Hewitt's History Files

DAVID Arscott has got a theory as to why Sussex was quite so special to Rudyard Kipling '“ a theory which has much to do with the sheer restlessness of the great man.

In so much of Kipling's life, Kipling was the rootless outsider looking in, without actually being part. In Sussex, however, he found somewhere he could truly call home.

"He just fell in love with the place", says David, compiler of the first comprehensive anthology of Rudyard Kipling's prose and poetry for many years '“ an anthology which focuses very specifically on Sussex.

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We meet Kipling first in Rottingdean, and we follow his escapades as one of the country's pioneer motorists, but it is the Bateman's (his house in Burwash, East Sussex) period which dominates.

Here he created his writer's haven, immersing himself in the life of Sussex, telling its history through the children's stories of Puck of Pook's Hill and fashioning a potent literary myth from his study of the Sussex people and their colourful past.

"People think of Kipling and they think of India and of the empire and they think of nothing else," David says. "But Sussex was actually a place that rooted him. He had been in India and came back and then went back to India as a journalist, always the outsider.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette June 20