Although born in India, like others of his class and generation Rudyard Kipling was sent back to England for his schooling. From 1878 he attended the United Services College (USC) at Westward Ho! in North Devon, a school that had been recently established under the headmastership of a family friend, Cormell Price, to accommodate the children of Indian Army officers unable to afford the fees of institutions such as Wellington College, originally established to prepare boys for the military academies at Sandhurst and Woolwich. The school was later to provide the inspiration for Kipling's Stalky & Co., a collection of stories first assembled for publication in book form in 1899 and re-issued, with five further tales, in 1929. The reception of this work and the characters within it was not universally favourable, the school upon which it was based was in many ways atypical of the standard English public school (if ever such a thing existed), and, although unquestionably a ‘school story', it is not in line with the tradition fathered by Tom Brown.