Rudjard Kipling

[druiaghtagh]

Why did he have such an affinity withe British Tommy please?

[T&S]

His son was a soldier who died in WWI, it was a TV drama starring Daniel Radcliffe.

http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0851430/

The below link is quite interesting...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling#E ffects_of_World_War_I

[fredpuli47]

Though his support of the'Tommy' went back a long way before the Great War. He wrote two collections of poems published as " Barrack Room Ballads" in 1890 and 1896.He writes from the viewpoint of the ordinary soldier and often uses the vernacular language of the men

The poem "Tommy" is an example of how he tried to change the public perception of the ordinary soldier. In it the soldier speaking says that he couldn't get served in a pub, because they 'didn't want no Tommies', but goes on to note that their attitude is completely different when there's fighting to be done! Something suggests that Kipling didn't like hypocrisy!

Why did he think that way? Well for one thing,unlike his readers, he had been in India, at the height of British rule, in quite a lowly job as a newspaperman, and had witnessed the virtues (and vices) of all classes there, first hand. He was sensitive to injustices.He came to respect the ordinary soldiers as human beings.He wasn't one who thought that status, class and upbringing automatically made someone better, worse or morally different.

[fredpuli47]

The Kipling Society website is

http;//www.kipling.org.uk

and 'Tommy' is here (you may have to click on to 'poem' to avoid the editor's 'notes'):

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_tommy.htm

[MustafaTickl]

"So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man;
An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air -
You big black boundin' beggar - for you broke a British square!"

[Peter Pedant]

erm I have noticed MustafaTickls quote

Thing is the British massacred the Sudanese in a series of battles = with a very high kill ratio (sudanese to British). Their gri-gri's clearly not working. [In a CSI episode, Grissom finds a gri-gri: I nearly dropped dead when I heard it]


so it is a bit ironic to say that the average Tommy respected them.