 the Imperial War Graves Commission – Builders of the Silent Cities No. 4948 – where his signature appears on the warrant. Despite this, he did distance himself from any active involvement. So where did he find his ideas?
I found one of the answers to this enigma in the archives at Freemasons’ Hall. The biggest puzzle was the source of the story of Kim. It is undoubtedly the finest picture we have of late Victorian India, after the Indian Mutiny but before the Raj starts to disintegrate.
On the very first page of the book, we meet the boy Kim whom we are told is “a poor white of the very poorest”. Both his parents are dead. His mother, like many British in India, died of cholera. His father had been a colour sergeant in an Irish regiment, who on leaving the army became addicted to opium. All he left Kim were three pieces of paper: his ne varietur, his clearance certificate and his birth certificate. Before he died, he urged Kim (still only a child) that he must hang on to these papers as one day everything would come right and he “would be exalted between pillars – monstrous pillars – of beauty and strength”.
His father said that the papers belonged “to a great piece of magic – such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher – the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge”.
Kim lives on his wits in the bazaars of Lahore and he carries these papers sewn into an amulet around his neck. His father had promised that “they will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field and the Colonel riding on his tall horse”. Kim does not realise that this refers to the flag of his father’s old regiment, and the lodge he joined as a member of it. As the story unfolds, the Regiment do find him. On examining the amulet, they realise he is the son of one of their former comrades. and as his father was a Freemason, Kim’s future is assured as the Regiment takes responsibility for the orphan child.
This is only the start of Kim’s adventures as he travels India with the Lama, the holy man 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