Literary pilgrimage: Kipling's dream home in Sussex

Whenever I have been on literary pilgrimages, the greatest pleasure has usually been found in the private home of the Great Man or Great Woman. Libraries, museums, galleries, churches and theatres have been wonderful sources of information about literary heroes, but it was at home that the writer could be at his/her most intimate, domestic, sociable, comfortable and even idiosyncratic. It was also the place where the writer’s own taste in architecture, furniture, decorative arts and landscape gardening could be best examined.

Rudyard and Carrie Kipling moved into an impressive Jacobean home, Bateman's, near Burwash in rural East Sussex, in 1902. We know when the house was built; the date over the porch says 1634.

Bateman's in East Sussex, built in 1634

Kipling received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 and was both the first English language writer to receive a Nobel Prize and its youngest recipient ever. So we can assume that many of his important books were written inside the peaceful oak beams and mullioned windows of Bateman’s.

The book-packed study still holds all his writing paraphernalia. He was very fussy about his schedule and punctually, each morning, he went to his study to write. The Indian rugs that reminded him of his boyhood home in Mumbai are still there, along with an English walnut chair, his French walnut table, blotter, a pewter ink pot, a rather cheap pin box and a more expensive pen tray for the ink brushes. I rather expected Kipling to return from lunch at any moment, to rest and read on his oak day bed.

Rudyard Kipling's study

In fact there is an eastern flavour in other parts of the house as well, travel mementos from when he got his first job in India as a young journalist. There are blue and white dishes and vases, decorated boxes and Kipling's collection of miniature Indian, Chinese and Japanese deities that he called his household gods. You can see internal photos from the house in Period Property UK.  But part of the house is not exactly as the Kiplings left it. Today Rudyard and Carrie’s bedroom functions more explicitly as a house-museum, with many of the collectables that made Kipling happy, including some Admiral Nelson mementos.

When the Kiplings bought the estate in 1902, it already had 33 acres of land, a lovely river, an 18th century working mill, outbuildings, an orchard and a wild garden. The acreage was added to, as Rudyard Kipling made more money from his book sales and prize money, and the pond, rose garden and the yew hedges were all laid out according to his own design. His great pride and joy were classic cars, including a Rolls Royce Phantom I.

Pear garden

Although Kipling died in 1936, his wife lived at Bateman’s for another three years until she, too, passed away. The estate was later bequeathed to the National Trust by daughter Elsie and is now a public museum dedicated to the author. A lovely a portrait of Mrs Kipling, painted by Rudyard’s 1st cousin Sir Philip Burne-Jones (Sir Edward's son), can be seen above the main fireplace.

How did the Kiplings come to be related to the Burne-Jones? There were four MacDonald sisters who were clearly an impressive lot – one married Edward Burne-Jones and became a close friend of George Eliot, one married the artist Sir Edward Poynter, one married Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and the fourth sister became the mother of Rudyard Kipling. Thus Sir Edward Burne-Jones was Rudyard Kipling's uncle.

A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin by Judith Flanders (published by WW Norton in 2005) is interesting, particularly on the family's connection with the Pre-Raphaelites.

Rudyard Kipling and his beloved books, date?