Line 10] Told off to do: to have tasks allotted to them. Large country houses employed a number of specialist gardeners and many assistants who would be informed of their daily jobs in just this quasi-military way. Lines 21-4] There’s not a pair of legs so thin … glorifieth every one: lines which capture to perfection the range of attitudes Kipling is balancing throughout the poem. Although everyone has a democratic part to play in maintaining a healthy garden, according entirely, that is, to individual abilities, the process still clearly reveals the hierarchical manner of the whole enterprise already noted in the gardener distributing jobs (line 10). But, with that said, it remains true, that if all members of society really do play a part, with the kind of dedication expected by traditional worship, then the Garden certainly will glorify every one, though the glory will now have been inspired by a patriotic and national passion rather than religious faith. Wallgate Chronicles: Hugo Boss comes to Wigan; In the footsteps of the Manchester Rambler; Fun with Trigonometry; Surprise at the Philharmonic; The Marriage of Figaro; Cat Bells; A Walk in the Hills; Eay Times Uv Changed; Fidelio; The Ravioli Room; Desert Island Discs; Travels in Time 1960; Travels in Time 2010; The Spectroscope; The Bohemian Girl; Bookcase; Barnaby Rudge; Romance on a Budget; The Battle of Solferino; The Getaway Car; The Switchroom Wigan; The Force of Destiny; Adolphe Adam; The Fair Maid of Perth; Ivanhoe; Semele; Lohengrin; The Old Curiosity Shop; Hard Times. But in 1929 he was making another attempt to persuade the Press to agree to a new edition with his concluding chapter, now further revised. Kipling repeated what he had said ten years earlier. ‘As you know I didn’t do anything at all much beyond the verses,’, he wrote. ‘You lie’, Fletcher replied. ‘Some of the most valuable prose suggestions, and all the pretty little love-poems in prose to England were yours'”. Bob was a voracious reader, avid traveller, generous host, controversial conversationalist and consistent friend. From 2000 he made his base a cottage in east Suffolk.

The gardener spends so much time on his knees not because he is praying but because he is working in the garden. His devotion or dedication is to that work. Only thus can the glory of the garden of England be preserved. If people assume that they can rely on God to save the country, then it will swiftly and certainly decline. But if everyone works hard at the job, then ‘the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!’ The condition of a nation-state, like that of a garden, depends on constant vigilance and work. Vegetation must be controlled, and weeds handled ruthlessly if they are not to destroy healthy plants. Richard II and Queen Isabel are forced to learn this lesson. So, in a very different Shakespearean context, is Hamlet:

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Line 15] sift the sand and loam: Loam is a rich fine soil formed largely from decomposed vegetation. It is sifted with sand before being used, to lighten and enrich heavy earth. Kipling is even more concerned, though, with the popular children’s hymns that inculcated this view of creation and along with it a bland mood of social passivity. Of these hymns, Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander’s “All Things Bright and Beautiful” is the type: Line 26] netting strawberries: Strawberries grow along the ground and are covered with nets to stop birds from eating them.

First published in A History of England (1911) by C.R.L.Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling, and then in all subsequent editions of the book. It was placed at the end of Chapter XII, ‘George III to George V, 1815-1911,’ though it is not related specifically to this chapter, but serves rather as a summary of the whole book and a final exhortation to the reader. When the poem was reprinted in the Inclusive Edition of the Verse (1919), it was also used as the closing poem of the volume, even allowing two extraneous poems – “Philadelphia” and “When ’Omer Smote ’Is Bloomin’ Lyre” – to be inserted awkwardly between it and the rest of the items from the School History. It seems likely that in re-arranging the poems in this way Kipling was making a patriotic statement on the recent close of the First World War. Kipling’s view in “The Glory of the Garden” is little different from that of Shakespeare, except that he is writing for a newly democratic age. This understanding guides his whole approach. He is not in the position of a medieval King who can deal with the situation by lopping off the heads of a few rebellious ‘weeds.’ Nor is it necessary for him to act out the part of melancholy Hamlet because Kipling knows all too well what is to be done. If everyone in society, high or low – and it is soon clear that Kipling’s own view of English society in the poem remains firmly hierarchical – can be persuaded to play a part in making sure that the garden does not become over-run with weeds, then ‘things rank and gross in nature’ will be unable to ‘possess it merely.’ If not, then England could become as ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable’ as Denmark was to Hamlet. Line 24] glorifieth everyone (see also l.28, a partner in the glory) Kipling is also alluding here to chapter 17 of the Gospel of John, where Christ speaks of the Father glorifying Him, of His glorifying the Father, and of believers than being united to this glorification. John 17 is part of the same long final discourse of Christ as is John 15.1-8, on Christ as the vine, the Father as the husbandman, the believers as the branches. This too is in Kipling’s mind: vineyards are proximate to gardens (note in particular 15.8: “Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit”). All in all, Kipling is suggesting an equivalence between England and the Incarnate Son of God. [D.H.]Wigan and the American Civil War - Wigan Coal and Iron Company, The Right Honourable John Lancaster MP for Wigan, the Confederate Raider Alabama, USS Kearsarge, Cherbourg and the yacht Deerhound all feature in the last great sea battle of the American Civil War.

Not Much of a Warrior - Wigan RLFC in the fifties and sixties, through rose coloured glasses. A golden age of legendary players and memorable moments, along with some personal memories. Line 7] cold-frame: a small unheated container with a glass top for protecting young plants; hot-house, a heated building, made largely of glass, for rearing tender or exotic plants; dung-pit, a compost heap; tanks, to store water.

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Recent ventures with the illustrator Michael Woods resulted in Reynard the Fox, a new translation of the medieval fable, and Agon, a selection of Greek myths.

Wigan Old Bank 1792 - A tragic boating accident on Windermere and a surprising journey through the social history of Wigan during the reign of Queen Victoria, highlighting the relationships between four families who played an important part in the commercial development of the town. There is a very interesting section on Kipling and Fletcher’s collaboration in Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (1978, Oxford), pp. 158-62. I quote from pp. 161-62: Title] The Glory of the Garden: Normally such a phrase would refer to the beauty of the flowers, bushes, and trees growing in a garden, and/or to the horticultural skill that has nurtured and arranged the various plants into a splendid pattern. It also invokes many images which link God’s presence with gardens, the ‘glory’ of the one often being equated naturally with the glory of the other. Kipling refers to these various connotations in his poem, but insists that the true glory of the garden lies elsewhere.Line 13] begonia: a plant which has flowers with brightly coloured sepals, no petals, and glossy leaves; bud, to graft a bud from one plant onto another. Even here, the attitude is pious, with nothing of Kipling’s passionate moral concern or his profound understanding of the dangers that complacent patriotism can bring. “The Glory of the Garden” opens with the strikingly communal ‘Our England’, which makes it clear that the poem is about values that the poet wishes to share with his readers. There is no sense of a view of England being imposed from outside or above. If the reader does not respond positively to Kipling’s appeal, then the purpose of the poem collapses. The personal, inner nature of the values is stressed by the final line in the first stanza in which Kipling warns that the true glory of the garden is to be found in more than meets the eye. In other words, the reader is to be prepared for a point-of-view that is totally different from that of Felicia Hemans. Hemans offers a highly sentimental, idealised view of English home life, from the stately to the humble, and although not carrying the overtly political message that is so important to Kipling, she does – rather oddly given her very different mood – seem to at least look in that direction by prefacing her poem with an epigram taken from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808): Of course, Fletcher’s views weren’t Kipling’s: my point is merely that the School History wasn’t the place for Kipling to take a strong stand against conventional religious practice. Kipling and Fletcher