Biography | Rudyard Kipling — The Twelve Houses by the Shore Where Stalky Learned His Trade

In January 1878 Rudyard Kipling, twelve years old, entered the United Services College at Westward Ho!, on the north Devon coast.

The school had opened only four years earlier.

Its first headmaster, Cormell Price, had brought a dozen boys with him from Haileybury.

Price was a friend of Lockwood Kipling and of the Burne-Jones household into which Alice Kipling's sister had married.

The college leased a terrace of twelve stucco villas on the slope above Bideford Bay.

The houses still stand, numbered 1 to 12 Kipling Terrace on Kingsley Road, and were listed Grade II in 1951.

A plaque on the terrace records the school dates and Kipling's own: January 1878 to July 1882.

Most of the boys were sons of officers and civil servants.

The point of the place was to send them on to Sandhurst or Woolwich without a year at a crammer.

Kipling's eyesight kept him off the games field.

Price put him onto the school magazine.

In 1881 his parents printed a booklet of his verses, Schoolboy Lyrics, without asking him.

The college is the school in Stalky & Co., published in 1899 and dedicated to Price.

The prefatory verses call the buildings twelve bleak houses by the shore.

The Atlantic is still there.

The school left Westward Ho! in 1904, passed through mergers, and ended at Windsor.

The terrace was divided back into dwellings.

What a visitor can stand in front of is the same row Price leased in 1874.

Photo: Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons