KIPLING’S HOME

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 June 1940, Page 3

KIPLING’S HOME

BEQUEATHED TO NATIONAL TRUST. ESTATE OF ABOUT 300 ACRES. Mrs Rudyard Kipling has bequeathed to the National Trust the house — Bateman’s, at Burwash, in East Sussex —in which her husband spent the last half of his life. Her gift is accompanied by an endowment of £5OOO. The house is a stone building of three storeys and 20 rooms, with mullioned windows and brick chimneys, and it dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. The surrounding estate, of about 300 acres, on which Kipling placed his personal stamp by planning and planting, also has become the property of the nation. In the chapter of his autobiography headed “The Very-Own House” Kipling himself described how, after three years of house-hunting, he lighted upon Bateman’s and how the builder of the Assuan Dam helped him to instal a turbine for its electric lighting. Even more interesting to Kipling lovers is his account of the discovery of a slag heap of an ancient forge, supposed to have been worked by the Phoenicians and the Romans, and of a number of other relics of the past turned up in sinking a well and clearing out an old pond—discoveries which gave him the idea of writing “Puck of Pook's Hill.” The whole district indeed, seemed to have laid Kipling under a spell, and it became to him. as “The Times” put it, “almost the very essence of England—the one spot which was beloved over all, his own special portion in the earth which God gave all men to love.” Accordingly Bateman’s will be, to the pilgrims who resort thither, not merely the abode of a famous author but the heart of the countryside which won his deep affection more than any other region in the land. The National Trust has been searching for a suitable tenant, who must be approved by Kipling’s cousin, Lord Baldwin. The tenant will be required to leave the study in its present state and to allow certain of the living rooms to be on view to the public on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. In addition to leaving Bateman’s to the National Trust, Mrs Kipling has bequeathed to the British Museum the bound MSS. of her husband's works and a collection of one each of the various editions’and translations of them, on condition that they are not used for collation.