Schooldays with Kipling

In 1899, 33-year old Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) published a novel called STALKY & CO. It drew on Kipling's boarding school years (1878 - 1882) at United Services College (USC) at Westward Ho! on the north Devon Coast facing Wales. The novel focused on Kipling's last two years at USC (1880 - 1882) -- aged 15 and 16 -- and on the merry pranks played there on students and masters by the author ("Beetle") and his two best chums "Stalky" and "M'Turk." Stalky, the first friend, later Major General L. C. Dunsterville, devoted to the same school and his own schoolboy adventures there three chapters of his autobiography, STALKY'S REMINISCENCES (1928). The latter chum, G.C. Beresford, recalled what really went on at USC in SCHOOL DAYS WITH KIPLING. A notable features of Beresford's SCHOOL DAYS WITH KIPLING are seven "Plates" containing beyond two score tiny, tiny (a magnifying glass helps) contemporary pen and ink schoolboy sketches by "M'Turk" of Kipling, his friends and schoolmasters and of some few of the rather tame real adventures and pranks on which Kipling and his imagination had later drawn and built up STALKY & CO. Beresford's book is also enriched by an incisive Preface by Dunsterville/Stalky. These three books taken as an intentional unit of sorts are enormously helpful for recreating the life and budding literary poetic genius of 1907 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Rudyard Kipling. -OOO-