Scotland’s Lost Bard
The Bard of the Yukon, Canadian poet Robert Service had roots firmly grown in Scottish soil
Kenny MacAskill explores the travels of Scots-Canadian poet Robert Service
ACANADIAN journalist, knowing of my interest in the Scottish diaspora, once asked me why I’d never written anything about Robert Service. I’d heard of the Canadian poet and recalled a few lines of The Shooting of Dan Mcgrew;
Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan Mcgrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that’s known as Lou.
But I had no idea of any Scottish link. So, having been told that he’d grown up in Ayrshire and Glasgow, I ventured off to investigate and found that not only was that correct, but that the man was a far more interesting character than I’d ever realised.
The “Bard of the Yukon” as he was sometimes disparagingly described by more refined poetry critics, was most certainly a Scot. Indeed, his poetry was often compared by those somewhat literary snobs with Rudyard Kipling, who’s quintessentially English, despite being born in India. However, Service would have the last laugh on those that denigrated his work as doggerel by becoming one of the bestselling poets of the 20th century and a very rich man.
Service’s parents were both Scottish, but work as a bank clerk had taken his father south to Lancashire and it was in Preston that he was born in 1874. However, at the age of five he was sent to stay with his paternal grandfather and maiden aunts who lived in Kilwinning, where the former was postmaster. It was there he wrote his first poetry at just six years old and where he stayed for three years until his parents returned north.
When Service was nine, the family was reunited in Glasgow where he attended Hillhead High School. Leaving school at 15, he was already writing and reading extensively but still required employment, which he found as a bank clerk, like his father before him.
Neither that work nor even a brief sojourn studying literature at Glasgow University seemed to satisfy him.
Whether through his own reading, especially of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, or just his own imagination, he longed for the American West and the outdoor life.
Accordingly, in 1894, aged just 21, he set off, initially heading for Vancouver Island, Canada. Thereafter he moved around the west coast of Canada, the US and even Mexico, working in a variety of jobs from farmer to bank clerk. It doesn’t seem to have been easy for him, but he continued to pen his prose, and by the turn of the century he was having some minor success with publications in Canadian magazines.
However, prodigious writing didn’t equate with financial success and he was struggling to make ends meet as a bank clerk in Victoria, when he was transferred to the branch in Whitehorse, Yukon in 1904.
The town had only sprung up a decade before as a staging post for prospectors heading north on the gold rush to the Klondike.
But that move north was to be the making of him, providing both the inspiration and the material which would bring him worldwide fame.
In some ways this mirrored the literary and physical journey of the writer Jack London around the same time. Indeed, Jack London’s success with The Call of the Wild in 1903 led Service’s publisher in the US to change the title of his book of prose from Songs of Sourdough to The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses. All to phenomenal success.
That recognition came speedily and as a surprise to him. Life in the north seemed to appeal to him and he was active in the social circuit that existed there.
What he saw and the tales he was told gave rise to
his penning poems that resonated far and wide. The Shooting of Dan Mcgrew apparently originated from him hearing raucous sounds from a saloon and saw him heading home to pen the lines;
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a rag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan Mcgrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.
Other poems were to follow including The Cremation of Sam Mcgee, all of which he sent to his father who by then had also emigrated to Canada. His father took the works to a publisher in Toronto and his son’s literary career took off.
By 1909, he was able to resign from the bank and concentrate on his writing, though he continued to live in Dawson City where he had been transferred. It was there in a small cabin that he wrote his first novel The Trail of ’98, making him an author as well as a poet.
But a further career was to beckon, all the time continuing his varied writing. In 1912, he became a correspondent for the Toronto Star newspaper, initially covering the Balkan War.
The following year, he moved to Paris, and France was
“It’s him” time for Scotland to remember
to become his home, albeit with sojourns elsewhere. By then a wealthy man, the bohemian lifestyle in the Latin Quarter seemed to appeal to him and he married Germaine Bourgoin, a wealthy Parisienne, that same year. They were to remain married for the rest of his life, though she would outlive him by 31 years.
Despite his wealth and his artistic endeavours, he still found time to participate in the First World War, volunteering with the Ambulance Corps and then, during the Second World War, having sought shelter in California, he entertained troops.
After the war, he and his wife returned to France where they rebuilt a home they had in Brittany, which had been destroyed in the conflict. It was there that he was to remain until he died in 1958, aged 84, and where he is buried today.
Returning to Kilwinning in 1930, he erected a family memorial there but it’s maybe time for Scotland to remember him too.