During our preparations for the Autumn 2026 play, we have been finding out a bit more about Rudyard Kipling, his son John and their story. One line in the play talks of John having come back from officer training at ‘Warley’ – a throwaway line that went unnoticed for a while. But then a chance discussion with someone recently led to us learning that John Kipling completed his officer training at Warley Barracks, here in Brentwood!
Our production of David Haig’s ‘My Boy Jack’ has a relevance to the town that we didn’t originally appreciate!
So we started to talk to our friends at the Brentwood Museum and they are helping us look into this element of history – plus we talked to a contact on the Army Reserve base that sits on part of the original site to see what they might know.
Here is what we have found out so far:
Warley Barracks1 on Warley Common, a few miles south of Brentwood, was officially formed in the early 1800s after having being used as a military training ground from the mid-1700s. It was home to the East India Company but is most well known for being the main home of the Essex Regiment2 until land was sold in 1958.
At the time of the First World War, Warley Barracks was apparently in a ‘condemned’ state according to Rudyard Kipling’s book ‘The Irish Guards in the Great War – Edited and Compiled from their diaries and papers; Volume II – The Second Battalion’3 - the Essex Regiment having moved out because of its state some 50 years prior. But Kipling basically stated that war-needs-must, and so the site was revitalised in July 1915 for the Irish Guards Reserve battalion.
Today the site houses the building that, from the 1960s up until 2019, was the Ford Motor Company UK headquarters, and is now a residential building. The Marillac Hospital, and the Keys Hall sites were also parts of the former barracks, the latter being the gymnasium.4
Within the grounds of the existing Army Reserve site is Blenheim House – a grade II listed building (which is currently for sale to the general public – or so our army contact tells us!4) and it is Blenheim House that was the Officers’ Mess during the First World War period… we surmise that John Kipling may well have spent some time in this very building…
The following photo is taken from a page of Mike Kipling’s article in the ‘Kipling Journal’ of September 20155 and shows a photograph from the Irish Guards Archives of John Kipling with five other junior officers of the Irish Guards taken outside of a building in Warley – could it be Blenheim House?
John Kipling is third from left – wearing the glasses of course.
If any of our Marlborough members and friends have any further information or clarifications to this article, then please do get in touch.
We hope to visit relevant places soon to find out more – we have been advised that IWM Duxford may have information about Warley Barracks donated from the Essex Regiment collection that used to be housed at Chelmsford Museum. There is of course ‘Bateman’s’, the Kiplings’ home in Sussex too, as well as the resources and insights of the (proper) historians of Brentwood Museum who are conducting some research too.
Keep an eye on this space!
Footnotes:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warley_Barracks
- https://www.essexregiment.co.uk/warleybindex.html
- https://archive.org/details/irishguardsofgre02rudy/page/1/mode/1up
- Information from our contact at the Army Reserve base
- https://genealogy.kipling.me.uk/KJ_Sept15.pdf