BATEMAN’SEASTSUSSEX

When Rudyard Kipling bought Bateman’s in 1902, it felt like a haven. Recently returned from America, where he’d been living for several years – and after a feud with his in-laws that caused some distressing publicity – he fell in love with this

17th-century mansion at first sight. ‘A real house in which to settle down,’ he thought.

Kipling (right) was a literary celebrity, author of Kim and the two Jungle

Books – the JK

Rowling of his day.

From his study at

Bateman’s (you can still see his ink-spotted desk) he published some of his best-loved works. Including If, the poem of paternal advice (‘You’ll be a man, my son’) which caused his son John torment at school. ‘Why did you write that stuff?’ he complained in a letter home, having had to write the poem out twice as lines for some schoolboy misdemeanour.

Rudyard was a doting father to his children John and Elsie.

But when the First World War broke out his only son was keen to fight for his country. When

John was initially rejected because of his appallingly bad eyesight Kipling pulled strings to get him into the Army.

In September 1915, at the Battle of Loos, the new recruits had little training and chlorine gas released by the British blew back into their own trenches. John was reported missing on his first day of action, six weeks after his 18th birthday. As good as blind after losing his spectacles, he was reputedly last seen screaming in agony after his face was shattered by a shell.

For two years Rudyard and his wife Carrie clung to hope that John might still be alive. Rudyard toured hospitals interviewing soldiers for scraps of information. He struggled with guilt and remorse for the rest of his life.

In 1992, the grave of a previously unidentified officer was declared to be John’s; sadly, recent research has proved that not to be the case. To this day, where John lies is ‘Known unto God’, the epitaph coined by his father, as literary adviser to the War Graves Commission, for all unidentified soldiers.