Tag Archives: Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Leave a reply

Marion, born in 1888, was 8 years old when she was given this copy of The Jungle Book in 1896. The book The-Jungle-Book-coverwas first published in 1894 while Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was living in Vermont. He had spent the first six years of his life living in Bombay and many of his stories reflect that early influence. Early on he became a master of the Short Story format and was a prolific writer and poet. In 1907, Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature; he was the youngest ever recipient and the first Briton to win this honor. Before the war he was a very popular writer and Marion’s writing reflects his influence as she subtly refers to him and his writing in her war journal.

His only son, John, died in WWI in September, 1915 at the Battle of Loos; he was serving with the Irish Guard. With his body not accounted for, Kipling spent many years after the war trying to locate him as a prisoner or his burial spot. In 1992, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission changed the inscription on a gravestone of an unknown soldier to read John Kipling after conclusive evidence that this indeed was the final resting spot of the young soldier.Rudyard Kipling 1

Rudyard Kipling is buried in the Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey.

Disney has announced the remake and re-imagining of the 1967 animated movie, Jungle Book, due to be released in April, 2016. Who hasn’t hummed those songs or sung along with the different generations who watched the movie and listened to the cassette or CD in the car on road trips? – Jungle Book Trailer

 

 

 

Bears of WWI and Winnie-the-Pooh

Leave a reply

Margaret and Bear

For over a year now Alexa and I have been sorting and ‘cataloguing’ the photographs, slides, glass negatives and lantern slides in this collection (we have 100’s) and one of the pictures that intrigued us was this one. The caption is ‘Margaret and Baloo, the bear.’  Margaret was a friend of Marion and Alexine’s  who went to France with them and served as a first aid worker with the Red Cross. I thought perhaps bear cubs during WWI were plentiful as there were many forests in France and perhaps the cub’s mothers were being killed. My research, however, did not support my theory.

However, I did come across something very interesting (at least to me; I have a great affection for children’s literature). In August, 1914, a train carrying Canadian troops was making it’s way from Manitoba to Ontario. Stopping at one of the stations, Lieutenant Harry Colebourn photo-2paid $20 to a hunter for a female bear cub that the Lieutenant named Winnie (for his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba). When Colebourn was being sent over to France to fight in December 1914, he left the bear at the London Zoo for safe-keeping. A.A. Milne took his young son, Christopher Robin, to the zoo and the bear and Christopher became good friends. There is a picture of the young boy actually in the enclosure feeding the bear. In 1924, A.A. Milne decided to put his son’s childhood ‘friends’ and stuffed animals into print with his first book and the Bear of Very Little Brain was introduced. His son had named the bear Winnie-the-Pooh after his friend at the zoo and a swan that he knew named Pooh. The real bear, Winnie, stayed at the London Zoo until she died in 1934. Lieutenant Colebourn did come back for her, but when he saw how popular she was with everyone, he decided to leave her there. We only have this one picture of Baloo, the bear, and the bear is not mentioned in Marion’s journal, so who knows the story behind this. What we do know is that Marion admired Rudyard Kipling so she was probably the one to name the bear and take the picture.  Posted by Vicki Rondeau