Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936). ALS to Charles Henry Shinglewood Taylor (1883 – 1935), Engelberg, Switzerland, January 14, 1911. 7 pp. on two densely-written bifolia imprinted with the letterhead of the Hotels Cattani. Signed in full. Near fine.

In this lengthy letter to a fellow enthusiast, Kipling offers a wonderfully vigorous report of a hockey game played by Harvard students and other guests vacationing in Switzerland. Written with the high good humor and colloquially vivid prose for which the author is celebrated, this unpublished work, clocking in at about 1700 words, may also be the most sustained piece of sports writing in Kipling's oeuvre.

Kipling the Winter Sportsman

Switzerland touted as a tourist destination in the Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), 26 February 1911, p. 45.

In December 1908, Rudyard Kipling inaugurated what would become an annual tradition of wintering in Engelberg, an Alpine resort in central Switzerland, south of Lucerne. He would return there every year until 1913, after which the war made foreign travel impossible. Alpine towns were celebrated worldwide among those who preferred their vacations vigorous. Kipling was among them. Fellow vacationer August Fröhlich, a Viennese academic whom Kipling called “the Professor,” wrote an account of the writer’s love for winter sports and claimed to have “helped him take his very first steps on the ice” on “the day of the great earthquake at Messina” – i.e. 28 December 1908 (Fröhlich, p. 42; see also Letters 3:360-61).

The Tatler, 21 February 1912, p. 213.

Kipling apparently took to skating quickly and returned “winter after winter.” He was soon recognizable by his distinctive attire, which was that of a Sussex sportsman not an alpine athlete. Fröhlich reports attending a fancy dress ball disguised as his friend. “I donned his well-known skating costume and a theatrical wig-maker converted me into a second Rudyard Kipling while the original posed as the model” (Fröhlich, 43). Kipling gave his own account:

The professor … got himself up to look exactly like me when I am on the rink. I lent him my jersey, knickers, puttee, coat, cap and shoes and a hair dresser came in an stuck a moustache and black eyebrows upon him and – you never saw anything so funny in your life. We laughed ourselves nearly ill. (Letters 3: 361).

One of the great pleasures of his annual stay in Engelberg were the pick-up hockey games that brought residents together in riotous – and often brutal – competition. The games were intergenerational and occasionally co-ed, but appear to have been dominated by American university students. Players were divided into ad hoc teams – Bellevue, Cattani’s, Engelberg, Zurich. Kipling was an eager participant. A photograph preserved at the Library of Congress may show Kipling at a match.

Kipling may be the skater in tweeds in this photograph by the Bain News Service of Hockey at Engelberg, ca. 1910-1913. Library of Congress

Harvard Men and the Zurich Game

The present letter is by far Kipling's longest account of hockey at Engelberg (or indeed anywhere else). It is focused on the 1911 "Zurich game,” which he considered a particular highlight of the season. Kipling wrote to Frank N. Doubleday the following year to limn the basics:

On Sunday the Zurich hockey team plays us on the ice. It is called Zurich to disguise the fact that it is 80% American. They are a very delightful crowd and played us last year. Their captain is Burr – lineal descendant of the great Aaron and they include representatives of at least three U.S. colleges. (Letters, 4: 81)

Harvard was one of the U.S. colleges represented on the hockey teams at Engelberg. Kipling reports on at least three of its affiliates by name in this letter. The captain of the Zurich team was Carleton Maurice “Chubby” Burr (1891–1918), a member of the Harvard class of 1913 cut from the same strenuous cloth as Theodore Roosevelt. He played football and spent one summer assisting Dr. Willard Grenfell in Labrador and another hunting in Wyoming. Like Kipling's own son, Burr was a casualty of the Great War. 

Zurich team captain Carleton “Chubby” Burr, Harvard '13 (from Howe, 3: 444)

Kipling mentions two other Harvard affiliates. Augustus Henry Fiske (1880–1948) was a graduate of the College (1901) and served on the faculty while pursuing his Ph.D. in organic chemistry, which was awarded in 1912. He would later join the Rumsford Chemical Company in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduating from the College in 1911, George Russell Harding (1889–1973) spent the summer riding in the southwest. He would return there several years later to join in the hunt for Pancho Villa.  There may be other Harvard men among the players in Kipling’s report, but as he does not mention their affiliation we assume they represented other institutions. 

Kipling’s son John was in Engelberg for the 1912-13 season, and he too became enamored of the game. "He has today been taken up, as a promising recruit, by a real, full-grown hockey player," wrote Kipling to Colonel H. W. Feilden on 4 January 1913. "The game, though painful, surely leads to such swift death or so much expensive mangling, as bobbing down ice-runs where there is no snow to break your fall if you upset. So we get him hockey skates and pray to Allah." (Letters 4: 143). A letter to Fröhlich describes that year’s Zurich game in bloody detail:

We have had the Zurich match – in which John played. One man (a Belg) got his rib broken and the captain of the Zurich team was knocked silly. Also his front teeth were loosened. As the Zurich team came up with the loudly expressed intention of killing as many of our team as they could, I feel that, for me, Providence looked after its own. Engelberg had no casualties, but we lost the game by two goals to three. (Fröhlich, 44)

“It was glorious. Plain, straight, hammer & tongs, hell for leather hockey and all men played clean out to their last ounce.”

