Broken Oars University: Summer Shorts Series: Getting to Grips with Mr. Kipling

Broken Oars Podcast

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Welcome back one and all to Broken Oars Podcast - the Rowing World's best and most informative podcast (bar Crossy's Corner - we'll hear no bad words about that man. He's a legend).

As you know, while the Southern One finishes up a professional qualification the Northern One has been taking his brain out for a spin to talk about poets and poetry.

(Yes, it does sound remarkably like listening to paint drying, doesn't it ... ?)

But fear not, this is the Northern One - a man incapable of uttering a snooze-inducing sentence, finding a subject he can't make a quip or point about, or being boring generally. And it is in that capacity that he's created the perfect series for people to dip into while the nights are long, the air balmy, and the weather perfect for sitting out in the garden and doing some culture.

Yeah.

Cultchah!
Having whistle-stopped through Thomas Hardy and A.E Housman, detoured into how a Brian called Geordie (should that sentence be the other way 'round ... ? Ed) is to blame for guitar heroes and all of their widdle, and then leapt back to look at Charles Dickens ... a theme is emerging ...

That's right:

How did we get here from there.

Or to put it more simply, why Britain today is largely the same as Britain then?

(Isn't this fun? We're learning all about caesuras and enjambments and what happened when and where and to who and asking cool questions! Who said no, when's the rowing stuff coming ... ?).

In this episode we engage with one of the most problematic writers in the canon: Rudyard Kipling.

An Anglo-Indian, with a deep apprehension of the realities and mythologies of Empire, Kipling was more famous in his day than Steve Redgrave (largely because Steve Redgrave hadn't been born then) but is rarely read now.

We learn why; explore why it's a short step from denying or revising books to burning them; and look at why should and what we can learn from engaging with a racist, and imperialist ... and the most important English writer since Shakespeare. We explore how Empire was not a benevolent force for good, or a civilising mission but instead always and forever an economic enterprise; and illustrate how its expansion ran alongside technological expansion - something Kipling was keenly aware of.

Examining Kipling's status as an Anglo-Indian, and thus a second-class person, we look at the way he explored and exposed the myths of Empire to show its realities: the overt racism of The White Man's Burden, the sham of Britain standing alone given its reliance on its connections to the world in Big Steamers; and the people who work alongside or create the technology that sustains the whole endeavour in McAndrew's Hymn and The King. We reclaim Mandalay from Boorish and see how Kipling's wide-ranging work in poetry, short stories, children's stories and novels should be engaged with if we are to overcome our cultural amnesia and beliefs about the missing 300 years of our history that we don't talk about or teach.

And that's before we get to Tommy - as pertinent now as it was then.

And it's out in time for the weekend? And there's a rowing episode coming out too?

Get some!

Bow? You're a jelly-bellied flag-flapper. Take a tap.