With reference to John Seriot's message, I suspect that the writer of
the back cover blurb of the Houghton Miflin edition was confusing
Kipling with his son John.
Although Kipling was at what would have been described as an 'Army
School', with a majority of boys, themselves the sons of Army officers,
being destined for Sandhurst or Woolwich, his eyesight was always going
to precude his being accepted for the Army, and although he did at least
some of his classes with the 'Army' class (see /Stalky & Co/), he never
even sat the Civil Service Commissioners' exam for the army, leaving
school before he was old enough to have sat it anyway. Nor is there any
suggestion that he had the remotest interest in joining the army at any
stage of his life - if anything, before he went to Westward Ho!, it
might have been the Navy which caught his imagination based on his walks
through Portsmouth dockyard with old Captain Holloway.
John, on the other hand had expressed a desire to join the army
while at Wellington, and had spent the summer term 1914, at a crammer's
in Bournemoth, preparing for the Army exam. Preparation for John to
Join the army had started in April 1913, when Kipling visited John's
housemaster at Wellington to discuss the matter (Carrington extracts of
Carrie's diaries for May 2 1913). A simillar source (19 May `13)
records that they went to Aldershot for a preliminary medical , which
John failed, on eyesight grounds - all of which sounds like the H-M blurb.
/Alastair Wilson/
On 08/03/2017 19:12, john wrote:
>
> I have recently read /Kipling's Choice /and I am rather surprised to
> find at least twoinaccuracies:
>
> - p.62, we read that Captain Alexander (who actually served with the
> Irish Guards in WWI) 'would later be promoted to field marshall and
> "Duke of Tunis"'; he was in fact made 'Earl of Tunis' after WWII
>
> - p. 119, the date given is 'Saturday, September 25, 1915' and we read
> that 'Field-Marshal Haig is watching the smoke wafting from his
> cigarette at the same predawn moment'; in 1915, though, Haig was not
> yet Field-Marshal - he was promoted, I think, in 1917.
>
> Also, on the back cover of the 2005 Houghton Mifflin Company edition
> (English translation), we read that 'As a young man, the author
> Rudyard Kipling was devastated when his military application was
> rejected because of his poor eyesight'. I have not been able to trace
> any reference to such an application in four of the biographies of
> Kipling I have consulted (Carrington, Wilson, Birkenhead, Lycett) -
> but I may well have missed something. Harry Ricketts (1999) only
> mentions that 'it was becoming increasingly obvious that...his
> eyesight debarred Rud from a career in the Services' (1881, before he
> left Westward Ho!).
>
> I hope it helps.
>
> John Seriot
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* To exchange information and views on the life and work of
> Rudyard Kipling <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Elaine
> Dyke <[log in to unmask]>
> *Sent:* 08 March 2017 16:37
> *To:* [log in to unmask]
> *Subject:* 'Kipling's Choice' by Gert Spillebeen
> I am about to start the second year of an English MA with the Open
> University and have decided to write about Kipling's life in Sussex
> and his involvement with the Irish Guards. I have just read the novel
> 'Kipling's Choice' by Geert Spillebeen and was wondering if anyone can
> tell me how much of this is factual i.e. the correspondence between
> him and his family, and the correspondence from Sergeant's Kinneally
> and Cochrane. I realise that the portrayal of John's death is
> fictional, but a lot of the other information given seems very real
> i.e. only 2 men surviving out of 900 King's Own Scottish Borderers at
> Loos.
> Any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated.
> Thanking you
> Elaine Dyke
