Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) was a British author and poet, born in India. He is best known for the children's story The Jungle Book (1894), the Indian spy novel Kim (1901), the poems "Gunga Din" (1892), "If— " (1895), and his many short stories.

The effects of World War I

Kipling was so closely associated with the expansive, confident attitude of late 19th-century European civilisation that it was inevitable that his reputation would suffer in the years of and after World War I; Kipling also knew personal tragedy at the time as his eldest son, John, died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos, after which he wrote "If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied". This wording may have been due to his hand in getting John a commission in the Irish Guards, when he would have struggled with the medical on account of his eyesight. Partly in response to this tragedy, he joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and all the other locations around the world where Commonwealth troops lie buried. His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves. He also wrote a history of the Irish Guards, his son's regiment.

Related Topics:
19th-century - Europe - Civilisation - World War I - 1915 - Battle of Loos - Fabian Ware - Commonwealth War Graves Commission - Western Front - Irish Guards

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With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, and wrote enthusiastically of his trips around England and abroad.

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In 1922, Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of his poems and writings, was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor for his assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was very enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both an obligation and a ceremony formally entitled "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer". Today, engineering graduates all across Canada, and even some in the United States, are presented with an iron ring at the ceremony as a reminder of their obligation to society.

Related Topics:
1922 - Engineers - University of Toronto - Civil engineering - Professor - Ceremony - Student - The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer - Canada - United States - Iron ring

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