48 Fun Facts About Rudyard Kipling

In which city was Rudyard Kipling born in 1865?

Bombay's newly founded Sir J. J. School of Art had hired his father, John Lockwood Kipling, to teach architectural sculpture, so the newlyweds sailed for India months before Rudyard was born.

Kipling's parents met while his father worked in the potteries there, then named him after Rudyard Lake in which English county?

Staffordshire's Rudyard Lake is really a reservoir, built in the 1790s to feed the Caldon Canal; John Lockwood Kipling courted Alice Macdonald there in 1863, and they named their first child after it.

Which three-time British prime minister was Kipling's first cousin?

Stanley Baldwin's mother and Kipling's mother Alice were two of the Macdonald sisters; in 1936 Baldwin, then serving as prime minister, was one of the pallbearers at his cousin's funeral.

What did Kipling call the Southsea boarding house where he and his sister were left as young children?

The House of Desolation was his name for Lorne Lodge, where Mrs Holloway's bullying drove him to tell careful lies, a habit he later called 'the foundation of literary effort'.

Kipling's schooldays at the United Services College in Devon inspired which story collection?

Stalky & Co. turns a cheap, rough new school that readied boys for the army, where the short-sighted Kipling had a hard start, into an unruly paradise; the bookish Beetle is Kipling himself.

At sixteen Kipling returned to India to work as assistant editor of which newspaper?

The Civil and Military Gazette had an editorial staff of two, so Kipling was, as he put it, fifty per cent of it; he still called the little daily his 'first mistress and most true love'.

What was Kipling's first prose collection, published in Calcutta in January 1888?

Plain Tales from the Hills began as newspaper filler: twenty-eight of its forty stories had first run in his own paper, slotted in, he said, 'when and as padding was needed'.

Which American author said of Kipling, 'he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest'?

Mark Twain said it after an unknown young Kipling turned up unannounced at his Elmira home in 1889; Kipling's write-up records Twain's advice to get your facts first, then 'distort 'em as much as you please'.

Which novelist gave away Kipling's American bride, Carrie Balestier, at their London wedding in 1892?

Henry James was one of only a handful of guests, because London was deep in a flu epidemic so bad that, Kipling wrote, 'the undertakers had run out of black horses'.

In which US state did Kipling live from 1892 to 1896, writing the Jungle Books there?

Vermont was where his American wife's family lived; Naulakha, the house the couple built outside Brattleboro, is now a National Historic Landmark that anyone can rent for a holiday.

Kipling named the house he built in New England, Naulakha, after what?

A novel he co-wrote with his late friend Wolcott Balestier gave the house its name; the book's title was misspelt The Naulahka, and the house got the correct spelling.

Kipling quit New England in 1896 after having which relative arrested for threatening his life on a country road?

His brother-in-law Beatty Balestier, a charming drunk, swore to kill him; Kipling had him arrested, but the hearing drew hordes of reporters and the intensely private author sailed for England within months.

The Mowgli stories in The Jungle Book are set around which place in what is now Madhya Pradesh?

Seeonee is Kipling's spelling of Seoni, a district he never saw: he wrote the Mowgli tales in a snowbound New England cottage, taking the landscape from another man's books about the area.

What kind of animal is Baloo, Mowgli's teacher in The Jungle Book?

A bear: in the book Baloo is 'the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle', and he is the first to speak up for Mowgli when the pack debates whether to keep him.

Which Jungle Book hero is a mongoose who battles the cobras Nag and Nagaina?

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is named for his chattering war cry, 'Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!'; washed out of his burrow by a flood, he is adopted by an English family and repays them by saving them from both cobras.

The adult who leads a Cub Scout pack traditionally takes the name of which Jungle Book character?

Akela, the grey Lone Wolf, 'led all the Pack by strength and cunning' from the Council Rock; Cubs borrowed more than his name, and a wolfish Grand Howl is still part of many Cub meetings.

Kipling's novel Kim popularised which phrase for the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia?

The Great Game is what the novel's spymasters call their shadow war with Russia; its hero, an Irish soldier's orphan, is trained as a British secret agent while tramping India as the disciple of a Tibetan lama.

In Kim, the boy hero befriends an aged lama searching for what?

