Aldershot - in Literature

In Literature

Rudyard Kipling referenced Aldershot in his poem "Gunga Din".

You may talk o’ gin and beer

When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,

An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;

But when it comes to slaughter

You will do your work on water,

An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that's got it.

Sir John Betjeman also mentions Aldershot in the poem "A Subaltern's Love Song"

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,

We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,

With carefullest carelessness, how gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

Aldershot appears as Quartershot in Thomas Hardy's novels.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle set the short story The Adventure of the Crooked Man in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in Aldershot. Holmes suspects a deformed beggar knows what caused Colonel James Barclay's sudden death during an argument with his wife.

P. G. Wodehouse set several episodes of his early school stories in Aldershot, at a convocation of British public school athletes. He refers to the Queen's Avenue gymnasium as the site of the boxing matches there. He mentions this convocation in The Gold Bat, The White Feather, and The Pothunters.

Aldous Huxley mentions Aldershot in Eyeless in Gaza

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