Dunscombe Colt Papers

Photocopies and transcripts of over 450 letters written by Rudyard Kipling to family and friends. The family letters are to his aunt Edith Macdonald, his aunt Louisa Macdonald, her husband Alfred Baldwin and their grandson Oliver Baldwin; 1886-1918. The larger groups of letters are to Charles Frederic Moberly Bell (1847-1911) (62 letters, c.1894-c.1906), Leslie Cope Cornford (60 letters, 1897-1927), Colonel C. E. Hughes of the Imperial War Graves Commission (42 letters, 1929-1936), Cormell Price, headmaster of United Services College while Kipling was a pupil (36 letters, 1882-1910), Barclay H. Walton, a stockbroker and amateur sailor (47 letters, 1903-1912). To no other correspondent are there more than 15 letters.

Correspondence, lists, invoices, notes etc. relating to collection.

Printed, typed and photocopied versions of some Kipling verses.

One photograph of Kipling on board Barclay Walton's yacht, Bantam.

Mr H. Dunscombe Colt of 70 Chester Square, London, SW1 (d in or before 1994) was a collector of material relating to the author, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). A member of the Kipling Society, he formed his collection, probably in the 1960s, by purchase at auction and from dealers and by making copies.

Kipling's letters to his family precede an alphabetical arrangement of letters to other addressees.

Items in the collection may be consulted for the purpose of private study and personal research, within the controlled environment and restrictions of the Library's Special Collections Reading Rooms.

Deposited by the National Trust, 1994.

A handlist is available in the Library and also on its website .

COPIES FOR PRIVATE STUDY: Subject to copyright, conditions imposed by owners and protecting the documents, the Library can supply, at a charge, photocopies, photographs or digital copies.

Note that many items in this collection are photocopies of original documents which are in copyright. The Library is able to supply copies of them, only with the written permission of the copyright owner or representative.

PUBLICATION: A reader wishing to publish material in the collection should contact the Head of Special Collections, in writing. The reader is responsible for obtaining permission to publish from the copyright owner. The National Trust is the owner of the copyright in the works of the Kipling family.

Colt formed his collection, probably in the 1960s, by purchase at auction and from dealers and by making copies. The collection was subsequently sold, the important letters going to the Library of Congress in Washington, but before disposal photocopies and, in some cases, manuscript transcriptions of texts, had been prepared. In the summer of 1994 his widow presented the photocopies and transcripts to the National Trust, to join the Kipling Papers (SxMs 38).

This collection supplements the main collection of the papers of Rudyard Kipling, his parents, his wife and his daughter, which accumulated at Wimpole Hall, near Cambridge and which is deposited at the University of Sussex as SxMs 38, Kipling Papers - Wimpole Archive. The record for that collection includes a list of all the supplementary collections.

Some items have been published, from the originals, in Thomas Pinney (ed.), The letters of Rudyard Kipling , in progress (London: Macmillan, 1990-).

Some in Library of Congress, Washington DC.