Line 15] sift the sand and loam: Loam is a rich fine soil formed largely from decomposed vegetation. It is sifted with sand before being used, to lighten and enrich heavy earth. Wigan Old Bank 1792 - A tragic boating accident on Windermere and a surprising journey through the social history of Wigan during the reign of Queen Victoria, highlighting the relationships between four families who played an important part in the commercial development of the town. Title] The Glory of the Garden: Normally such a phrase would refer to the beauty of the flowers, bushes, and trees growing in a garden, and/or to the horticultural skill that has nurtured and arranged the various plants into a splendid pattern. It also invokes many images which link God’s presence with gardens, the ‘glory’ of the one often being equated naturally with the glory of the other. Kipling refers to these various connotations in his poem, but insists that the true glory of the garden lies elsewhere. Hemans offers a highly sentimental, idealised view of English home life, from the stately to the humble, and although not carrying the overtly political message that is so important to Kipling, she does – rather oddly given her very different mood – seem to at least look in that direction by prefacing her poem with an epigram taken from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808):

Line 26] netting strawberries: Strawberries grow along the ground and are covered with nets to stop birds from eating them.While freelance copywriting provided his income for many years, Bob’s heart and much of his time were engaged in less lucrative projects. He gave his energy to such charities as Friends of the Earth, Book Trust and Chance to Shine and was for many years an active school governor in Tower Hamlets. He was always ready with practical help and advice to would-be authors. Of course, Fletcher’s views weren’t Kipling’s: my point is merely that the School History wasn’t the place for Kipling to take a strong stand against conventional religious practice. Kipling and Fletcher Line 7] cold-frame: a small unheated container with a glass top for protecting young plants; hot-house, a heated building, made largely of glass, for rearing tender or exotic plants; dung-pit, a compost heap; tanks, to store water. It may be that Kipling had this hymn specifically in mind. After all, “The Glory of the Garden,” along with all the other poems in A School History was also written with the aim of instilling into young children a very different set of values and overthrowing the views expressed in hymns like “All Things Bright and Beauty.” He must have felt that this ambition had to some extent been achieved, because on 11 October 1919 he proudly told André Chevrillon that “The Glory of the Garden” had become ‘a sort of school recitation piece’. Letters 4, p. 580. I shared Bob’s life for nearly 50 years, collaborating on adventures, not least a three-month walk to Santiago de Compostela 30 years ago and several trekking trips to the mountains of Pakistan, where we made lifelong friends.

The most detailed of Shakespeare’s comparisons between a garden and England comes in Richard II. Queen Isabel, unaware that her husband has been imprisoned, walks in the garden and stops to listen to the gardener and his assistants discussing Richard’s fate. In the process they advance a number of extended comparisons between the condition of England (over which they have no control) and the condition of the garden for which they are fully responsible. One of the assistants asks whether the rebels Wiltshire, Bushy and Greene are dead. The gardener replies: Shakespeare’s presence in the poem is more oblique than that of the Bible. He is never alluded to directly (as the Bible is several times), but the political and social ideas being explored by Kipling are often unmistakably associated with the form they have been given by Shakespeare. They echo throughout Kipling’s poem. Kipling is even more concerned, though, with the popular children’s hymns that inculcated this view of creation and along with it a bland mood of social passivity. Of these hymns, Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander’s “All Things Bright and Beautiful” is the type:

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Kipling’s view in “The Glory of the Garden” is little different from that of Shakespeare, except that he is writing for a newly democratic age. This understanding guides his whole approach. He is not in the position of a medieval King who can deal with the situation by lopping off the heads of a few rebellious ‘weeds.’ Nor is it necessary for him to act out the part of melancholy Hamlet because Kipling knows all too well what is to be done. If everyone in society, high or low – and it is soon clear that Kipling’s own view of English society in the poem remains firmly hierarchical – can be persuaded to play a part in making sure that the garden does not become over-run with weeds, then ‘things rank and gross in nature’ will be unable to ‘possess it merely.’ If not, then England could become as ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable’ as Denmark was to Hamlet. Lines 30-33] That half …upon his knees … wash your hands and pray…away!: As has been made clear throughout the poem, Kipling’s call for people to sink to their knees and pray has little to do with conventional religious practice: he is simply asking that the same kind of devotion demanded by religious institutions be given to secular activities. The image of a kingdom, state, or community as a garden, with all its accompanying connotations of natural growth and development, seasonal change, decay and rebirth, is ages old. The main literary traditions on which Kipling draws are those established by the Bible and Shakespeare. He is also obviously aware of the country-house poem which holds such a distinguished place in English literature, though in the main he stands aloof from it, largely for positive reasons. It is the garden itself that Kipling wants to focus on, not the grand architecture of a house or its social arrangements which feature so prominently in many country-house poems. In the opening stanza of the poem, Kipling seems to suggest that he might be writing just that kind of poem, and then discards the possibility. But in 1929 he was making another attempt to persuade the Press to agree to a new edition with his concluding chapter, now further revised. Kipling repeated what he had said ten years earlier. ‘As you know I didn’t do anything at all much beyond the verses,’, he wrote. ‘You lie’, Fletcher replied. ‘Some of the most valuable prose suggestions, and all the pretty little love-poems in prose to England were yours'”. Wallgate Chronicles: Hugo Boss comes to Wigan; In the footsteps of the Manchester Rambler; Fun with Trigonometry; Surprise at the Philharmonic; The Marriage of Figaro; Cat Bells; A Walk in the Hills; Eay Times Uv Changed; Fidelio; The Ravioli Room; Desert Island Discs; Travels in Time 1960; Travels in Time 2010; The Spectroscope; The Bohemian Girl; Bookcase; Barnaby Rudge; Romance on a Budget; The Battle of Solferino; The Getaway Car; The Switchroom Wigan; The Force of Destiny; Adolphe Adam; The Fair Maid of Perth; Ivanhoe; Semele; Lohengrin; The Old Curiosity Shop; Hard Times.