So, I mean, I'll tell you, my position has moved a little. So my resistance to Kippling, it's not funny, daddy, because the writing,

and, you know, because we were doing this, I've had opportunity to revisit some of the writing. It's beautiful. You know, his turn. of phrases are elegant, his imagery is gorgeous. But at the end of the day, I can't love somebody who would have hated me and hated, you know, everyone I know and care about, because I'm exactly the kind of character who he loathed and was his worst nightmare. To me, that is very, very difficult. And I've just about managed it with Orwell, who was, as we discovered in our

Orwell season, just thoroughly shit as a husband and as a, a, a man towards women. But with Kipling, he loved India, he hated Indians, which is such a mark of people who did really cruel, terrible things under the Raj that I still, I struggle with him much more. So where I can, I suppose, recognize that Rushdie, where Rushdie's coming from, you know, where you give yourself a punch up while reading him, I think I'm there. I can sort of, you know, I can appreciate the words, but it doesn't make me cut him

any more slack, if you see what I mean. Fair enough. Fair enough. He wouldn't have cut me any, I think. I think maybe it's that. Isn't that petty? Maybe it's petty. Discuss on our Discord.

EmpirePod UK.com, if you are a member of our club, you can get involved in this conversation and have a chat about it. And, you know, we might even read out some of your submissions. Anyway, what are we doing next? We're doing Nipal. That's exciting. An equally complicated figure. I have to say that I have been reading all weekend the lamented Patrick French's book on Nipa, which, weirdly enough, I never read.

read at the time for some reason. Although it did so well that I read every review as it came out and was there with him when he was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and very much sort of saw that book coming together and I never actually read it. It's a complete masterpiece. We're going to talk about it with another of my friends who also has very complicated views about Naipal, but ultimately is on the defence team and that is Ben Moser. Who himself is a sublime writer, writes so beautifully. Yeah. I wonder if it. Pulitzer and many other things. So yes, join us for that. Till the next time we meet, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. And goodbye from me, William Turample.