Arthur  R.  Ankers

THE  PATER:
JOHN  LOCKWOOD  KIPLING:
HIS LIFE AND TIMES
1837 - 1911

        Otford, Kent. Pond View. 1988. 161 pages
       
        ISBN-10: 1871044006

reviewed by Patrick Killough



(1) biblio.com  02/25/2011

Would you recommend this book to other readers?  Possibly. * * * *

review:

Retired Methodist minister, Englishman Arthur R. Ankers knows his Kiplings. And it shows in his 1988 "first ever" (dust jacket) biography of Rudyard's father, THE PATER -JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING: HIS LIFE AND TIMES 1837 - 1911. Some of the Kipling ancestors had been close associates of Methodism's founder John Wesley. John Lockwood Kipling's own father was a hard working Methodist minister. And John himself was educated at Woodhouse Grove School, Apperley Bridge, North Yorkshire, England. Tuition was free and pocket money was made available to sons of Methodist divines. Sensitive, inward-looking John Lockwood Kipling went there for seven years, beginning in 1844, hated the place and never failed to hide his loathing of Methodism and all its works. Schoolboy bullying and "saintly sadism" by the schoolmasters made John Lockwood an eternal rebel. Author Ankers describes Woodhouse Grove School in minute detail in Chapter Two.

Chapter Two concludes with a  preview of the rest of the biography to come:
"Kipling left his school to become a designer, an artist, a journalist, a teacher of arts and crafts and a good servant of India and its peoples. Despite all the hardships, the tyrannies and the loneliness he suffered during his schooldays, he emerged a singularly humane and well-balanced young man - and 'the Pater' to his son, Rudyard Kipling."

Ankers's biography of John Lockwood Kipling is very nearly as much about his wife of more than four decades, glamorous, vivacious very celtic Alice MacDonald, and about their two children, Joseph Rudyard and Alice ("Trix") Kipling. The author shares the almost universal criticism of John Lockwood and Alice Kipling for leaving their children (at ages five and three) with foster parents in England for years without preparing them for the separation to come (back to Bombay for the parents) or even for saying goodbye. Surprisingly, then, Rudyard grew extremely close to his father and collaborated with him for 30 years as journalist, critic and writer of fiction. Perhaps the best sketch of John Lockwood is in Rudyard's 1900 novel KIM, where his father is shown working in his book-crammed office at the Lahore, Punjab, museum, while being notably kind to a red lama from Tibet. John Lockwood gave his own spectacles to the lama. 

In my opinion, the book should have been better edited. Abbreviations like KA (Kipling Archives) and KJ (Kipling Journal) are used without identification. There are 15 numbered chapters in the table of contents. But no chapter is numbered when it occurs in the narrative, save in the handful of terse endnotes. The book is excellent in sharing the flavor of British India, especially for Lahore and Simla, and for selective quotes from the acerbic wit of John Lockwood Kipling. Much of the time, however, the narrative is so compressed that it reads more like an executive summary than a full biography. A decent first biography; let us hope it is not the last. -OOO-


http://www.biblio.com/books/373741472.html
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(2) lunch.com  02/25/2011

name of review:  The British Empire in India: "at all events it is the best we've got." Said John Lockwood Kipling.

rating: * * *

review:

The dust jacket of 1988's THE PATER - JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING: HIS LIFE AND TIMES 1837 -1911 declared this book "the first ever biography of John Lockwood Kipling." If there is a later, better biography I am unaware of it. The author, Rev. Arthur R. Ankers, was a retired Methodist minister who wrote and lectured on the Kipling family and the part of West Yorkshire associated with them. Most readers will turn to this biography simply for family background of the man who begat poet, journalist, essayist and novelist Rudyard Kipling (1965 - 1936). And they will not be disappointed, as there is nearly as much in this book about Rudyard, his sister Alice (Trix) and their mother Alice MacDonald as there is about their father.
 
For two generations back, on both sides, the family of John Lockwood Kipling were Methodists, including very early associates of Methodism's founder John Wesley. John Lockwood was surrounded by Methodist ministers, including his father. John learned good, fire and brimstone pulpit oratory from these dissenters. But by his teens he hated Methodism, after seven years in a free-of-cost school for sons of Methodist ministers. Bullied by students, punished savagely by teachers, the sensitive future painter and student of culture John Kipling saw Methodism as "sadistic sanctity."
 