Though Kipling seems to have joined the students on the ice for scrimmages, the annual Zurich match was too rough for a man then in his mid-forties. His seven-page report on the 1911 game makes it clear that he cheered the players from the sidelines. The letter is addressed to C. H. S. Taylor (1883 – 1935), then a medical student at Cambridge University with an abiding interest in the medical benefits of athletics in general and rowing in particular – he was an accomplished oarsman at Caius College, Cambridge. He was a player in the 1910 game, but missed the 1911 season. Kipling obliged Taylor by giving him a play-by-play account of the game.

C.H.S. Taylor (right) as stroke at Cambridge, The Bystander, 29 March 1905, p. 693

Kipling's letter opens:

Our honour has been saved! I sit down to give you a more or less full account of this year's match against our hockey-playing little friends from Zurich.

He is full of praise for the Harvard men on the Zurich team, who comprised for him "the enemy." Fiske ("a long lathy young American—a Harvard boy training to be a chemist, reported to possess an analytic mind who certainly understood combinations & permutations") and Burr were the stars. 

The key of the Z[urich] position was first-class combination work between Burr and the analytical chemist Fiske. You would have rejoiced to have seen their play.

At half-time the score was 3 to 1, and the Engelberg team looked to be in bad shape, but then the tide turned.

As so often happens, our chaps got together — I guess Hingston had told ‘em a few things—and we began to press Zurich. Still, Fiske and Burr played together beautifully — the little man Tait raged around like a flame and the others in their degree backed up. Hood had come into the game at half time but his skates didn't seem easy and he dropped about a lot — once slom across the boards so that I thought he'd have the graining of ‘em neatly stamped on his alnes[?], if that's the right word. But I observed that Zurich was falling about a little more than we were and by the look of the goal-keepers legs (you know that goal-keepers express caution, like grass-hoppers, with their hind legs) there seemed to be some uneasiness on the enemy's side. Then the scrums got tighter, the flat hockey-skates rasped and ripped, Hingston smashed a stick, swooped to the side & got a fresh one as quick as I can write it, the men began to grunt and even genteel Engelberg, on whom good hockey is wasted, faintly applauded as we worked Z[urich] back & back. I was moderately agitated at this point and couldn't give any collected account of anything except that Hood like a battleship and Bedford (in a yellow jersey) like a cruiser rolled back and forth and Bedford, I think, got a goal. Then Hardinge got another (3 to 4) and only a few minutes to play. Then Hingston got in — so far as I could see — but it might have been Hardinge — with a Fourth; and there we were 4 all — and three goals made in the last five minutes of play! It was glorious. Plain, straight, hammer & tongs, hell for leather hockey and all men played clean out to their last ounce.

The second half of the game proved especially savage. “I had never realized that men could cut each others heads about with their own skulls," Kipling notes. But the scent of blood had the same affect on the players as it does on sharks:

Burr's was the only gore than flowed. It seemed to make him livelier if anything and the last 7 minutes was a sort of tumultuous Catherine-wheel of a game.

The game ended tied at 4-4, and the players went into overtime for ten minutes before calling it a draw. “Any more play would have been rank cruelty to animals,” Kipling writes. Afterwards he joined the players for beer at the hotel. "All agreed that there hadn't been a better game and I only wish, as indeed we all wished, that you had been there," Kipling writes.

In all, a superbly evocative account capturing the joy and vigor of student athletics. Had he lent his talents more consistently to sportswriting, Kipling surely would have given A. J. Liebling, W. C. Heinz, and Red Smith a run for their money. And what a shame he wasn't around to see Bobby Orr!

Selected References

Frölich, Alfred. “Kipling and winter sports,” Kipling Journal 38 (June 1936), pp. 42-44

“George Russell Harding,” Class of 1911 – Decennial Report. Boston: Four Seas Company, 1921, pp. 185-86

Harvard Alumni Directory… Boston: Harvard Alumni Association, 1919

Howe, Mark Antony De Wolfe. “Carleton Burr,” Memoirs of the Harvard dead in the war against Germany. 6 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920-24, 3: 444-70

Kipling, Rudyard. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 6 vols. ed. Thomas Pinney. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990-2004

“Obituary: C. H. S. Taylor, M.D.” British Medical Journal, 6 July 1935, p. 41

Coed hockey at Engelberg, New York Daily Tribune, 2 January 1910, p. 20