[BITList] Fwd: [INDIA-BRITISH-RAJ] The Electric Kipling

[John Feltham]

Begin forwarded message:



For those 'on list' devotees of Kipling I give below a copy of a note I
sent to a Kipling aficionado:

    A further somewhat tenuous link between my 'family history'
    interests and Rudyard Kipling that I discovered earlier today. (You
    may recall that recently I got in touch with you concerning the
    Dunstervilles and 'Stalkey').

    I was looking over some texts concerning an uncle of Robert Percy
    Sellon, a John Scudamore Sellon who was a brother of Patty Caroline
    Dunsterville, nee Sellon, when I found:

    "An early customer of the company [Electrical Power Storage Company]
    was Rudyard Kipling, who had E.P.S. installations at his homes in
    Rottingdean and Burwash. Electrical power in the form of a battery —
    a fizzing and fuming 'big box of tanks' with a dynamo — features in
    his 'Below the Mill Dam' of 1902 as a symbol of the modern world
    with which the Tory old guard has failed to come to terms."
    <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46514#n70> .

    John Scudamore Sellon, a metallurgist and electrical engineer, had
    founded the Electrical Power Storage Company, (commonly known as
    E.P.S.) in the 1880's, as well as manufacturing accumulators they
    designed and built the first electrically powered launch,
    appropriately named 'Electric', and tram car.

    It might not be too wild a surmise to think that perhaps the idea of
    lighting his homes by electricity might have come to Kipling through
    his Dunsterville friendship.

No doubt there are those who know 'Below the Mill Dam', I can not say
that I do.

Yours Aye


ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.