Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there,
before being sent, aged six, to England, a desperately unhappy experience.
Charles Allen's great-grandfather brought the sixteen-year-old Kipling out to
Lahore to work on The Civil and Military Gazette with the words 'Kipling will
do', and thus set young Rudyard on his literary course. And so it was that at
the start of the cold weather of 1882 he stepped ashore at Bombay on 18 October
1882 - 'a prince entering his kingdom'. He stayed for seven years during which
he wrote the work that established him as a popular and critical,