The River of the Arrow sprang up, the lama says, where an arrow shot by the young Buddha fell to earth, and whoever bathes in it is washed clean of all sin and freed from the Wheel of Things.

Kipling began the Just So Stories as bedtime tales for which daughter, who died of pneumonia in 1899?

Josephine, known as Effie, made him tell each tale 'just so', word for word, or she would 'wake up and put back the missing sentence'; the book came out in 1902, three years after her death at six.

In the Just So Stories, why is the Whale's throat so small?

A sailor wedged a grating there: swallowed whole, the shipwrecked Mariner cut up his raft with a jack-knife, tied the pieces with his suspenders and jammed them in the Whale's throat on his way out.

The poem 'If—' was written as a tribute to which leader of a failed 1895-96 raid on the Transvaal?

Leander Starr Jameson was tried and jailed in England for the botched raid, yet rose to be prime minister of the Cape Colony; Kipling wrote in his memoir that the verses 'were drawn from Jameson's character'.

Two lines of 'If—' about 'Triumph and Disaster' are inscribed above the players' entrance at which venue?

Wimbledon's Centre Court players walk out beneath the advice to 'treat those two impostors just the same'; in a 1995 BBC poll the poem was voted Britain's favourite, with twice the votes of the runner-up.

'If—' first appeared in which 1910 collection of stories and poems?

Rewards and Fairies printed it after the story 'Brother Square-Toes'; Kipling marvelled that the verses 'escaped from the book, and for a while ran about the world', hung up in offices and set as school punishments.

Gunga Din, of the famous line 'You're a better man than I am', works as what in the British Indian army?

A water-carrier, or bhisti: the narrator admits he 'belted' and 'flayed' Din, yet when he is wounded Din brings him water, carries him to a stretcher and is shot a moment later.

'Mandalay', 'Gunga Din' and 'Danny Deever' were collected in which 1892 volume?

Barrack-Room Ballads speaks in the Cockney voice of the enlisted man who defends the Empire yet is scorned for his low birth; its runaway success made Kipling a force among the poets of his day.

The poem 'Mandalay' is set in which colony, then part of British India?

Burma gave the homesick Cockney narrator his 'old Moulmein pagoda', but readers spotted that the sea lies west of Moulmein, so Kipling later changed the pagoda's gaze from 'lookin' eastward' to 'lookin' lazy at the sea'.

In 'The Man Who Would Be King', Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan set out to rule which remote region?

Kafiristan's tribes take Dravot for a god until his terrified bride bites him and he bleeds; 'Neither god nor devil but a man!' howl the priests. Sean Connery and Michael Caine played the pair in the 1975 film.

Kipling's Captains Courageous follows a rich boy rescued by a schooner off which grounds?

The Grand Banks of Newfoundland are where the crew fish him out after he is washed off an ocean liner; the captain refuses to turn back for port, so the millionaire's spoiled son has to work the whole season for his keep.

Why was the Nobel banquet cancelled when Kipling collected his prize in Stockholm in 1907?

Sweden's king had just died: Oscar II's death two days before the ceremony put Stockholm into official mourning, and Kipling, at 41 still the youngest winner of the literature prize, met the new king in a half-darkened palace.

Kipling turned down a knighthood more than once and also declined which official post?

Poet Laureate joined the knighthood on his list of refusals: he declined honours offered by his own government yet accepted them from abroad, the Nobel Prize among them.

Which house in Burwash, East Sussex, built in 1634, was Kipling's home from 1902 until his death?

Bateman's had no electricity when the Kiplings bought it, so he uncoupled the water-wheel of the old mill at the end of the garden and ran a turbine off its pond to light the house.

Kipling escaped English winters until 1908 at The Woolsack, a house on whose Groote Schuur estate near Cape Town?

Cecil Rhodes had the architect Herbert Baker ready The Woolsack for him, and the Kipling children grew up playing beside the lions and zebras kept on the estate; it is now a University of Cape Town residence.

Kipling's only son John was killed in 1915 at which battle, serving with the Irish Guards?

Loos was John's first battle, six weeks after his eighteenth birthday: both Navy and Army had rejected him for short sight, and he held his Irish Guards commission only because his father had appealed to Lord Roberts.

