‘BOBS’ poem is probably a copy

Press, 22 April 1986, Page 21

‘BOBS’ poem is probably a copy

Lewis Boyes, a former British Army soldier who served in India, was looking through an Auckland bookstore about two years ago for works by Rudyard Kipling. Mr Boyes, a Christchurch resident, had developed an interest in Kipling’s poetry, particularly the verse written about British soldiers. In an old Dominion edition of “The Years Between,” a volume of poetry first published in 1919, he found an ageing sheet of notepaper between the pages.

Neatly written in longhand on both sides of the paper was “BOBS,” Kipling’s famous poem about Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar. Mr Boyes wondered if the old sheet of paper, with the initials “R.K.” at the bottom of the poem, could be an original draft of “BOBS.” “The Press” sent a photocopy of the hand-written poem to Harry Ricketts, a Victoria University English lecturer who has a special interest in Kipling’s work.

Presumably because Lord Roberts bad not liked the poem, it was suppressed and did not appear in a volume of Kipling’s poetry until after the soldierhero’s death in France in 1914, says Mr Ricketts. “BOBS” had been written by Kipling in the 1890 s. Mr Ricketts compared the handwriting of Mr Boyes’ find with early and late examples of Kipling’s handwriting. He found that the scripts were not similar. For one thing, Kipling had a different way of writing the

letter “K.” He thinks that someone keen on Kipling’s work could have copied the poem, since it was not readily-available in a collection years.ago, and inserted it in a book of poems for his own enjoyment Some “h” letters in the handwritten poem are included, but Kipling had left them out The written copy includes an explanation of the poem’s word “arder,” which means “a half,” at the bottom, where subsequent

verse collections include the meaning as a footnote. Kipling would not have written in his own footnote. In his recent book, “The Kipling I Knew,” Captain Edward Parsons of Auckland noted that Kipling wrote to help raise money for soldiers’ comforts when the Boer War broke out At the instigation of Lord Roberts, he helped produce a newspaper for the troops in South Africa. He had known the British military leader in India.