Biography | Rudyard Kipling — His Ashes Went Into This Floor at Noon on 23 January 1936

Rudyard Kipling died in London on 18 January 1936, aged seventy.

Five days later, at noon on 23 January, his ashes were buried in Poets' Corner, the south transept of Westminster Abbey.

The place chosen was beside Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Three ledger stones, set flush in the floor, a few inches apart.

The marble casket was covered with a Union flag. Among the bearers was his cousin Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister.

The stone says almost nothing: RUDYARD KIPLING. BORN 30th DEC. 1865 DIED 18th JAN. 1936.

No line from the work, no title, no epitaph.

That restraint is worth noticing, because Kipling had spent the previous two decades choosing other people's inscriptions.

As one of the first members of the Imperial War Graves Commission he recommended "Their name liveth for evermore", from Ecclesiasticus, for the Stone of Remembrance set in every large war cemetery.

For the headstones of men who could not be identified he wrote "A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God." That wording still stands over the unidentified graves in the Commission's cemeteries in France, Belgium and far beyond them.

He came to the work as a bereaved father. His only son John was killed at Loos in September 1915, and his name is among the missing on the Loos Memorial.

The original ledger stone faded badly. The abbey records that it was replaced in 1965 with Belgian marble, paid for by American admirers.

Westminster Abbey is a working church, and the floor of the south transept is walked over all day. The stones are read by looking down; keep your voice low, and do not photograph other visitors at them.

Photo: Jack1956, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons — the Dickens stone with Kipling's alongside it, photographed at the Dickens bicentenary in February 2012.