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The house
Bateman's was built around 1634. A large block of ironstone is incorporated into the porch and a longstanding tradition claims the house was built by a Wealden ironmaster. The first known occupant was a John Briteen (or Brittan) at the end of the 17th century. He was, in fact, an iron dealer but he may well be the ironmaster referred to.
The house itself is built of local sandstone, quarried from a site across the lane. The tiles are all baked from Wealden clay and the internal structures and interior woodwork is made from local Sussex oak.
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Rudyard Kipling buys Bateman's
Rudyard Kipling bought Bateman's in 1902. He and his American wife, Carrie, had discovered the house two years earlier but had been too slow in deciding to buy it and it was let before they could close the deal. When the house came on the market again in 1902, they had no hesitation and bought it along with the surrounding buildings, the mill and 33 acres for £9,300. It had no bathroom, no running water upstairs and no electricity but Kipling loved it. 'Behold us, lawful owners of a grey stone lichened house - A.D. 1634 over the door - beamed, panelled, with old oak staircase, and all untouched and unfaked. It is a good and peaceable place,' he wrote in November 1902. 'We have loved it ever since our first sight of it.'
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The perfect retreat
Bateman's was Kipling's idea of home - a sanctuary, private and protective, away from the noise of village and road, embedded in the richly wooded landscape of the Sussex Weald. 'A real House in which to settle down for keeps,' was how Kipling described it in his autobiography. Rudyard and Carrie had been married for 10 years when they moved to Bateman's and he was by then the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. His success and income were enormous but he was in a fragile condition. Four perfect years in Vermont, where he had hoped they might live forever, had been ruined by a public row with Carrie's brother. Then in 1899, their elder daughter Josephine, for whom he wrote the 'Just So Stories', had died aged six after a bout of pneumonia from which Kipling himself had recovered. 'His life was never the same after her death,' Elsie, his younger daughter, wrote later. 'A light had gone out that could never be rekindled.' They needed a haven and an escape.
The calm and solid stability of Bateman's provided the necessary balm. Unfortunately, Kipling was to suffer further loss in 1915 when his son, John, was killed in action at the Battle of Loos.
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The Rose Garden
The avenue of pleached limes had been planted in 1898 before Kipling arrived but the pond, the Rose Garden at the far end and the encircling yew hedges were all aid out according to his own design, which still hangs in his study. The garden was paid for out of the £7,700 he received for the Nobel Prize in 1907.
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The Mill
The present building was erected c1750. There are documents showing that two mills were built, by Royal command, in Burwash parish in 1246-8 but Kipling claimed that he owned 'an old house and a mill (water) that dates from 1196'. Despite its antiquity, Kipling showed the mill little respect and within weeks of his arrival had de-clutched the 18th-century corn-grinding mechanism and installed a water turbine made by Gilbert Gilkes & Co. in the mill dam. It drove a generator which led to storage batteries in an outhouse which supplied enough current to light ten 60-watt bulbs in the house for about four hours every evening.
In 1968-75, the building, which had fallen into a sad state of disrepair, was restored along with its contents.
©NTPL / Rupert Truman
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The Rolls Royce
Kipling was one of those pioneer motorists for whom a short drive in a 'horseless carriage' was an adventure. He owned a number of Lanchesters and Rolls-Royces and his Phantom I, which he bought in 1928, is on view in the garage. His own cars often drove him to despair and he had many a farcical motoring tale to tell but to Kipling, the motor car was a time-machine in which centuries slid by like milestones, revealing 'a land of stupefying marvels and mysteries'.
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Given to the Trust
Rudyard Kipling died in 1936 and Carrie continued to live at Bateman's until her death in 1939, when she bequeathed the estate to the National Trust as a memorial to her late husband. Today, the house is shown as it was in his time, filled with the traces and memories of his extraordinary life and work.
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