Macmillan and Co. first edition - 1899
At last, I have got around to reading Kipling's fictional tale of his life at the United Services College (USC) at Westward Ho! on Bideford Bay in North Devon. He arrived at the 'Coll' in January 1878, aged twelve. His ambitious mother had known the headmaster, Cormell Price, as a friend of her brother Harry in the early 1850s. The school, with its motto Fear God Honour the King was intended to have 200 pupils accommodated in four houses, but when it opened for the autumn term of 1874 there were fifty-eight boys. Price was not obsessed with Classical Studies and the teaching was geared to the needs of the Army and Civil Service examinations - practical 'modern' subjects, i.e. mathematics, science, English and languages. Other pastimes including acting and zoology. There were few restrictions on bounds, pupils being free to wander the country lanes and into the market towns of Bideford and Appledore.
The United Services College, Westward Ho!
Kipling was keen, in his Autobiography, to minimise any evidence of homosexuality (rife in most public schools) but did admit the extent of bullying, He hated life at the school at first, writing a succession of miserable, tear-stained letters to his mother. An outbreak of boils in the following year suggested all was still not well, but his fondness for (and keeping of) an assortment of birds and small, furry animals, as well as his first dabbling in 'journalism' undoubtedly helped him. He was the only boy wearing glasses, and the nickname Gigger was given to him after Giglamps. He made two firm friends - Lionel Dunsterville, the son and grandson of career officers who rose to become major-generals in the Indian army, who Kipling nicknamed Stalky (Dunsterville regularly outwitted the schoolmasters and, in school slang, it was known as 'Stalkyism'); and George Beresford, son of a military man, a wealthy cousin of the Marquess of Waterford. Aristocratic in bearing, with a quick Irish wit, he was called 'Turkey' or 'M'Turk'. It is not known why. In 1879 or early 1880, the three set up in Number Five study in Pugh's house. The difference between the riotous behaviour in Stalky & Co. and in reality was marked. Far from the crypto-anarchy of the book and Kipling's later autobiography, Something of Myself (1935), according to Beresford, the latter was as full of misstatement and absurdities as Stalky & Co which is undoubtedly farce. Beresford thought Kipling had become rather 'gaga', wanting to portray himself as hearty, hefty, athletic person to match his propaganda of imperialism and jingoism, instead of what he was - a podgy, spectacled highbrow. Beresford's reminiscences - Schooldays with Kipling (Gollancz 1936) - were full of embittered disparagement and Dunsterville regarded him as filled with hatred and contempt for his fellow men. Dunsterville was much more mellow and tolerant in his Stalky's Reminiscences (Cape 1928). Dunsterville did have a lot of Stalky in him. Never an intellectual, he had a certain high-spirited cunning - shown early in 1918, when he convinced the Turks not to advance into the Southern Caucasus. He had started at the school three years earlier than Kipling and had found appalling and unchecked bullying there - which had greatly declined by 1878
Kipling as a boy Dunsterville 'Stalky'
Much of their time was spent out of doors; like their fictional alter egos, they had a bolt-hole, a hut in a thicket of furze bushes, where they went to read, smoke and relax. In the winter, they rented a room from a drunken yokel. Kipling enjoyed swimming, which he learned from Sergeant-Major George Schofield, the school gym master (known as 'Foxy' in the book). Kipling also liked and respected Rev. George Willes, a man of sound common sense, and who featured as the Padre, Rev. John Gillett in the novel. W.C. Crofts ('King' in the book) an eccentric English and Classics scholar from Brasenose College, was a fine rower and liked to show off his manly physique skiing cross-country in the nude. The most important influence was the Head - not the stern whacker portrayed in the novel but a leader often accused by his staff of not being firm enough. Cormell Price excused Kipling from Maths lessons and put him in the Library and also allowed him access to his own library. Kipling revived the school magazine, the Chronicle, took part in debating and dramatics whilst poetry poured from him. Kipling left in the summer of 1882, bound for a career in India.
Cormell Price - Headmaster
Kipling's fictional masters were just that. They were certainly not the same as their real-life counterparts. Both Dunsterville and, particularly, Beresford further muddied the waters. The latter sneered at Cormell Price and turned Pugh into a half-witted oaf. Dunsterville maintained that the book's events are actual events in most cases, but very much written up...we were only just a lot of potty little schoolboys with playful ingenuity...
Stalky & Co. received a fair amount of criticism. Robert Buchanan wrote: Only the spoiled child of an utterly brutalised public could possibly have written it. The vulgarity, the brutality, the savagery...reeks on every page. It is true that the beatings, the bullying are unpleasant but Kingsley Amis, in his short appraisal of Kipling, is surely right to say the element of cruelty is in fact mild. When an enemy is defeated, the stress is not so much on his humiliation as on the ingenuity that brought it about....the stories are best read as fictional demonstrations of cleverness defeating strength. Where one can cavil is the rather distasteful story of the systematic torture of the bullies in one story made worse because it is done coolly without any loss of temper. Here is the deliberate cruelty of the goodies to the baddies in order to teach them a lesson.
I read the book with interest rather than enjoyment. The product of a boarding public school myself - the 1950s and early 1960s still had long dormitories, a host of minor rules that simply had to be broken - I could empathise with several of Kipling's chapters. I treated it as faction - reminiscences drenched in fiction.
Angus Wilson: He was an anomaly in a school that was itself an anomaly and with a headmaster who was an anomaly.
In My Library
Kingsley Amis - Rudyard Kipling (Thames and Hudson, 1975)
Angus Wilson - The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (Secker & Warburg, 1977)
Lord Birkenhead - Rudyard Kipling (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978)
Andrew Lycett - Rudyard Kipling (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999)
David Gilmour - The Long Recessional. The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (John Murray, 2002)
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