The Fringes of the Fleet

[1] In 1915 Kipling was commissioned by The Daily Telegraph to write a series of six articles on his view of life in less well-known aspects of the defence of the nation on its seas.

In the production the curtain rose on a seaport scene, outside a public house, with the four singers in rough-and-ready merchant-seamen's clothes, seated around a table.

[5][7] The song Inside the Bar, with words by Sir Gilbert Parker, was subsequently added to the cycle and performed by the same singers at the same theatre exactly two weeks later.

[5] For reasons which Elgar did not understand at the time, when they returned to the Coliseum at the end of that year, Kipling appeared and objected to his songs being performed at music-halls.

[9] In 1916 The Fringes of the Fleet was republished by Macmillan, titled Sea Warfare, with two other sections relating to the Navy and a final poem: