'My Boy Jack?'

My Boy Jack? is the first biography of John Kipling, woven around the extraordinary story of Kipling's search for his son. John Kipling was reported missing in the Battle of Loos on the Western Front in 1915. His father, Rudyard, had pulled strings to get his myopic son into the firing line. Devastated at the loss of his only son, Rudyard undertook the sad mission to find John's grave but tragically never succeeded in his quest. Yet in 1992, 77 years later, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission took the exceptional step of naming a previously unknown soldier buried in St. Mary's ADS CWGC Cemetery in France as John Kipling. The authors, Tonie and Valmai Holt, intrigued by this unusual and newsworthy action felt drawn into taking the investigation further, to examine the evidence and to question the identification. The result of their research, much of it from previously unpublished sources, found John to be likeable, humorous, extraordinarily unspoilt by his father's fame and a remarkably good and, in his final hours, brave young officer. The book also reveals the devastating effect that John's death had on his father and on his subsequent work.