HE WAS a prolific writer, the first Briton to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, who nonetheless declined the appointment as Poet Laureate and turned down a knighthood. Fêted in his day for his portrayal of stiff-upper-lip Englishness – even though his traditional values and literary reputation are now occasionally vilified by fashionable revisionism – this is the familiar Rudyard Kipling. However, there was another side to him. The author and poet had a passion that later went on to be shared by millions. He loved motoring.
Kipling was drawn into the fraternity of the road by newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth, who drove down to Rottingdean on the Sussex coast in October 1899 to demonstrate his Panhard car to his literary friend. Motoring was “like being massaged at speed”, Harmsworth declared. Kipling and his wife, Carrie, took a 20-minute trip and were equally enthralled. The outing left them ‘white with dust and dizzy with noise – but the poison worked from that hour’, Kipling declared in Something of Myself.
He hired atinkered at its insides, and then had to get out with a promise for a real ride some day,” Thirkell wrote. Kipling and his wife used it through the summer of 1900, ostensibly for house-hunting although he admitted in a letter that they simply enjoyed the “small and fascinating villages” of England. They were driven 20 or 30 miles after breakfast, lunching in hotels and returning home in the cool of the evening on virtually empty roads.