Which phrase did Kipling suggest for the gravestones of unidentified war dead?

Known unto God closes the headstone he worded for every unidentified body, which begins 'A Soldier of the Great War'. He advised the war graves commission as a bereaved father: his own son was missing with no known grave.

What Indian symbol appeared on the covers of many older Kipling editions until he ordered it removed?

A swastika, the Hindu good-luck sign he learned from his father, was his trademark for nearly forty years; once the Nazis took it he had it cut from his bindings as 'defiled beyond redemption'.

Kipling scripted the first ever Royal Christmas Message, broadcast in 1932 by which monarch?

George V spoke live from Sandringham at 3 pm, the hour picked so the most countries across the Empire could hear him, and the message still goes out at three. His first words were Kipling's: 'Through one of the marvels of modern Science'.

A French soldier whose pocket copy of Kim stopped a bullet sent Kipling the pierced book along with what?

His Croix de Guerre went to Kipling with the book that won it. Kipling, whose own son had died in the war, accepted both on one condition: that Maurice Hamonneau take them back when he had a son of his own, as he did.

Where were Kipling's ashes interred after his death in January 1936?

Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, took his ashes on 23 January 1936, next to the graves of Dickens and Hardy. His first stone wore so faint that American admirers paid for the marble one laid in 1965.

Kipling became a Freemason at about 20, below the usual minimum age, in a lodge in which city?

Lahore's Lodge Hope and Perseverance waived the age rule because it wanted him as its secretary; there, he wrote, he met Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and a Jewish tyler, the mix he put into his poem 'The Mother Lodge'.

Kipling's first novel, The Light That Failed, follows a war artist who suffers what fate?

He goes blind from an old war wound and finishes his masterpiece on whisky as his sight fails, only for his model to destroy it out of spite. Maisie, who spurns him, was drawn from Flo Garrard, Kipling's own unrequited love.

Kipling's daughter had which singer's swinging 'Mandalay', with 'broad' swapped for 'girl', cut from a 1958 album's British release?

Frank Sinatra was swinging the setting by the American composer Oley Speaks, long a favourite of concert baritones. Elsie Bambridge, who controlled her father's copyrights, had the track pulled from British copies of Come Fly with Me.

The Nobel presentation speech singled out Kipling's travel sketches of the manners and customs of which country?

Japan: the speech praised From Sea to Sea, his letters from the 1889 voyage home. Back there on honeymoon in 1892, he called at his Yokohama bank one afternoon and found that it had shut its doors that very day.

Which Kipling poem, written as Queen Victoria's 1897 Diamond Jubilee ended, popularised the phrase 'lest we forget'?

Recessional was his charm against the evil eye, he said: amid the Jubilee's boasting it warned that every empire fades, and he took no fee when The Times printed it. Its refrain reworks a verse of Deuteronomy.

Which visiting British writer brought his clubs to Naulakha in 1894 and gave Kipling golf lessons in a field?

Arthur Conan Doyle came for Thanksgiving, and New England rustics watched from afar, he recalled, 'wondering what on earth we were at'. Kipling kept playing even on snow, where a drive could skid two miles downhill.

The seller of Kipling's Sussex home, who wore out horses on its steep lane, wished he had foreseen what?

Motor-cars catching on: asked how he would manage the four miles to the station, Kipling replied from the seat of his Lanchester. 'Those things haven't come to stay,' said the seller, who later admitted he would have asked twice the £9,300.

Kipling's 1899 poem 'The White Man's Burden' urged the United States to take up the rule of which islands?

The Philippines: the poem's subtitle is 'The United States and the Philippine Islands'. Theodore Roosevelt sent it on to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge as 'rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion standpoint'.

At a ceremony Kipling scripted in the 1920s, Canada's graduating engineers receive what reminder of their duty to society?

An iron ring, worn on the little finger of the working hand, goes to each of them at the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, which Kipling wrote in 1923 at the request of the Toronto professor Herbert Haultain.

What is Mowglis, founded in New Hampshire in 1903 with Kipling's permission to borrow his characters' names?

A boys' summer camp, one of America's oldest: Elizabeth Ford Holt borrowed names for its buildings from the Jungle Books, and Kipling told her how to say Mowglis, with a first syllable that sounds like 'cow'.