"The Absent-Minded Beggar" is an 1899 poem by Rudyard Kipling, set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan and often accompanied by an illustration of a wounded but defiant British soldier, "A Gentleman in Kharki", by Richard Caton Woodville. The song was written as part of an appeal by the Daily Mail to raise money for soldiers fighting in the Second Boer War and their families. The fund was the first such charitable effort for a war.
The chorus of the song exhorted its audience to "pass the hat for your credit's sake, and pay– pay– pay!" The patriotic poem and song caused a sensation and were constantly performed throughout the war and beyond. Kipling was offered a knighthood shortly after publication of the poem but declined the honour. Vast numbers of copies of the poem and sheet music were published, and large quantities of related merchandise were sold to aid the charity. The "Absent-Minded Beggar Fund" was an unprecedented success and raised a total of more than £250,000.
History
In September 1899, it was clear that the crisis in South Africa was likely to turn into war. By 2 October, all military leave had been cancelled, and urgent preparations were under way to send a large expeditionary force to the Cape, with horses and supplies being requisitioned and mobilised.[1] On 7 October, a proclamation was issued calling out the Army Reserve. Of 65,000 liable men, around 25,000 were intended to be called up for service.[2] The Second Boer War broke out on 11 October.[3]
Many, if not all, of the men thus mobilised were ex-soldiers in permanent employment for whom returning to military duty meant a significant cut in their income. As a result, many families were quickly plunged into poverty, since a lifestyle comfortably maintained on a workman's wage of twenty shillings could not be kept up on the infantryman's "shilling a day". In addition, there was no contemporary legislation protecting the permanent employment of Reservists. Employers could – and often would – replace them with other workers, with no guarantee that if the soldier returned he would be able to take back his job.[4] In addition, of course, the men faced the prospect of injury or death. A number of charitable funds existed to support these individuals, most notably the Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Association, and a number of private appeals were also made.[5] A wave of patriotism swept the country, catered to by jingoist newspapers such as the Daily Mail. Many of these newspapers were also involved in the charitable fundraising efforts to benefit the Reservists and their dependants.[6]
The Daily Mail proprietor, Alfred Harmsworth, publicised efforts to help soldiers and their families. This drew the attention of Rudyard Kipling, who produced "The Absent-Minded Beggar" on 16 October 1899[6] and sent the verses to Harmsworth on 22 October with a note that "they are at your service. ... turn [the proceeds] over to any one of the regularly ordained relief-funds, as a portion of your contribution. I don't want my name mixed up in the business except as it will help to get money. It's catchpenny verse and I want it to catch just as many pennies as it can. ... [p.s.] It isn't a thing I shall care to reprint; so there is no need of copyrighting it in America. If any one wants to sing it take care that the proceeds go to our men."[7] It was first published in the Daily Mail on 31 October 1899 and was an immediate success. Maud Tree, the wife of actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, recited it at the Palace Theatre, every night before the show, for fourteen months, and other performers recited it at music halls and elsewhere, giving part of the profits to the fund.[7] The manuscript itself was auctioned for £500, and a Special Edition de Luxe was issued.[3]
Meanwhile, by 25 October, Kipling was plotting with Harmsworth on how to maximise the fundraising from the poem. In addition to having it recited at entertainments, he suggested finding a composer to set it to a "common + catchy" tune.[7] The country's premier composer, Sir Arthur Sullivan, was immediately asked to set the poem to music. Sullivan had written some 20 operas, including fourteen comic operas with W. S. Gilbert, and a large volume of songs, orchestral pieces and other music. Although he was in the middle of composing his next opera, The Rose of Persia (which was to be his last completed opera), Sullivan agreed.[8] Both Kipling and Sullivan declined proffered fees for creating the song.[9] Artist Richard Caton Woodville, within several days, provided an illustration, titled "A Gentleman in Kharki",[Note 1] showing a wounded but defiant British Tommy in battle. This illustration was included in "art editions" of the poem and song.[10]