Visiting the 1851 Great International Exhibition in London, and its great "Crystal Palace" inspired by Queen Victoria's Prince Albert, transformed young John. "For he came away with the conviction that he must become a craftsman and an artist" (Ch.3).
 
After marriage, John Lockwood Kipling sailed for India to teach industrial arts at a school founded by a leading Parsee family. His son Rudyard (named for Rudyard Lake where John and Alice became engaged in 1863) was born in Bombay in 1865. Years later John Lockwood Kipling went to Lahore, the capital of Punjab, to head both an art school and the Lahore Museum. His role at the museum (or "wonder house") has been immortalized in the early pages of Rudyard's novel KIM. In old age Rudyard reminisced fondly of his journalist, artist, scholarly father and their 30-years creative partnership in plotting and illustrating Rudyard's tales.
 
Through his MacDonald relatives and in-laws, John and Rudyard came in contact with often bohemian London artistic circles, including Rossetti and Swinburne. In India John's carvings caught the attention of Queen VIctoria's youngest son and led to a commission to illustrate the Durbar Room at her palace on the Isle of Wight. Author Ankers brings to life John Kipling's 28-year career in India, his writings, drawings, friendships with Viceroys, his sympathy for the poor of India and much more. The book is moderately coherent albeit rambling. It emphasizes the acerbic wit and otherwise kindly leanings of John Kipling. It also makes concrete the development of British India through railroads and the very competent Indian Civil Service. The descriptions of the unsanitary, stifling city of Lahore are memorable.

John Kipling wrote for two Indian newspapers and was an insightful, critical observer of the local scene. He said in one:
"much as we love to dwell on its faults it (the Raj) is not altogether despicable and at all events it is the best we've got" (Ch. 9).
 
On balance, this is a good, chatty start towards a future definitive biography of the father of Rudyard Kipling. But more than that it is not.  - OOO -




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(3) bn.com not reviewable 02/28/2011


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(4) amazon.com 02/25/2011

title of review: "Work is an outrage" (John Lockridge Kipling)

rating: * * *

review:

THE PATER- JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING: HIS LIFE AND TIMES 1837 - 1911, claims on its 1988 dust cover to be "the first ever biography" of its subject. The author, Reverend Arthur R. Ankers, Englishman, retired Methodist minister and student of and lecturer on several generations of the largely Methodist Kiplings of West Yorkshire, makes you want to know more and especially more of the depth of soul and achievement of the father of poet, journalist and novelist Rudyard Kipling. THE PATER (a phrase often use by Rudyard for John) is a decent start but far from a definitive biography of John Lockwood Kipling. John's 28 years teaching art and working in India after 1865 carried him through the terms in office of seven viceroys, several of whom knew and admired him and his beautiful wife Alice MacDonald Kipling. John Kipling's knowledge of Indian woodwork impressed Queen Victoria's youngest son, the Duke of Gloucester. And the Queen herself commissioned John to design her India (Durbar) Room at her vacation home on the Isle of Wight. One of Kipling's Indian students, Ram Singh, did the actual installation.

John Lockridge Kipling had a biting wit. In England as a boy, art student and apprentice ceramicist, and later in India, he worked very hard and achieved much. Yet he said: "Work is an outrage: a vice of youth which I have long foresworn." THE PATER abounds with examples of his wit:
-- "There is a saying that in every Lahore week there are seven holidays."

-- His many Indian servants "serve us in the intervals of their abundant leisure."

-- A Brahmin saying: "A man of sixty is like a young elephant; a woman at twenty is growing old" (Ch. 11). John Kipling noted that "The inevitable result of the yoking of a very young girl (as young as three years) with a mature man was the proliferation of widows" (Ch. 11).

Nor was Alice MacDonald Kipling's tongue less sharp than her husband's. Swept as a young bride into the intense intra-British social life of 1860s Bombay, Alice reported that, not having attended the St Andrews Day dinner, she could not say "in what respects it differed from the other three hundred and sixty four dinners which were held throughout the year." She filled in occasionally for her husband's newspaper column, once writing
 "in view of the difficulty of loving one's neighbour as one's self, some of us sought to compensate by loving our neighbour's wife better than our own" (Ch. 4).

