-From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel

-From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel

Kipling's early experience

Lack of sanitation always bothered Kipling. In May 1882, while still at school, he was writing articles for local newspapers on gas and sewerage. His father, in a letter to Cormell Price said RK was “writing nonsense about sanitation etc. in some local paper - terribly fluent and diffuse - but altogether wide of any useful purpose”. [Information from Thomas Pinney, editor, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.1, p.20.]

In February 1886, he wrote to W.C.Crofts: “Drains are a great and glorious thing and I study ’em and write about ’em when I can.” Further on in the same letter he wrote: “....one decent primer on Sanitary Engineering and sewage disposal is worth more than all the tomes of sacred smut ever produced”. [Information from Thomas Pinney, editor, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.1, p.121.]

In 1886 Kipling wrote to Margaret Burne-Jones that he:

“fell foul of the Lahore Municipality for the filthy state of Lahore City and every moment I could spare from routine work was devoted to abusing them and pointing out a few trifling foolish defects in their drains and sanitary arrangements.”

He went on to say that he:

“had managed to get a few neglected evils looked into and startled the old President - Nawab Nawazish Ali Khan - almost into energy. By the same token my wanderings into the lesser known lanes and gullies of the city made me most amazing sick....”
[Information from Thomas Pinney, editor, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.1 p.131.]

Further afield

In May 1889 Kipling arrived in San Francisco where he found all the men spat “on principle”. In the Palace Hotel the spittoons were “on the staircases, in each bedroom.....but they blossomed in chiefest splendour round the Bar, and they were all used, every reeking one of ’em”. [Information from From Sea To Sea, Vol.1, p.474.]

Years later, when Kipling visited Dublin in 1911, he wrote that “the people in the streets spat joyously (after the manner of the U.S.)”. [Information from Thomas Pinney, editor, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.4 , p.58.]

After the Boer War, Henry Edward Leigh Canney, who took his MD in London in 1890, campaigned for measures to prevent typhoid in armies. He proposed having a programme of instruction to make it a “crime” to use any unapproved water source and a special water supply section whose transport was to be kept “sacred”. The Royal Army Medical Corps was to supply the officers assigned to the water section. [Information from Thomas Pinney, editor, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.3, p.140, note1.]

A continuing concern

In October 1911, in a letter to Sir James Walker, Kipling hoped that the Durbar at Delhi would be cancelled because “The risks both of life and of plague are so heavy....” [Information from Thomas Pinney, editor, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.4, p.54].

On a visit to Ireland in October 1911, Kipling, in a letter to his children, Elsie and John, described the River Liffey as ‘a rich, pure black stone-faced sewer’. He said that ‘the dirt and slop and general shiftlessness of Dublin beats belief’. [Information from Thomas Pinney, editor, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.4, letter to Col.Feilden, 2 October 1911.] Regarding Belfast he wrote that ‘nothing short of the Deluge would clean the city’.

In a letter to Captain R.A.Duckworth Ford, an Englishman serving with the American army in the Philippines in December 1911, Kipling asked for some reports on sanitation such as the disposal of rubbish, village water arrangements, and their methods of dealing with cholera outbreaks. Kipling went on to say:

‘permanganate of potash down the village well, and dilute sulphuric for the villager appears to be the accepted treatment now, and they tell me they can get an outbreak under control in three days. But we don’t make any head against plague.’ [Information from Thomas Pinney, editor, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol.4, letter to Captain R.A.Duckworth-Ford, 10 December 1911.]

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