Kipling wasn’t exceedingly fond of sailing

I can’t identify Marcus Tylor’s grandfather’s boat (Letters, PBO September 2017) which looks too big for a private pleasure yacht – a barque-rigged sloop, she must be at least 100 feet long. But I can shed some light on Rudyard Kipling, whom Mr Tylor’s mother remembers seeing photos of on a cruise to Egypt shortly before WW1, and his attitude to boats.

Although he wrote prolifically about the sea, and had close connections with the Royal Navy, Kipling went to sea to gather material, or to get somewhere. Only rarely did he go yachting, and then only to be sociable and please his children (he took them on trips with his friend and financial advisor, the London stockbroker Barclay Harper Walton, aboard his steam yacht, the Bantam, between 1905 and 1911).

Kipling didn’t sail for pleasure, and wrote to a friend: ‘I hate yachts and nets of slimy fish flopping about the deck.’

Kipling did travel to Egypt in February 1913 as a passenger aboard the P&O liner the SS Persia, embarking at Marseilles. He then travelled up the Nile on the SS Rameses III, owned by Thomas Cook. This kind of trip to the only recently peaceful Egypt was fashionable during British winters, between the Battle of Omdurman in the 1898 (or Kitchener’s machine-gun massacre, revenge for the death of Gordon at Khartoum, depending on your view of Empire), and the First World War, in which Kipling lost his only son John. Could it be that the photographs Mr Tylor’s mother recalls seeing were taken aboard the Persia or the Rameses III in 1913, and not on great grandfather’s yacht? Rupert Maas Camberwell, London