Those quotations give, I think, much of the flavor of THE PATER as a whole: selective, amusing and superficial. The descriptions of cities like Lahore and towns like Simla are memorable in their evocative detail. There is rapid sketching of the rise of technological innovations in British India such as tramways, railroads and telegraph. John Kipling is shown as a hard-working teacher and artist. John and Alice are seen as loving but unorthodox parents of Rudyard (Ruddy, Rud) and Alice Junior (Trix). They are blamed for dropping of Rud (5) and Trix (3) for years at a foster home in England to pursue their early education. Parental poverty regretably prevented university attendance by the children. John, despite honors bestowed and a pension granted for service in India, left an estate of less than 1,000 pounds sterling. The boy and girl made a good life for themselves when they returned as teens (Rud 17, Trix 15). But the trauma of early, unexplained separation marred them for life. Both children were susceptible to mental illnesses.

Yet Rudyard loved and honored his father (saying little about his mother) as a wise, learned, kind man. He portrays John Lockhart Kipling lovingly in the opening pages of his 1900 novel KIM. At the Lahore Wonder House (museum) Kipling senior discusses Buddhism at great length with a red lama from Tibet and gives the latter his own spectacles.

The book would have been better if maps of India were included, if the 15 chapters had their numbers atop their first pages and if so many items had not been omitted from the Subject Index. The author assumes that readers recognize the abbreviations KA and KJ (Kipling Archives, Kipling Journal), both much cited without further attribution. There is considerable repetition of sentences and phrases as the author ranges back and forth through time in the lives of "the Square," Trix's name for the four Kiplings.

On balance, you have to read this book if you are keen to grasp something of the forces at play on Nobel Prize winner (1907) Rudyard Kipling. A certain mild incoherence and slapdash scholarship is a small price to pay.  -OOO-

tags:  john lockhart kipling, alice macdonald kipling, rudyard kipling, arthur r. ankers, british raj, lahore, bombay, simla

http://www.amazon.com/Pater-Lockwood-Kipling-Times
-1837-1911/dp/1871044006/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=
books&qid=1297253639&sr=1-1
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(5) epinions.com  02/28/2011

Review Title: "... in every Lahore week there are seven holidays."

Product Rating: * * *

PROS: "First ever" biography of distinguished father of world famous author Rudyard Kipling. Atmospherics of India.

CONS: No maps. Unnumbered chapter headings. Incomplete Index. Unidentified sources KA and KJ. Not deep. Rambling.

BOTTOM LINE: Artist John Lockwood Kipling begat one masterpiece: his Nobel Prize winning son Rudyard. He was also loving husband and father, authority on all things Indian, humorist, journalist, illustrator, art teacher.

aohcapablanca's Full Review: 


Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) was fortunate in his parents. Good genes! His mother was Alice MacDonald (1837 - 1910), mostly Scottish with a dash of Welsh. 100% spirited, imaginative, gorgeous Celt. Rudyard's father John Lockhart Kipling (1837 - 1911) was solidly English, a painter, architectural sculptor and teacher of rising East Indian artists. Rudyard had a younger sister Alice (Trix) Kipling who had a stunning season or two coming out in high Anglo-Indian society in the  hill station summer capital of Simla, then descended into decades of mental illness. The male Kipling line was extinguished with the death in battle early in WW I of Rudyard's son John.

All this and much more is told by retired Methodist minister, Rev. Arthur R. Ankers in his compact (161 pages) 1988 THE PATER - JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING: HIS LIFE AND TIMES 1837 - 1911.

From the dust jacket we learn two important things:

-- (1) "THE PATER is the first ever biography of John Lockwood Kipling"

and

-- (2) "Some men have suffered the disadvantage of ... having fathered famous sons: such a man was John Lockwood Kipling."

Author Ankers strives manfully to give John Lockwood Kipling an identity distinct from his Nobel Prize (1907) winning son. But I suspect that John Kipling himself would have rejected that. After all, his son Rudyard was devoted to him and they collaborated for a solid 30 years as journalists, students of all things Indian and on Rudyard's fiction, most notably KIM (1900). In KIM Rudyard's father plays an unforgettable cameo role. Who can forget the rapport of the Curator of the "wonder house" Lahore Museum with the Red Lama of Tibet and their exhange of eye glasses for a monastic pen case?

All four Kiplings, called "the Square" by daughter Trix, were witty and their humor could be barbed. Author Ankers scatters their wit through his text. Here are some samples from "the Pater,"  as Rudyard often referred to his father:
-- "Work is an outrage: a vice of youth which I have long foresworn."

