Burial at Westminster

Day before all London watched King Edward VIII follow the body of his father, George V to Westminster Hall last week, a quiet company gathered in nearby Westminster Abbey to watch the cremated ashes of Rudyard Kipling, housed in a marble urn, disappear into the shallow loam under the paved flooring where are mixed the dust of Tennyson, Dickens and Samuel Johnson. At the end of the quiet service the Abbey choir soared into Kipling's stirring Recessional. To honor Britain's great Imperial Poet, the third man in the 20th Century to be buried in the Poets' Corner of the Abbey,* the pallbearers included Kipling's cousin. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, Major General Sir Fabian Ware. the Morning Post's Editor H. A. Gwynne. Then to the Abbey floor was added a plain stone inscribed, "RUDYARD KIPLING, 1865-1936."

*The other two: Thomas Hardy (1840-192) and Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905).

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