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the "Clampherdown"" (1892) (notes by John McGivering) |
the poem 
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the "Clampherdown"" (1892) (notes by John McGivering) |
the poem
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… during manoeuvres in the Mediterranean on 22 June 1893, the fleet was steaming in two lines, which the Admiral ordered to turn inwards. The result was a collision of the two flagships, which were the leaders, and the Victoria, with the Commander-in-Chief, went to the bottom, as did most of her crew.The collision is reported in The Times of 24 June and 6 July 1893 together with the death of Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon and about 370 others.
The great weight of her guns and turret contributed to the rapid capsizing. Her antagonist, the Camperdown suffered severe flooding forward and was also very close to capsizing.
… The Barrack-Room Ballads essentially are songs for the ’Halls’ in which the ‘patter’ dominates the musical setting. Apart from Kipling, the greatest master in that art was W.S. .Gilbert (whom Kipling several times imitated in Departmental Ditties) but Gilbert’s method was to compose the ‘patter’ and then employ Sullivan … at writing tunes to it.See our Notes on "The Absent-minded Beggar"” for Sullivan’s musical setting.
Verse fitted his intuitive habit of mind. The method of the ballad – which suggests a whole story by a phrase or a line – was something that exactly suited him because he too saw things and felt them rather than reasoned about them. It was his method to start fitting words to a tune and to hum them to himself for a little while until suddenly they began to flow.Lionel Johnson, writing in three numbers of the Academy in 1891-2 collected in his Reviews and Critical Papers (1921), reprinted in Kipling, the Critical Heritage edited by R L Green (p. 103), says of Barrack-Room Ballads:
…far the best are the “Ballad of East and Wesr”, a thing to stir the blood like a trumpet, “The Conundrum of the Workshops”, a charming satire upon critics and criticism; and “The Ballad of the Clampherdown” and the “Bolivar”…Quite the opposite view, however, is taken by Robert Buchanan in "The Voice of the Hooligan, A Discussion of Kiplingism" (New York, 1900) and reprinted in Kipling and the Critics edited by Elliott Gilbert, (p. 23):
The “Ballads”, thus introduced, are twenty-one in number, of which the majority are descriptive of whatever is basest and most brutal in the character of the British mercenary…Few of the audiences in the 'Halls', or indeed few Victorians outside the ranks of the literati, would have decribed British soldiers as 'mercenaries'. But Buchanan clearly found the whole busines of soldiering deeply uncongenial. Looking at “Loot” he adds:
….the verses are indeed, with their brutal violence and their hideous refrain, only too sadly understandable. Worse still, in its horrible savagery, is the piece called “Belts”...Some further Reading