Kipling Drive

Kipling Drive in Whaler’s Gate was named in the late 1970s after famous writer Rudyard Kipling. The street was developed by Beazley Homes Limited as part of a multistage subdivision, and the name, along with several others in the vicinity, was copied from the original Plymouth in Devon, drawing on a theme of great British writers.

An aerial photograph taken in November 1976 shows this part of Whalers Gate under construction, but Kipling Drive has yet to be formed and farmland still surrounds what was about to become a residential area.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was Britain’s first Nobel laureate in literature, and the most widely read writer of the later-Victorian era. Classics like The Jungle Books, Just So Stories and Kim soon made him a household name and poems like If and Recessional were learned by heart. Queen Victoria wanted to knight him. When he died, the Taranaki Daily News called him the “Apostle of Empire” and his ashes were interred at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, next to the grave of Charles Dickens.

Kipling actually visited New Zealand in October and November 1891, as part of a journey that also took him to South Africa and Australia. He travelled around the country for a month, writing a short story (One lady at Wairakei) and giving interviews to local newspapers. He enjoyed his time in Wellington, staying at the Oriental Hotel and being taken on a moonlit canoe trip around the harbour, but Auckland was his favourite – he described it in his poem The Song of the Cities as “last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart”. Kipling actually passed through Taranaki on his travels, arriving in New Plymouth from Auckland on the ship SS Mahinapua on 30 October. He left again that same day, however, heading for Hāwera which he also saw only briefly on his way further south. A reporter for the Hawera and Normanby Star caught a glimpse of the “young writer who has recently risen to eminence” and confided to readers that he was “below the average height, is fairly corpulent and has need of constant use of spectacles”.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.