A sensitive bounder

He was a noisy boy from the start. At the age of two, he was taken out for walks in order not to disturb his ailing grandfather and he would march down the main street of Bewdley shouting, ‘Ruddy is coming!’ Or sometimes, ‘An angry Ruddy is coming!’ Despite these precautions, his grandfather died and Kipling’s aunts and uncles believed that Ruddy’s tantrums had hastened and embittered his end. When he left the United Services College at Westward Ho! and returned to India, he quickly gained a reputation in the Punjab Club for boorish and bumptious behaviour. A visiting colonel wanted to thrash him for making disparaging remarks about the Indian Civil Service; two lawyers were so annoyed by his persistent interruptions that they kicked him down the club’s front steps. He didn’t mind who he was rude to or about, from the Viceroy and the C-in-C to the smartest ladies of Simla and South Kensington. When Mrs Macmillan, wife of the publisher, told him that India was now fit to govern itself, he told her that she was suffering from hysteria because ‘you haven’t got enough to divert your mind’. Literary curmudgeons of our day — Sir V. S. Naipaul, Sir Kingsley Amis — seem models of tact and discretion by comparison. Every brigadier and boxwallah from Bombay to Calcutta would have agreed with Max Beerbohm that ‘the schoolboy, the bounder and the brute — these three types have surely never found a more brilliant expression of themselves than in Rudyard Kipling.’

Few of Beerbohm’s drawings have skewered their victim more memorably than the one captioned ‘Mr Rudyard Kipling takes a bloomin’ day aht, on the blasted ’eath, along with Britannia, ’is gurl’. Britannia has swapped her helmet for Ruddy’s bowler, while the beetle-browed Nobel laureate in a vulgar check suit is tootling through his moustache on a penny trumpet.