In 1897, Sullivan had agreed to compose music for Kipling's poem Recessional, but he never completed the song. When asked to set "The Absent-Minded Beggar" to music two years later, Sullivan found Kipling's verses so difficult to set that he told his diary, "if it wasn't for charity's sake, I could never have undertaken the task".[8] Still, the experienced composer completed the music in four days, on 5 November 1899, and it was published by Enoch & Sons for the Daily Mail.[3] The first public performance was sung by John Coates, under Sullivan's baton, at the Alhambra Theatre on 13 November 1899, to a "magnificent reception" of an overflowing theatre.[8] In 1900, "Kipling travelled to South Africa to help distribute the supplies bought with the funds raised by the song."[11]
Sullivan's music captured Britain's jingoistic mood, and his diary entry notes, "Wild enthusiasm. All sang chorus! I stood on the stage and conducted the encore – funny sight!"[8] With characteristic grace, the composer wrote to Kipling, "Your splendid words went with a swing and enthusiasm which even my music cannot stifle".[8] Kipling, on the other hand, described the music as "a tune guaranteed to pull teeth out of barrel-organs".[12]
The Daily Chronicle wrote that "It has not been often that the greatest of English writers and the greatest of English musicians have joined inspiring words and stirring melody in a song which expresses the heart feelings of the entire nation".[8] Sullivan's manuscript was later auctioned for £500 towards the fund.[13] Critic Fuller Maitland disapproved of the composition in The Times, but Sullivan asked a friend, "Did the idiot expect the words to be set in cantata form, or as a developed composition with symphonic introduction, contrapuntal treatment, etc.?"[14]
The poem, song and piano music sold in extraordinary numbers, as did all kinds of household items, postcards, memorabilia and other merchandise emblazoned, woven or engraved with the "Gentleman in Kharki" figure, the poem itself, the sheet music, or humorous illustrations. Some of these items were very expensive.[8] 40 clerks answered 12,000 requests a day for copies of the poem, and it was included in 148,000 packets of cigarettes within two months of the first performance.[10] Alternative arrangements of the song were published, such as "The Absent-Minded Beggar March".[15]
Humorous postcard
The Daily Mail's charitable fund was eventually titled the "Absent Minded Beggar Relief Corps" or the "Absent-Minded Beggar Fund", providing small comforts to the soldiers themselves as well as supporting their families. Among other activities of the Corps, it "met the soldiers on arrival in South Africa, welcomed them on their return to Britain and, more importantly, set up overseas centres to minister to the sick and wounded".[10] The fund raised the unprecedented amount of more than £250,000.[6] The money was not raised solely by the Daily Mail; the poem was publicly available, with anyone permitted to perform or print it in any way, so long as the copyright royalties went to the fund.[12] Newspapers around the world published the poem, hundreds of thousands of copies were quickly sold internationally, and the song was sung widely in theatres and music halls, first being heard in Australia on 23 December 1899. Local "Absent Minded Beggar Relief Corps" branches were opened in Trinidad, Cape Town, Ireland, New Zealand, China, India and numerous places throughout the world; all of this contributed to the fund and to other war efforts, such as the building of hospitals.[7] The fund was the first such charitable effort for a war and has been referred to as the origin of the welfare state.[8] In December, after the first £50,000 was raised, the Daily Mail asserted, "The history of the world can produce no parallel to the extraordinary record of this poem."[7]
The popularity of the poem was such that allusions to it were common. Mark Twain wrote that "The clarion-peal of its lines thrilled the world".[8] By 18 November, less than a month after publication of the poem, "a new patriotic play" was advertised to open the next week, titled The Absent Minded Beggar, or, For Queen and Country.[16] The same month, the Charity Organisation Society called "The Absent-Minded Beggar" the "most prominent figure on the charitable horizon at present."[6] Even a critical book on the conduct of the war, published in 1900, was titled An Absent-Minded War. Kipling was offered a knighthood within a few weeks of publication of the song but declined, as he declined all offers of State honours.[9] Historian Stephen M. Miller wrote in 2007, "Kipling almost single-handedly restored the strong ties between civilians and soldiers and put Britain and its army back together again."[10][17]
A performance of "The Absent-Minded Beggar March" on 21 July 1900 at The Crystal Palace was Sullivan's last public appearance, and the composer died four months later.[9] "The Absent-Minded Beggar" remained popular throughout the three-year war and for years after the war ended. It became a part of popular culture of the time, with its title becoming a popular phrase and cartoons, postcards and other humorous representations of the character of the absent-minded beggar becoming popular.[10] The song is performed in John Osborne's 1957 play The Entertainer.[18]T. S. Eliot included the poem in his 1941 collection A Choice of Kipling's Verse.
