Rottingdean celebrates its most famous resident Rudyard Kipling

“She thought it was some sort of emergency," says Gary Enstone, premises manager at Bateman's, the Burwash house Kipling lived out his last days.

“In fact it was just tourists looking through the gate to see if they could see her husband. She had to push through the crowd to get into her own home."

It was a common feature of Kipling's time in Rottingdean, where he lived for four years after moving away from the US following a family argument.

“In 1897 only Queen Victoria and [cricketer] WG Grace had a more famous face,” says Enstone. “Put into a modern context you have to think of David Beckham or Tom Cruise for his level of fame.”

This weekend sees the village celebrate its famous former resident in Kipling Gardens, the public park created in the grounds of his rented Rottingdean home The Elms.

The festival was the brainchild of Aimee Harman, who runs the Open Art Cafe, in Neville Road, following a conversation with recent Rottingdean resident Christine Foster.

“I was astonished to find Kipling had lived here," says Foster who has headed up the organising team and created a live stage adaptation of Kipling's Just So Stories.

“He is mostly associated with Bateman's, but the time he spent in Rottingdean was an amazing four years. He wrote the Just So Stories, [poems] Recessional and The Absent-Minded Beggar and the novel Kim. The heritage of the village is all tied up with his presence."

As well as an open-air version of The Cliffhanger Company’s take on the Just So Stories - which was premiered at the Brighton Fringe earlier this year – the festival will recreate the Village Boys Club Kipling set up to give youngsters training in marksmanship, Morse code and semaphore.

Performer Geoff Hutchinson will don the guise of the writer to recount his best-loved works, there will be historical tours of the gardens and villages, and each evening will end with a costumed Edwardian tea dance from 4pm to 5pm. Tomorrow also sees a Jungle Book party in the Village Hall from 6pm.

Throughout the week there will be talks and readings.

Monday sees Judith Flanders in North End House discussing Kipling's mother, Alice, and aunts Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa, who all made a mark on the worlds of art and politics.

On Friday, July 18, historian Peter Crowhurst will re-examine Kipling's controversial Imperial Dream at St Margaret's Cottage, while Dr Lizzy Welby will talk about Kipling's Sussex on Saturday, July 19.

The festival has received a £6,000 Heritage Lottery Grant. The money went towards the staging of Just So and a village schools tour, as well as a revamp of The Kipling Room in Rottingdean's Grange Museum.

Throughout the festival the museum will host a special exhibition featuring responses to Kipling's work from schoolchildren and village artists.

“The title for this year’s festival is The Calm Before The Storm,” says Foster, adding she hopes the event will become an annual event on the village calendar.

Foster believes it was a time when Kipling was happiest, having already established his name on the international stage with his classic The Jungle Book.

Having received a death threat from his brother-in-law in Vermont, Kipling had initially taken a house in Torquay on his return from the US, but left claiming the feng shui was wrong.

It was the presence of his aunt Georgiana Burne-Jones in North End House that enticed Kipling and his young family to Rottingdean - which became the birthplace of his son John.

As children, when Kipling and his sister Trixie had been sent from India to school in Southsea, Portsmouth, Georgy's Chelsea home had provided a sanctuary from what he described as a “horrible place”.

The village's proximity to London made it additionally attractive, but as news of his new home spread that closeness led to problems with fans travelling down to catch a glimpse of the writer.

“He was extraordinarily successful,” says Enstone. “Between 1895 and 1896 one in every 12 books sold was by Kipling.

“He had a wonderful time in Rottingdean, but the cult of celebrity was beginning to build and get worse. Tourists would come to Rottingdean and sit on The Green to see the man. Pub landlords started to advertise holidays in Rottingdean to see Mr Kipling - all unofficially. When the trolleybus service started people would get on the top deck in the hope of spotting him in his garden.”

Throughout it all, Kipling tried to live as normally as possible - writing and spending time with his children.

One time saw Kipling and his son John go fishing off Rottingdean pier with their chaffeur in tow.

“Kipling asked the chauffeur to stand at the other end of the pier with a pile of signed photographs to give to anyone who came up wanting to meet him, rather than disturb his time with his son,” says Enstone. “He was trying to have a normal relationship with his son – and there was a worry that he couldn't because of the life he led.”

The final impetus to leave the village arose from tragedy.

On a trip back to the US in 1899 both Kipling and his daughter Josephine contracted pneumonia.

Kipling survived, but his “best beloved” eldest daughter didn't, dying at the age of six.

“His life in Rottingdean changed,” says Enstone. “In his autobiography [Something Of Myself] he talks about seeing the ghost of Josephine everywhere – on the top stair of the staircase, standing at the bottom of the hallway and following him around. That combined with the building celebrity status ramped up the pressure."

Kipling’s solution was to move to Bateman's in Burwash, where he could make a new start as a family of four.

“He was still writing works, but the pressure was off him to produce as much as he had before,” says Enstone. “He could enjoy being a father and a country gentleman.”

Kipling's growing fascination with Sussex was reflected in his written work.

He had made his name writing stories and poems inspired by his experiences in India – albeit penned many miles away in the US and UK. But by the time he left Rottingdean he had written his last Indian novel, Kim.

Burwash provided the setting for his 1906 time-travelling historical stories for children collected in Puck Of Pook's Hill and its 1910 sequel Rewards And Fairies.

“Sussex wasn’t his birthplace, but it became his home,” says Enstone. “He fell in love with the countryside and the tales of smugglers and Romans who lived in the area. His literature changed.”

It was the First World War which would change his life completely, and partially lead to the on-again/off-again relationship both his contemporaries and future readers would have with his work.

“He was already talking about his “fear of the Hun” as early as 1900,” says Enstone. “He felt the British people should be concerned.”

Kipling was no stranger to the wartime experience – he had embedded with the Indian army as a journalist, and frequently visited South Africa to report on the Boer War – highlighting the appalling conditions of the British soldier.

He penned the poem The Absent-Minded Beggar in 1899 about an ex-serviceman he found begging on the streets of London having been booted out of the army after losing an arm and a leg.

The poem, which was set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, became part of a Daily Mail appeal for soldiers fighting in the Boer War, eventually raising an estimated £250,000.

“Kipling was a great believer in the British Army but he did a lot to make sure the young men were looked after,” says Enstone.

In a post-war world his writing has appeared jingoistic, and on occasion racist when he describes the Empire as “the white man's burden”.

Enstone believes Kipling's war poetry is as valid as those frontline poems by Seigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

“His work is often dismissed because he wasn't there, but he represents what a lot of people back home were thinking,” he says.

“Kipling was one of the first journalists to go to the front and witness trench warfare. He was able to say ‘This is what it’s like for our boys.”

Even in his lifetime people were critical of his writing.

The Bloomsbury set, based in nearby Charleston, dismissed him as a “children's writer” in an open letter to the Telegraph – to which Kipling replied he had no interest in the Bloomsbury Group either as they were all “adult writers”.

One famous critique of Kipling’s work comes from George Orwell, writing in 1936: “For my own part I worshipped Kipling at 13, loathed him at 17, enjoyed him at 20, despised him at 25 and now again rather admire him.”

“There was probably a degree of snobbery in the fact Kipling wrote very popular children’s books,” says Enstone. “He never quite fitted into the establishment – he was born overseas, his lifestyle was very different, he wasn't in the right social circles.

“One of the worst things that could have happened to Kipling was Disney's 1967 Jungle Book film.

“It’s a lovely film, and done marvellous things for his name, but it also means he is only known as the man who wrote The Jungle Book rather than 30 or 40 other books that were just as famous.”