Editor's Note

Kipling's school was the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, North Devon, founded in 1874, only four years before Kipling entered it as pupil number 264 in January of 1878; he remained there until the spring of 1882. It is “The School Before its Time,” described in Chapter 2 of Something of Myself, and it is the school transformed into the setting of Stalky & Co. It was here, at school, that Kipling left behind the miseries of his childhood in the House of Desolation and took on an identity as a man of words, a writer. He never failed in gratitude to his old school as the place of his metamorphosis.

The occasion of this article accounts for something of its character. The United Services College, never in good financial health, was almost wholly dependent upon its ability to provide a cheap entrance into the army for the sons of army officers by prepping them for the Army Examination. The school was reasonably prosperous in Kipling's time there, but, after he left, the decline in the exchange value of the rupee made it difficult for army men in India to send their sons back to England; at the same time, increased competition from other schools in the business of preparing students for the Army Examination hurt the school.