The song is still heard on re-issues of early recordings and on post-Second World War recordings by Donald Adams and others.[8][19] In 1942, George Orwell noted that "The phrase "killing Kruger with your mouth" ... was current till very recently".[20] In 2010, a Kipling conference, called "Following The Absent-minded Beggar" was held at the School of the Humanities of the University of Bristol, organised by Dr. John Lee,[21] that included lectures and an exhibition of memorabilia and documents relating to the poem and song.[10]
Lyrics
Woodville's illustration of "A Gentleman in Kharki"Sheet music
The first and final stanzas are:
When you've shouted "Rule Britannia," when you've sung "God Save the Queen,"[Note 2] When you've finished killing Kruger with your mouth, Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine For a gentleman in khaki ordered South? He's an absent-minded beggar and his weaknesses are great— But we and Paul must take him as we find him— He is out on active service, wiping something off a slate— And he's left a lot of little things behind him! Duke's son—cook's son—son of a hundred kings— (Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay!) Each of 'em doing his country's work (and who's to look after the things?) Pass the hat for your credit's sake, and pay—pay—pay! ... Let us manage so as, later, we can look him in the face, And tell him—what he'd very much prefer— That, while he saved the Empire, his employer saved his place, And his mates (that's you and me) looked out for her. He's an absent-minded beggar, and he may forget it all, But we do not want his kiddies to remind him That we sent 'em to the workhouse while their daddy hammered Paul, So we'll help the homes that Tommy left behind him! Cook's home—Duke's home—home of a millionaire, (Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay!) Each of 'em doing his country's work (and what have you got to spare?) Pass the hat for your credit's sake, and pay—pay—pay![22]
—Stanzas 1 and 4
Notes
↑ The phrase "a gentleman in khaki" is from the first verse of the poem, which uses the more common spelling, "khaki"; loanwords from such as this Hindi word often had multiple forms in English. The spelling "Kharki" is given as a "vulgar" form in the Hobson-Jobson dictionary.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.
This is a bibliography of works by Rudyard Kipling, including books, short stories, poems, and collections of his works.
"Gunga Din" is an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling set in British India. The poem was published alongside "Mandalay" and "Danny Deever" in the collection "Barrack-Room Ballads".
"If—" is a poem by English poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), written circa 1895 as a tribute to Leander Starr Jameson. It is a literary example of Victorian-era stoicism. The poem, first published in Rewards and Fairies (1910) following the story "Brother Square-Toes", is written in the form of paternal advice to the poet's son, John.
"The White Man's Burden" (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) that exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country. Originally written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, the jingoistic poem was replaced with the sombre "Recessional" (1897), also a Kipling poem about empire.
The Barrack-Room Ballads are a series of songs and poems by Rudyard Kipling, dealing with the late-Victorian British Army and mostly written in a vernacular dialect. The series contains some of Kipling's best-known works, including the poems "Gunga Din", "Tommy", "Mandalay", and "Danny Deever", helping consolidate his early fame as a poet.
"Danny Deever" is an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling, one of the first of the Barrack-Room Ballads. It received wide critical and popular acclaim, and is often regarded as one of the most significant pieces of Kipling's early verse. The poem, a ballad, describes the execution of a British soldier in India for murder. His execution is viewed by his regiment, paraded to watch it, and the poem is composed of the comments they exchange as they see him hanged.
"The Last of the Light Brigade" is a poem written in 1890 by Rudyard Kipling echoing – thirty-six years after the event – Alfred Tennyson's famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. Employing synecdoche, Kipling uses his poem to expose the terrible hardship faced in old age by veterans of the Crimean War, as exemplified by the cavalry men of the light brigade who charged at the Battle of Balaclava. It describes a visit by the last twenty survivors of the charge to Tennyson to reproach him gently for not writing a sequel about the way in which England was treating its old soldiers. Some sources treat the poem as an account of a real event, but other commentators class the destitute old soldiers as allegorical, with the visit invented by Kipling to draw attention to the poverty in which the real survivors were living, in the same way that he evoked Tommy Atkins in "The Absent Minded Beggar".