-- There is a Brahmin saying: "A man of sixty is like a young elephant; a woman at twenty is growing old." "The inevitable result of the yoking of a very young girl (as young as three years) with a mature man was the proliferation of widows" (Ch. 11).
     On domestic servants:

-- "There is a saying that in every Lahore week there are seven holidays."

-- The Kiplings' many Indian servants "serve us in the intervals of their abundant leisure." (Ch. 11)

Both John Lockwood and future wife Alice were embedded in intensely Methodist families. Their elders had known and worked closely with John Wesley. John Lockwood Kipling attended a boarding school for children of Methodist preachers. Being sensitive and inward-looking, he hated the bullying by his schoolmates and the "saintly sadism" of his teachers. In India he and his wife worshipped with Anglicans and the children were not raised as Methodists.

Too poor to attend university, John Kipling studied art and apprenticed in a ceramics factory. He proposed to his wife at a picnic on Rudyard Lake near Leek in Staffordshire. Their son Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in December 1865, not long after a three month journey by land and by sea had brought John and Alice there.

John taught art in a Bombay school founded by wealthy Parsees until he was promoted, thereafter running a school and being curator of a museum in Lahore. He spent three decades hard at work in India.

The blot that all biographers of the senior Kiplings agree on was their placing with foster-parents in England for a decade five year old Ruddy or Rud and three year old Trix. The parents had not prepared them for this separation from India and had slipped away without even saying goodbye. By all accounts this episode creating lasting instability in the psyches of Trix and Ruddy.

But they got over it and in the early 1880s were happily reunited with their parents in a 14-room bungalow in Lahore. Rudyard landed an assistant editor job thanks to John's ties. John and Alice became friends with a series of Viceroys. John also won the respect of the Duke of Connaught, youngest son of Queen Victoria. This led to the Queen's commissioning John Kipling to design the "Durbar Room" in Osborne House, the Queen's favorite retreat on the Isle of Wight (she would die there). A gifted Indian student of John did the actual carvings and decorations of the Durbar Room.

John Lockwood Kipling wrote a number of books, in addition to his journalism. Some are readily available even today. His "masterpiece" is BEAST AND MAN IN INDIA: A POPULAR SKETCH OF INDIAN ANIMALS IN THEIR RELATIONS WITH THE PEOPLE. John also illustrated several of his son's books

John went prematurely bald and had a long white beard. He poked fun at British officialdom in India. He flirted chastely with the ladies. His son idolized him. John Lockwood Kipling also taught a generation of rising Indian artists in Bombay and Lahore. His was a life well, usefully and contentedly lived.

I give a qualified recommendation, despite editing shortcomings, to THE PATER. This "first ever" biography of John shows the sometimes sharp verbal wit of the four Kiplings. It is very detailed about John's Methodist family history and his "preacher kid's" schooldays, with their "saintly sadism." The same is true regarding memorable, atmosphere-rich sketches of the Indian towns of Bombay, Lahore and Simla. We see Rudyard Kipling as unabashedly and correctly acknowledging his indebtedness to his polymath father: as journalist, student of India and for thirty years of  literary collaboration.

But if you are not keen to flesh out what you already know of Rudyard Kipling, then this biograpny of his father can be safely neglected.

The book is, alas, sloppily edited.

-- It has 15 chapters, numbered in the Table of Contents and in each chapter's meagre End Notes, but not at the head of each chapter itself. You have, therefore, to exert yourself to find out which numbered chapter you have jurst read or are now reading.

-- The Index is weak. You can look in vain for a third of the persons or places named in the text.

-- There are no maps of either England or India. They would greatly help readers follow the Kipling family's travels.

-- There are frequent references in the notes to KA and KJ. Though never identified, I take KA to be "Kipling Archives" and KJ to be "Kipling Journal." The author is a great authority on all things Kipling and seems to expect too much advance knowledge by his readers.

I also found the book mildly incoherent, with much jumping around in time and place and several verbatim repetitions of earlier segments.

Nonetheless, there is a trove of useful information in JOHN LOCKHART KIPLING. Thus, Rudyard's mother was one of three sisters to marry artists. One sister's famous husband gave the Kiplings access to a wide circle of poets and artists.

-OOO-

p.s. thank you Pestyside Patsy for making this reviewable. The biography, astonishingly, is not covered by Barnes and Noble.

Recommended: Yes.

http://www0.epinions.com/review/Arthur_R_Ankers_The_Pate
r_John_Lockwood_Kipling_His_Life_and_Times_1837_1914_
epi/content_542470082180
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http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/ankers_pater.html