AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER FROM KIPLING TO A FORMER RESIDENT OF BATEMAN’S,
WHO WOULD VISIT A FEW WEEKS LATER AND DESCRIBE KIPLING’S BELOVED HOME IN THE 1870s


KIPLING, Joseph Rudyard. Autograph letter signed (‘Rudyard Kipling’) to an unidentified correspondent [?Mr Whitehead] (‘Dear Sir’). Pinbury Park, Cirencester, [?26-29 August 1925].

Octavo, 1p. Laid paper, watermarked ‘Truslove & Han[son] / Hand Made / London’, with printed ‘Pinbury Park, / Cirencester’ letterhead. (Folded for dispatch, a few light marks.) A very good example.



A letter from Kipling inviting a former tenant of Bateman’s to visit the house. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and his wife Caroline (1862-1939) had purchased Bateman’s, a Jacobean house at Burwash, East Sussex in 1902, and it remained their family home for more than thirty years until Caroline’s death. Bateman’s was Kipling’s ‘idea of home, a sanctuary, private and protective, away from the noise of village and road, embedded in the richly wooded landscape of the Sussex Weald, “a real House in which to settle down for keeps”, as he described it in his autobiography written as the end of his life’ (A. Nicolson, Bateman’s East Sussex (Swindon, 2004), p. 5). This letter was written from Pinbury Park near Cirencester, an Elizabethan house which had been owned by the Bathurst family since the late 18th century, and was used as their summer residence by Lord and Lady Bathurst from 1902 to 1928. The Bathursts’ guests at Pinbury Park included Queen Mary, and, although undated, internal evidence suggests that this letter was written by Rudyard Kipling during a visit in August 1925. Rudyard Kipling and his wife Caroline travelled from Bateman’s to Oxford on Monday 24 August 1925, and called on Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, the following day. 

An account of the meeting between the Poet Laureate and one of the most famous poets of the early twentieth century was recorded by Kipling in a letter to his daughter, Elsie Bambridge, written a few days later: ‘[t]he P.L. himself is a very tall and strikingly handsome white haired pointy-bearded man, who looks much younger than his age. […] The diction, low, even and smooth and, as one might put it, aggressively “Oxford.” Every note and tone appeared to be studied. […] There was no talk (I took care of that) about verse or poetry at large, but there was a certain amount of ungenerous and typically narrow “Oxford” criticism of men (I did not know them) who appeared to have been trying to do things’ (T. Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Volume 5 1920-1930 (Iowa City, IA, 2004) pp. 259-260). On Wednesday 26th August Rudyard and Caroline Kipling continued their journey to Pinbury Park, arriving later that day and staying until Saturday 29th August, when they returned to Bateman’s (cf. Pinney, p. 260, n.1), so it seems most probable that this letter was written from Pinbury Park between Wednesday 26th and Saturday 29th August 1925. 

In the letter, which he marked ‘Private’ at the head, Kipling thanks the recipient for his note, which had been forwarded to Pinbury Park, and replies that ‘it will give Mrs Kipling and myself much pleasure if you and your son and daughter would come over to tea at Batemans on Monday Aug 31’ – since ‘[t]hat unfortunately, is the only free day I have for some time to come’ – and concludes with the words ‘[w]ill you please reply to Batemans’. It seems most probable that this letter was addressed to ‘an old man of the name of Whitehead, who wrote to us once or twice, asking to be allowed to look over Bateman’s, as that was a place where he had lived when a boy’, as Kipling told his daughter in a letter of 12 September 1925 (Pinney, p. 261; the 31st of August fell on a Monday in 1925). Since there ‘was something in his letter’s simplicity which drew us’, a visit to Bateman’s was planned – presumably that proposed in this letter – but Whitehead could not ‘come the first time that he had arranged’, so ‘we made a fresh appointment’ (Pinney, p. 262). 

Whitehead – ‘small keen and seventy-nine!’ – arrived at Bateman’s with his son and daughter on 8 September 1925, and ‘from the instant that he arrived, he stepped back fifty years in time, and moved in a world to which we had no key. He told us what the garden had been, and how the fields lay in his faraway time. […] It appeared he was a young man who had learned farming in [1870] and had begun at Bateman’s where he knew old Colonel Fielden’s uncle […]. And then he went into the house which he presently began to call “my house.” For the while, it was his house to him. He went through it very slowly, room by room. He used as a boy to sit at the window of your boudoir with a saloon pistol and shoot at the jays who robbed the orchard, which was on the lawn. […] A cheerful life! And one which he rehearsed in detail. […] I do not think in all my life I have ever made any human being as happy as that queer tremulous old chap. He came at four and he left at twenty to seven! And he had talked and told old tales the whole while’ (loc. cit.).

This letter cannot be traced in Pinney’s edition of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling and is apparently unpublished. In later life, much of Kipling’s correspondence was typed, either by himself or by his secretary, and autograph letters from this period are consequently less common than those from earlier years. 

£395


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