"Mandalay" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, written and published in 1890, and first collected in Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses in 1892. The poem is set in colonial Burma, then part of British India. The protagonist is a Cockney working-class soldier, back in grey, restrictive London, recalling the time he felt free and had a Burmese girlfriend, now unattainably far away.
— Opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden, first published this year
In the field of psychology, absent-mindedness is a mental state wherein a person is forgetfully inattentive. It is the opposite mental state of mindfulness.
Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, was a British newspaper and publishing magnate. As owner of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, he was an early developer of popular journalism, and he exercised vast influence over British popular opinion during the Edwardian era. Lord Beaverbrook said he was "the greatest figure who ever strode down Fleet Street." About the beginning of the 20th century there were increasing attempts to develop popular journalism intended for the working class and tending to emphasize sensational topics. Harmsworth was the main innovator. He said, "News is something someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising."
"My Boy Jack" is a 1916 poem by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling wrote it for Jack Cornwell, the 16-year-old youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross, who stayed by his post on board the light cruiser HMS Chester at the Battle of Jutland until he died. Kipling's son John was never referred to as "Jack". The poem echoes the grief of all parents who lost sons in the First World War. John Kipling was a 2nd Lt in the Irish Guards and disappeared in September 1915 during the Battle of Loos in the First World War. The poem was published as a prelude to a story in his book Sea Warfare written about the Battle of Jutland in 1916. The imagery and theme is maritime in nature and as such it is about a generic nautical Jack, though emotionally affected by the death of Kipling's son.
In the British Army, a gentleman ranker is an enlisted soldier who is suited through education and social background to be a commissioned officer, or indeed a former commissioned officer. Rudyard Kipling titled one of his poems, which was published in 1892, "Gentlemen-Rankers".
"Submarines" is a poem written by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), and set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar in 1917, as the third of a set of four war-related songs on nautical subjects for which he chose the title "The Fringes of the Fleet".
The Fringes of the Fleet is a booklet written in 1915 by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). The booklet contains essays and poems about nautical subjects in World War I.
Soldiers Three is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. The three soldiers of the title are Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris, who had also appeared previously in the collection Plain Tales from the Hills. The current version, dating from 1899 and more fully titled Soldiers Three and other stories, consists of three sections which each had previously received separate publication in 1888; Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris appear only in the first section, which is also titled Soldiers Three. The books reveal a side of the British Tommy in Afghanistan rarely seen in the Twilight of the British Empire. The soldiers comment on their betters, act the fool, but cut straight to the rawness of war in central Asia as the British began to loosen their Imperial hold.
"Boots" is a poem by English author and poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). It was first published in 1903, in his collection The Five Nations.
A Choice of Kipling's Verse, made by T. S. Eliot, with an essay on Rudyard Kipling is a book first published in December 1941. It is in two parts. The first part is an essay by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), in which he discusses the nature and stature of British poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). The second part consists of Eliot's selection from Kipling's poems.
Known unto God is a phrase used on the gravestones of unknown soldiers in Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemeteries. The phrase was selected by British poet Rudyard Kipling who worked for what was then the Imperial War Graves Commission during the First World War. The origin of the phrase is unknown but it has been linked to sections of the King James Bible. The phrase was re-used for those killed during the Second World War and appears on more than 212,000 gravestones across the world. In 2013 there was controversy when it was proposed that the phrase be removed from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial.
References
↑ "The Transvaal Crisis", The Times, 2 October 1899
↑ "The Transvaal Crisis", The Times, 9 October 1899
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Cannon, John. "The Absent-Minded Beggar", Gilbert and Sullivan News, March 1997, Vol. 11, No. 8, pp. 16–17, The Gilbert and Sullivan Society, London
1 2 3 Cannon, John. "A Little-Heralded Sullivan Centenary", Gilbert and Sullivan News, Autumn/Winter 1999, Vol. 11, No. 16, p. 18, The Gilbert and Sullivan Society, London
1 2 3 4 5 6 Cannon, John. "Following the Absent-minded Beggar", Gilbert and Sullivan News, Autumn 2010, Vol. IV, No.12, pp. 10–12
↑ Phillip Mallett (nd), "The Poetry of the Boer War", School of English, University of St Andrews, retrieved 27 February 2017
1 2 Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself, chapter 6
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