n who becomes his mentor, and shares Kim’s education with the members of the Regiment. Kim after his schooling, goes to work for the British and becomes involved in the Great Game, the conflict between the British and the Russians on India’s northern borders. Kim’s adventures make a wonderful story for readers of any age.
So, where did Kipling get the idea of an orphan child and his education being funded by his father’s old comrades? The answer is that the idea came from his work as Charity Secretary of his lodge.
The story may sound romantic and fanciful, but I found the source of it, buried deep in the archives at Great Queen Street.
It seems his idea of a Regimental lodge supporting orphans and widows was normal practice. So harsh were conditions in India for the British in the nineteenth century, that death rates were horribly high. Almost one third of the soldiers and administrators died leaving impecunious widows and orphans.
The children were often educated at the Regiment’s expense or repatriated to England. Kipling’s Lodge was actively involved in raising money for them. The Masonic Yearbooks for the Punjab in the 1880s list the lodges and their contributions to this charitable work.
Illustration of a begging leper and pariah dogs, to give an example of Kipling’s ‘Outcastes’ and showing relationships between people and animals in India.
IMAGE CREDIT: Wellcome Digital Collection – Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
In 1887, the charity account for his lodge in Lahore was called “The Educational Fund of Lodge Hope and Perseverance”, and in the yearbook it shows J. Rudyard Kipling as the Charity Steward, and his and other brethren’s contributions to the fund.
Each yearbook lists the funds raised by individual lodges and the numbers of widows and orphans they helped. By 1888, Kipling had moved from Lahore to Allahabad and joined another lodge there. The yearbooks list the number of children supported, to which schools they were sent and the cost per child. In this period the Punjab District regularly supported up to forty children at any one time, apart from those too young to leave their mothers.
From his work as a Charity Steward, Kipling would have been familiar with problems of orphaned British children in India and it is not a huge leap to see that this was one of the ideas for the plot of Kim. By the time Kipling left India in March 1889, he was already an established writer but his experiences in Freemasonry would continue to influence his writing for the rest of his life
Kipling did attend one meeting of Rosemary Lodge No.2851 in London in 1924, as a guest of his next-door neighbour Colonel Sutherland-Harris, although I was told it was thought he only went to the festive board! I obtained a copy of the page in the Tyler’s book where Kipling’s very familiar signature appears and he signed as a visitor from Motherland Lodge No.3861, although there is no evidence that he ever visited that lodge.
Article by: Richard Jaffa
Richard Jaffa who is a Past Junior Grand Deacon of UGLE and a Past Assistant Provincial Grand Master of Warwickshire. His mother lodge in St. Paul’s Lodge No.43 founded in 1733; he is also a member of Lodge of Jurisprudence No. 9457 and Earl Spencer Lodge No. 1420. He is a retired lawyer and journalist.
Man and Mason – Rudyard Kipling by Richard Jaffa is available from all good bookshops and Amazon Online
Man and Mason – Rudyard Kipling
by Richard Jaffa
Rudyard Kipling remains one of the most intriguing and elusive personalities in English literature. He was a Nobel laureate, prolific writer, political figure and one of the outstanding men of his era. There are many dimensions to his work but no-one has previously examined in depth his interest in Freemasonry and its impact on his literary output. This book looks at the life of both the young Kipling and the old one and shows how, at two major stages of his life he turned to Freemasonry, not only for dramatic impact, but also as a source of spiritual comfort after the horrors of the First World War.