Rudyard Kipling and H Rider Haggard were great friends – my family and I, on more than one occasion have visited Kipling’s house ‘Batemans’ in Sussex and I remember the guide showing us round on one occasion and when we went into Kipling’s study she said that Rider Haggard often visited and he would sit and chat for long periods in that same room.

I felt a shiver of excitement to think that I was actually standing where these two colossal figures had often been together exchanging notes no doubt because in terms of story telling these two are in a class of their own.

Two giants of Literature and this book which I have just acquired, details the film and television adaptations of their stories

King Solomons Mines

‘King Solomons Mines’ – a big and impressive picture – . Looking even further into this, it appears that most of the African location filming for King Solomons Mines was done by February of 1950 –

‘King Solomons Mines’ proved a massive hit at the Box Office for MGM

Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr were top billed – Elizabeth Curtis (Deborah Kerr) is missing her husband, who departed on a quest to find King Solomon’s lost diamond mines.  She meets and hires a disenchanted safari guide – Allan Quatermain (Stewart Granger) to lead a search party to find him.

Along the way they are besieged with several challenges, including a tremendous animal stampede which even today makes one wonder how it was filmed – and this was way before the days of CGI special effects.

 Even now this must rank as one of the best stampede scenes ever done.

‘King Solomons Mines has a strong storyline loosely based on H Rider Haggard’s magnificent novel –

I remember someone quite famous saying that he loved H Rider Haggard’s books and he used to encourage his children to read them – this is in quite recent times. He made a deal with them to read the first 50 pages of any one of his novels – and he said he knew that after that they would not be able to put the book down.

H Rider Haggard’s remains one of the greatest adventure story tellers in English Literature of all time